Tono-Bungay

Tono-Bungay Page 6

by H. G. Wells

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  THE HARDINGHAM HOTEL, AND HOW WE BECAME BIG PEOPLE

  I

  But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well todescribe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him duringthose magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to finance.The little man plumped up very considerably during the creation of theTono-Bungay property, but with the increasing excitements that followedthat first flotation came dyspepsia and a certain flabbiness and fallingaway. His abdomen--if the reader will pardon my taking his featuresin the order of their value--had at first a nice full roundness, butafterwards it lost tone without, however, losing size. He always went asthough he was proud of it and would make as much of it as possible. Tothe last his movements remained quick and sudden, his short firm legs,as he walked, seemed to twinkle rather than display the scissors-strideof common humanity, and he never seemed to have knees, but instead, adispersed flexibility of limb.

  There was, I seem to remember, a secular intensification of hisfeatures; his nose developed character, became aggressive, stuck out atthe world more and more; the obliquity of his mouth, I think, increased.From the face that returns to my memory projects a long cigar that issometimes cocked jauntily up from the higher corner, that sometimesdroops from the lower;--it was as eloquent as a dog's tail, and heremoved it only for the more emphatic modes of speech. He assumed abroad black ribbon for his glasses, and wore them more and more askew astime went on. His hair seemed to stiffen with success, but towards theclimax it thinned greatly over the crown, and he brushed it hard backover his ears where, however, it stuck out fiercely. It always stuck outfiercely over his forehead, up and forward.

  He adopted an urban style of dressing with the onset of Tono-Bungay andrarely abandoned it. He preferred silk hats with ample rich brims, oftena trifle large for him by modern ideas, and he wore them at variousangles to his axis; his taste in trouserings was towards fairly emphaticstripes and his trouser cut was neat; he liked his frock-coat long andfull, although that seemed to shorten him. He displayed a number ofvaluable rings, and I remember one upon his left little finger with alarge red stone bearing Gnostic symbols. "Clever chaps, those Gnostics,George," he told me. "Means a lot. Lucky!" He never had any but a blackmohair watch-chair. In the country he affected grey and a largegrey cloth top-hat, except when motoring; then he would have a browndeer-stalker cap and a fur suit of esquimaux cut with a sort of boot-endto the trousers. Of an evening he would wear white waistcoats and plaingold studs. He hated diamonds. "Flashy," he said they were. "Might aswell wear--an income tax-receipt. All very well for Park Lane. Unsoldstock. Not my style. Sober financier, George."

  So much for his visible presence. For a time it was very familiar tothe world, for at the crest of the boom he allowed quite a numberof photographs and at least one pencil sketch to be published in thesixpenny papers.

  His voice declined during those years from his early tenor to a flatrich quality of sound that my knowledge of music is inadequate todescribe. His Zzz-ing inrush of air became less frequent as he ripened,but returned in moments of excitement. Throughout his career, in spiteof his increasing and at last astounding opulence, his more intimatehabits remained as simple as they had been at Wimblehurst. He wouldnever avail himself of the services of a valet; at the very climax ofhis greatness his trousers were folded by a housemaid and his shouldersbrushed as he left his house or hotel. He became wary about breakfastas life advanced, and at one time talked much of Dr. Haig and uric acid.But for other meals he remained reasonably omnivorous. He was somethingof a gastronome, and would eat anything he particularly liked in anaudible manner, and perspire upon his forehead. He was a studiouslymoderate drinker--except when the spirit of some public banquet or somegreat occasion caught him and bore him beyond his wariness--therehe would, as it were, drink inadvertently and become flushed andtalkative--about everything but his business projects.

  To make the portrait complete one wants to convey an effect of sudden,quick bursts of movement like the jumps of a Chinese-cracker to indicatethat his pose whatever it is, has been preceded and will be followedby a rush. If I were painting him, I should certainly give him fora background that distressed, uneasy sky that was popular in theeighteenth century, and at a convenient distance a throbbing motor-car,very big and contemporary, a secretary hurrying with papers, and analert chauffeur.

  Such was the figure that created and directed the great property ofTono-Bungay, and from the successful reconstruction of that companypassed on to a slow crescendo of magnificent creations and promotionsuntil the whole world of investors marveled. I have already I think,mentioned how, long before we offered Tono Bungay to the public, we tookover the English agency of certain American specialties. To this waspresently added our exploitation of Moggs' Domestic Soap, and so he tookup the Domestic Convenience Campaign that, coupled with his equatorialrotundity and a certain resolute convexity in his bearings won my unclehis Napoleonic title.

  II

  It illustrates the romantic element in modern commerce that my unclemet young Moggs at a city dinner--I think it was the Bottle-makers'Company--when both were some way advanced beyond the initial sobrietyof the occasion. This was the grandson of the original Moggs, and a verytypical instance of an educated, cultivated, degenerate plutocrat. Hispeople had taken him about in his youth as the Ruskins took their Johnand fostered a passion for history in him, and the actual management ofthe Moggs' industry had devolved upon a cousin and a junior partner.

  Mr. Moggs, being of a studious and refined disposition, had justdecided--after a careful search for a congenial subject in which hewould not be constantly reminded of soap--to devote himself to theHistory of the Thebaid, when this cousin died suddenly and precipitatedresponsibilities upon him. In the frankness of conviviality, Moggsbewailed the uncongenial task thus thrust into his hands, and my uncleoffered to lighten his burden by a partnership then and there. They evengot to terms--extremely muzzy terms, but terms nevertheless.

  Each gentleman wrote the name and address of the other on his cuff, andthey separated in a mood of brotherly carelessness, and next morningneither seems to have thought to rescue his shirt from the wash untilit was too late. My uncle made a painful struggle--it was one of mybusiness mornings--to recall name and particulars.

  "He was an aquarium-faced, long, blond sort of chap, George, withglasses and a genteel accent," he said.

  I was puzzled. "Aquarium-faced?"

  "You know how they look at you. His stuff was soap, I'm prettynearly certain. And he had a name--And the thing was the straightestBit-of-All-right you ever. I was clear enough to spot that..."

  We went out at last with knitted brows, and wandered up into Finsburyseeking a good, well-stocked looking grocer. We called first on achemist for a pick-me-up for my uncle, and then we found the shop weneeded.

  "I want," said my uncle, "half a pound of every sort of soap you got.Yes, I want to take them now. Wait a moment, George.... Now what sort ofsoap d'you call THAT?"

  At the third repetition of that question the young man said, "Moggs'Domestic."

  "Right," said my uncle. "You needn't guess again. Come along, George,let's go to a telephone and get on to Moggs. Oh--the order? Certainly. Iconfirm it. Send it all--send it all to the Bishop of London; he'll havesome good use for it--(First-rate man, George, he is--charities and allthat)--and put it down to me, here's a card--Ponderevo--Tono-Bungay."

  Then we went on to Moggs and found him in a camel-hair dressing-jacketin a luxurious bed, drinking China tea, and got the shape of everythingbut the figures fixed by lunch time.

  Young Moggs enlarged my mind considerably; he was a sort of thingI hadn't met before; he seemed quite clean and well-informed and heassured me to never read newspapers nor used soap in any form at all,"Delicate skin," he said.

  "No objection to our advertising you wide and free?" said my uncle.

  "I draw the line at railway stations," said Moggs, "south-coast cliffs,theatre prog
rammes, books by me and poetry generally--scenery--oh!--andthe Mercure de France."

  "We'll get along," said my uncle.

  "So long as you don't annoy me," said Moggs, lighting a cigarette, "youcan make me as rich as you like."

  We certainly made him no poorer. His was the first firm that wasadvertised by a circumstantial history; we even got to illustratedmagazine articles telling of the quaint past of Moggs. We concoctedMoggsiana. Trusting to our partner's preoccupation with the uncommercialaspects of life, we gave graceful history--of Moggs the First, Moggs theSecond, Moggs the Third, and Moggs the Fourth. You must, unless you arevery young, remember some of them and our admirable block of a Georgianshop window. My uncle brought early nineteenth-century memoirs, soakedhimself in the style, and devised stories about old Moggs the First andthe Duke of Wellington, George the Third and the soap dealer ("almostcertainly old Moggs"). Very soon we had added to the original Moggs'Primrose several varieties of scented and superfatted, a "specialnurseries used in the household of the Duke of Kent and for the oldQueen in Infancy," a plate powder, "the Paragon," and a knife powder.We roped in a good little second-rate black-lead firm, and carried theirorigins back into the mists of antiquity. It was my uncle's own unaidedidea that we should associate that commodity with the Black Prince. Hebecame industriously curious about the past of black-lead. I rememberhis button-holing the president of the Pepys Society.

  "I say, is there any black-lead in Pepys? You know--black-lead--forgrates! OR DOES HE PASS IT OVER AS A MATTER OF COURSE?"

  He became in those days the terror of eminent historians. "Don't wantyour drum and trumpet history--no fear," he used to say. "Don't wantto know who was who's mistress, and why so-and-so devastated such aprovince; that's bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not myaffair. Nobody's affair now. Chaps who did it didn't clearly know....What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything forHousemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting,and was the Black Prince--you know the Black Prince--was he enameledor painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded--very likely--likepipe-clay--but DID they use blacking so early?"

  So it came about that in designing and writing those Moggs' SoapAdvertisements, that wrought a revolution in that department ofliterature, my uncle was brought to realise not only the lost history,but also the enormous field for invention and enterprise that lurkedamong the little articles, the dustpans and mincers, the mousetrapsand carpet-sweepers that fringe the shops of the oilman and domesticironmonger. He was recalled to one of the dreams of his youth, to hisconception of the Ponderevo Patent Flat that had been in his mind soearly as the days before I went to serve him at Wimblehurst. "The Home,George," he said, "wants straightening up. Silly muddle! Things that getin the way. Got to organise it."

  For a time he displayed something like the zeal of a genuine socialreformer in relation to these matters.

  "We've got to bring the Home Up to Date? That's my idee, George. We gotto make a civilised domestic machine out of these relics of barbarism.I'm going to hunt up inventors, make a corner in d'mestic ideas.Everything. Balls of string that won't dissolve into a tangle, and gumthat won't dry into horn. See? Then after conveniences--beauty. Beauty,George! All these few things ought to be made fit to look at; it's youraunt's idea, that. Beautiful jam-pots! Get one of those new art chapsto design all the things they make ugly now. Patent carpet-sweepers bythese greenwood chaps, housemaid's boxes it'll be a pleasure to fallover--rich coloured house-flannels. Zzzz. Pails, f'rinstance. Hang 'emup on the walls like warming-pans. All the polishes and things in suchtins--you'll want to cuddle 'em, George! See the notion? 'Sted of allthe silly ugly things we got."...

  We had some magnificent visions; they so affected me that when I passedironmongers and oil-shops they seemed to me as full of promise astrees in late winter, flushed with the effort to burst into leaf andflower.... And really we did do much towards that very brightness theseshops display. They were dingy things in the eighties compared to whatour efforts have made them now, grey quiet displays.

  Well, I don't intend to write down here the tortuous financial historyof Moggs' Limited, which was our first development of Moggs and Sons;nor will I tell very much of how from that we spread ourselves witha larger and larger conception throughout the chandlery and minorironmongery, how we became agents for this little commodity, partners inthat, got a tentacle round the neck of a specialised manufacturer or so,secured a pull upon this or that supply of raw material, and so preparedthe way for our second flotation, Domestic Utilities; "Do it,"they reordered it in the city. And then came the reconstruction ofTono-Bungay, and then "Household services" and the Boom!

  That sort of development is not to be told in detail in a novel. I have,indeed, told much of it elsewhere. It is to be found set out atlength, painfully at length, in my uncle's examination and mine inthe bankruptcy proceedings, and in my own various statements after hisdeath. Some people know everything in that story, some know it alltoo well, most do not want the details, it is the story of a man ofimagination among figures, and unless you are prepared to collatecolumns of pounds, shillings and pence, compare dates and checkadditions, you will find it very unmeaning and perplexing. And afterall, you wouldn't find the early figures so much wrong as STRAINED. Inthe matter of Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first Tono-Bungay promotionand in its reconstruction, we left the court by city standards withouta stain on our characters. The great amalgamation of Household Serviceswas my uncle's first really big-scale enterprise and his first displayof bolder methods: for this we bought back Do Ut, Moggs (going strongwith a seven per cent. dividend) and acquired Skinnerton's polishes, theRiffleshaw properties and the Runcorn's mincer and coffee-mill business.To that Amalgamation I was really not a party; I left it to my unclebecause I was then beginning to get keen upon the soaring experimentsI had taken on from the results then to hand of Lilienthal, Pilcher andthe Wright brothers. I was developing a glider into a flyer. I meantto apply power to this glider as soon as I could work out one or tworesidual problems affecting the longitudinal stability. I knew that Ihad a sufficiently light motor in my own modification of Bridger'slight turbine, but I knew too that until I had cured my aeroplane of atendency demanding constant alertness from me, a tendency to jerk up itsnose at unexpected moments and slide back upon me, the application of anengine would be little short of suicide.

  But that I will tell about later. The point I was coming to was that Idid not realise until after the crash how recklessly my uncle had kepthis promise of paying a dividend of over eight per cent. on the ordinaryshares of that hugely over-capitalised enterprise, Household Services.

  I drifted out of business affairs into my research much more than eitherI or my uncle had contemplated. Finance was much less to my tastethan the organisation of the Tono-Bungay factory. In the new field ofenterprise there was a great deal of bluffing and gambling, of takingchances and concealing material facts--and these are hateful things tothe scientific type of mind. It wasn't fear I felt so much as an uneasyinaccuracy. I didn't realise dangers, I simply disliked the sloppy,relaxing quality of this new sort of work. I was at last constantlymaking excuses not to come up to him in London. The latter part of hisbusiness career recedes therefore beyond the circle of any particularlife. I lived more or less with him; I talked, I advised, I helped himat times to fight his Sunday crowd at Crest Hill, but I did not follownor guide him. From the Do Ut time onward he rushed up the financialworld like a bubble in water and left me like some busy water-thing downbelow in the deeps.

  Anyhow, he was an immense success. The public was, I think, particularlyattracted by the homely familiarity of his field of work--you never lostsight of your investment they felt, with the name on the house-flanneland shaving-strop--and its allegiance was secured by the Egyptiansolidity of his apparent results. Tono-Bungay, after its reconstruction,paid thirteen, Moggs seven, Domestic Utilities had been a safe-lookingnine; here was Household Services with eight; on such a showing he hadmerely to buy a
nd sell Roeburn's Antiseptic fluid, Razor soaks and Bathcrystals in three weeks to clear twenty thousand pounds.

  I do think that as a matter of fact Roeburn's was good value at theprice at which he gave it to the public, at least until it was strainedby ill-conserved advertisement. It was a period of expansion andconfidence; much money was seeking investment and "Industrials" were thefashion. Prices were rising all round. There remained little more formy uncle to do therefore, in his climb to the high unstable crestof Financial Greatness but, as he said, to "grasp the cosmic oyster,George, while it gaped," which, being translated, meant for him to buyrespectable businesses confidently and courageously at the vendor'sestimate, add thirty or forty thousand to the price and sell them again.His sole difficulty indeed was the tactful management of the loadof shares that each of these transactions left upon his hands. But Ithought so little of these later things that I never fully appreciatedthe peculiar inconveniences of that until it was too late to help him.

  III

  When I think of my uncle near the days of his Great Boom and inconnection with the actualities of his enterprises, I think of him asI used to see him in the suite of rooms he occupied in the HardinghamHotel, seated at a great old oak writing-table, smoking, drinking, andincoherently busy; that was his typical financial aspect--our evenings,our mornings, our holidays, our motor-car expeditions, Lady Grove andCrest Hill belong to an altogether different set of memories.

  These rooms in the Hardingham were a string of apartments along onehandsome thick-carpeted corridor. All the doors upon the corridor werelocked except the first; and my uncle's bedroom, breakfast-room andprivate sanctum were the least accessible and served by an entrance fromthe adjacent passage, which he also used at times as a means ofescape from importunate callers. The most eternal room was a generalwaiting-room and very business-like in quality; it had one or two uneasysofas, a number of chairs, a green baize table, and a collection of thevery best Moggs and Tone posters: and the plush carpets normal to theHardingham had been replaced by a grey-green cork linoleum; Here Iwould always find a remarkable miscellany of people presided over bya peculiarly faithful and ferocious looking commissioner, Ropper, whoguarded the door that led a step nearer my uncle. Usually there wouldbe a parson or so, and one or two widows; hairy, eyeglassy, middle-agedgentlemen, some of them looking singularly like Edward Ponderevoswho hadn't come off, a variety of young and youngish men more or lessattractively dressed, some with papers protruding from their pockets,others with their papers decently concealed. And wonderful, incidental,frowsy people.

  All these persons maintained a practically hopeless siege--sometimes forweeks together; they had better have stayed at home. Next came a roomfull of people who had some sort of appointment, and here one would findsmart-looking people, brilliantly dressed, nervous women hiding behindmagazines, nonconformist divines, clergy in gaiters, real business men,these latter for the most part gentlemen in admirable morning dress whostood up and scrutinised my uncle's taste in water colours manfully andsometimes by the hour together. Young men again were here of varioussocial origins, young Americans, treasonable clerks from other concerns,university young men, keen-looking, most of them, resolute, reserved,but on a sort of hair trigger, ready at any moment to be most voluble,most persuasive.

  This room had a window, too, looking out into the hotel courtyard withits fern-set fountains and mosaic pavement, and the young men wouldstand against this and sometimes even mutter. One day I heard onerepeating in all urgent whisper as I passed "But you don't quite see,Mr. Ponderevo, the full advantages, the FULL advantages--" I met his eyeand he was embarrassed.

  Then came a room with a couple of secretaries--no typewriters, becausemy uncle hated the clatter--and a casual person or two sitting about,projectors whose projects were being entertained. Here and in a furtherroom nearer the private apartments, my uncle's correspondence underwentan exhaustive process of pruning and digestion before it reached him.Then the two little rooms in which my uncle talked; my magic uncle whohad got the investing public--to whom all things were possible. As onecame in we would find him squatting with his cigar up and an expressionof dubious beatitude upon his face, while some one urged him to growstill richer by this or that.

  "That'ju, George?" he used to say. "Come in. Here's a thing. Tellhim--Mister--over again. Have a drink, George? No! Wise man! Liss'n."

  I was always ready to listen. All sorts of financial marvels came out ofthe Hardingham, more particularly during my uncle's last great flurry,but they were nothing to the projects that passed in. It was the littlebrown and gold room he sat in usually. He had had it redecorated byBordingly and half a dozen Sussex pictures by Webster hung about it.Latterly he wore a velveteen jacket of a golden-brown colour in thisapartment that I think over-emphasised its esthetic intention, and healso added some gross Chinese bronzes.

  He was, on the whole, a very happy man throughout all that wildlyenterprising time. He made and, as I shall tell in its place, spentgreat sums of money. He was constantly in violent motion, constantlystimulated mentally and physically and rarely tired. About him was anatmosphere of immense deference much of his waking life was triumphaland all his dreams. I doubt if he had any dissatisfaction with himselfat all until the crash bore him down. Things must have gone very rapidlywith him.... I think he must have been very happy.

  As I sit here writing about all these things, jerking down notes andthrowing them aside in my attempt to give some literary form to the taleof our promotions, the marvel of it all comes to me as if it came forthe first time the supreme unreason of it. At the climax of his Boom, myuncle at the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance andcredit about two million pounds'-worth of property to set off againsthis vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have hada controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions.

  This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that,paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and tellingit lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economisednothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesseswe organised added any real value to human life at all. Several likeTono-Bungay were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the givingof nothing coated in advertisements for money. And the things theHardingham gave out, I repeat, were nothing to the things that camein. I think of the long procession of people who sat down before us andpropounded this and that. Now it was a device for selling bread undera fancy name and so escaping the laws as to weight--this was afterwardsfloated as the Decorticated Health-Bread Company and bumped against thelaw--now it was a new scheme for still more strident advertisement,now it was a story of unsuspected deposits of minerals, now a cheap andnasty substitute for this or that common necessity, now the treachery ofa too well-informed employee, anxious to become our partner. It wasall put to us tentatively, persuasively. Sometimes one had a large pinkblusterous person trying to carry us off our feet by his pseudo-boyishfrankness, now some dyspeptically yellow whisperer, now some earnest,specially dressed youth with an eye-glass and a buttonhole, now somehomely-speaking, shrewd Manchester man or some Scotchman eager to bevery clear and full.

  Many came in couples or trios, often in tow of an explanatory solicitor.Some were white and earnest, some flustered beyond measure at theiropportunity. Some of them begged and prayed to be taken up. My unclechose what he wanted and left the rest. He became very autocratic tothese applicants.

  He felt he could make them, and they felt so too. He had but to say"No!" and they faded out of existence.... He had become a sort of vortexto which wealth flowed of its own accord. His possessions increased byheaps; his shares, his leaseholds and mortgages and debentures.

  Behind his first-line things he found it necessary at last, andsanctioned by all the precincts, to set up three general tradingcompanies, the London and African Investment Company, the BritishTraders' Loan Company, and Business Organisations Limited. This was inthe culminating time when I had least to do with affai
rs. I don't saythat with any desire to exculpate myself; I admit I was a directorof all three, and I will confess I was willfully incurious in thatcapacity. Each of these companies ended its financial year solvent byselling great holdings of shares to one or other of its sisters, andpaying a dividend out of the proceeds. I sat at the table and agreed.That was our method of equilibrium at the iridescent climax of thebubble.

  You perceive now, however, the nature of the services for which thisfantastic community have him unmanageable wealth and power and realrespect. It was all a monstrous payment for courageous fiction, agratuity in return for the one reality of human life--illusion. We gavethem a feeling of hope and profit; we sent a tidal wave of water andconfidence into their stranded affairs. "We mint Faith, George," said myuncle one day. "That's what we do. And by Jove we got to keep minting!We been making human confidence ever since I drove the first cork ofTono-Bungay."

  "Coining" would have been a better word than minting! And yet, youknow, in a sense he was right. Civilisation is possible only throughconfidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about thestreets. The bank reserve or a policeman keeping order in a jostlingmultitude of people, are only slightly less impudent bluffs than myuncle's prospectuses. They couldn't for a moment "make good" if thequarter of what they guarantee was demanded of them. The whole of thismodern mercantile investing civilisation is indeed such stuff as dreamsare made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systemsgrow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines areopened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countriesare settled; about this busy striving world the rich owners go,controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating the confidencethat draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconsciousbrotherhood. I wonder and plan my engines. The flags flutter, the crowdscheer, the legislatures meet. Yet it seems to me indeed at times thatall this present commercial civilisation is no more than my poor uncle'scareer writ large, a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances; thatits arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised, itsultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps tosome tremendous parallel to his individual disaster...

  Well, so it was we Boomed, and for four years and a half we lived a lifeof mingled substance and moonshine. Until our particular unsoundnessovertook us we went about in the most magnificent of motor-cars upontangible high roads, made ourselves conspicuous and stately in splendidhouses, ate sumptuously and had a perpetual stream of notes and moneytrickling into our pockets; hundreds of thousands of men and womenrespected us, saluted us and gave us toil and honour; I asked, and myworksheets rose, my aeroplanes swooped out of nothingness to scare thedownland pe-wits; my uncle waved his hand and Lady Grove and all itsassociations of chivalry and ancient peace were his; waved again, andarchitects were busy planning the great palace he never finished atCrest Hill and an army of folkmen gathered to do his bidding, bluemarble came from Canada, and timber from New Zealand; and beneath itall, you know, there was nothing but fictitious values as evanescent asrainbow gold.

  IV

  I pass the Hardingham ever and again and glance aside through the greatarchway at the fountain and the ferns, and think of those receding dayswhen I was so near the centre of our eddy of greed and enterprise. I seeagain my uncle's face, white and intent, and hear him discourse, hearhim make consciously Napoleonic decisions, "grip" his nettles, puthis "finger on the spot," "bluff," say "snap." He became particularlyaddicted to the last idiom. Towards the end every conceivable act tookthe form of saying "snap!"

  The odd fish that came to us! And among others came Gordon-Nasmyth, thatqueer blend of romance and illegality who was destined to drag me intothe most irrelevant adventure in my life the Mordet Island affair; andleave me, as they say, with blood upon my hands. It is remarkable howlittle it troubles my conscience and how much it stirs my imagination,that particular memory of the life I took. The story of Mordet Islandhas been told in a government report and told all wrong; there are stillexcellent reasons for leaving it wrong in places, but the liveliestappeals of discretion forbid my leaving it out altogether.

  I've still the vividest memory of Gordon-Nasmyth's appearance in theinner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds with a yellow-brownhatchet face and one faded blue eye--the other was a closed and sunkenlid--and how he told us with a stiff affectation of ease his incrediblestory of this great heap of quap that lay abandoned or undiscoveredon the beach behind Mordet's Island among white dead mangroves and theblack ooze of brackish water.

  "What's quap?" said my uncle on the fourth repetition of the word.

  "They call it quap, or quab, or quabb," said Gordon-Nasmyth; "but ourrelations weren't friendly enough to get the accent right....

  "But there the stuff is for the taking. They don't know about it.Nobody knows about it. I got down to the damned place in a canoe alone.The boys wouldn't come. I pretended to be botanising." ...

  To begin with, Gordon-Nasmyth was inclined to be dramatic.

  "Look here," he said when he first came in, shutting the door rathercarefully behind him as he spoke, "do you two men--yes or no--want toput up six thousand--for--a clear good chance of fifteen hundred percent. on your money in a year?"

  "We're always getting chances like that," said my uncle, cocking hiscigar offensively, wiping his glasses and tilting his chair back. "Westick to a safe twenty."

  Gordon-Nasmyth's quick temper showed in a slight stiffening of hisattitude.

  "Don't you believe him," said I, getting up before he could reply."You're different, and I know your books. We're very glad you've cometo us. Confound it, uncle! Its Gordon-Nasmyth! Sit down. What is it?Minerals?"

  "Quap," said Gordon-Nasmyth, fixing his eye on me, "in heaps."

  "In heaps," said my uncle softly, with his glasses very oblique.

  "You're only fit for the grocery," said Gordon-Nasmyth scornfully,sitting down and helping himself to one of my uncle's cigars. "I'm sorryI came. But, still, now I'm here.... And first as to quap; quap, sir, isthe most radio-active stuff in the world. That's quap! It's a festeringmass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium,carium, and new things, too. There's a stuff called Xk--provisionally.There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What itis, how it got made, I don't know. It's like as if some young creatorhad been playing about there. There it lies in two heaps, one small,one great, and the world for miles about it is blasted and scorched anddead. You can have it for the getting. You've got to take it--that'sall!"

  "That sounds all right," said I. "Have you samples?"

  "Well--should I? You can have anything--up to two ounces."

  "Where is it?"...

  His blue eye smiled at me and scrutinised me. He smoked and wasfragmentary for a time, fending off my questions; then his story beganto piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strangeforgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channelsthat spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt withinthe thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation thatcreeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a senseof heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at lastcomes a break among these things, an arena fringed with bone-white deadtrees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf anda wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and scarred....A little way off among charred dead weeds stands the abandonedstation,--abandoned because every man who stayed two months at thatstation stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a leper with itsdismantled sheds and its decaying pier of wormrotten and oblique pilesand planks, still insecurely possible.

  And in the midst, two clumsy heaps shaped like the backs of hogs, onesmall, one great, sticking out under a rib of rock that cuts the spaceacross,--quap!

  "There it is," said Gordon-Nasmyth, "worth three pounds an ounce, ifit's worth a penny; two great heaps of it, rotten stuff and soft, readyto shovel and wheel, and you may get it by the ton!"
>
  "How did it get there?"

  "God knows! ... There it is--for the taking! In a country where youmustn't trade. In a country where the company waits for good kind mento find it riches and then take 'em away from 'em. There you haveit--derelict."

  "Can't you do any sort of deal?"

  "They're too damned stupid. You've got to go and take it. That's all."

  "They might catch you."

  "They might, of course. But they're not great at catching."

  We went into the particulars of that difficulty. "They wouldn't catchme, because I'd sink first. Give me a yacht," said Gordon-Nasmyth;"that's all I need."

  "But if you get caught," said my uncle.

  I am inclined to think Gordon-Nasmyth imagined we would give him acheque for six thousand pounds on the strength of his talk. It was verygood talk, but we didn't do that. I stipulated for samples of his stufffor analysis, and he consented--reluctantly.

  I think, on the whole, he would rather I didn't examine samples. He madea motion pocketwards, that gave us an invincible persuasion that hehad a sample upon him, and that at the last instant he decided not toproduce it prematurely.

  There was evidently a curious strain of secretiveness in him. He didn'tlike to give us samples, and he wouldn't indicate within three hundredmiles the position of this Mordet Island of his. He had it clear in hismind that he had a secret of immense value, and he had no idea at all ofjust how far he ought to go with business people. And so presently,to gain time for these hesitations of his, he began to talk of otherthings. He talked very well. He talked of the Dutch East Indies and ofthe Congo, of Portuguese East Africa and Paraguay, of Malays and richChinese merchants, Dyaks and negroes and the spread of the Mahometanworld in Africa to-day. And all this time he was trying to judge ifwe were good enough to trust with his adventure. Our cosy inner officebecame a little place, and all our business cold and lifeless exploitsbeside his glimpses of strange minglings of men, of slayings unavengedand curious customs, of trade where no writs run, and the darktreacheries of eastern ports and uncharted channels.

  We had neither of us gone abroad except for a few vulgar raids on Paris;our world was England, are the places of origin of half the raw materialof the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland or theforest of Arden. But Gordon-Nasmyth made it so real and intimate for usthat afternoon--for me, at any rate--that it seemed like something seenand forgotten and now again remembered.

  And in the end he produced his sample, a little lump of muddy clayspeckled with brownish grains, in a glass bottle wrapped about with leadand flannel--red flannel it was, I remember--a hue which is, I know,popularly supposed to double all the mystical efficacies of flannel.

  "Don't carry it about on you," said Gordon-Nasmyth. "It makes a sore."

  I took the stuff to Thorold, and Thorold had the exquisite agony ofdiscovering two new elements in what was then a confidentialanalysis. He has christened them and published since, but at the timeGordon-Nasmyth wouldn't hear for a moment of our publication of anyfacts at all; indeed, he flew into a violent passion and abused memercilessly even for showing the stuff to Thorold. "I thought you weregoing to analyse it yourself," he said with the touching persuasion ofthe layman that a scientific man knows and practises at the sciences.

  I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much truthin Gordon-Nasmyth's estimate of the value of the stuff. It was beforethe days of Capern's discovery of the value of canadium and his use ofit in the Capern filament, but the cerium and thorium alone were worththe money he extracted for the gas-mantles then in vogue. There were,however, doubts. Indeed, there were numerous doubts. What were thelimits of the gas-mantle trade? How much thorium, not to speak ofcerium, could they take at a maximum. Suppose that quantity was highenough to justify our shipload, came doubts in another quarter. Werethe heaps up to sample? Were they as big as he said? WasGordon-Nasmyth--imaginative? And if these values held, could we afterall get the stuff? It wasn't ours. It was on forbidden ground. You see,there were doubts of every grade and class in the way of this adventure.

  We went some way, nevertheless, in the discussion of his project, thoughI think we tried his patience. Then suddenly he vanished from London,and I saw no more of him for a year and a half.

  My uncle said that was what he had expected, and when at lastGordon-Nasmyth reappeared and mentioned in an incidental way that hehad been to Paraguay on private (and we guessed passionate) affairs,the business of the "quap" expedition had to be begun again at thebeginning. My uncle was disposed to be altogether sceptical, but Iwasn't so decided. I think I was drawn by its picturesque aspects.But we neither of us dreamt of touching it seriously until Capern'sdiscovery.

  Nasmyth's story had laid hold of my imagination like one small, intensepicture of tropical sunshine hung on a wall of grey business affairs.I kept it going during Gordon-Nasmyth's intermittent appearances inEngland. Every now and then he and I would meet and reinforce itseffect. We would lunch in London, or he would cone to see my gliders atCrest Hill, and make new projects for getting at those heaps again nowwith me, now alone.

  At times they became a sort of fairy-story with us, an imaginativeexercise. And there came Capern's discovery of what he called the idealfilament and with it an altogether less problematical quality about thebusiness side of quap. For the ideal filament needed five per cent. ofcanadium, and canadium was known to the world only as a newly separatedconstituent of a variety of the rare mineral rutile. But to Thorold itwas better known as an element in a mysterious sample brought to himby me, and to me it was known as one of the elements in quap. I toldmy uncle, and we jumped on to the process at once. We found thatGordon-Nasmyth, still unaware of the altered value of the stuff, andstill thinking of the experimental prices of radium and the rarityvalue of cerium, had got hold of a cousin named Pollack, made someextraordinary transaction about his life insurance policy, and wasbuying a brig. We put in, put down three thousand pounds, and forthwiththe life insurance transaction and the Pollack side of this financevanished into thin air, leaving Pollack, I regret to say, in the brigand in the secret--except so far as canadium and the filament went--asresiduum. We discussed earnestly whether we should charter a steamer orgo on with the brig, but we decided on the brig as a less conspicuousinstrument for an enterprise that was after all, to put it plainly,stealing.

  But that was one of our last enterprises before our great crisis, and Iwill tell of it in its place.

  So it was quap came into our affairs, came in as a fairy-tale and becamereal. More and more real it grew until at last it was real, until atlast I saw with my eyes the heaps my imagination had seen for so long,and felt between my fingers again that half-gritty, half soft textureof quap, like sanded moist-sugar mixed with clay in which there stirssomething--

  One must feel it to understand.

  V

  All sorts of things came to the Hardingham and offered themselves to myuncle. Gordon-Nasmyth stands but only because he played a part at lastin the crisis of our fortunes. So much came to us that it seemed tome at times as though the whole world of human affairs was ready toprostitute itself to our real and imaginary millions. As I look back,I am still dazzled and incredulous to think of the quality of ouropportunities.

  We did the most extraordinary things; things that it seems absurd tome to leave to any casual man of wealth and enterprise who cares to dothem. I had some amazing perceptions of just how modern thought and thesupply of fact to the general mind may be controlled by money. Amongother things that my uncle offered for, he tried very hard to buy theBritish Medical Journal and the Lancet, and run them on what he calledmodern lines, and when they resisted him he talked very vigorously for atime of organising a rival enterprise. That was a very magnificent ideaindeed in its way; it would have given a tremendous advantage in thehandling of innumerable specialties and indeed I scarcely know howfar it would not have put the medical profession in our grip. It stillamazes me--I shall die amazed--that such a thing can be possible
in themodern state. If my uncle failed to bring the thing off, some oneelse may succeed. But I doubt, even if he had got both these weeklies,whether his peculiar style would have suited them. The change of purposewould have shown. He would have found it difficult to keep up theirdignity.

  He certainly did not keep up the dignity of the Sacred Grove,an important critical organ which he acquired one day--by saying"snap"--for eight hundred pounds. He got it "lock, stock andbarrel"--under one or other of which three aspects the editor wasincluded. Even at that price it didn't pay. If you are a literary personyou will remember the bright new cover he gave that representative organof British intellectual culture, and how his sound business instinctsjarred with the exalted pretensions of a vanishing age. One old wrapperI discovered the other day runs:--

  "THE SACRED GROVE."

  Weekly Magazine of Art, Philosophy, Science and Belles Lettres. ----------------------------------------------

  HAVE YOU A NASTY TASTE IN YOUR MOUTH? IT IS LIVER.

  YOU NEED ONE TWENTY-THREE PILL.

  (JUST ONE.)

  NOT A DRUG BUT A LIVE AMERICAN REMEDY. -----------------------------------------------

  CONTENTS.

  A Hitherto Unpublished Letter from Walter Pater. Charlotte Bronte's Maternal Great Aunt. A New Catholic History of England. The Genius of Shakespeare. Correspondence:--The Mendelian Hypothesis; The Split Infinitive;

  "Commence," or "Begin;" Claverhouse; Socialism and the

  Individual; The Dignity of Letters. Folk-lore Gossip. The Stage; the Paradox of Acting. Travel Biography, Verse, Fiction, etc. ---------------------------------------------------- THE BEST PILL IN THE WORLD FOR AN IRREGULAR LIVER

  I suppose it is some lingering traces of the Bladesover tradition to methat makes this combination of letters and pills seem so incongruous,just as I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and myineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should bewise, sane and dignified, that makes me think a country which leavesits medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally importantcriticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances ofany purchaser must be in a frankly hopeless condition. These are idealconceptions of mine.

  As a matter of fact, nothing would be more entirely natural andrepresentative of the relations of learning, thought and the economicsituation in the world at the present time than this cover of theSacred Grove--the quiet conservatism of the one element embedded inthe aggressive brilliance of the other; the contrasted notes of boldphysiological experiment and extreme mental immobility.

  VI

  There comes back, too, among these Hardingham memories, an impressionof a drizzling November day, and how we looked out of the windows upon aprocession of the London unemployed.

  It was like looking down a well into some momentarily revealed netherworld. Some thousands of needy ineffectual men had been raked togetherto trail their spiritless misery through the West Eire with an appealthat was also in its way a weak and insubstantial threat: "It is Work weneed, not Charity."

  There they were, half-phantom through the fog, a silent, foot-dragging,interminable, grey procession. They carried wet, dirty banners, theyrattled boxes for pence; these men who had not said "snap" in the rightplace, the men who had "snapped" too eagerly, the men who had neversaid "snap," the men who had never had a chance of saying "snap." Ashambling, shameful stream they made, oozing along the street, thegutter waste of competitive civilisation. And we stood high out of itall, as high as if we looked godlike from another world, standing ina room beautifully lit and furnished, skillfully warmed, filled withcostly things.

  "There," thought I, "but for the grace of God, go George and EdwardPonderevo."

  But my uncle's thoughts ran in a different channel, and he made thatvision the test of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon TariffReform.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  OUR PROGRESS FROM CAMDEN TOWN TO CREST HILL

  I

  So far my history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with hisindustrial and financial exploits. But side by side with that history ofinflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is another development,the change year by year from the shabby impecuniosity of the Camden Townlodging to the lavish munificence of the Crest Hill marble staircase andmy aunt's golden bed, the bed that was facsimiled from Fontainebleau.And the odd thing is that as I come to this nearer part of my story Ifind it much more difficult to tell than the clear little perspectivememories of the earlier days. Impressions crowd upon one another andoverlap one another; I was presently to fall in love again, to be seizedby a passion to which I still faintly respond, a passion that stillclouds my mind. I came and went between Ealing and my aunt and uncle,and presently between Effie and clubland, and then between businessand a life of research that became far more continuous, infinitely moreconsecutive and memorable than any of these other sets of experiences.I didn't witness a regular social progress therefore; my aunt anduncle went up in the world, so far as I was concerned, as if they weredisplayed by an early cinematograph, with little jumps and flickers.

  As I recall this side of our life, the figure of my round-eyes,button-nosed, pink-and-white Aunt Susan tends always to the centralposition. We drove the car and sustained the car, she sat in it witha magnificent variety of headgear poised upon her delicate neck,and always with that faint ghost of a lisp no misspelling canrender--commented on and illuminated the new aspects.

  I've already sketched the little home behind the Wimblehurst chemist'sshop, the lodging near the Cobden statue, and the apartments in GowerStreet. Thence my aunt and uncle went into a flat in RedgauntletMansions. There they lived when I married. It was a compact flat, withvery little for a woman to do in it In those days my aunt, I think,used to find the time heavy upon her hands, and so she took to books andreading, and after a time even to going to lectures in the afternoon.I began to find unexpected books upon her table: sociological books,travels, Shaw's plays. "Hullo!" I said, at the sight of some volume ofthe latter.

  "I'm keeping a mind, George," she explained.

  "Eh?"

  "Keeping a mind. Dogs I never cared for. It's been a toss-up betweensetting up a mind and setting up a soul. It's jolly lucky for Him andyou it's a mind. I've joined the London Library, and I'm going in forthe Royal Institution and every blessed lecture that comes along nextwinter. You'd better look out."...

  And I remember her coming in late one evening with a note-book in herhand.

  "Where ya been, Susan?" said my uncle.

  "Birkbeck--Physiology. I'm getting on." She sat down and took off hergloves. "You're just glass to me," she sighed, and then in a note ofgrave reproach: "You old PACKAGE! I had no idea! The Things you've keptfrom me!"

  Presently they were setting; up the house at Beckengham, and my auntintermitted her intellectual activities. The house at Beckengham wassomething of an enterprise for them at that time, a reasonably largeplace by the standards of the early years of Tono-Bungay. It was a big,rather gaunt villa, with a conservatory and a shrubbery, a tennis-lawn,a quite considerable vegetable garden, and a small disused coach-house.I had some glimpses of the excitements of its inauguration, but not manybecause of the estrangement between my aunt and Marion.

  My aunt went into that house with considerable zest, and my uncledistinguished himself by the thoroughness with which he did therepainting and replumbing. He had all the drains up and most of thegarden with them, and stood administrative on heaps--administratingwhisky to the workmen. I found him there one day, most Napoleonic, ona little Elba of dirt, in an atmosphere that defies print. He also, Iremember, chose what he considered cheerful contrasts of colours for thepainting of the woodwork. This exasperated my aunt extremely--shecalled him a "Pestilential old Splosher" with an unusual note ofearnestness--and he also enraged her into novelties of abuse by givingeach bedroom the name of some favourite hero--Cliff, Napoleon, Caesar
,and so forth--and having it painted on the door in gilt letters ona black label. "Martin Luther" was kept for me. Only her respect fordomestic discipline, she said, prevented her retaliating with "OldPondo" on the housemaid's cupboard.

  Also he went and ordered one of the completest sets of garden requisitesI have ever seen--and had them all painted a hard clear blue. My auntgot herself large tins of a kindlier hued enamel and had everythingsecretly recoated, and this done, she found great joy in the garden andbecame an ardent rose grower and herbaceous borderer, leaving her Mind,indeed, to damp evenings and the winter months. When I think of her atBeckenham, I always think first of her as dressed in that blue cottonstuff she affected, with her arms in huge gauntleted gardening gloves, atrowel in one hand and a small but no doubt hardy and promising annual,limp and very young-looking and sheepish, in the other.

  Beckenham, in the persons of a vicar, a doctor's wife, and a large proudlady called Hogberry, "called" on my uncle and aunt almost at once, sosoon in fact as the lawn was down again, and afterwards my aunt madefriends with a quiet gentlewoman next door, a propos of an overhangingcherry tree and the need of repairing the party fence. So she resumedher place in society from which she had fallen with the disaster ofWimblehurst. She made a partially facetious study of the etiquette ofher position, had cards engraved and retaliated calls. And then shereceived a card for one of Mrs. Hogberry's At Homes, gave an old gardenparty herself, participated in a bazaar and sale of work, and was reallybecoming quite cheerfully entangled in Beckenham society when she wassuddenly taken up by the roots again by my uncle and transplanted toChiselhurst.

  "Old Trek, George," she said compactly, "Onward and Up," when I foundher superintending the loading of two big furniture vans. "Go up and saygood-bye to 'Martin Luther,' and then I'll see what you can do to helpme."

  II

  I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory, andBeckenham seems to me a quite transitory phase. But really they werethere several years; through nearly all my married life, in fact,and far longer than the year and odd months we lived together atWimblehurst. But the Wimblehurst time with them is fuller in my memoryby far then the Beckenham period. There comes back to me with a quiteconsiderable amount of detail the effect of that garden party of myaunt's and of a little social misbehaviour of which I was guilty on thatoccasion. It's like a scrap from another life. It's all set in what isfor me a kind of cutaneous feeling, the feeling of rather ill-cut cityclothes, frock coat and grey trousers, and of a high collar and tieworn in sunshine among flowers. I have still a quite vivid memory of thelittle trapezoidal lawn, of the gathering, and particularly of thehats and feathers of the gathering, of the parlour-maid and the bluetea-cups, and of the magnificent presence of Mrs. Hogberry and of herclear, resonant voice. It was a voice that would have gone with a gardenparty on a larger scale; it went into adjacent premises; it included thegardener who was far up the vegetable patch and technically out of play.The only other men were my aunt's doctor, two of the clergy, amiablecontrasted men, and Mrs. Hogberry's imperfectly grown-up son, a youthjust bursting into collar. The rest were women, except for a young girlor so in a state of speechless good behaviour. Marion also was there.

  Marion and I had arrived a little estranged, and I remember her asa silent presence, a shadow across all that sunlit emptiness ofintercourse. We had embittered each other with one of those miserablelittle disputes that seemed so unavoidable between us. She had, with thehelp of Smithie, dressed rather elaborately for the occasion, and whenshe saw me prepared to accompany her in, I think it was a grey suit,she protested that silk hat and frock coat were imperative. I wasrecalcitrant, she quoted an illustrated paper showing a garden partywith the King present, and finally I capitulated--but after my evilhabit, resentfully.... Eh, dear! those old quarrels, how pitiful theywere, how trivial! And how sorrowful they are to recall! I think theygrow more sorrowful as I grow older, and all the small passionatereasons for our mutual anger fade and fade out of memory.

  The impression that Beckenham company has left on my mind is one ofa modest unreality; they were all maintaining a front of unspecifiedsocial pretension, and evading the display of the economic facts of thecase. Most of the husbands were "in business" off stage, it would havebeen outrageous to ask what the business was--and the wives weregiving their energies to produce, with the assistance of novels and theillustrated magazines, a moralised version of the afternoon life of thearistocratic class. They hadn't the intellectual or moral enterpriseof the upper-class woman, they had no political interests, they had noviews about anything, and consequently they were, I remember, extremelydifficult to talk to. They all sat about in the summer-house and ingarden-chairs, and were very hatty and ruffley and sunshady. Threeladies and the curate played croquet with a general immense gravity,broken by occasional loud cries of feigned distress from the curate."Oh! Whacking me about again! Augh!"

  The dominant social fact that afternoon was Mrs. Hogberry; she took up acertain position commanding the croquet and went on, as my aunt said tome in an incidental aside, "like an old Roundabout." She talked of theway in which Beckenham society was getting mixed, and turned on toa touching letter she had recently received from her former nurse atLittle Gossdean. Followed a loud account of Little Gossdean and how muchshe and her eight sisters had been looked up to there. "My poor motherwas quite a little Queen there," she said. "And such NICE Common people!People say the country labourers are getting disrespectful nowadays. Itisn't so--not if they're properly treated. Here of course in Beckenhamit's different. I won't call the people we get here a Poor--they'recertainly not a proper Poor. They're Masses. I always tell Mr. Bugshootthey're Masses, and ought to be treated as such."...

  Dim memories of Mrs. Mackridge floated through my mind as I listened toher....

  I was whirled on this roundabout for a bit, and then had the fortune tofall off into a tete-a-tete with a lady whom my aunt introduced asMrs. Mumble--but then she introduced everybody to me as Mumble thatafternoon, either by way of humour or necessity.

  That must have been one of my earliest essays in the art of politeconversation, and I remember that I began by criticising the localrailway service, and that at the third sentence or thereabouts Mrs.Mumble said in a distinctly bright and encouraging way that she feared Iwas a very "frivolous" person.

  I wonder now what it was I said that was "frivolous."

  I don't know what happened to end that conversation, or if it hadan end. I remember talking to one of the clergy for a time ratherawkwardly, and being given a sort of topographical history of Beckenham,which he assured me time after time was "Quite an old place. Quite anold place." As though I had treated it as new and he meant to be verypatient but very convincing. Then we hung up in a distinct pause, and myaunt rescued me. "George," she said in a confidential undertone, "keepthe pot a-boiling." And then audibly, "I say, will you both old trotabout with tea a bit?"

  "Only too delighted to TROT for you, Mrs. Ponderevo," said theclergyman, becoming fearfully expert and in his elements; "only toodelighted."

  I found we were near a rustic table, and that the housemaid was behindus in a suitable position to catch us on the rebound with the teathings.

  "Trot!" repeated the clergyman to me, much amused; "excellentexpression!" And I just saved him from the tray as he turned about.

  We handed tea for a while....

  "Give 'em cakes," said my aunt, flushed, but well in hand. "Helps 'em totalk, George. Always talk best after a little nourishment. Like throwinga bit of turf down an old geyser."

  She surveyed the gathering with a predominant blue eye and helpedherself to tea.

  "They keep on going stiff," she said in an undertone.... "I've done mybest."

  "It's been a huge success," I said encouragingly.

  "That boy has had his legs crossed in that position and hasn't spokenfor ten minutes. Stiffer and stiffer. Brittle. He's beginning a drycough--always a bad sign, George.... Walk 'em about, shall I?--rub theirnoses with snow?
"

  Happily she didn't. I got myself involved with the gentlewoman from nextdoor, a pensive, languid-looking little woman with a low voice, and felltalking; our topic, Cats and Dogs, and which it was we liked best.

  "I always feel," said the pensive little woman, "that there's somethingabout a dog--A cat hasn't got it."

  "Yes," I found myself admitting with great enthusiasm, "there issomething. And yet again--"

  "Oh! I know there's something about a cat, too. But it isn't the same."

  "Not quite the same," I admitted; "but still it's something."

  "Ah! But such a different something!"

  "More sinuous."

  "Much more."

  "Ever so much more."

  "It makes all the difference, don't you think?"

  "Yes," I said, "ALL."

  She glanced at me gravely and sighed a long, deeply felt "Yes." A longpause.

  The thing seemed to me to amount to a stale-mate. Fear came into myheart and much perplexity.

  "The--er--Roses," I said. I felt like a drowning man. "Thoseroses--don't you think they are--very beautiful flowers?"

  "Aren't they!" she agreed gently. "There seems to be something inroses--something--I don't know how to express it."

  "Something," I said helpfully.

  "Yes," she said, "something. Isn't there?"

  "So few people see it," I said; "more's the pity!"

  She sighed and said again very softly, "Yes."...

  There was another long pause. I looked at her and she was thinkingdreamily. The drowning sensation returned, the fear and enfeeblement. Iperceived by a sort of inspiration that her tea-cup was empty.

  "Let me take your cup," I said abruptly, and, that secured, made for thetable by the summer-house. I had no intention then of deserting myaunt. But close at hand the big French window of the drawing-roomyawned inviting and suggestive. I can feel all that temptation now, andparticularly the provocation of my collar. In an instant I was lost. Iwould--Just for a moment!

  I dashed in, put down the cup on the keys of the grand piano and fledupstairs, softly, swiftly, three steps at a time, to the sanctuary of myuncle's study, his snuggery. I arrived there breathless, convincedthere was no return for me. I was very glad and ashamed of myself, anddesperate. By means of a penknife I contrived to break open his cabinetof cigars, drew a chair to the window, took off my coat, collar and tie,and remained smoking guiltily and rebelliously, and peeping through theblind at the assembly on the lawn until it was altogether gone....

  The clergymen, I thought, were wonderful.

  III

  A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and thenI find myself among the Chiselhurst memories. The Chiselhurst mansionhad "grounds" rather than a mere garden, and there was a gardener'scottage and a little lodge at the gate. The ascendant movement wasalways far more in evidence there than at Beckenham. The velocity wasincreasing.

  One night picks itself out as typical, as, in its way, marking an epoch.I was there, I think, about some advertisement stuff, on some sort ofbusiness anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back in a fly from adinner at the Runcorns. (Even there he was nibbling at Runcorn with theidea of our great Amalgamation budding in his mind.) I got down there, Isuppose, about eleven. I found the two of them sitting in the study, myaunt on a chair-arm with a whimsical pensiveness on her face, regardingmy uncle, and he, much extended and very rotund, in the low arm-chairdrawn up to the fender.

  "Look here, George," said my uncle, after my first greetings. "I justbeen saying: We aren't Oh Fay!"

  "Eh?"

  "Not Oh Fay! Socially!"

  "Old FLY, he means, George--French!"

  "Oh! Didn't think of French. One never knows where to have him. What'sgone wrong to-night?"

  "I been thinking. It isn't any particular thing. I ate too much of thatfishy stuff at first, like salt frog spawn, and was a bit confused byolives; and--well, I didn't know which wine was which. Had to say THATeach time. It puts your talk all wrong. And she wasn't in evening dress,not like the others. We can't go on in that style, George--not a properad."

  "I'm not sure you were right," I said, "in having a fly."

  "We got to do it all better," said my uncle, "we got to do it in Style.Smart business, smart men. She tries to pass it off as humorous"--myaunt pulled a grimace--"it isn't humorous! See! We're on the up-gradenow, fair and square. We're going to be big. We aren't going to belaughed at as Poovenoos, see!"

  "Nobody laughed at you," said my aunt. "Old Bladder!"

  "Nobody isn't going to laugh at me," said my uncle, glancing at hiscontours and suddenly sitting up.

  My aunt raised her eyebrows slightly, swung her foot, and said nothing.

  "We aren't keeping pace with our own progress, George. We got to. We'rebumping against new people, and they set up to be gentlefolks--etiquettedinners and all the rest of it. They give themselves airs and expectus to be fish-out-of-water. We aren't going to be. They think we've noStyle. Well, we give them Style for our advertisements, and we're goingto give 'em Style all through.... You needn't be born to it to dancewell on the wires of the Bond Street tradesmen. See?"

  I handed him the cigar-box.

  "Runcorn hadn't cigars like these," he said, truncating one lovingly."We beat him at cigars. We'll beat him all round."

  My aunt and I regarded him, full of apprehensions.

  "I got idees," he said darkly to the cigar, deepening our dread.

  He pocketed his cigar-cutter and spoke again.

  "We got to learn all the rotten little game first. See, F'rinstance, wegot to get samples of all the blessed wines there are--and learn 'em up.Stern, Smoor, Burgundy, all of 'em! She took Stern to-night--and whenshe tasted it first--you pulled a face, Susan, you did. I saw you. Itsurprised you. You bunched your nose. We got to get used to wine and notdo that. We got to get used to wearing evening dress--YOU, Susan, too."

  "Always have had a tendency to stick out of my clothes," said my aunt."However--Who cares?" She shrugged her shoulders.

  I had never seen my uncle so immensely serious.

  "Got to get the hang of etiquette," he went on to the fire. "Horseseven. Practise everything. Dine every night in evening dress.... Geta brougham or something. Learn up golf and tennis and things. Countrygentleman. Oh Fay. It isn't only freedom from Goochery."

  "Eh?" I said.

  "Oh!--Gawshery, if you like!"

  "French, George," said my aunt. "But I'M not ol' Gooch. I made that facefor fun."

  "It isn't only freedom from Gawshery. We got to have Style. See! Style!Just all right and one better. That's what I call Style. We can do it,and we will."

  He mumbled his cigar and smoked for a space, leaning forward and lookinginto the fire.

  "What is it," he asked, "after all? What is it? Tips about eating; tipsabout drinking. Clothes. How to hold yourself, and not say jes' thefew little things they know for certain are wrong--jes' the shibboleththings."

  He was silent again, and the cigar crept up from the horizontal towardsthe zenith as the confidence of his mouth increased.

  "Learn the whole bag of tricks in six months." he said, becoming morecheerful. "Ah, Susan? Beat it out! George, you in particular ought toget hold of it. Ought to get into a good club, and all that."

  "Always ready to learn!" I said. "Ever since you gave me the chance ofLatin. So far we don't seem to have hit upon any Latin-speaking stratumin the population."

  "We've come to French," said my aunt, "anyhow."

  "It's a very useful language," said my uncle. "Put a point on things.Zzzz. As for accent, no Englishman has an accent. No Englishmanpronounces French properly. Don't you tell ME. It's a Bluff.--It's all aBluff. Life's a Bluff--practically. That's why it's so important, Susan,for us to attend to Style. Le Steel Say Lum. The Style it's the man.Whad you laughing at, Susan? George, you're not smoking. These cigarsare good for the mind.... What do YOU think of it all? We got to adaptourselves. We have--so far.... Not going to be beat b
y these sillythings."

  IV

  "What do you think of it, George?" he insisted.

  What I said I thought of it I don't now recall. Only I have verydistinctly the impression of meeting for a moment my aunt's impenetrableeye. And anyhow he started in with his accustomed energy to rape themysteries of the Costly Life, and become the calmest of its lords. Onthe whole, I think he did it--thoroughly. I have crowded memories,a little difficult to disentangle, of his experimental stages, hisexperimental proceedings. It's hard at times to say which memory comesin front of which. I recall him as presenting on the whole a series ofsmall surprises, as being again and again, unexpectedly, a little moreself-confident, a little more polished, a little richer and finer, alittle more aware of the positions and values of things and men.

  There was a time--it must have been very early--when I saw him deeplyimpressed by the splendours of the dining-room of the National LiberalClub. Heaven knows who our host was or what that particular little"feed" was about now!--all that sticks is the impression of ourstraggling entry, a string of six or seven guests, and my uncle lookingabout him at the numerous bright red-shaded tables, at the exotics ingreat Majolica jars, at the shining ceramic columns and pilasters, atthe impressive portraits of Liberal statesmen and heroes, and all thatcontributes to the ensemble of that palatial spectacle. He was betrayedinto a whisper to me, "This is all Right, George!" he said. That artlesscomment seems almost incredible as I set it down; there came a timeso speedily when not even the clubs of New York could have overawed myuncle, and when he could walk through the bowing magnificence of theRoyal Grand Hotel to his chosen table in that aggressively exquisitegallery upon the river, with all the easy calm of one of earth'slegitimate kings.

  The two of them learnt the new game rapidly and well; they experimentedabroad, they experimented at home. At Chiselhurst, with the aid ofa new, very costly, but highly instructive cook, they tried overeverything they heard of that roused their curiosity and had anyreputation for difficulty, from asparagus to plover's eggs. Theyafterwards got a gardener who could wait at table--and he brought thesoil home to one. Then there came a butler.

  I remember my aunt's first dinner-gown very brightly, and how she stoodbefore the fire in the drawing-room confessing once unsuspected prettyarms with all the courage she possessed, and looking over her shoulderat herself in a mirror.

  "A ham," she remarked reflectively, "must feel like this. Just anecklace."...

  I attempted, I think, some commonplace compliment.

  My uncle appeared at the door in a white waistcoat and with his hands inhis trouser pockets; he halted and surveyed her critically.

  "Couldn't tell you from a duchess, Susan," he remarked. "I'd liketo have you painted, standin' at the fire like that. Sargent! Youlook--spirited, somehow. Lord!--I wish some of those damned tradesmen atWimblehurst could see you."...

  They did a lot of week-ending at hotels, and sometimes I went down withthem. We seemed to fall into a vast drifting crowd of social learners. Idon't know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but itseems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments ofthe hotel-frequenting and restaurant-using population during the lasttwenty years. It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of peoplewho, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but wholemasses of the prosperous section of the population must be altering itshabits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, usingthe week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these new social arts. Aswift and systematic conversion to gentility has been going on, I amconvinced, throughout the whole commercial upper-middle class since Iwas twenty-one. Curiously mixed was the personal quality of thepeople one saw in these raids. There were conscientiously refinedand low-voiced people reeking with proud bashfulness; there wereaggressively smart people using pet diminutives for each other loudlyand seeking fresh occasions for brilliant rudeness; there were awkwardhusbands and wives quarrelling furtively about their manners and illat ease under the eye of the winter; cheerfully amiable and oftendiscrepant couples with a disposition to inconspicuous corners, and thejolly sort, affecting an unaffected ease; plump happy ladies who laughedtoo loud, and gentlemen in evening dress who subsequently "got theirpipes." And nobody, you knew, was anybody, however expensively theydressed and whatever rooms they took.

  I look back now with a curious remoteness of spirit to those crowdeddining-rooms with their dispersed tables and their inevitable red-shadedlights and the unsympathetic, unskillful waiters, and the choice of"Thig or Glear, Sir?" I've not dined in that way, in that sort of place,now for five years--it must be quite five years, so specialised andnarrow is my life becoming.

  My uncle's earlier motor-car phases work in with these associations,and there stands out a little bright vignette of the hall of theMagnificent, Bexhill-on-Sea, and people dressed for dinner and sittingabout amidst the scarlet furniture--satin and white-enameled woodworkuntil the gong should gather them; and my aunt is there, verymarvelously wrapped about in a dust cloak and a cage-like veil, andthere are hotel porters and under-porters very alert, and an obsequiousmanager; and the tall young lady in black from the office is surprisedinto admiration, and in the middle of the picture is my uncle, makinghis first appearance in that Esquimaux costume I have already mentioned,a short figure, compactly immense, hugely goggled, wearing a sort ofbrown rubber proboscis, and surmounted by a table-land of motoring cap.

  V

  So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the upperlevels of the social system, and set ourselves quite consciously tothe acquisition of Style and Savoir Faire. We became part of what isnowadays quite an important element in the confusion of our world, thatmultitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to spendmoney. It is made up of financial people, the owners of the businessesthat are eating up their competitors, inventors of new sources ofwealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one seesit on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only thisin common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind aremoving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite, thingswere few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and thesphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Theirgeneral effect is one of progressive revolution, of limitless rope.

  They discover suddenly indulgences their moral code never foresaw andhas no provision for, elaborations, ornaments, possessions beyond theirwildest dreams. With an immense astonished zest they begin shoppingbegin a systematic adaptation to a new life crowded and brilliantwith things shopped, with jewels, maids, butlers, coachmen, electricbroughams, hired town and country houses. They plunge into it asone plunges into a career; as a class, they talk, think, and dreampossessions. Their literature, their Press, turns all on that; immenseillustrated weeklies of unsurpassed magnificence guide them in domesticarchitecture, in the art of owning a garden, in the achievement of thesumptuous in motor-cars, in an elaborate sporting equipment, in thepurchase and control of their estates, in travel and stupendous hotels.Once they begin to move they go far and fast. Acquisition becomes thesubstance of their lives. They find a world organised to gratify thatpassion. In a brief year or so they are connoisseurs. They join inthe plunder of the eighteenth century, buy rare old books, fine oldpictures, good old furniture. Their first crude conception of dazzlingsuites of the newly perfect is replaced almost from the outset by ajackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.

  I seem to remember my uncle taking to shopping quite suddenly. Inthe Beckenham days and in the early Chiselhurst days he was chieflyinterested in getting money, and except for his onslaught on theBeckenham house, bothered very little about his personal surroundingsand possessions. I forget now when the change came and he began tospend. Some accident must have revealed to him this new source of power,or some subtle shifting occurred in the tissues of his brain. He beganto spend and "shop." So soon as he began to shop, he began to shopviolently. He began buying pictures,
and then, oddly enough, old clocks.For the Chiselhurst house he bought nearly a dozen grandfather clocksand three copper warming pans. After that he bought much furniture. Thenhe plunged into art patronage, and began to commission pictures and tomake presents to churches and institutions. His buying increased with aregular acceleration. Its development was a part of the mental changesthat came to him in the wild excitements of the last four years of hisascent. Towards the climax he was a furious spender; he shopped withlarge unexpected purchases, he shopped like a mind seeking expression,he shopped to astonish and dismay; shopped crescendo, shoppedfortissimo, con molto espressione until the magnificent smash of CrestHill eroded his shopping for ever. Always it was he who shopped. My auntdid not shine as a purchaser. It is a curious thing, due to I know notwhat fine strain in her composition, that my aunt never set any greatstore upon possessions. She plunged through that crowded bazaar ofVanity Fair during those feverish years, spending no doubt freely andlargely, but spending with detachment and a touch of humorous contemptfor the things, even the "old" things, that money can buy. It came tome suddenly one afternoon just how detached she was, as I saw her goingtowards the Hardingham, sitting up, as she always did, rather stifflyin her electric brougham, regarding the glittering world with interestedand ironically innocent blue eyes from under the brim of a hat thatdefied comment. "No one," I thought, "would sit so apart if she hadn'tdreams--and what are her dreams?"

  I'd never thought.

  And I remember, too, an outburst of scornful description after she hadlunched with a party of women at the Imperial Cosmic Club. She cameround to my rooms on the chance of finding me there, and I gave hertea. She professed herself tired and cross, and flung herself into mychair....

  "George," she cried, "the Things women are! Do _I_ stink of money?"

  "Lunching?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  "Plutocratic ladies?"

  "Yes."

  "Oriental type?"

  "Oh! Like a burst hareem!... Bragging of possessions.... They feel you.They feel your clothes, George, to see if they are good!"

  I soothed her as well as I could. "They ARE Good aren't they?" I said.

  "It's the old pawnshop in their blood," she said, drinking tea; and thenin infinite disgust, "They run their hands over your clothes--they pawyou."

  I had a moment of doubt whether perhaps she had not been discovered inpossession of unsuspected forgeries. I don't know. After that my eyeswere quickened, and I began to see for myself women running their handsover other women's furs, scrutinising their lace, even demanding tohandle jewelry, appraising, envying, testing. They have a kind ofetiquette. The woman who feels says, "What beautiful sables?" "Whatlovely lace?" The woman felt admits proudly: "It's Real, you know,"or disavows pretension modestly and hastily, "It's Rot Good." Ineach other's houses they peer at the pictures, handle the selvage ofhangings, look at the bottoms of china....

  I wonder if it IS the old pawnshop in the blood.

  I doubt if Lady Drew and the Olympians did that sort of thing, buthere I may be only clinging to another of my former illusions aboutaristocracy and the State. Perhaps always possessions have been Booty,and never anywhere has there been such a thing as house and furnishingsnative and natural to the women and men who made use of them....

  VI

  For me, at least, it marked an epoch in my uncle's career when I learntone day that he had "shopped" Lady Grove. I realised a fresh, wide,unpreluded step. He took me by surprise with the sudden change of scalefrom such portable possessions as jewels and motor-cars to a stretch ofcountryside. The transaction was Napoleonic; he was told of the place;he said "snap"; there were no preliminary desirings or searchings. Thenhe came home and said what he had done. Even my aunt was for a day orso measurably awestricken by this exploit in purchase, and we both wentdown with him to see the house in a mood near consternation. It struckus then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the three ofus standing on the terrace that looked westward, surveying thesky-reflecting windows of the house, and a feeling of unwarrantableintrusion comes back to me.

  Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still andgracious place, whose age-long seclusion was only effectively brokenwith the toot of the coming of the motor-car. An old Catholic familyhad died out in it, century by century, and was now altogetherdead. Portions of the fabric are thirteenth century, and its lastarchitectural revision was Tudor; within, it is for the most part darkand chilly, save for two or three favoured rooms and its tall-windowed,oak-galleried hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature; a very wide,broad lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there isa great cedar in one corner under whose level branches one looks outacross the blue distances of the Weald, blue distances that are madeextraordinarily Italian in quality by virtue of the dark masses of thatsingle tree. It is a very high terrace; southward one looks down uponthe tops of wayfaring trees and spruces, and westward on a steep slopeof beechwood, through which the road comes. One turns back to the stillold house, and sees a grey and lichenous facade with a very finelyarched entrance. It was warmed by the afternoon light and touched withthe colour of a few neglected roses and a pyracanthus. It seemed to methat the most modern owner conceivable in this serene fine placewas some bearded scholarly man in a black cassock, gentle-voiced andwhite-handed, or some very soft-robed, grey gentlewoman. And there wasmy uncle holding his goggles in a sealskin glove, wiping the glass witha pocket-handkerchief, and asking my aunt if Lady Grove wasn't a "Bit ofall Right."

  My aunt made him no answer.

  "The man who built this," I speculated, "wore armour and carried asword."

  "There's some of it inside still," said my uncle.

  We went inside. An old woman with very white hair was in charge of theplace and cringed rather obviously to the new master. She evidentlyfound him a very strange and frightful apparition indeed, and wasdreadfully afraid of him. But if the surviving present bowed down tous, the past did not. We stood up to the dark, long portraits of theextinguished race--one was a Holbein--and looked them in their sidelongeyes. They looked back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmaticalquality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, bythat invincibly self-complacent expression. It was just as though, afterall, he had not bought them up and replaced them altogether; as thoughthat, secretly, they knew better and could smile at him.

  The spirit of the place was akin to Bladesover, but touched withsomething older and remoter. That armour that stood about had onceserved in tilt-yards, if indeed it had not served in battle, and thisfamily had sent its blood and treasure, time after time, upon the mostromantic quest in history, to Palestine. Dreams, loyalties, place andhonour, how utterly had it all evaporated, leaving, at last, the finalexpression of its spirit, these quaint painted smiles, these smilesof triumphant completion! It had evaporated, indeed, long before theultimate Durgan had died, and in his old age he had cumbered the placewith Early Victorian cushions and carpets and tapestry table-cloths andinvalid appliances of a type even more extinct, it seemed to us, thanthe crusades.... Yes, it was different from Bladesover.

  "Bit stuffy, George," said my uncle. "They hadn't much idea ofventilation when this was built."

  One of the panelled rooms was half-filled with presses and a four-posterbed. "Might be the ghost room," said my uncle; but it did not seem tome that so retiring a family as the Durgans, so old and completelyexhausted a family as the Durgans, was likely to haunt anybody. Whatliving thing now had any concern with their honour and judgments andgood and evil deeds? Ghosts and witchcraft were a later innovation--thatfashion came from Scotland with the Stuarts.

  Afterwards, prying for epitaphs, we found a marble crusader with abroken nose, under a battered canopy of fretted stone, outside therestricted limits of the present Duffield church, and half buried innettles. "Ichabod," said my uncle. "Eh? We shall be like that, Susan,some day.... I'm going to clean him up a bit and put a railing to keepoff the children."

  "Old saved at the
eleventh hour," said my aunt, quoting one of the lesssuccessful advertisements of Tono-Bungay.

  But I don't think my uncle heard her.

  It was by our captured crusader that the vicar found us. He came roundthe corner at us briskly, a little out of breath. He had an air ofhaving been running after us since the first toot of our horn had warnedthe village of our presence. He was an Oxford man, clean-shaven, witha cadaverous complexion and a guardedly respectful manner, a cultivatedintonation, and a general air of accommodation to the new order ofthings. These Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire. Hewas a Tory in spirit, and what one may call an adapted Tory by stressof circumstances; that is to say, he was no longer a legitimist; he wasprepared for the substitution of new lords for old. We were pill vendorshe knew, and no doubt horribly vulgar in soul; but then it might havebeen some polygamous Indian rajah, a great strain on a good man's tact,or some Jew with an inherited expression of contempt. Anyhow, we wereEnglish, and neither Dissenters nor Socialists, and he was cheerfullyprepared to do what he could to make gentlemen of both of us. He mighthave preferred Americans for some reasons; they are not so obviouslytaken from one part of the social system and dumped down in another, andthey are more teachable; but in this world we cannot always be choosers.So he was very bright and pleasant with us, showed us the church,gossiped informingly about our neighbours on the countryside--Tux, thebanker; Lord Boom, the magazine and newspaper proprietor; Lord Carnaby,that great sportsman, and old Lady Osprey. And finally he took us byway of a village lane--three children bobbed convulsively with eyesof terror for my uncle--through a meticulous garden to a big, slovenlyVicarage with faded Victorian furniture and a faded Victorian wife, whogave us tea and introduced us to a confusing family dispersed among alot of disintegrating basket chairs upon the edge of a well-used tennislawn.

  These people interested me. They were a common type, no doubt, but theywere new to me. There were two lank sons who had been playing singlesat tennis, red-eared youths growing black moustaches, and dressed inconscientiously untidy tweeds and unbuttoned and ungirt Norfolk jackets.There were a number of ill-nourished-looking daughters, sensibleand economical in their costume, the younger still with long,brown-stockinged legs, and the eldest present--there were, wediscovered, one or two hidden away--displaying a large gold crossand other aggressive ecclesiastical symbols; there were two or threefox-terriers, a retrieverish mongrel, and an old, bloody-eyed and veryevil-smelling St. Bernard. There was a jackdaw. There was, moreover, anambiguous, silent lady that my aunt subsequently decided must be a verydeaf paying guest. Two or three other people had concealed themselves atour coming and left unfinished teas behind them. Rugs and cushions layamong the chairs, and two of the latter were, I noted, covered withUnion Jacks.

  The vicar introduced us sketchily, and the faded Victorian wife regardedmy aunt with a mixture of conventional scorn and abject respect,and talked to her in a languid, persistent voice about people in theneighbourhood whom my aunt could not possibly know.

  My aunt received these personalia cheerfully, with her blue eyesflitting from point to point, and coming back again and again to thepinched faces of the daughters and the cross upon the eldest's breast.Encouraged by my aunt's manner, the vicar's wife grew patronising andkindly, and made it evident that she could do much to bridge the socialgulf between ourselves and the people of family about us.

  I had just snatches of that conversation. "Mrs. Merridew brought himquite a lot of money. Her father, I believe, had been in the Spanishwine trade--quite a lady though. And after that he fell off his horseand cracked his brain pan and took to fishing and farming. I'm sureyou'll like to know them. He's most amusing.... The daughter had adisappointment and went to China as a missionary and got mixed up in amassacre."...

  "The most beautiful silks and things she brought back, you'd hardlybelieve!"

  "Yes, they gave them to propitiate her. You see, they didn't understandthe difference, and they thought that as they'd been massacring people,THEY'D be massacred. They didn't understand the difference Christianitymakes."...

  "Seven bishops they've had in the family!"

  "Married a Papist and was quite lost to them."...

  "He failed some dreadful examination and had to go into the militia."...

  "So she bit his leg as hard as ever she could and he let go."...

  "Had four of his ribs amputated."...

  "Caught meningitis and was carried off in a week."

  "Had to have a large piece of silver tube let into his throat, and if hewants to talk he puts his finger on it. It makes him so interesting, Ithink. You feel he's sincere somehow. A most charming man in every way."

  "Preserved them both in spirits very luckily, and there they are in hisstudy, though of course he doesn't show them to everybody."

  The silent lady, unperturbed by these apparently exciting topics,scrutinised my aunt's costume with a singular intensity, and was visiblymoved when she unbuttoned her dust cloak and flung it wide. Meanwhile wemen conversed, one of the more spirited daughters listened brightly, andthe youths lay on the grass at our feet. My uncle offered them cigars,but they both declined,--out of bashfulness, it seemed to me, whereasthe vicar, I think, accepted out of tact. When we were not looking atthem directly, these young men would kick each other furtively.

  Under the influence of my uncle's cigar, the vicar's mind had soaredbeyond the limits of the district. "This Socialism," he said, "seemsmaking great headway."

  My uncle shook his head. "We're too individualistic in this countryfor that sort of nonsense," he said "Everybody's business is nobody'sbusiness. That's where they go wrong."

  "They have some intelligent people in their ranks, I am told," saidthe vicar, "writers and so forth. Quite a distinguished playwright, myeldest daughter was telling me--I forget his name.

  "Milly, dear! Oh! she's not here. Painters, too, they have. ThisSocialist, it seems to me, is part of the Unrest of the Age.... But, asyou say, the spirit of the people is against it. In the country, at anyrate. The people down here are too sturdily independent in their smallway--and too sensible altogether."...

  "It's a great thing for Duffield to have Lady Grove occupied again," hewas saying when my wandering attention came back from some attractivecasualty in his wife's discourse. "People have always looked up tothe house and considering all things, old Mr. Durgan really wasextraordinarily good--extraordinarily good. You intend to give us a gooddeal of your time here, I hope."

  "I mean to do my duty by the Parish," said my uncle.

  "I'm sincerely glad to hear it--sincerely. We've missed--the houseinfluence. An English village isn't complete--People get out of hand.Life grows dull. The young people drift away to London."

  He enjoyed his cigar gingerly for a moment.

  "We shall look to you to liven things up," he said, poor man!

  My uncle cocked his cigar and removed it from his mouth.

  "What you think the place wants?" he asked.

  He did not wait for an answer. "I been thinking while you beentalking--things one might do. Cricket--a good English game--sports.Build the chaps a pavilion perhaps. Then every village ought to have aminiature rifle range."

  "Ye-ees," said the vicar. "Provided, of course, there isn't a constantpopping."...

  "Manage that all right," said my uncle. "Thing'd be a sort of long shed.Paint it red. British colour. Then there's a Union Jack for the churchand the village school. Paint the school red, too, p'raps. Not enoughcolour about now. Too grey. Then a maypole."

  "How far our people would take up that sort of thing--" began the vicar.

  "I'm all for getting that good old English spirit back again," saidmy uncle. "Merrymakings. Lads and lasses dancing on the village green.Harvest home. Fairings. Yule Log--all the rest of it."

  "How would old Sally Glue do for a May Queen?" asked one of the sons inthe slight pause that followed.

  "Or Annie Glassbound?" said the other, with the huge virile guffaw of ayoung man whose voice has
only recently broken.

  "Sally Glue is eighty-five," explained the vicar, "and Annie Glassboundis well--a young lady of extremely generous proportions. And not quiteright, you know. Not quite right--here." He tapped his brow.

  "Generous proportions!" said the eldest son, and the guffaws wererenewed.

  "You see," said the vicar, "all the brisker girls go into service inor near London. The life of excitement attracts them. And no doubtthe higher wages have something to do with it. And the liberty to wearfinery. And generally--freedom from restraint. So that there might bea little difficulty perhaps to find a May Queen here just at present whowas really young and er--pretty.... Of course I couldn't think of any ofmy girls--or anything of that sort."

  "We got to attract 'em back," said my uncle. "That's what I feel aboutit. We got to Buck-Up the country. The English country is a goingconcern still; just as the Established Church--if you'll excuse mesaying it, is a going concern. Just as Oxford is--or Cambridge. Or anyof those old, fine old things. Only it wants fresh capital, freshidees and fresh methods. Light railways, f'rinstance--scientific use ofdrainage. Wire fencing machinery--all that."

  The vicar's face for one moment betrayed dismay. Perhaps he was thinkingof his country walks amids the hawthorns and honeysuckle.

  "There's great things," said my uncle, "to be done on Mod'un lines withVillage Jam and Pickles--boiled in the country."

  It was the reverberation of this last sentence in my mind, I think,that sharpened my sentimental sympathy as we went through the stragglingvillage street and across the trim green on our way back to London.It seemed that afternoon the most tranquil and idyllic collection ofcreeper-sheltered homes you can imagine; thatch still lingered on awhitewashed cottage or two, pyracanthus, wall-flowers, and daffodilsabounded, and an unsystematic orchard or so was white with blossomabove and gay with bulbs below. I noted a row of straw beehives,beehive-shaped, beehives of the type long since condemned as inefficientby all progressive minds, and in the doctor's acre of grass a flock oftwo whole sheep was grazing,--no doubt he'd taken them on account. Twomen and one old woman made gestures of abject vassalage, and my unclereplied with a lordly gesture of his great motoring glove....

  "England's full of Bits like this," said my uncle, leaning over thefront seat and looking back with great satisfaction. The black glare ofhis goggles rested for a time on the receding turrets of Lady Grove justpeeping over the trees.

  "I shall have a flagstaff, I think," he considered. "Then one could showwhen one is in residence. The villagers will like to know."...

  I reflected. "They will" I said. "They're used to liking to know."...

  My aunt had been unusually silent. Suddenly she spoke. "He says Snap,"she remarked; "he buys that place. And a nice old job of Housekeeping hegives me! He sails through the village swelling like an old turkey. Andwho'll have to scoot the butler? Me! Who's got to forget all she everknew and start again? Me! Who's got to trek from Chiselhurst and be agreat lady? Me! ... You old Bother! Just when I was settling down andbeginning to feel at home."

  My uncle turned his goggles to her. "Ah! THIS time it is home, Susan....We got there."

  VII

  It seems to me now but a step from the buying of Lady Grove to thebeginning of Crest Hill, from the days when the former was a stupendousachievement to the days when it was too small and dark and inconvenientaltogether for a great financier's use. For me that was a period ofincreasing detachment from our business and the great world of London; Isaw it more and more in broken glimpses, and sometimes I was working inmy little pavilion above Lady Grove for a fortnight together; even whenI came up it was often solely for a meeting of the aeronautical societyor for one of the learned societies or to consult literature or employsearchers or some such special business. For my uncle it was a periodof stupendous inflation. Each time I met him I found him more confident,more comprehensive, more consciously a factor in great affairs. Soon hewas no longer an associate of merely business men; he was big enough forthe attentions of greater powers.

  I grew used to discovering some item of personal news about him inmy evening paper, or to the sight of a full-page portrait of him in asixpenny magazine. Usually the news was of some munificent act,some romantic piece of buying or giving or some fresh rumour ofreconstruction. He saved, you will remember, the Parbury Reynoldsfor the country. Or at times, it would be an interview or my uncle'scontribution to some symposium on the "Secret of Success," or such-liketopic. Or wonderful tales of his power of work, of his wonderfulorganisation to get things done, of his instant decisions and remarkablepower of judging his fellow-men. They repeated his great mot: "Eighthour working day--I want eighty hours!"

  He became modestly but resolutely "public." They cartooned him in VanityFair. One year my aunt, looking indeed a very gracious, slender lady,faced the portrait of the King in the great room at Burlington House,and the next year saw a medallion of my uncle by Ewart, looking out uponthe world, proud and imperial, but on the whole a trifle too prominentlyconvex, from the walls of the New Gallery.

  I shared only intermittently in his social experiences. People knew ofme, it is true, and many of them sought to make through me a sort offlank attack upon him, and there was a legend, owing, very unreasonably,partly to my growing scientific reputation and partly to an element ofreserve in my manner, that I played a much larger share in planninghis operations than was actually the case. This led to one or two veryintimate private dinners, to my inclusion in one or two house partiesand various odd offers of introductions and services that I didn't forthe most part accept. Among other people who sought me in this waywas Archie Garvell, now a smart, impecunious soldier of no particulardistinction, who would, I think, have been quite prepared to develop anysporting instincts I possessed, and who was beautifully unaware of ourformer contact. He was always offering me winners; no doubt in aspirit of anticipatory exchange for some really good thing in our morescientific and certain method of getting something for nothing....

  In spite of my preoccupation with my experiments, work, I did, I findnow that I come to ransack my impressions, see a great deal of the greatworld during those eventful years; I had a near view of the machineryby which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed shoulders and exchangedexperiences with bishops and statesmen, political women and women whowere not political, physicians and soldiers, artists and authors, thedirectors of great journals, philanthropists and all sorts of eminent,significant people. I saw the statesmen without their orders and thebishops with but a little purple silk left over from their canonicals,inhaling, not incensen but cigar smoke. I could look at them all thebetter because, for the most part, they were not looking at me but at myuncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they might usehim and assimilate him to their system, the most unpremeditated, subtle,successful and aimless plutocracy that ever encumbered the destinies ofmankind. Not one of them, so far as I could see, until disaster overtookhim, resented his lies, his almost naked dishonesty of method, thedisorderly disturbance of this trade and that, caused by his spasmodicoperations. I can see them now about him, see them polite, watchful,various; his stiff compact little figure always a centre ofattention, his wiry hair, his brief nose, his under-lip, electric withself-confidence. Wandering marginally through distinguished gatherings,I would catch the whispers: "That's Mr. Ponderevo!"

  "The little man?"

  "Yes, the little bounder with the glasses."

  "They say he's made--"...

  Or I would see him on some parterre of a platform beside my aunt'shurraying hat, amidst titles and costumes, "holding his end up," ashe would say, subscribing heavily to obvious charities, even at timesmaking brief convulsive speeches in some good cause before the mostexalted audiences. "Mr. Chairman, your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladiesand Gentlemen,"`he would begin amidst subsiding applause and adjustthose obstinate glasses and thrust back the wings of his frock-coat andrest his hands upon his hips and speak his fragment with ever and againan incidental Zzzz. His hands would f
ret about him as he spoke, fiddlehis glasses, feel in his waistcoat pockets; ever and again he would riseslowly to his toes as a sentence unwound jerkily like a clockwork snake,and drop back on his heels at the end. They were the very gestures ofour first encounter when he had stood before the empty fireplace in hisminute draped parlour and talked of my future to my mother.

  In those measurelessly long hot afternoons in the little shop atWimblehurst he had talked and dreamt of the Romance of Modern Commerce.Here, surely, was his romance come true.

  VIII

  People say that my uncle lost his head at the crest of his fortunes,but if one may tell so much truth of a man one has in a manner loved,he never had very much head to lose. He was always imaginative, erratic,inconsistent, recklessly inexact, and his inundation of wealth merelygave him scope for these qualities. It is true, indeed, that towardsthe climax he became intensely irritable at times and impatient ofcontradiction, but that, I think, was rather the gnawing uneasiness ofsanity than any mental disturbance. But I find it hard either to judgehim or convey the full development of him to the reader. I saw too muchof him; my memory is choked with disarranged moods and aspects. Nowhe is distended with megalomania, now he is deflated, now he isquarrelsome, now impenetrably self-satisfied, but always he is sudden,jerky, fragmentary, energetic, and--in some subtle fundamental way thatI find difficult to define--absurd.

  There stands out--because of the tranquil beauty of its settingperhaps--a talk we had in the veranda of the little pavilion nearmy worksheds behind Crest Hill in which my aeroplanes and navigableballoons were housed. It was one of many similar conversations, and I donot know why it in particular should survive its fellows. It happensso. He had come up to me after his coffee to consult me about a certainchalice which in a moment of splendour and under the importunity ofa countess he had determined to give to a deserving church in theeast-end. I, in a moment of even rasher generosity, had suggested Ewartas a possible artist. Ewart had produced at once an admirable sketch forthe sacred vessel surrounded by a sort of wreath of Millies with openarms and wings and had drawn fifty pounds on the strength of it. Afterthat came a series of vexatious delays. The chalice became less andless of a commercial man's chalice, acquired more and more the elusivequality of the Holy Grail, and at last even the drawing receded.

  My uncle grew restive.... "You see, George, they'll begin to want theblasted thing!"

  "What blasted thing?"

  "That chalice, damn it! They're beginning to ask questions. It isn'tBusiness, George."

  "It's art," I protested, "and religion."

  "That's all very well. But it's not a good ad for us, George, to make apromise and not deliver the goods.... I'll have to write off yourfriend Ewart as a bad debt, that's what it comes to, and go to a decentfirm."...

  We sat outside on deck chairs in the veranda of the pavilion, smoked,drank whisky, and, the chalice disposed of, meditated. His temporaryannoyance passed. It was an altogether splendid summer night, followinga blazing, indolent day. Full moonlight brought out dimly the linesof the receding hills, one wave beyond another; far beyond were thepin-point lights of Leatherhead, and in the foreground the little stagefrom which I used to start upon my gliders gleamed like wet steel. Theseason must have been high June, for down in the woods that hid thelights of the Lady Grove windows, I remember the nightingales thrilledand gurgled....

  "We got here, George," said my uncle, ending a long pause. "Didn't Isay?"

  "Say!--when?" I asked.

  "In that hole in the To'nem Court Road, eh? It's been a Straight SquareFight, and here we are!"

  I nodded.

  "'Member me telling you--Tono-Bungay?.... Well.... I'd just thatafternoon thought of it!"

  "I've fancied at times;" I admitted.

  "It's a great world, George, nowadays, with a fair chance for everyone who lays hold of things. The career ouvert to the Talons--eh?Tono-Bungay. Think of it! It's a great world and a growing world, andI'm glad we're in it--and getting a pull. We're getting big people,George. Things come to us. Eh? This Palestine thing."...

  He meditated for a time and Zzzzed softly. Then he became still.

  His theme was taken up by a cricket in the grass until he himself wasready to resume it. The cricket too seemed to fancy that in some schemeof its own it had got there. "Chirrrrrrup" it said; "chirrrrrrup."

  "Lord, what a place that was at Wimblehurst!" he broke out. "If everI get a day off we'll motor there, George, and run over that dog thatsleeps in the High Street. Always was a dog asleep there--always.Always... I'd like to see the old shop again. I daresay old Ruck stillstands between the sheep at his door, grinning with all his teeth, andMarbel, silly beggar! comes out with his white apron on and a pencilstuck behind his ear, trying to look awake... Wonder if they know it'sme? I'd like 'em somehow to know it's me."

  "They'll have had the International Tea Company and all sorts of peoplecutting them up," I said. "And that dog's been on the pavement this sixyears--can't sleep even there, poor dear, because of the motor-horns andits shattered nerves."

  "Movin' everywhere," said my uncle. "I expect you're right.... It's abig time we're in, George. It's a big Progressive On-coming ImperialTime. This Palestine business--the daring of it.... It's, it's aProcess, George. And we got our hands on it. Here we sit--with our handson it, George. Entrusted.

  "It seems quiet to--night. But if we could see and hear." He waved hiscigar towards Leatherhead and London.

  "There they are, millions, George. Jes' think of what they've been up toto-day--those ten millions--each one doing his own particular job. Youcan't grasp it. It's like old Whitman says--what is it he says? Well,anyway it's like old Whitman. Fine chap, Whitman! Fine old chap! Queer,you can't quote him. ... And these millions aren't anything. There'sthe millions over seas, hundreds of millions, Chinese, M'rocco, Africagenerally, 'Merica.... Well, here we are, with power, with leisure,picked out--because we've been energetic, because we've seizedopportunities, because we've made things hum when other people havewaited for them to hum. See? Here we are--with our hands on it. Bigpeople. Big growing people. In a sort of way,--Forces."

  He paused. "It's wonderful, George," he said.

  "Anglo-Saxon energy," I said softly to the night.

  "That's it, George--energy. It's put things in our grip--threads, wires,stretching out and out, George, from that little office of ours, out toWest Africa, out to Egypt, out to Inja, out east, west, north and south.Running the world practically. Running it faster and faster. Creative.There's that Palestine canal affair. Marvellous idee! Suppose we takethat up, suppose we let ourselves in for it, us and the others, and runthat water sluice from the Mediterranean into the Dead Sea Valley--thinkof the difference it will make! All the desert blooming like a rose,Jericho lost for ever, all the Holy Places under water.... Very likelydestroy Christianity."...

  He mused for a space. "Cuttin' canals," murmured my uncle. "Makingtunnels.... New countries.... New centres.... Zzzz.... Finance.... Notonly Palestine.

  "I wonder where we shall get before we done, George? We got a lot of bigthings going. We got the investing public sound and sure. I don't seewhy in the end we shouldn't be very big. There's difficulties but I'mequal to them. We're still a bit soft in our bones, but they'll hardenall right.... I suppose, after all, I'm worth something like a million,George, cleared up and settled. If I got out of things now. It's a greattime, George, a wonderful time!"...

  I glanced through the twilight at his convexity and I must confess itstruck me that on the whole he wasn't particularly good value.

  "We got our hands on things, George, us big people. We got to hangtogether, George run the show. Join up with the old order like thatmill-wheel of Kipling's. (Finest thing he ever wrote, George; I jes'been reading it again. Made me buy Lady Grove.) Well, we got to runthe country, George. It's ours. Make it a Scientific Organised BusinessEnterprise. Put idees into it. 'Lectrify it. Run the Press. Run allsorts of developments. All sorts of developments. I been talking to LordBo
om. I been talking to all sorts of people. Great things. Progress. Theworld on business lines. Only jes' beginning."...

  He fell into a deep meditation.

  He Zzzzed for a time and ceased.

  "YES," he said at last in the tone of a man who has at last emerged withultimate solutions to the profoundest problems.

  "What?" I said after a seemly pause.

  My uncle hung fire for a moment and it seemed to me the fate of nationstrembled in the balance. Then he spoke as one who speaks from the verybottom of his heart--and I think it was the very bottom of his heart.

  "I'd jes' like to drop into the Eastry Arms, jes' when all those beggarsin the parlour are sittin' down to whist, Ruck and Marbel and all, andgive 'em ten minutes of my mind, George. Straight from the shoulder.Jes' exactly what I think of them. It's a little thing, but I'd like todo it jes' once before I die."...

  He rested on that for some time Zzzz-ing.

  Then he broke out at a new place in a tone of detached criticism.

  "There's Boom," he reflected.

  "It's a wonderful system this old British system, George. It's staidand stable and yet it has a place for new men. We come up and take ourplaces. It's almost expected. We take a hand. That's where our Democracydiffers from America. Over there a man succeeds; all he gets is money.Here there's a system open to every one--practically.... Chaps likeBoom--come from nowhere."

  His voice ceased. I reflected upon the spirit of his words. Suddenly Ikicked my feet in the air, rolled on my side and sat up suddenly on mydeck chair with my legs down.

  "You don't mean it!" I said.

  "Mean what, George?"

  "Subscription to the party funds. Reciprocal advantage. Have we got tothat?"

  "Whad you driving at, George?"

  "You know. They'd never do it, man!"

  "Do what?" he said feebly; and, "Why shouldn't they?"

  "They'd not even go to a baronetcy. NO!.... And yet, of course, there'sBoom! And Collingshead and Gorver. They've done beer, they've donesnippets! After all Tono-Bungay--it's not like a turf commissionagent or anything like that!... There have of course been some verygentlemanly commission agents. It isn't like a fool of a scientific manwho can't make money!"

  My uncle grunted; we'd differed on that issue before.

  A malignant humour took possession of me. "What would they call you?"I speculated. "The vicar would like Duffield. Too much like Duffer!Difficult thing, a title." I ran my mind over various possibilities."Why not take a leaf from a socialist tract I came upon yesterday. Chapsays we're all getting delocalised. Beautiful word--delocalised! Why notbe the first delocalised peer? That gives you--Tono-Bungay! There is aBungay, you know. Lord Tono of Bungay--in bottles everywhere. Eh?"

  My uncle astonished me by losing his temper.

  "Damn it. George, you don't seem to see I'm serious! You're alwayssneering at Tono-Bungay! As though it was some sort of swindle. It wasperfec'ly legitimate trade, perfec'ly legitimate. Good value and agood article.... When I come up here and tell you plans and exchangeidees--you sneer at me. You do. You don't see--it's a big thing. It'sa big thing. You got to get used to new circumstances. You got to facewhat lies before us. You got to drop that tone."

  IX

  My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and ambition. Hekept in touch with modern thought. For example, he was, I know, greatlyswayed by what he called "This Overman idee, Nietzsche--all that stuff."

  He mingled those comforting suggestions of a potent and exceptionalhuman being emancipated from the pettier limitations of integrity withthe Napoleonic legend. It gave his imagination a considerable outlet.That Napoleonic legend! The real mischief of Napoleon's immenselydisastrous and accidental career began only when he was dead and theromantic type of mind was free to elaborate his character. I do believethat my uncle would have made a far less egregious smash if there hadbeen no Napoleonic legend to misguide him. He was in many ways betterand infinitely kinder than his career. But when in doubt betweendecent conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and moreinfluentially: "think of Napoleon; think what the inflexibly-wilfulNapoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;" that was therule, and the end was invariably a new step in dishonour.

  My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics;the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; hepurchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotelyupon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he neverbrought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; hecrowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures ofhim, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex portraits with thewhite vest and those statuettes with the hands behind the back whichthrew forward the figure. The Durgans watched him through it all,sardonically.

  And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the windowat Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one hand stuckbetween his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken, thinking,--the mostpreposterous little fat man in the world. It made my aunt feel, shesaid, "like an old Field Marshal--knocks me into a cocked hat, George!"

  Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with hiscigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I cannot be sure,and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable amount of vexation afterhe had read Napoleon and the Fair Sex, because for a time that rousedhim to a sense of a side of life he had in his commercial preoccupationsvery largely forgotten. Suggestion plays so great a part in this field.My uncle took the next opportunity and had an "affair"!

  It was not a very impassioned affair, and the exact particulars never ofcourse reached me. It is quite by chance I know anything of it atall. One evening I was surprised to come upon my uncle in a mixture ofBohemia and smart people at an At Home in the flat of Robbert, the R.A.who painted my aunt, and he was standing a little apart in a recess,talking or rather being talked to in undertones by a plump, blondlittle woman in pale blue, a Helen Scrymgeour who wrote novels and wasorganising a weekly magazine. I elbowed a large lady who was sayingsomething about them, but I didn't need to hear the thing she said toperceive the relationship of the two. It hit me like a placard on ahoarding. I was amazed the whole gathering did not see it. Perhaps theydid. She was wearing a remarkably fine diamond necklace, much too finefor journalism, and regarding him with that quality of questionableproprietorship, of leashed but straining intimacy, that seemsinseparable from this sort of affair. It is so much more palpable thanmatrimony. If anything was wanted to complete my conviction it wasmy uncles's eyes when presently he became aware of mine, a certainembarrassment and a certain pride and defiance. And the next day he madean opportunity to praise the lady's intelligence to me concisely, lest Ishould miss the point of it all.

  After that I heard some gossip--from a friend of the lady's. I wasmuch too curious to do anything but listen. I had never in all my lifeimagined my uncle in an amorous attitude. It would appear that shecalled him her "God in the Car"--after the hero in a novel of AnthonyHope's. It was essential to the convention of their relations that heshould go relentlessly whenever business called, and it was generallyarranged that it did call. To him women were an incident, it wasunderstood between them; Ambition was the master-passion. A great worldcalled him and the noble hunger for Power. I have never been able todiscover just how honest Mrs. Scrymgeour was in all this, but it isquite possible the immense glamour of his financial largeness prevailedwith her and that she did bring a really romantic feeling to theirencounters. There must have been some extraordinary moments....

  I was a good deal exercised and distressed about my aunt when I realisedwhat was afoot. I thought it would prove a terrible humiliation to her.I suspected her of keeping up a brave front with the loss of my uncle'saffections fretting at her heart, but there I simply underestimated her.She didn't hear for some time and when she did hear she was extremelyangry and energetic. The sentimental situation didn't trouble her fora moment. She decided that my uncle
"wanted smacking." She accentuatedherself with an unexpected new hat, went and gave him an inconceivabletalking-to at the Hardingham, and then came round to "blow-up" me fornot telling her what was going on before....

  I tried to bring her to a proper sense of the accepted values in thisaffair, but my aunt's originality of outlook was never so invincible."Men don't tell on one another in affairs of passion," I protested, andsuch-like worldly excuses.

  "Women!" she said in high indignation, "and men! It isn't women andmen--it's him and me, George! Why don't you talk sense?

  "Old passion's all very well, George, in its way, and I'm the lastperson to be jealous. But this is old nonsense.... I'm not going to lethim show off what a silly old lobster he is to other women....I'll mark every scrap of his underclothes with red letters,'Ponderevo-Private'--every scrap.

  "Going about making love indeed,--in abdominal belts!--at his time oflife!"

  I cannot imagine what passed between her and my uncle. But I have nodoubt that for once her customary badinage was laid aside. How theytalked then I do not know, for I who knew them so well had never heardthat much of intimacy between them. At any rate it was a concerned andpreoccupied "God in the Car" I had to deal with in the next few days,unusually Zzzz-y and given to slight impatient gestures that had nothingto do with the current conversation. And it was evident that in alldirections he was finding things unusually difficult to explain.

  All the intimate moments in this affair were hidden from me, but inthe end my aunt triumphed. He did not so much throw as jerk over Mrs.Scrymgeour, and she did not so much make a novel of it as upset a hugepailful of attenuated and adulterated female soul upon this occasion.My aunt did not appear in that, even remotely. So that it is doubtfulif the lady knew the real causes of her abandonment. The Napoleonic herowas practically unmarried, and he threw over his lady as Napoleon threwover Josephine for a great alliance.

  It was a triumph for my aunt, but it had its price. For some time it wasevident things were strained between them. He gave up the lady, but heresented having to do so, deeply. She had meant more to his imaginationthan one could have supposed. He wouldn't for a long time "come round."He became touchy and impatient and secretive towards my aunt, and she, Inoted, after an amazing check or so, stopped that stream of kindly abusethat had flowed for so long and had been so great a refreshment in theirlives. They were both the poorer for its cessation, both less happy.She devoted herself more and more to Lady Grove and the humours andcomplications of its management. The servants took to her--as theysay--she god-mothered three Susans during her rule, the coachman's, thegardener's, and the Up Hill gamekeeper's. She got together a library ofold household books that were in the vein of the place. She revived thestill-room, and became a great artist in jellies and elder and cowslipwine.

  X

  And while I neglected the development of my uncle's finances--andmy own, in my scientific work and my absorbing conflict with thedifficulties of flying,--his schemes grew more and more expansive andhazardous, and his spending wilder and laxer. I believe that a hauntingsense of the intensifying unsoundness of his position accounts largelyfor his increasing irritability and his increasing secretiveness with myaunt and myself during these crowning years. He dreaded, I think, havingto explain, he feared our jests might pierce unwittingly to the truth.Even in the privacy of his mind he would not face the truth. He wasaccumulating unrealisable securities in his safes until they hung apotential avalanche over the economic world. But his buying became afever, and his restless desire to keep it up with himself that he wasmaking a triumphant progress to limitless wealth gnawed deeper anddeeper. A curious feature of this time with him was his buying over andover again of similar things. His ideas seemed to run in series. Withina twelve-month he bought five new motor-cars, each more swift andpowerful than its predecessor, and only the repeated prompt resignationof his chief chauffeur at each moment of danger, prevented his drivingthem himself. He used them more and more. He developed a passion forlocomotion for its own sake.

  Then he began to chafe at Lady Grove, fretted by a chance jest he hadoverheard at a dinner. "This house, George," he said. "It's a misfit.There's no elbow-room in it; it's choked with old memories. And I can'tstand all these damned Durgans!

  "That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man in acherry-coloured coat. He watched you! He'd look silly if I stuck a pokerthrough his Gizzard!"

  "He'd look," I reflected, "much as he does now. As though he wasamused."

  He replaced his glasses, which had fallen at his emotion, and glared athis antagonists. "What are they? What are they all, the lot of 'em?Dead as Mutton! They just stuck in the mud. They didn't even rise to theReformation. The old out-of-date Reformation! Move with the times!--theymoved against the times.

  "Just a Family of Failure,--they never even tried!

  "They're jes', George, exactly what I'm not. Exactly. It isn'tsuitable.... All this living in the Past.

  "And I want a bigger place too, George. I want air and sunlight androom to move about and more service. A house where you can get a Moveon things! Zzzz. Why! it's like a discord--it jars--even to have thetelephone.... There's nothing, nothing except the terrace, that's wortha Rap. It's all dark and old and dried up and full of old-fashionedthings--musty old idees--fitter for a silver-fish than a modern man....I don't know how I got here."

  He broke out into a new grievance. "That damned vicar," he complained,"thinks I ought to think myself lucky to get this place! Every time Imeet him I can see him think it.... One of these days, George I'll showhim what a Mod'un house is like!"

  And he did.

  I remember the day when he declared, as Americans say, for CrestHill. He had come up to see my new gas plant, for I was then only justbeginning to experiment with auxiliary collapsible balloons, and allthe time the shine of his glasses was wandering away to the open downbeyond. "Let's go back to Lady Grove over the hill," he said. "SomethingI want to show you. Something fine!"

  It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earthwarm with sundown, and a pe-wit or so just accentuating the pleasantstillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful peace, it was, towreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in hisgrey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned glasses, short,thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threateningthis calm.

  He began with a wave of his arm. "That's the place, George," he said."See?"

  "Eh!" I cried--for I had been thinking of remote things.

  "I got it."

  "Got what?"

  "For a house!--a Twentieth Century house! That's the place for it!"

  One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him.

  "Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!" he said. "Eh? Four-squareto the winds of heaven!"

  "You'll get the winds up here," I said.

  "A mammoth house it ought to be, George--to suit these hills."

  "Quite," I said.

  "Great galleries and things--running out there and there--See? I beenthinking of it, George! Looking out all this way--across the Weald. Withits back to Lady Grove."

  "And the morning sun in its eye."

  "Like an eagle, George,--like an eagle!"

  So he broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation ofhis culminating years, Crest Hill. But all the world has heard of thatextravagant place which grew and changed its plans as it grew, andbubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and bulged and evermoregrew. I know not what delirium of pinnacles and terraces and arcades andcorridors glittered at last upon the uplands of his mind; the place,for all that its expansion was terminated abruptly by our collapse, iswonderful enough as it stands,--that empty instinctive building of achildless man. His chief architect was a young man named Westminster,whose work he had picked out in the architecture room of the RoyalAcademy on account of a certain grandiose courage in it, but with himhe associated from time to time a number of fellow professionals,stonemasons, sanitary
engineers, painters, sculptors, scribes, metalworkers, wood carvers, furniture designers, ceramic specialists,landscape gardeners, and the man who designs the arrangement andventilation of the various new houses in the London Zoological Gardens.In addition he had his own ideas. The thing occupied his mind at alltimes, but it held it completely from Friday night to Monday morning.He would come down to Lady Grove on Friday night in a crowded motor-carthat almost dripped architects. He didn't, however, confine himself toarchitects; every one was liable to an invitation to week-end and viewCrest Hill, and many an eager promoter, unaware of how Napoleonicallyand completely my uncle had departmentalised his mind, tried to creep upto him by way of tiles and ventilators and new electric fittings. Alwayson Sunday mornings, unless the weather was vile, he would, so soon asbreakfast and his secretaries were disposed of, visit the site with aconsiderable retinue, and alter and develop plans, making modifications,Zzzz-ing, giving immense new orders verbally--an unsatisfactory way, asWestminster and the contractors ultimately found.

  There he stands in my memory, the symbol of this age for me, the man ofluck and advertisement, the current master of the world. There hestands upon the great outward sweep of the terrace before the hugemain entrance, a little figure, ridiculously disproportionate to thatforty-foot arch, with the granite ball behind him--the astronomicalball, brass coopered, that represented the world, with a littleadjustable tube of lenses on a gun-metal arm that focussed the sunupon just that point of the earth on which it chanced to be shiningvertically. There he stands, Napoleonically grouped with his retinue menin tweeds and golfing-suits, a little solicitor, whose name I forget,in grey trousers and a black jacket, and Westminster in Jaegerunderclothing, a floriferous tie, and peculiar brown cloth of his own.

  The downland breeze flutters my uncle's coat-tails, disarranges hisstiff hair, and insists on the evidence of undisciplined appetites inface and form, as he points out this or that feature in the prospect tohis attentive collaborator.

  Below are hundreds of feet of wheeling-planks, ditches, excavations,heaps of earth, piles of garden stone from the Wealden ridges. On eitherhand the walls of his irrelevant unmeaning palace rise at one time hehad working in that place--disturbing the economic balance of the wholecountryside by their presence--upwards of three thousand men....

  So he poses for my picture amidst the raw beginnings that were never tobe completed. He did the strangest things about that place, things moreand more detached from any conception of financial scale, things moreand more apart from sober humanity. He seemed to think himself, at last,released from any such limitations. He moved a quite considerable hill,and nearly sixty mature trees were moved with it to open his prospecteastward, moved it about two hundred feet to the south. At anothertime he caught a suggestion from some city restaurant and made abilliard-room roofed with plate glass beneath the waters of hisornamental lake. He furnished one wing while its roof still awaitedcompletion. He had a swimming bath thirty feet square next to hisbedroom upstairs, and to crown it all he commenced a great wall to holdall his dominions together, free from the invasion of common men. Itwas a ten-foot wall, glass surmounted, and had it been completed as heintended it, it would have had a total length of nearly eleven miles.Some of it towards the last was so dishonestly built that it collapsedwithin a year upon its foundations, but some miles of it still stand. Inever think of it now but what I think of the hundreds of eager littleinvestors who followed his "star," whose hopes and lives, whose wives'security and children's prospects are all mixed up beyond redemptionwith that flaking mortar....

  It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and bluffhave ended their careers by building. It was not merely my uncle. Sooneror later they all seem to bring their luck to the test of realisation,try to make their fluid opulence coagulate out as bricks and mortar,bring moonshine into relations with a weekly wages-sheet. Then the wholefabric of confidence and imagination totters--and down they come....

  When I think of that despoiled hillside, that colossal litter of bricksand mortar, and crude roads and paths, the scaffolding and sheds, thegeneral quality of unforeseeing outrage upon the peace of nature, Iam reminded of a chat I had with the vicar one bleak day after he hadwitnessed a glide. He talked to me of aeronautics as I stood in jerseyand shorts beside my machine, fresh from alighting, and his cadaverousface failed to conceal a peculiar desolation that possessed him.

  "Almost you convince me," he said, coming up to me, "against my will....A marvellous invention! But it will take you a long time, sir, beforeyou can emulate that perfect mechanism--the wing of a bird."

  He looked at my sheds.

  "You've changed the look of this valley, too," he said.

  "Temporary defilements," I remarked, guessing what was in his mind.

  "Of course. Things come and go. Things come and go. But--H'm. I'vejust been up over the hill to look at Mr. Edward Ponderevo's new house.That--that is something more permanent. A magnificent place!--in manyways. Imposing. I've never somehow brought myself to go that way before.Things are greatly advanced.... We find--the great number of strangersintroduced into the villages about here by these operations, working-menchiefly, a little embarrassing. It put us out. They bring a newspirit into the place; betting--ideas--all sorts of queer notions.Our publicans like it, of course. And they come and sleep in one'southouses--and make the place a little unsafe at nights. The othermorning I couldn't sleep--a slight dyspepsia--and I looked out ofthe window. I was amazed to see people going by on bicycles. A silentprocession. I counted ninety-seven--in the dawn. All going up to the newroad for Crest Hill. Remarkable I thought it. And so I've been up to seewhat they were doing."

  "They would have been more than remarkable thirty years ago," I said.

  "Yes, indeed. Things change. We think nothing of it now atall--comparatively. And that big house--"

  He raised his eyebrows. "Really stupendous! Stupendous.

  "All the hillside--the old turf--cut to ribbons!"

  His eye searched my face. "We've grown so accustomed to look up to LadyGrove," he said, and smiled in search of sympathy. "It shifts our centreof gravity."

  "Things will readjust themselves," I lied.

  He snatched at the phrase. "Of course," he said.

  "They'll readjust themselves--settle down again. Must. In the old way.It's bound to come right again--a comforting thought. Yes. After all,Lady Grove itself had to be built once upon a time--was--to beginwith--artificial."

  His eye returned to my aeroplane. He sought to dismiss his graverpreoccupations. "I should think twice," he remarked, "before I trustedmyself to that concern.... But I suppose one grows accustomed to themotion."

  He bade me good morning and went his way, bowed and thoughtful....

  He had kept the truth from his mind a long time, but that morning it hadforced its way to him with an aspect that brooked no denial that thistime it was not just changes that were coming in his world, but that allhis world lay open and defenceless, conquered and surrendered, doomed sofar as he could see, root and branch, scale and form alike, to change.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  SOARING

  I

  For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatchingCrest Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between thatgreat beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and ambitiousexperiments in aerial navigation. This work was indeed the mainsubstance of my life through all the great time of the Tono-Bungaysymphony.

  I have told already how I came to devote myself to this system ofinquiries, how in a sort of disgust with the common adventure of lifeI took up the dropped ends of my college studies, taking them up againwith a man's resolution instead of a boy's ambition. From the firstI did well at this work. It--was, I think, largely a case of specialaptitude, of a peculiar irrelevant vein of faculty running through mymind. It is one of those things men seem to have by chance, that haslittle or nothing to do with their general merit, and which it isridiculous to be either conceited or
modest about. I did get througha very big mass of work in those years, working for a time with aconcentrated fierceness that left little of such energy or capacity asI possess unused. I worked out a series of problems connected with thestability of bodies pitching in the air and the internal movements ofthe wind, and I also revolutionised one leading part at last of thetheory of explosive engines. These things are to be found in thePhilosophical Transactions, the Mathematical Journal, and lessfrequently in one or two other such publications, and they needn'tdetain us here. Indeed, I doubt if I could write about them here. Oneacquires a sort of shorthand for one's notes and mind in relation tosuch special work. I have never taught; nor lectured, that is to say,I have never had to express my thoughts about mechanical things inordinary everyday language, and I doubt very much if I could do so nowwithout extreme tedium.

  My work was, to begin with, very largely theoretical. I was able toattack such early necessities of verification as arose with quite littlemodels, using a turntable to get the motion through the air, andcane, whalebone and silk as building material. But a time came whenincalculable factors crept in, factors of human capacity and factors ofinsufficient experimental knowledge, when one must needs guess andtry. Then I had to enlarge the scale of my operations, and soon I hadenlarged them very greatly. I set to work almost concurrently on thebalance and stability of gliders and upon the steering of inflated bags,the latter a particularly expensive branch of work. I was no doubt movedby something of the same spirit of lavish expenditure that was runningaway with my uncle in these developments. Presently my establishmentabove Lady Grove had grown to a painted wood chalet big enough toaccommodate six men, and in which I would sometimes live for threeweeks together; to a gasometer, to a motor-house, to three bigcorrugated-roofed sheds and lock-up houses, to a stage from which tostart gliders, to a workshop and so forth. A rough road was made. Webrought up gas from Cheaping and electricity from Woking, which placeI found also afforded a friendly workshop for larger operations thanI could manage. I had the luck also to find a man who seemed myheaven-sent second-in-command--Cothope his name was. He was aself-educated-man; he had formerly been a sapper and he was one of thebest and handiest working engineers alive. Without him I do not think Icould have achieved half what I have done. At times he has been not somuch my assistant as my collaborator, and has followed my fortunes tothis day. Other men came and went as I needed them.

  I do not know how far it is possible to convey to any one who has notexperienced it, the peculiar interest, the peculiar satisfaction thatlies in a sustained research when one is not hampered by want of money.It is a different thing from any other sort of human effort. Youare free from the exasperating conflict with your fellow-creaturesaltogether--at least so far as the essential work goes; that for me isits peculiar merit. Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses;she hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laboriousroads, but SHE IS ALWAYS THERE! Win to her and she will not fail you;she is yours and mankind's for ever. She is reality, the one reality Ihave found in this strange disorder of existence. She will not sulk withyou nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of your reward upon some pettydoubt. You cannot change her by advertisement or clamour, nor stifle herin vulgarities. Things grow under your hands when you serve her, thingsthat are permanent as nothing else is permanent in the whole life ofman. That, I think, is the peculiar satisfaction of science and itsenduring reward....

  The taking up of experimental work produced a great change in mypersonal habits. I have told how already once in my life at WimblehurstI had a period of discipline and continuous effort, and how, when Icame to South Kensington, I became demoralised by the immense effectof London, by its innumerable imperative demands upon my attention andcuriosity. And I parted with much of my personal pride when I gaveup science for the development of Tono-Bungay. But my poverty kept meabstinent and my youthful romanticism kept me chaste until my marriedlife was well under way. Then in all directions I relaxed. I did a largeamount of work, but I never troubled to think whether it was my maximumnor whether the moods and indolences that came to me at times wereavoidable things. With the coming of plenty I ate abundantly andfoolishly, drank freely and followed my impulses more and morecarelessly. I felt no reason why I should do anything else. Never at anypoint did I use myself to the edge of my capacity. The emotional crisisof my divorce did not produce any immediate change in these matters ofpersonal discipline. I found some difficulty at first in concentratingmy mind upon scientific work, it was so much more exacting thanbusiness, but I got over that difficulty by smoking. I became aninordinate cigar smoker; it gave me moods of profound depression, butI treated these usually by the homeopathic method,--by lighting anothercigar. I didn't realise at all how loose my moral and nervous fibre hadbecome until I reached the practical side of my investigations and wasface to face with the necessity of finding out just how it felt to use aglider and just what a man could do with one.

  I got into this relaxed habit of living in spite of very realtendencies in my nature towards discipline. I've never been in love withself-indulgence. That philosophy of the loose lip and the lax paunchis one for which I've always had an instinctive distrust. I like barethings, stripped things, plain, austere and continent things, fine linesand cold colours. But in these plethoric times when there is too muchcoarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form ofcompetitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour's eye,when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nervesor stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before thesetimes the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because theycouldn't, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very fewwere kept "fit" by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, ifonly he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almostany one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporarylife fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungrynor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a meresentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary andelemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it waswith my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.

  But the glider brought me up smartly. I had to find out how these thingswent down the air, and the only way to find out is to go down with one.And for a time I wouldn't face it.

  There is something impersonal about a book, I suppose. At any rate Ifind myself able to write down here just the confession I've never beenable to make to any one face to face, the frightful trouble it was tome to bring myself to do what I suppose every other coloured boy in theWest Indies could do without turning a hair, and that is to fling myselfoff for my first soar down the wind. The first trial was bound to be theworst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance of death orinjury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of success. I believedthat with a dawn-like lucidity. I had begun with a glider that Iimagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers' aeroplane, but I couldnot be sure. It might turn over. I might upset it. It might burrow itsnose at the end and smash itself and me. The conditions of the flightnecessitated alert attention; it wasn't a thing to be done by jumpingoff and shutting one's eyes or getting angry or drunk to do it. Onehad to use one's weight to balance. And when at last I did it it washorrible--for ten seconds. For ten seconds or so, as I swept down theair flattened on my infernal framework and with the wind in my eyes, therush of the ground beneath me filled me with sick and helpless terror;I felt as though some violent oscillatory current was throbbing in brainand back bone, and I groaned aloud. I set my teeth and groaned. It wasa groan wrung out of me in spite of myself. My sensations of terrorswooped to a climax. And then, you know, they ended!

  Suddenly my terror was over and done with. I was soaring through the airright way up, steadily, and no mischance had happened. I felt intenselyalive and my nerves were strung like a bow. I shifted a limb, swervedand shouted between fear and triumph as I recovered from the swerve andheeled the other way and steadied myself.r />
  I thought I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart me,--itwas queer with what projectile silence that jumped upon me out ofnothingness, and I yelled helplessly, "Get out of the way!" The birddoubled itself up like a partly inverted V, flapped, went up to theright abruptly and vanished from my circle of interest. Then I sawthe shadow of my aeroplane keeping a fixed distance before me and verysteady, and the turf as it seemed streaming out behind it. The turf!--itwasn't after all streaming so impossibly fast.

  When I came gliding down to the safe spread of level green I had chosen,I was as cool and ready as a city clerk who drops off an omnibus inmotion, and I had learnt much more than soaring. I tilted up her noseat the right moment, levelled again and grounded like a snowflake on awindless day. I lay flat for an instant and then knelt up and got on myfeet atremble, but very satisfied with myself. Cothope was running downthe hill to me. ...

  But from that day I went into training, and I kept myself in trainingfor many months. I had delayed my experiments for very nearly six weekson various excuses because of my dread of this first flight, because ofthe slackness of body and spirit that had come to me with the businesslife. The shame of that cowardice spurred me none the less because itwas probably altogether my own secret. I felt that Cothope at any ratemight suspect. Well,--he shouldn't suspect again.

  It is curious that I remember that shame and self accusation and itsconsequences far more distinctly than I recall the weeks of vacillationbefore I soared. For a time I went altogether without alcohol, I stoppedsmoking altogether and ate very sparingly, and every day I did somethingthat called a little upon my nerves and muscles. I soared as frequentlyas I could. I substituted a motor-bicycle for the London train and tookmy chances in the southward traffic, and I even tried what thrills wereto be got upon a horse. But they put me on made horses, and I conceiveda perhaps unworthy contempt for the certitudes of equestrian exercisein comparison with the adventures of mechanism. Also I walked along thehigh wall at the back of Lady Grove garden, and at last brought myselfto stride the gap where the gate comes. If I didn't altogether get ridof a certain giddy instinct by such exercises, at least I trained mywill until it didn't matter. And soon I no longer dreaded flight, butwas eager to go higher into the air, and I came to esteem soaring upona glider, that even over the deepest dip in the ground had barely fortyfeet of fall beneath it, a mere mockery of what flight might be. I beganto dream of the keener freshness in the air high above the beechwoods,and it was rather to satisfy that desire than as any legitimatedevelopment of my proper work that presently I turned a part of myenergies and the bulk of my private income to the problem of thenavigable balloon.

  II

  I had gone far beyond that initial stage; I had had two smashes and abroken rib which my aunt nursed with great energy, and was getting somereputation in the aeronautic world when, suddenly, as though she hadnever really left it, the Honourable Beatrice Normandy, dark-eyed, andwith the old disorderly wave of the hair from her brow, came back intomy life. She came riding down a grass path in the thickets below LadyGrove, perched up on a huge black horse, and the old Earl of Carnabyand Archie Garvell, her half-brother, were with her. My uncle had beenbothering me about the Crest Hill hot-water pipes, and we were returningby a path transverse to theirs and came out upon them suddenly. OldCarnaby was trespassing on our ground, and so he hailed us in a friendlyfashion and pulled up to talk to us.

  I didn't note Beatrice at all at first. I was interested in LordCarnaby, that remarkable vestige of his own brilliant youth. I had heardof him, but never seen him. For a man of sixty-five who had sinned allthe sins, so they said, and laid waste the most magnificent politicaldebut of any man of his generation, he seemed to me to be lookingremarkably fit and fresh. He was a lean little man with grey-blue eyesin his brown face, and his cracked voice was the worst thing in hiseffect.

  "Hope you don't mind us coming this way, Ponderevo," he cried; and myuncle, who was sometimes a little too general and generous with titles,answered, "Not at all, my lord, not at all! Glad you make use of it!"

  "You're building a great place over the hill," said Carnaby.

  "Thought I'd make a show for once," said my uncle. "It looks big becauseit's spread out for the sun."

  "Air and sunlight," said the earl. "You can't have too much of them. Butbefore our time they used to build for shelter and water and the highroad."

  Then I discovered that the silent figure behind the earl was Beatrice.

  I'd forgotten her sufficiently to think for a moment that she hadn'tchanged at all since she had watched me from behind the skirts of LadyDrew. She was looking at me, and her dainty brow under her broad brimmedhat--she was wearing a grey hat and loose unbuttoned coat--was knit withperplexity, trying, I suppose, to remember where she had seen me before.Her shaded eyes met mine with that mute question....

  It seemed incredible to me she didn't remember.

  "Well," said the earl and touched his horse.

  Garvell was patting the neck of his horse, which was inclined to fidget,and disregarding me. He nodded over his shoulder and followed. Hismovement seemed to release a train of memories in her. She glancedsuddenly at him and then back at me with a flash of recognition thatwarmed instantly to a faint smile. She hesitated as if to speak to me,smiled broadly and understandingly and turned to follow the others.All three broke into a canter and she did not look back. I stood for asecond or so at the crossing of the lanes, watching her recede, and thenbecame aware that my uncle was already some paces off and talking overhis shoulder in the belief that I was close behind. I turned about andstrode to overtake him. My mind was full of Beatrice and this surprise.I remembered her simply as a Normandy. I'd clean forgotten that Garvellwas the son and she the step-daughter of our neighbour, Lady Osprey.Indeed, I'd probably forgotten at that time that we had Lady Osprey as aneighbour. There was no reason at all for remembering it. It was amazingto find her in this Surrey countryside, when I'd never thought of heras living anywhere in the world but at Bladesover Park, near forty milesand twenty years away. She was so alive--so unchanged! The same quickwarm blood was in her cheeks. It seemed only yesterday that we hadkissed among the bracken stems....

  "Eh?" I said.

  "I say he's good stuff," said my uncle. "You can say what you likeagainst the aristocracy, George; Lord Carnaby's rattling good stuff.There's a sort of Savoir Faire, something--it's an old-fashioned phrase,George, but a good one there's a Bong-Tong.... It's like the Oxfordturf, George, you can't grow it in a year. I wonder how they do it.It's living always on a Scale, George. It's being there from thebeginning."...

  "She might," I said to myself, "be a picture by Romney come alive!"

  "They tell all these stories about him," said my uncle, "but what dothey all amount to?"

  "Gods!" I said to myself; "but why have I forgotten for so long? Thosequeer little brows of hers, the touch of mischief in her eyes--the wayshe breaks into a smile!"

  "I don't blame him," said my uncle. "Mostly it's imagination. That andleisure, George. When I was a young man I was kept pretty busy. So wereyou. Even then--!"

  What puzzled me more particularly was the queer trick of my memorythat had never recalled anything vital of Beatrice whatever when Imet Garvell again that had, indeed, recalled nothing except a boyishantagonism and our fight. Now when my senses were full of her, it seemedincredible that I could ever have forgotten....

  III

  "Oh, Crikey!" said my aunt, reading a letter behind her coffee-machine."HERE'S a young woman, George!"

  We were breakfasting together in the big window bay at Lady Grove thatlooks upon the iris beds; my uncle was in London.

  I sounded an interrogative note and decapitated an egg.

  "Who's Beatrice Normandy?" asked my aunt. "I've not heard of herbefore."

  "She the young woman?"

  "Yes. Says she knows you. I'm no hand at old etiquette, George, buther line is a bit unusual. Practically she says she's going to make hermother--"

 
"Eh? Step-mother, isn't it?"

  "You seem to know a lot about her. She says 'mother'--Lady Osprey.They're to call on me, anyhow, next Wednesday week at four, and there'sgot to be you for tea."

  "Eh?"

  "You--for tea.

  "H'm. She had rather--force of character. When I knew her before."

  I became aware of my aunt's head sticking out obliquely from behind thecoffee-machine and regarding me with wide blue curiosity. I met her gazefor a moment, flinched, coloured, and laughed.

  "I've known her longer than I've known you," I said, and explained atlength.

  My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffee-machine as I didso. She was greatly interested, and asked several elucidatory questions.

  "Why didn't you tell me the day you saw her? You've had her on your mindfor a week," she said.

  "It IS odd I didn't tell you," I admitted.

  "You thought I'd get a Down on her," said my aunt conclusively. "That'swhat you thought" and opened the rest of her letters.

  The two ladies came in a pony-carriage with conspicuous punctuality, andI had the unusual experience of seeing my aunt entertaining callers. Wehad tea upon the terrace under the cedar, but old Lady Osprey, being anembittered Protestant, had never before seen the inside of the house,and we made a sort of tour of inspection that reminded me of my firstvisit to the place. In spite of my preoccupation with Beatrice, I storeda queer little memory of the contrast between the two other women; myaunt, tall, slender and awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping dress, anomnivorous reader and a very authentic wit, and the lady of pedigree,short and plump, dressed with Victorian fussiness, living at theintellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction, pink in the faceand generally flustered by a sense of my aunt's social strangeness anddisposed under the circumstances to behave rather like an imitationof the more queenly moments of her own cook. The one seemed made ofwhalebone, the other of dough. My aunt was nervous, partly through theintrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly because of herpassionate desire to watch Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took acommon form with her, a wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbationof her habitual oddity of phrase which did much to deepen the pinkperplexity of the lady of title. For instance, I heard my aunt admitthat one of the Stuart Durgan ladies did look a bit "balmy onthe crumpet"; she described the knights of the age of chivalry as"korvorting about on the off-chance of a dragon"; she explained shewas "always old mucking about the garden," and instead of offering me aGaribaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to"have some squashed flies, George." I felt convinced Lady Ospreywould describe her as "a most eccentric person" on the very firstopportunity;--"a most eccentric person." One could see her, as peoplesay, "shaping" for that.

  Beatrice was dressed very quietly in brown, with a simple but courageousbroad-brimmed hat, and an unexpected quality of being grown-up andresponsible. She guided her step-mother through the first encounter,scrutinised my aunt, and got us all well in movement through the house,and then she turned her attention to me with a quick and half-confidentsmile.

  "We haven't met," she said, "since--"

  "It was in the Warren."

  "Of course," she said, "the Warren! I remembered it all except just thename.... I was eight."

  Her smiling eyes insisted on my memories being thorough. I looked up andmet them squarely, a little at a loss for what I should say.

  "I gave you away pretty completely," she said, meditating upon my face."And afterwards I gave way Archie."

  She turned her face away from the others, and her voice fell ever solittle.

  "They gave him a licking for telling lies!" she said, as though that wasa pleasant memory. "And when it was all over I went to our wigwam. Youremember the wigwam?"

  "Out in the West Wood?"

  "Yes--and cried--for all the evil I had done you, I suppose.... I'veoften thought of it since."...

  Lady Osprey stopped for us to overtake her. "My dear!" she said toBeatrice. "Such a beautiful gallery!" Then she stared very hard at me,puzzled in the most naked fashion to understand who I might be.

  "People say the oak staircase is rather good," said my aunt, and led theway.

  Lady Osprey, with her skirts gathered for the ascent to the galleryand her hand on the newel, turned and addressed a look full of meaningoverflowing indeed with meanings--at her charge. The chief meaningno doubt was caution about myself, but much of it was just meaning atlarge. I chanced to catch the response in a mirror and detected Beatricewith her nose wrinkled into a swift and entirely diabolical grimace.Lady Osprey became a deeper shade of pink and speechless withindignation--it was evident she disavowed all further responsibility, asshe followed my aunt upstairs.

  "It's dark, but there's a sort of dignity," said Beatrice verydistinctly, regarding the hall with serene tranquillity, and allowingthe unwilling feet on the stairs to widen their distance from us. Shestood a step up, so that she looked down a little upon me and over me atthe old hall.

  She turned upon me abruptly when she thought her step-mother was beyondear-shot.

  "But how did you get here?" she asked.

  "Here?"

  "All this." She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the hand athall and tall windows and sunlit terrace. "Weren't you the housekeeper'sson?"

  "I've adventured. My uncle has become--a great financier. He used tobe a little chemist about twenty miles from Bladesover. We're promotersnow, amalgamators, big people on the new model."

  "I understand." She regarded me with interested eyes, visibly thinkingme out.

  "And you recognised me?" I asked.

  "After a second or so. I saw you recognised me. I couldn't place you,but I knew I knew you. Then Archie being there helped me to remember."

  "I'm glad to meet again," I ventured. "I'd never forgotten you."

  "One doesn't forget those childish things."

  We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously easy and confidentsatisfaction in coming together again. I can't explain our ready zest inone another. The thing was so. We pleased each other, we had no doubt inour minds that we pleased each other. From the first we were at our easewith one another. "So picturesque, so very picturesque," came a voicefrom above, and then: "Bee-atrice!"

  "I've a hundred things I want to know about you," she said with an easyintimacy, as we went up the winding steps....

  As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the terrace sheasked questions about my aeronautics. My aunt helped with a word or soabout my broken ribs. Lady Osprey evidently regarded flying as a mostindesirable and improper topic--a blasphemous intrusion upon the angels."It isn't flying," I explained. "We don't fly yet."

  "You never will," she said compactly. "You never will."

  "Well," I said, "we do what we can."

  The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a height ofabout four feet from the ground. "Thus far," she said, "thus far--AND NOFARTHER! No!"

  She became emphatically pink. "NO," she said again quite conclusively,and coughed shortly. "Thank you," she said to her ninth or tenth cake.Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with her eye on me. I was lyingon the turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion about theprimordial curse in Lady Osprey's mind.

  "Upon his belly shall he go," she said with quiet distinctness, "all thedays of his life."

  After which we talked no more of aeronautics.

  Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with exactlythe same scrutiny, I thought, the same adventurous aggression, thatI had faced long ago at the tea-table in my mother's room. She wasamazingly like that little Princess of my Bladesover memories, thewilful misbehaviours of her hair seemed the same--her voice; things onewould have expected to be changed altogether. She formed her plans inthe same quick way, and acted with the same irresponsible decision.

  She stood up abruptly.

  "What is there beyond the terrace?" she said, and found me promptlybeside her.

  I inven
ted a view for her.

  At the further corner from the cedar she perched herself up upon theparapet and achieved an air of comfort among the lichenous stones. "Nowtell me," she said, "all about yourself. Tell me about yourself; I knowsuch duffers of men! They all do the same things. How did you get--here?All my men WERE here. They couldn't have got here if they hadn't beenhere always. They wouldn't have thought it right. You've climbed."

  "If it's climbing," I said.

  She went off at a tangent. "It's--I don't know if you'llunderstand--interesting to meet you again. I've remembered you. I don'tknow why, but I have. I've used you as a sort of lay figure--when I'vetold myself stories. But you've always been rather stiff and difficultin my stories--in ready-made clothes--a Labour Member or a Bradlaugh, orsomething like that. You're not like that a bit. And yet you ARE!"

  She looked at me. "Was it much of a fight? They make out it is."

  "I don't know why."

  "I was shot up here by an accident," I said. "There was no fight at all.Except to keep honest, perhaps and I made no great figure in that. Iand my uncle mixed a medicine and it blew us up. No merit in that! Butyou've been here all the time. Tell me what you have done first."

  "One thing we didn't do." She meditated for a moment.

  "What?" said I.

  "Produce a little half-brother for Bladesover. So it went to thePhillbrick gang. And they let it! And I and my step-mother--we let, too.And live in a little house."

  She nodded her head vaguely over her shoulder and turned to me again."Well, suppose it was an accident. Here you are! Now you're here, whatare you going to do? You're young. Is it to be Parliament? heard somemen the other day talking about you. Before I knew you were you. Theysaid that was what you ought to do."...

  She put me through my intentions with a close and vital curiosity. Itwas just as she had tried to imagine me a soldier and place me yearsago. She made me feel more planless and incidental than ever. "You wantto make a flying-machine," she pursued, "and when you fly? What then?Would it be for fighting?"

  I told her something of my experimental work. She had never heard ofthe soaring aeroplane, and was excited by the thought, and keen to hearabout it. She had thought all the work so far had been a mere projectingof impossible machines. For her Pilcher and Lilienthal had died in vain.She did not know such men had lived in the world.

  "But that's dangerous!" she said, with a note of discovery.

  "Oh!--it's dangerous."

  "Bee-atrice!" Lady Osprey called.

  Beatrice dropped from the wall to her feet.

  "Where do you do this soaring?"

  "Beyond the high Barrows. East of Crest Hill and the wood."

  "Do you mind people coming to see?"

  "Whenever you please. Only let me know"

  "I'll take my chance some day. Some day soon." She looked at methoughtfully, smiled, and our talk was at an end.

  IV

  All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with thequality of Beatrice, with her incidental presence, with things she saidand did and things I thought of that had reference to her.

  In the spring of that year I had got to a flying machine that lackednothing but longitudinal stability. My model flew like a bird for fiftyor a hundred yards or so, and then either dived and broke its nose or,what was commoner, reared up, slid back and smashed its propeller. Therhythm of the pitching puzzled me. I felt it must obey some laws notyet quite clearly stated. I became therefore a student of theory andliterature for a time; I hit upon the string of considerations that ledme to what is called Ponderevo's Principle and my F.R.S., and I workedthis out in three long papers. Meanwhile I made a lot of turn-tableand glider models and started in upon an idea of combining gas-bags andgliders. Balloon work was new to me. I had made one or two ascents inthe balloons of the Aero Club before I started my gasometer andthe balloon shed and gave Cothope a couple of months with Sir PeterRumchase. My uncle found part of the money for these developments; hewas growing interested and competitive in this business because ofLord Boom's prize and the amount of reclame involved, and it was at hisrequest that I named my first navigable balloon Lord Roberts Alpha.

  Lord Roberts A very nearly terminated all my investigations. My ideaboth in this and its more successful and famous younger brother, LordRoberts B, was to utilise the idea of a contractile balloon with a rigidflat base, a balloon shaped rather like an inverted boat that shouldalmost support the apparatus, but not quite. The gas-bag was of thechambered sort used for these long forms, and not with an internalballoonette. The trouble was to make the thing contractile. This Isought to do by fixing a long, fine-meshed silk net over it thatwas fastened to be rolled up on two longitudinal rods. Practically Icontracted my sausage gas-bag by netting it down. The ends were toocomplex for me to describe here, but I thought them out elaborately andthey were very carefully planned. Lord Roberts A was furnished with asingle big screw forward, and there was a rudder aft. The engine was thefirst one to be, so to speak, right in the plane of the gas-bag. I layimmediately under the balloon on a sort of glider framework, far awayfrom either engine or rudder, controlling them by wire-pulls constructedon the principle of the well-known Bowden brake of the cyclist.

  But Lord Roberts A has been pretty exhaustively figured and described invarious aeronautical publications. The unforeseen defect was the badnessof the work in the silk netting. It tore aft as soon as I began tocontract the balloon, and the last two segments immediately bulgedthrough the hole, exactly as an inner tube will bulge through theruptured outer cover of a pneumatic tire, and then the sharp edge of thetorn net cut the oiled-silk of the distended last segment along a weakseam and burst it with a loud report.

  Up to that point the whole thing had been going on extremely well. As anavigable balloon and before I contracted it, the Lord Roberts A was anunqualified success. It had run out of the shed admirably at nine orten miles an hour or more, and although there was a gentle southwesterblowing, it had gone up and turned and faced it as well as any craft ofthe sort I have ever seen.

  I lay in my customary glider position, horizontal and face downward, andthe invisibility of all the machinery gave an extraordinary effect ofindependent levitation. Only by looking up, as it were, and turning myhead back could I see the flat aeroplane bottom of the balloon andthe rapid successive passages, swish, swish, swish of the vans of thepropeller. I made a wide circle over Lady Grove and Duffield andout towards Effingham and came back quite successfully to thestarting-point.

  Down below in the October sunlight were my sheds and the little groupthat had been summoned to witness the start, their faces craned upwardand most of them scrutinising my expression through field-glasses. Icould see Carnaby and Beatrice on horseback, and two girls I did notknow with them; Cothope and three or four workmen I employed; my auntand Mrs. Levinstein, who was staying with her, on foot, and Dimmock, theveterinary surgeon, and one or two others. My shadow moved a little tothe north of them like the shadow of a fish. At Lady Grove the servantswere out on the lawn, and the Duffield school playground swarmed withchildren too indifferent to aeronautics to cease their playing. But inthe Crest Hill direction--the place looked extraordinarily squatand ugly from above--there were knots and strings of staring workmeneverywhere--not one of them working, but all agape. (But now I write it,it occurs to me that perhaps it was their dinner hour; it was certainlynear twelve.) I hung for a moment or so enjoying the soar, then turnedabout to face a clear stretch of open down, let the engine out to fullspeed and set my rollers at work rolling in the net, and so tighteningthe gas-bags. Instantly the pace quickened with the diminishedresistance...

  In that moment before the bang I think I must have been really flying.Before the net ripped, just in the instant when my balloon was at itssystole, the whole apparatus was, I am convinced, heavier than air.That, however, is a claim that has been disputed, and in any case thissort of priority is a very trivial thing.

  Then came a sudden retardation, instantly followed by an
inexpressiblydisconcerting tilt downward of the machine. That I still recall withhorror. I couldn't see what was happening at all and I couldn't imagine.It was a mysterious, inexplicable dive. The thing, it seemed, withoutrhyme or reason, was kicking up its heels in the air. The bang followedimmediately, and I perceived I was falling rapidly.

  I was too much taken by surprise to think of the proper cause of thereport. I don't even know what I made of it. I was obsessed, I suppose,by that perpetual dread of the modern aeronaut, a flash between engineand balloon. Yet obviously I wasn't wrapped in flames. I ought to haverealised instantly it wasn't that. I did, at any rate, whatever otherimpressions there were, release the winding of the outer net and let theballoon expand again, and that no doubt did something to break my fall.I don't remember doing that. Indeed, all I do remember is the giddyeffect upon the landscape of falling swiftly upon it down a flat spiral,the hurried rush of fields and trees and cottages on my left shoulderand the overhung feeling as if the whole apparatus was pressing downthe top of my head. I didn't stop or attempt to stop the screw. That wasgoing on, swish, swish, swish all the time.

  Cothope really knows more about the fall than I do. He describes theeasterly start, the tilt, and the appearance and bursting of a sortof bladder aft. Then down I swooped, very swiftly, but not nearly sosteeply as I imagined I was doing. "Fifteen or twenty degrees," saidCothope, "to be exact." From him it was that I learnt that I let thenets loose again, and so arrested my fall. He thinks I was more incontrol of myself than I remember.

  But I do not see why I should have forgotten so excellent a resolution.His impression is that I was really steering and trying to drop intothe Farthing Down beeches. "You hit the trees," he said, "and the wholeaffair stood on its nose among them, and then very slowly crumpled up.I saw you'd been jerked out, as I thought, and I didn't stay for more. Irushed for my bicycle."

  As a matter of fact, it was purely accidental that I came down in thewoods. I am reasonably certain that I had no more control then than athing in a parcel. I remember I felt a sort of wincing, "Now it comes!"as the trees rushed up to me. If I remember that, I should remembersteering. Then the propeller smashed, everything stopped with a jerk,and I was falling into a mass of yellowing leaves, and Lord Roberts A,so it seemed to me, was going back into the sky.

  I felt twigs and things hit me in the face, but I didn't feel injuredat the time; I clutched at things that broke, tumbled through a frothof green and yellow into a shadowy world of great bark-covered arms, andthere, snatching wildly, got a grip on a fair round branch, and hung.

  I became intensely alert and clear-headed. I held by that branch for amoment and then looked about me, and caught at another, and then foundmyself holding to a practicable fork. I swung forward to that and got aleg around it below its junction, and so was able presently to clamberdown, climbing very coolly and deliberately. I dropped ten feet or sofrom the lowest branch and fell on my feet. "That's all right," I said,and stared up through the tree to see what I could of the deflated andcrumpled remains that had once been Lord Roberts A festooned on thebranches it had broken. "Gods!" I said, "what a tumble!"

  I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to see myhand covered with blood. I looked at myself and saw what seemed to mean astonishing quantity of blood running down my arm and shoulder.I perceived my mouth was full of blood. It's a queer moment when onerealises one is hurt, and perhaps badly hurt, and has still to discoverjust how far one is hurt. I explored my face carefully and foundunfamiliar contours on the left side. The broken end of a branch haddriven right through my cheek, damaging my cheek and teeth and gums,and left a splinter of itself stuck, like an explorer's fartherest-pointflag, in the upper maxillary. That and a sprained wrist were all mydamage. But I bled as though I had been chopped to pieces, and itseemed to me that my face had been driven in. I can't describe just thehorrible disgust I felt at that.

  "This blood must be stopped, anyhow," I said, thickheadedly.

  "I wonder where there's a spider's web"--an odd twist for my mind totake. But it was the only treatment that occurred to me.

  I must have conceived some idea of going home unaided, because I wasthirty yards from the tree before I dropped.

  Then a kind of black disc appeared in the middle of the world and rushedout to the edge of things and blotted them out. I don't remember fallingdown. I fainted from excitement, disgust at my injury and loss of blood,and lay there until Cothope found me.

  He was the first to find me, scorching as he did over the downlandturf, and making a wide course to get the Carnaby plantations at theirnarrowest. Then presently, while he was trying to apply the methodicalteachings of the St. John's Ambulance classes to a rather abnormal case,Beatrice came galloping through the trees full-tilt, with Lord Carnabyhard behind her, and she was hatless, muddy from a fall, and white asdeath. "And cool as a cucumber, too," said Cothope, turning it over inhis mind as he told me.

  ("They never seem quite to have their heads, and never seem quite tolose 'em," said Cothope, generalising about the sex.)

  Also he witnessed she acted with remarkable decision. The questionwas whether I should be taken to the house her step-mother occupied atBedley Corner, the Carnaby dower house, or down to Carnaby's place atEasting. Beatrice had no doubt in the matter, for she meant to nurse me.Carnaby didn't seem to want that to happen. "She WOULD have it wasn'thalf so far," said Cothope. "She faced us out....

  "I hate to be faced out of my opinion, so I've taken a pedometer over itsince. It's exactly forty-three yards further.

  "Lord Carnaby looked at her pretty straight," said Cothope, finishingthe picture; "and then he give in."

  V

  But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during that timemy relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was her setting haddeveloped in many directions. She came and went, moving in an orbitfor which I had no data, going to London and Paris, into Wales andNorthampton, while her stepmother, on some independent system of herown, also vanished and recurred intermittently. At home they obeyed therule of an inflexible old maid, Charlotte, and Beatrice exercisedall the rights of proprietorship in Carnaby's extensive stables. Herinterest in me was from the first undisguised. She found her way to myworksheds and developed rapidly, in spite of the sincere discouragementof Cothope, into a keen amateur of aeronautics. She would come sometimesin the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes afoot with anIrish terrier, sometimes riding. She would come for three or four daysevery day, vanish for a fortnight or three weeks, return.

  It was not long before I came to look for her. From the first Ifound her immensely interesting. To me she was a new feminine typealtogether--I have made it plain, I think, how limited was my knowledgeof women. But she made me not simply interested in her, but in myself.She became for me something that greatly changes a man's world. Howshall I put it? She became an audience. Since I've emerged from theemotional developments of the affair I have thought it out in a hundredaspects, and it does seem to me that this way in which men and womenmake audiences for one another is a curiously influential force in theirlives. For some it seems an audience is a vital necessity, they seekaudiences as creatures seek food; others again, my uncle among them,can play to an imaginary audience. I, I think, have lived and can livewithout one. In my adolescence I was my own audience and my own courtof honour. And to have an audience in one's mind is to play a part,to become self-conscious and dramatic. For many years I had beenself-forgetful and scientific. I had lived for work and impersonalinterests until I found scrutiny, applause and expectation in Beatrice'seyes. Then I began to live for the effect I imagined I made upon her, tomake that very soon the principal value in my life. I played to her.I did things for the look of them. I began to dream more and more ofbeautiful situations and fine poses and groupings with her and for her.

  I put these things down because they puzzle me. I think I was in lovewith Beatrice, as being in love is usually understood; but it was quitea different state alto
gether from my passionate hunger for Marion, ormy keen, sensuous desire for and pleasure in Effie. These were selfish,sincere things, fundamental and instinctive, as sincere as the leap ofa tiger. But until matters drew to a crisis with Beatrice, there wasan immense imaginative insurgence of a quite different quality. I amsetting down here very gravely, and perhaps absurdly, what are no doubtelementary commonplaces for innumerable people. This love that grew upbetween Beatrice and myself was, I think--I put it quite tentatively andrather curiously--romantic love. That unfortunate and truncated affairof my uncle and the Scrymgeour lady was really of the same stuff, ifa little different in quality. I have to admit that. The factor ofaudience was of primary importance in either else.

  Its effect upon me was to make me in many respects adolescent again.It made me keener upon the point of honour, and anxious and eager todo high and splendid things, and in particular, brave things. So far itennobled and upheld me. But it did also push me towards vulgar and showythings. At bottom it was disingenuous; it gave my life the quality ofstage scenery, with one side to the audience, another side that wasn'tmeant to show, and an economy of substance. It certainly robbed my workof high patience and quality. I cut down the toil of research in myeagerness and her eagerness for fine flourishes in the air, flights thatwould tell. I shirked the longer road.

  And it robbed me, too, of any fine perception of absurdity.

  Yet that was not everything in our relationship. The elemental thing wasthere also. It came in very suddenly.

  It was one day in the summer, though I do not now recall withoutreference to my experimental memoranda whether it was in July orAugust. I was working with a new and more bird-like aeroplane with wingcurvatures studied from Lilienthal, Pilcher and Phillips, that Ithought would give a different rhythm for the pitching oscillations thananything I'd had before. I was soaring my long course from the frameworkon the old barrow by my sheds down to Tinker's Corner. It is a clearstretch of downland, except for two or three thickets of box and thornto the right of my course; one transverse trough, in which there is bushand a small rabbit warren, comes in from the east. I had started,and was very intent on the peculiar long swoop with which any newarrangement flew. Then, without any sort of notice, right ahead of meappeared Beatrice, riding towards Tinker's Corner to waylay and talk tome. She looked round over her shoulder, saw me coming, touched herhorse to a gallop, and then the brute bolted right into the path of mymachine.

  There was a queer moment of doubt whether we shouldn't all smashtogether. I had to make up my mind very quickly whether I would pitch-upand drop backward at once and take my chance of falling undamaged--apoor chance it would have been--in order to avoid any risk to her, orwhether I would lift against the wind and soar right over her. Thislatter I did. She had already got her horse in hand when I came up toher. Her woman's body lay along his neck, and she glanced up as I, withwings aspread, and every nerve in a state of tension, swept over her.

  Then I had landed, and was going back to where her horse stood still andtrembling.

  We exchanged no greetings. She slid from her saddle into my arms, andfor one instant I held her.

  "Those great wings," she said, and that was all.

  She lay in my arms, and I thought for a moment she had fainted.

  "Very near a nasty accident," said Cothope, coming up and regardingour grouping with disfavour. He took her horse by the bridle. "Verydangerous thing coming across us like that."

  Beatrice disengaged herself from me, stood for a moment trembling, andthen sat down on the turf "I'll just sit down for a moment," she said.

  "Oh!" she said.

  She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with anexpression between suspicion and impatience.

  For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he'dbetter get her water.

  As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcelyknow how from this incident, with its instant contacts and swiftemotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice. Isee no particular reason why that thought should have come to me in thatmoment, but it did. I do not believe that before then I had thoughtof our relations in such terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember it, thefactor of passion came. She crouched there, and I stood over her, andneither of us said a word. But it was just as though something had beenshouted from the sky.

  Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her face. "Ishan't want any water," she said. "Call him back."

  VI

  After that the spirit of our relations changed. The old ease had gone.She came to me less frequently, and when she came she would have someone with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would do the bulk of thetalking. All through September she was away. When we were alone togetherthere was a curious constraint. We became clouds of inexpressiblefeeling towards one another; we could think of nothing that was not toomomentous for words.

  Then came the smash of Lord Roberts A, and I found myself with abandaged face in a bedroom in the Bedley Corner dower-house withBeatrice presiding over an inefficient nurse, Lady Osprey very pink andshocked in the background, and my aunt jealously intervening.

  My injuries were much more showy than serious, and I could have beentaken to Lady Grove next day, but Beatrice would not permit that, andkept me at Bedley Corner three clear days. In the afternoon of thesecond day she became extremely solicitous for the proper aeration ofthe nurse, packed her off for an hour in a brisk rain, and sat by mealone.

  I asked her to marry me.

  All the whole I must admit it was not a situation that lent itself toeloquence. I lay on my back and talked through bandages, and withsome little difficulty, for my tongue and mouth had swollen. But I wasfeverish and in pain, and the emotional suspense I had been in so longwith regard to her became now an unendurable impatience.

  "Comfortable?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Shall I read to you?"

  "No. I want to talk."

  "You can't. I'd better talk to you."

  "No," I said, "I want to talk to you."

  She came and stood by my bedside and looked me in the eyes. "I don't--Idon't want you to talk to me," she said. "I thought you couldn't talk."

  "I get few chances--of you."

  "You'd better not talk. Don't talk now. Let me chatter instead. Youought not to talk."

  "It isn't much," I said.

  "I'd rather you didn't."

  "I'm not going to be disfigured," I said. "Only a scar."

  "Oh!" she said, as if she had expected something quite different. "Didyou think you'd become a sort of gargoyle?"

  "L'Homme qui Rit!--I didn't know. But that's all right. Jolly flowersthose are!"

  "Michaelmas daisies," she said. "I'm glad you'r not disfigured, andthose are perennial sunflowers. Do you know no flowers at all? When Isaw you on the ground I certainly thought you were dead. You ought tohave been, by all the rules of the game."

  She said some other things, but I was thinking of my next move.

  "Are we social equals?" I said abruptly.

  She stared at me. "Queer question," she said.

  "But are we?"

  "H'm. Difficult to say. But why do you ask? Is the daughter of acourtesy Baron who died--of general disreputableness, I believe--beforehis father--? I give it up. Does it matter?"

  "No. My mind is confused. I want to know if you will marry me."

  She whitened and said nothing. I suddenly felt I must plead with her."Damn these bandages!" I said, breaking into ineffectual febrile rage.

  She roused herself to her duties as nurse. "What are you doing? Why areyou trying to sit up? Sit down! Don't touch your bandages. I told younot to talk."

  She stood helpless for a moment, then took me firmly by the shouldersand pushed me back upon the pillow. She gripped the wrist of the hand Ihad raised to my face.

  "I told you not to talk," she whispered close to my face. "I asked younot to talk. Why couldn't you do as I asked you?"


  "You've been avoiding me for a month," I said.

  "I know. You might have known. Put your hand back--down by your side."

  I obeyed. She sat on the edge of the bed. A flush had come to hercheeks, and her eyes were very bright. "I asked you," she repeated, "notto talk."

  My eyes questioned her mutely.

  She put her hand on my chest. Her eyes were tormented.

  "How can I answer you now?" she said.

  "How can I say anything now?"

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  She made no answer.

  "Do you mean it must be 'No'?"

  She nodded.

  "But" I said, and my whole soul was full of accusations.

  "I know," she said. "I can't explain. I can't. But it has to be 'No!' Itcan't be. It's utterly, finally, for ever impossible.... Keep your handsstill!"

  "But," I said, "when we met again--"

  "I can't marry. I can't and won't."

  She stood up. "Why did you talk?" she cried, "couldn't you SEE?"

  She seemed to have something it was impossible to say.

  She came to the table beside my bed and pulled the Michaelmas daisiesawry. "Why did you talk like that?" she said in a tone of infinitebitterness. "To begin like that!"

  "But what is it?" I said. "Is it some circumstance--my social position?"

  "Oh, DAMN your social position!" she cried.

  She went and stood at the further window, staring out at the rain. Fora long time we were absolutely still. The wind and rain came in littlegusts upon the pane. She turned to me abruptly.

  "You didn't ask me if I loved you," she said.

  "Oh, if it's THAT!" said I.

  "It's not that," she said. "But if you want to know--" She paused.

  "I do," she said.

  We stared at one another.

  "I do--with all my heart, if you want to know."

  "Then, why the devil--?" I asked.

  She made no answer. She walked across the room to the piano and beganto play, rather noisily and rapidly, with odd gusts of emphasis,the shepherd's pipe music from the last act in "Tristan and Isolde."Presently she missed a note, failed again, ran her finger heavily up thescale, struck the piano passionately with her fist, making a feeble jarin the treble, jumped up, and went out of the room....

  The nurse found me still wearing my helmet of bandages, partiallydressed, and pottering round the room to find the rest of my clothes.I was in a state of exasperated hunger for Beatrice, and I was tooinflamed and weakened to conceal the state of my mind. I was feeblyangry because of the irritation of dressing, and particularly of thestruggle to put on my trousers without being able to see my legs. I wasstaggering about, and once I had fallen over a chair and I had upset thejar of Michaelmas daisies.

  I must have been a detestable spectacle. "I'll go back to bed," said I,"if I may have a word with Miss Beatrice. I've got something to say toher. That's why I'm dressing."

  My point was conceded, but there were long delays. Whether the householdhad my ultimatum or whether she told Beatrice directly I do not know,and what Lady Osprey can have made of it in the former case I don'timagine.

  At last Beatrice came and stood by my bedside. "Well?" she said.

  "All I want to say," I said with the querulous note of a misunderstoodchild, "is that I can't take this as final. I want to see you and talkwhen I'm better, and write. I can't do anything now. I can't argue."

  I was overtaken with self-pity and began to snivel, "I can't rest. Yousee? I can't do anything."

  She sat down beside me again and spoke softly. "I promise I will talkit all over with you again. When you are well. I promise I will meet yousomewhere so that we can talk. You can't talk now.

  "I asked you not to talk now. All you want to know you shall know... Willthat do?"

  "I'd like to know"

  She looked round to see the door was closed, stood up and went to it.

  Then she crouched beside me and began whispering very softly and rapidlywith her face close to me.

  "Dear," she said, "I love you. If it will make you happy to marry me, Iwill marry you. I was in a mood just now--a stupid, inconsiderate mood.Of course I will marry you. You are my prince, my king. Women are suchthings of mood--or I would have behaved differently. We say 'No' when wemean 'Yes'--and fly into crises. So now, Yes--yes--yes. I will. I can'teven kiss you. Give me your hand to kiss that. Understand, I am yours.Do you understand? I am yours just as if we had been married fiftyyears. Your wife--Beatrice. Is that enough? Now--now will you rest?"

  "Yes," I said, "but why?"

  "There are complications. There are difficulties. When you are betteryou will be able to--understand them. But now they don't matter. Onlyyou know this must be secret--for a time. Absolutely secret between us.Will you promise that?"

  "Yes," I said, "I understand. I wish I could kiss you."

  She laid her head down beside mine for a moment and then she kissed myhand.

  "I don't care what difficulties there are," I said, and I shut my eyes.

  VII

  But I was only beginning to gauge the unaccountable elements inBeatrice. For a week after my return to Lady Grove I had no sign ofher, and then she called with Lady Osprey and brought a huge bunch ofperennial sunflowers and Michaelmas daisies, "just the old flowers therewere in your room," said my aunt, with a relentless eye on me. I didn'tget any talk alone with Beatrice then, and she took occasion to tell usshe was going to London for some indefinite number of weeks. I couldn'teven pledge her to write to me, and when she did it was a brief,enigmatical, friendly letter with not a word of the reality between us.

  I wrote back a love letter--my first love letter--and she made no replyfor eight days. Then came a scrawl: "I can't write letters. Wait till wecan talk. Are you better?"

  I think the reader would be amused if he could see the papers on my deskas I write all this, the mangled and disfigured pages, the experimentalarrangements of notes, the sheets of suggestions balanced inconstellations, the blottesque intellectual battlegrounds over whichI have been fighting. I find this account of my relations to Beatricequite the most difficult part of my story to write. I happen to be avery objective-minded person, I forget my moods, and this was so much anaffair of moods. And even such moods and emotions as I recall are verydifficult to convey. To me it is about as difficult as describing ataste or a scent.

  Then the objective story is made up of little things that are difficultto set in a proper order. And love in an hysterical passion, now high,now low, now exalted, and now intensely physical. No one has ever yetdared to tell a love story completely, its alternations, its comings andgoings, its debased moments, its hate. The love stories we tell, tellonly the net consequence, the ruling effect....

  How can I rescue from the past now the mystical quality of Beatrice; myintense longing for her; the overwhelming, irrational, formless desire?How can I explain how intimately that worship mingled with a high,impatient resolve to make her mine, to take her by strength and courage,to do my loving in a violent heroic manner? And then the doubts, thepuzzled arrest at the fact of her fluctuations, at her refusal to marryme, at the fact that even when at last she returned to Bedley Corner sheseemed to evade me?

  That exasperated me and perplexed me beyond measure.

  I felt that it was treachery. I thought of every conceivableexplanation, and the most exalted and romantic confidence in her did notsimply alternate, but mingled with the basest misgivings.

  And into the tangle of memories comes the figure of Carnaby, comingout slowly from the background to a position of significance, as aninfluence, as a predominant strand in the nets that kept us apart, as arival. What were the forces that pulled her away from me when it wasso clearly manifest she loved me? Did she think of marrying him? HadI invaded some long-planned scheme? It was evident he did not like me,that in some way I spoilt the world for him. She returned to BedleyCorner, and for some weeks she was flitting about me, and never oncecould I have talk with her alone. W
hen she came to my sheds Carnaby wasalways with her, jealously observant. (Why the devil couldn't she sendhim about his business?) The days slipped by and my anger gathered.

  All this mingles with the making of Lord Roberts B. I had resolved uponthat one night as I lay awake at Bedley Corner; I got it planned outbefore the bandages were off my face. I conceived this second navigableballoon in a grandiose manner. It was to be a second Lord Roberts A,only more so; it was to be three times as big, large enough to carrythree men, and it was to be an altogether triumphant vindication of myclaims upon the air. The framework was to be hollow like a bird's bones,airtight, and the air pumped in or out, and the weight of fuel I carriedchanged. I talked much and boasted to Cothope--whom I suspectedof scepticisms about this new type--of what it would do, and itprogressed--slowly. It progressed slowly because I was restless anduncertain. At times I would go away to London to snatch some chance ofseeing Beatrice there, at times nothing but a day of gliding and hardand dangerous exercise would satisfy me. And now in the newspapers, inconversation, in everything about me, arose a new invader of my mentalstates. Something was happening to the great schemes of my uncle'saffairs; people were beginning to doubt, to question. It was the firstquiver of his tremendous insecurity, the first wobble of that giganticcredit top he had kept spinning so long.

  There were comings and goings, November and December slipped by. Ihad two unsatisfactory meetings with Beatrice, meetings that had noprivacy--in which we said things of the sort that need atmosphere,baldly and furtively. I wrote to her several times and she wrote backnotes that I would sometimes respond to altogether, sometimes condemn asinsincere evasions. "You don't understand. I can't just now explain. Bepatient with me. Leave things a little while to me." She wrote.

  I would talk aloud to these notes and wrangle over them in myworkroom--while the plans of Lord Roberts B waited.

  "You don't give me a chance!" I would say. "Why don't you let meknow the secret? That's what I'm for--to settle difficulties! to telldifficulties to!"

  And at last I could hold out no longer against these accumulatingpressures.

  I took an arrogant, outrageous line that left her no loopholes; Ibehaved as though we were living in a melodrama.

  "You must come and talk to me," I wrote, "or I will come and take you. Iwant you--and the time runs away."

  We met in a ride in the upper plantations. It must have been early inJanuary, for there was snow on the ground and on the branches of thetrees. We walked to and fro for an hour or more, and from the first Ipitched the key high in romance and made understandings impossible. Itwas our worst time together. I boasted like an actor, and she, I knownot why, was tired and spiritless.

  Now I think over that talk in the light of all that has happened since,I can imagine how she came to me full of a human appeal I was toofoolish to let her make. I don't know. I confess I have never completelyunderstood Beatrice. I confess I am still perplexed at many things shesaid and did. That afternoon, anyhow, I was impossible. I posed andscolded. I was--I said it--for "taking the Universe by the throat!"

  "If it was only that," she said, but though I heard, I did not heed her.

  At last she gave way to me and talked no more. Instead she lookedat me--as a thing beyond her controlling, but none the lessinteresting--much as she had looked at me from behind the skirts of LadyDrew in the Warren when we were children together.

  Once even I thought she smiled faintly.

  "What are the difficulties" I cried, "there's no difficulty I will notovercome for you! Do your people think I'm no equal for you? Who saysit? My dear, tell me to win a title! I'll do it in five years!...

  "Here am I just grown a man at the sight of you. I have wanted somethingto fight for. Let me fight for you!...

  "I'm rich without intending it. Let me mean it, give me an honourableexcuse for it, and I'll put all this rotten old Warren of England atyour feet!"

  I said such things as that. I write them down here in all theirresounding base pride. I said these empty and foolish things, and theyare part of me. Why should I still cling to pride and be ashamed? Ishouted her down.

  I passed from such megalomania to petty accusations.

  "You think Carnaby is a better man than I?" I said.

  "No!" she cried, stung to speech. "No!"

  "You think we're unsubstantial. You've listened to all these rumoursBoom has started because we talked of a newspaper of our own. When youare with me you know I'm a man; when you get away from me you think I'ma cheat and a cad.... There's not a word of truth in the things they sayabout us. I've been slack. I've left things. But we have only to exertourselves. You do not know how wide and far we have spread our nets.Even now we have a coup--an expedition--in hand. It will put us on afooting."...

  Her eyes asked mutely and asked in vain that I would cease to boast ofthe very qualities she admired in me.

  In the night I could not sleep for thinking of that talk and the vulgarthings I had said in it. I could not understand the drift my mind hadtaken. I was acutely disgusted. And my unwonted doubts about myselfspread from a merely personal discontent to our financial position.It was all very well to talk as I had done of wealth and power andpeerages, but what did I know nowadays of my uncle's position? Supposein the midst of such boasting and confidence there came some turn I didnot suspect, some rottenness he had concealed from me? I resolved I hadbeen playing with aeronautics long enough; that next morning I would goto him and have things clear between us.

  I caught an early train and went up to the Hardingham.

  I went up to the Hardingham through a dense London fog to see how thingsreally stood. Before I had talked to my uncle for ten minutes I feltlike a man who has just awakened in a bleak, inhospitable room out of agrandiose dream.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  HOW I STOLE THE HEAPS OF QUAP FROM MORDET ISLAND

  I

  "We got to make a fight for it," said my uncle. "We got to face themusic!"

  I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impendingcalamity. He sat under the electric light with the shadow of his hairmaking bars down his face. He looked shrunken, and as though his skinhad suddenly got loose and yellow. The decorations of the room seemedto have lost freshness, and outside the blinds were up--there was not somuch fog as a dun darkness. One saw the dingy outlines of the chimneysopposite quite distinctly, and then a sky of such brown as only Londoncan display.

  "I saw a placard," I said: "'More Ponderevity.'"

  "That's Boom," he said. "Boom and his damned newspapers. He's trying tofight me down. Ever since I offered to buy the Daily Decorator he'sbeen at me. And he thinks consolidating Do Ut cut down the ads. He wantseverything, damn him! He's got no sense of dealing. I'd like to bash hisface!"

  "Well," I said, "what's to be done?"

  "Keep going," said my uncle.

  "I'll smash Boom yet," he said, with sudden savagery.

  "Nothing else?" I asked.

  "We got to keep going. There's a scare on. Did you notice the rooms?Half the people out there this morning are reporters. And if I talk theytouch it up!... They didn't used to touch things up! Now they put incharacter touches--insulting you. Don't know what journalism's comingto. It's all Boom's doing."

  He cursed Lord Boom with considerable imaginative vigour.

  "Well," said I, "what can he do?"

  "Shove us up against time, George; make money tight for us. We beenhandling a lot of money--and he tightens us up."

  "We're sound?"

  "Oh, we're sound, George. Trust me for that! But all the same--There'ssuch a lot of imagination in these things.... We're sound enough. That'snot it."

  He blew. "Damn Boom!" he said, and his eyes over his glasses met minedefiantly.

  "We can't, I suppose, run close hauled for a bitstop expenditure?"

  "Where?"

  "Well,--Crest Hill"

  "What!" he shouted. "Me stop Crest Hill for Boom!" He waved a fist as ifto hit his inkpot, and controlled himself with
difficulty. He spoke atlast in a reasonable voice. "If I did," he said, "he'd kick up a fuss.It's no good, even if I wanted to. Everybody's watching the place. If Iwas to stop building we'd be down in a week."

  He had an idea. "I wish I could do something to start a strike orsomething. No such luck. Treat those workmen a sight too well. No, sinkor swim, Crest Hill goes on until we're under water."

  I began to ask questions and irritated him instantly.

  "Oh, dash these explanations, George!" he cried; "You only make thingslook rottener than they are. It's your way. It isn't a case of figures.We're all right--there's only one thing we got to do."

  "Yes?"

  "Show value, George. That's where this quap comes in; that's why I fellin so readily with what you brought to me week before last. Here we are,we got our option on the perfect filament, and all we want's canadium.Nobody knows there's more canadium in the world than will go on theedge of a sixpence except me and you. Nobody has an idee the perfectfilament's more than just a bit of theorising. Fifty tons of quap andwe'd turn that bit of theorising into something. We'd make the lamptrade sit on its tail and howl. We'd put Ediswan and all of 'em into aparcel without last year's trousers and a hat, and swap 'em off for apot of geraniums. See? We'd do it through Business Organisations, andthere you are! See? Capern's Patent Filament!

  "The Ideal and the Real! George, we'll do it! We'll bring it off! Andthen we'll give such a facer to Boom, he'll think for fifty years. He'slaying up for our London and African meeting. Let him. He can turn thewhole paper on to us. He says the Business Organisations shares aren'tworth fifty-two and we quote 'em at eighty-four. Well, here we aregettin' ready for him--loading our gun."

  His pose was triumphant.

  "Yes," I said, "that's all right. But I can't help thinking where shouldwe be if we hadn't just by accident got Capern's Perfect Filament.Because, you know it was an accident--my buying up that."

  He crumpled up his nose into an expression of impatient distaste at myunreasonableness.

  "And after all, the meeting's in June, and you haven't begun to get thequap! After all, we've still got to load our gun."

  "They start on Toosday."

  "Have they got the brig?"

  "They've got a brig."

  "Gordon-Nasmyth!" I doubted.

  "Safe as a bank," he said. "More I see of that man the more I like him.All I wish is we'd got a steamer instead of a sailing ship."

  "And," I went on, "you seem to overlook what used to weigh with us abit. This canadium side of the business and the Capern chance hasrushed you off your legs. After all--it's stealing, and in its way aninternational outrage. They've got two gunboats on the coast."

  I jumped up and went and stared out at the fog.

  "And, by Jove, it's about our only chance! I didn't dream."

  I turned on him. "I've been up in the air," I said.

  "Heaven knows where I haven't been. And here's our only chance--and yougive it to that adventurous lunatic to play in his own way--in a brig!"

  "Well, you had a voice--"

  "I wish I'd been in this before. We ought to have run out a steamer toLagos or one of those West Coast places and done it from there. Fancy abrig in the channel at this time of year, if it blows southwest!"

  "I dessay you'd have shoved it, George. Still you know, George.... Ibelieve in him."

  "Yes," I said. "Yes, I believe in him, too. In a way. Still--"

  We took up a telegram that was lying on his desk and opened it. Hisface became a livid yellow. He put the flimsy paper down with a slow,reluctant movement and took off his glasses.

  "George," he said, "the luck's against us."

  "What?"

  He grimaced with his mouth--in the queerest way at the telegram.

  "That."

  I took it up and read:

  "Motor smash compound fracture of the leg gordon nasmyth what pricemordet now"

  For a moment neither of us spoke.

  "That's all right," I said at last.

  "Eh?" said my uncle.

  "I'M going. I'll get that quap or bust."

  II

  I had a ridiculous persuasion that I was "saving the situation."

  "I'm going," I said quite consciously and dramatically. I saw the wholeaffair--how shall I put it?--in American colours.

  I sat down beside him. "Give me all the data you've got," I said, "andI'll pull this thing off."

  "But nobody knows exactly where--"

  "Nasmyth does, and he'll tell me."

  "He's been very close," said my uncle, and regarded me.

  "He'll tell me all right, now he's smashed."

  He thought. "I believe he will."

  "George," he said, "if you pull this thing off--Once or twice beforeyou've stepped in--with that sort of Woosh of yours--"

  He left the sentence unfinished.

  "Give me that note-book," I said, "and tell me all you know. Where's theship? Where's Pollack? And where's that telegram from? If that quap'sto be got, I'll get it or bust. If you'll hold on here until I get backwith it."...

  And so it was I jumped into the wildest adventure of my life.

  I requisitioned my uncle's best car forthwith. I went down that nightto the place of despatch named on Nasmyth's telegram, Bampton S.O. Oxon,routed him out with a little trouble from that centre, made things rightwith him and got his explicit directions; and I was inspecting the MaudMary with young Pollack, his cousin and aide, the following afternoon.She was rather a shock to me and not at all in my style, a beast of abrig inured to the potato trade, and she reeked from end to end with thefaint, subtle smell of raw potatoes so that it prevailed even over thetemporary smell of new paint. She was a beast of a brig, all hold anddirty framework, and they had ballasted her with old iron and oldrails and iron sleepers, and got a miscellaneous lot of spades and ironwheelbarrows against the loading of the quap. I thought her over withPollack, one of those tall blond young men who smoke pipes and don'thelp much, and then by myself, and as a result I did my best to sweepGravesend clean of wheeling planks, and got in as much cord and smallrope as I could for lashing. I had an idea we might need to run up ajetty. In addition to much ballast she held, remotely hidden in a sortof inadvertent way a certain number of ambiguous cases which I didn'texamine, but which I gathered were a provision against the need of atrade.

  The captain was a most extraordinary creature, under the impression wewere after copper ore; he was a Roumanian Jew, with twitching, excitablefeatures, who had made his way to a certificate after some preliminarynaval experiences in the Black Sea. The mate was an Essex man ofimpenetrable reserve. The crew were astoundingly ill-clad and destituteand dirty; most of them youths, unwashed, out of colliers. One, the cookwas a mulatto; and one, the best-built fellow of them all, was a Breton.There was some subterfuge about our position on board--I forget theparticulars now--I was called the supercargo and Pollack was thesteward. This added to the piratical flavour that insufficient funds andGordon-Nasmyth's original genius had already given the enterprise.

  Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in narrow,dirty streets, were a new experience for me. It is like nothing else inmy life. I realised that I was a modern and a civilised man. I foundthe food filthy and the coffee horrible; the whole town stank in mynostrils, the landlord of the Good Intent on the quay had a stand-upquarrel with us before I could get even a hot bath, and the bedroomI slept in was infested by a quantity of exotic but voracious flatparasites called locally "bugs," in the walls, in the woodwork,everywhere. I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatosein the morning. I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of thecontemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dipinto it when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery atChatham--where, by-the-by, we had to deal with cockroaches of a smaller,darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.

  Let me confess that through all this time before we started I wasimmensely self-conscious, and that Beatrice played the part of
audiencein my imagination throughout. I was, as I say, "saving the situation,"and I was acutely aware of that. The evening before we sailed, insteadof revising our medicine-chest as I had intended, I took the car andran across country to Lady Grove to tell my aunt of the journey I wasmaking, dress, and astonish Lady Osprey by an after dinner call.

  The two ladies were at home and alone beside a big fire that seemedwonderfully cheerful after the winter night. I remember the effect ofthe little parlour in which they sat as very bright and domestic. LadyOsprey, in a costume of mauve and lace, sat on a chintz sofa and playedan elaborately spread-out patience by the light of a tall shaded lamp;Beatrice, in a whiteness that showed her throat, smoked a cigarettein an armchair and read with a lamp at her elbow. The room waswhite-panelled and chintz-curtained. About those two bright centres oflight were warm dark shadow, in which a circular mirror shone like apool of brown water. I carried off my raid by behaving like a slave ofetiquette. There were moments when I think I really made Lady Ospreybelieve that my call was an unavoidable necessity, that it would havebeen negligent of me not to call just how and when I did. But at thebest those were transitory moments.

  They received me with disciplined amazement. Lady Osprey was interestedin my face and scrutinised the scar. Beatrice stood behindher solicitude. Our eyes met, and in hers I could see startledinterrogations.

  "I'm going," I said, "to the west coast of Africa."

  They asked questions, but it suited my mood to be vague.

  "We've interests there. It is urgent I should go. I don't know when Imay return."

  After that I perceived Beatrice surveyed me steadily.

  The conversation was rather difficult. I embarked upon lengthy thanksfor their kindness to me after my accident. I tried to understand LadyOsprey's game of patience, but it didn't appear that Lady Osprey wasanxious for me to understand her patience. I came to the verge of takingmy leave.

  "You needn't go yet," said Beatrice, abruptly.

  She walked across to the piano, took a pile of music from the cabinetnear, surveyed Lady Osprey's back, and with a gesture to me dropped itall deliberately on to the floor.

  "Must talk," she said, kneeling close to me as I helped her to pick itup. "Turn my pages. At the piano."

  "I can't read music."

  "Turn my pages."

  Presently we were at the piano, and Beatrice was playing with noisyinaccuracy. She glanced over her shoulder and Lady Osprey had resumedher patience. The old lady was very pink, and appeared to be absorbed insome attempt to cheat herself without our observing it.

  "Isn't West Africa a vile climate?" "Are you going to live there?" "Whyare you going?"

  Beatrice asked these questions in a low voice and gave me no chance toanswer. Then taking a rhythm from the music before her, she said--

  "At the back of the house is a garden--a door in the wall--on the lane.Understand?"

  I turned over the pages without any effect on her playing.

  "When?" I asked.

  She dealt in chords. "I wish I COULD play this!" she said. "Midnight."

  She gave her attention to the music for a time.

  "You may have to wait."

  "I'll wait."

  She brought her playing to an end by--as school boys say--"stashing itup."

  "I can't play to-night," she said, standing up and meeting my eyes. "Iwanted to give you a parting voluntary."

  "Was that Wagner, Beatrice?" asked Lady Osprey looking up from hercards. "It sounded very confused."

  I took my leave. I had a curious twinge of conscience as I parted fromLady Osprey. Either a first intimation of middle-age or my inexperiencein romantic affairs was to blame, but I felt a very distinct objectionto the prospect of invading this good lady's premises from the gardendoor. I motored up to the pavilion, found Cothope reading in bed,told him for the first time of West Africa, spent an hour with him insettling all the outstanding details of Lord Roberts B, and left thatin his hands to finish against my return. I sent the motor back to LadyGrove, and still wearing my fur coat--for the January night was damp andbitterly cold--walked to Bedley Corner. I found the lane to the back ofthe Dower House without any difficulty, and was at the door in the wallwith ten minutes to spare. I lit a cigar and fell to walking up anddown. This queer flavour of intrigue, this nocturnal garden-doorbusiness, had taken me by surprise and changed my mental altitudes.I was startled out of my egotistical pose and thinking intently ofBeatrice, of that elfin quality in her that always pleased me, thatalways took me by surprise, that had made her for example so instantlyconceive this meeting.

  She came within a minute of midnight; the door opened softly and sheappeared, a short, grey figure in a motor-coat of sheepskin, bareheadedto the cold drizzle. She flitted up to me, and her eyes were shadows inher dusky face.

  "Why are you going to West Africa?" she asked at once.

  "Business crisis. I have to go."

  "You're not going--? You're coming back?"

  "Three or four months," I said, "at most."

  "Then, it's nothing to do with me?"

  "Nothing," I said. "Why should it have?"

  "Oh, that's all right. One never knows what people think or what peoplefancy." She took me by the arm, "Let's go for a walk," she said.

  I looked about me at darkness and rain.

  "That's all right," she laughed. "We can go along the lane and into theOld Woking Road. Do you mind? Of course you don't. My head. It doesn'tmatter. One never meets anybody."

  "How do you know?"

  "I've wandered like this before.... Of course. Did you think"--shenodded her head back at her home--"that's all?"

  "No, by Jove!" I cried; "it's manifest it isn't."

  She took my arm and turned me down the lane. "Night's my time," shesaid by my side. "There's a touch of the werewolf in my blood. One neverknows in these old families.... I've wondered often.... Here we are,anyhow, alone in the world. Just darkness and cold and a sky of cloudsand wet. And we--together.

  "I like the wet on my face and hair, don't you? When do you sail?"

  I told her to-morrow.

  "Oh, well, there's no to-morrow now. You and I!" She stopped andconfronted me.

  "You don't say a word except to answer!"

  "No," I said.

  "Last time you did all the talking."

  "Like a fool. Now--"

  We looked at each other's two dim faces. "You're glad to be here?"

  "I'm glad--I'm beginning to be--it's more than glad."

  She put her hands on my shoulders and drew me down to kiss her.

  "Ah!" she said, and for a moment or so we just clung to one another.

  "That's all," she said, releasing herself. "What bundles of clothes weare to-night. I felt we should kiss some day again. Always. The lasttime was ages ago."

  "Among the fern stalks."

  "Among the bracken. You remember. And your lips were cold. Were mine?The same lips--after so long--after so much!... And now let's trudgethrough this blotted-out world together for a time. Yes, let me takeyour arm. Just trudge. See? Hold tight to me because I know the way--anddon't talk--don't talk. Unless you want to talk.... Let me tell youthings! You see, dear, the whole world is blotted out--it's dead andgone, and we're in this place. This dark wild place.... We're dead. Orall the world is dead. No! We're dead. No one can see us. We're shadows.We've got out of our positions, out of our bodies--and together. That'sthe good thing of it--together. But that's why the world can't see usand why we hardly see the world. Sssh! Is it all right?"

  "It's all right," I said.

  We stumbled along for a time in a close silence. We passed a dim-lit,rain-veiled window.

  "The silly world," she said, "the silly world! It eats and sleeps.If the wet didn't patter so from the trees we'd hear it snoring. It'sdreaming such stupid things--stupid judgments. It doesn't know we arepassing, we two--free of it--clear of it. You and I!"

  We pressed against each other reassuringly.

  "I'm glad we're
dead," she whispered. "I'm glad we're dead. I was tiredof it, dear. I was so tired of it, dear, and so entangled."

  She stopped abruptly.

  We splashed through a string of puddles. I began to remember things Ihad meant to say.

  "Look here!" I cried. "I want to help you beyond measure. You areentangled. What is the trouble? I asked you to marry me. You said youwould. But there's something."

  My thoughts sounded clumsy as I said them.

  "Is it something about my position?... Or is itsomething--perhaps--about some other man?"

  There was an immense assenting silence.

  "You've puzzled me so. At first--I mean quite early--I thought you meantto make me marry you."

  "I did."

  "And then?"

  "To-night," she said after a long pause, "I can't explain. No! I can'texplain. I love you! But--explanations! To-night my dear, here we are inthe world alone--and the world doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Here Iam in the cold with you and my bed away there deserted. I'd tell you--Iwill tell you when things enable me to tell you, and soon enough theywill. But to-night--I won't--I won't."

  She left my side and went in front of me.

  She turned upon me. "Look here," she said, "I insist upon your beingdead. Do you understand? I'm not joking. To-night you and I are outof life. It's our time together. There may be other times, but this wewon't spoil. We're--in Hades if you like. Where there's nothing tohide and nothing to tell. No bodies even. No bothers. We loved eachother--down there--and were kept apart, but now it doesn't matter. It'sover.... If you won't agree to that--I will go home."

  "I wanted," I began.

  "I know. Oh! my dear, if you'd only understand I understand. If you'donly not care--and love me to-night."

  "I do love you," I said.

  "Then LOVE me," she answered, "and leave all the things that bother you.Love me! Here I am!"

  "But!--"

  "No!" she said.

  "Well, have your way."

  So she carried her point, and we wandered into the night together andBeatrice talked to me of love....

  I'd never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of love,who could lay bare and develop and touch with imagination all that massof fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides. She had read of love,she had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through herbrain and left fine fragments in her memory; she poured it out, allof it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me. I cannot give any sense of thattalk, I cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic ofher voice, the glow of her near presence. And always we walked swathedwarmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads--withnever a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields.

  "Why do people love each other?" I said.

  "Why not?"

  "But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice, yourface sweeter than any face?"

  "And why do I love you?" she asked; "not only what is fine in you,but what isn't? Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance? For I do.To--night I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!"...

  So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired,we parted at the garden door. We had been wandering for two hours in ourstrange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us,and particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleep--anddreaming of anything rather than Beatrice in the night and rain.

  She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed.

  "Come back," she whispered. "I shall wait for you."

  She hesitated.

  She touched the lapel of my coat. "I love you NOW," she said, and liftedher face to mine.

  I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. "O God!" I cried."And I must go!"

  She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an instant theworld seemed full of fantastic possibilities.

  "Yes, GO!" she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leavingme alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the black darkness ofthe night.

  III

  That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of mylife, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. Itwould, I suppose, make a book by itself--it has made a fairly voluminousofficial report--but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely anepisode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that.

  Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slownessand delay, sea--sickness, general discomfort and humiliatingself--revelation are the master values of these memories.

  I was sick all through the journey out. I don't know why. It was theonly time I was ever sea-sick, and I have seen some pretty bad weathersince I became a boat-builder. But that phantom smell of potatoes waspeculiarly vile to me. Coming back on the brig we were all ill, everyone of us, so soon as we got to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, byquap. On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but thestuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation keptme, if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical wretchednessthe whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimatevermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, thenI became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with Beatrice and mykeen desire to get the Maud Mary under way at once, to consider a properwardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how Ilacked that coat! And, moreover, I was cooped up with two of the worstbores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain. Pollack, after conductinghis illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera housethan a small compartment, suddenly got insupportably well and breezy,and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a tobacco as blond ashimself, and divided his time almost equally between smoking it andtrying to clean it. "There's only three things you can clean a pipewith," he used to remark with a twist of paper in hand. "The best's afeather, the second's a straw, and the third's a girl's hairpin. I neversee such a ship. You can't find any of 'em. Last time I came this wayI did find hairpins anyway, and found 'em on the floor of the captain'scabin. Regular deposit. Eh?... Feelin' better?"

  At which I usually swore.

  "Oh, you'll be all right soon. Don't mind my puffin' a bit? Eh?"

  He never tired of asking me to "have a hand at Nap. Good game. Makes youforget it, and that's half the battle."

  He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipeof blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but somnolent blueeye at the captain by the hour together. "Captain's a Card," he wouldsay over and over again as the outcome of these meditations. "He'd liketo know what we're up to. He'd like to know--no end."

  That did seem to be the captain's ruling idea. But he also wanted toimpress me with the notion that he was a gentleman of good family and toair a number of views adverse to the English, to English literature, tothe English constitution, and the like.

  He had learnt the sea in the Roumanian navy, and English out of a book;he would still at times pronounce the e's at the end of "there"and "here"; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove me into areluctant and uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting carping atthings English. Pollack would set himself to "draw him out." Heavenalone can tell how near I came to murder.

  Fifty-three days I had outward, cooped up with these two and a shy andprofoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays and spent therest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty days of life cooped upin a perpetual smell, in a persistent sick hunger that turned from thesight of food, in darkness, cold and wet, in a lightly ballasted shipthat rolled and pitched and swayed. And all the time the sands in thehour-glass of my uncle's fortunes were streaming out. Misery! Amidst itall I remember only one thing brightly, one morning of sunshine in theBay of Biscay and a vision of frothing waves, sapphire green, a birdfollowing our wake and our masts rolling about the sky. Then wind andrain close in on us again.

  You must not imagine they were ordinary days, days, I mean, of anaverage le
ngth; they were not so much days as long damp slabs of timethat stretched each one to the horizon, and much of that length wasnight. One paraded the staggering deck in a borrowed sou'-wester hourafter hour in the chilly, windy, splashing and spitting darkness, orsat in the cabin, bored and ill, and looked at the faces of thoseinseparable companions by the help of a lamp that gave smell rather thanlight. Then one would see going up, up, up, and then sinking down, down,down, Pollack, extinct pipe in mouth, humorously observant, bringing hismind slowly to the seventy-seventh decision that the captain was a Card,while the words flowed from the latter in a nimble incessant good."Dis England eet is not a country aristocratic, no! Eet is a glorifiedbourgeoisie! Eet is plutocratic. In England dere is no aristocracy sincede Wars of Roses. In the rest of Europe east of the Latins, yes; inEngland, no.

  "Eet is all middle-class, youra England. Everything you look at,middle-class. Respectable! Everything good--eet is, you say, shocking.Madame Grundy! Eet is all limited and computing and self-seeking. Dat iswhy your art is so limited, youra fiction, your philosophin, why youare all so inartistic. You want nothing but profit! What will pay! Whatwould you?"...

  He had all those violent adjuncts to speech we Western Europeans haveabandoned, shruggings of the shoulders, waving of the arms, thrustingout of the face, wonderful grimaces and twiddlings of the hands underyour nose until you wanted to hit them away. Day after day it went on,and I had to keep any anger to myself, to reserve myself for the timeahead when it would be necessary to see the quap was got aboard andstowed--knee deep in this man's astonishment. I knew he would make athousand objections to all we had before us. He talked like a druggedman. It ran glibly over his tongue. And all the time one could see hisseamanship fretting him, he was gnawed by responsibility, perpetuallyuneasy about the ship's position, perpetually imagining dangers. If asea hit us exceptionally hard he'd be out of the cabin in an instantmaking an outcry of inquiries, and he was pursued by a dread of thehold, of ballast shifting, of insidious wicked leaks. As we drew nearthe African coast his fear of rocks and shoals became infectious.

  "I do not know dis coast," he used to say. "I cama hera becauseGordon-Nasmyth was coming too. Den he does not come!"

  "Fortunes of war," I said, and tried to think in vain if any motive butsheer haphazard could have guided Gordon-Nasmyth in the choice of thesetwo men. I think perhaps Gordon-Nasmyth had the artistic temperament andwanted contrasts, and also that the captain helped him to express hisown malignant Anti-Britishism.

  He was indeed an exceptionally inefficient captain. On the whole I wasglad I had come even at the eleventh hour to see to things.

  (The captain, by-the-by, did at last, out of sheer nervousness, getaground at the end of Mordet's Island, but we got off in an hour or sowith a swell and a little hard work in the boat.)

  I suspected the mate of his opinion of the captain long before heexpressed it. He was, I say, a taciturn man, but one day speech brokethrough him. He had been sitting at the table with his arms folded onit, musing drearily, pipe in mouth, and the voice of the captain drifteddown from above.

  The mate lifted his heavy eyes to me and regarded me for a moment.Then he began to heave with the beginnings of speech. He disembarrassedhimself of his pipe. I cowered with expectation. Speech was coming atlast. Before he spoke he nodded reassuringly once or twice.

  "E--"

  He moved his head strangely and mysteriously, but a child might haveknown he spoke of the captain.

  "E's a foreigner."

  He regarded me doubtfully for a time, and at last decided for the sakeof lucidity to clench the matter.

  "That's what E is--a DAGO!"

  He nodded like a man who gives a last tap to a nail, and I could seehe considered his remark well and truly laid. His face, though stillresolute, became as tranquil and uneventful as a huge hall after apublic meeting has dispersed out of it, and finally he closed and lockedit with his pipe.

  "Roumanian Jew, isn't he?" I said.

  He nodded darkly and almost forbiddingly.

  More would have been too much. The thing was said. But from that timeforth I knew I could depend upon him and that he and I were friends. Ithappens I never did have to depend upon him, but that does not affectour relationship.

  Forward the crew lived lives very much after the fashion of ours, morecrowded, more cramped and dirty, wetter, steamier, more verminous. Thecoarse food they had was still not so coarse but that they did not thinkthey were living "like fighting cocks." So far as I could make outthey were all nearly destitute men; hardly any of them had a propersea outfit, and what small possessions they had were a source of mutualdistrust. And as we pitched and floundered southward they gambled andfought, were brutal to one another, argued and wrangled loudly, until weprotested at the uproar.

  There's no romance about the sea in a small sailing ship as I saw it.The romance is in the mind of the landsman dreamer. These brigs andschooners and brigantines that still stand out from every little portare relics from an age of petty trade, as rotten and obsolescent asa Georgian house that has sunken into a slum. They are indeed justfloating fragments of slum, much as icebergs are floating fragments ofglacier. The civilised man who has learnt to wash, who has developeda sense of physical honour, of cleanly temperate feeding, of time, canendure them no more. They pass, and the clanking coal-wasting steamerswill follow them, giving place to cleaner, finer things....

  But so it was I made my voyage to Africa, and came at last into a worldof steamy fogs and a hot smell of vegetable decay, and into sound andsight of surf and distant intermittent glimpses of the coast. I liveda strange concentrated life through all that time, such a life as acreature must do that has fallen in a well. All my former ways ceased,all my old vistas became memories.

  The situation I was saving was very small and distant now; I felt itsurgency no more. Beatrice and Lady Grove, my uncle and the Hardingham,my soaring in the air and my habitual wide vision of swift effectualthings, became as remote as if they were in some world I had left forever....

  IV

  All these African memories stand by themselves. It was for me anexpedition into the realms of undisciplined nature out of the world thatis ruled by men, my first bout with that hot side of our mother thatgives you the jungle--that cold side that gives you the air-eddy I wasbeginning to know passing well. They are memories woven upon a fabricof sunshine and heat and a constant warm smell of decay. They endin rain--such rain as I had never seen before, a vehement, a franticdownpouring of water, but our first slow passage through the channelsbehind Mordet's Island was in incandescent sunshine.

  There we go in my memory still, a blistered dirty ship with patchedsails and a battered mermaid to present Maud Mary, sounding and takingthought between high ranks of forest whose trees come out knee-deepat last in the water. There we go with a little breeze on our quarter,Mordet Island rounded and the quap, it might be within a day of us.

  Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of green witha trumpet call of colour. Things crept among the jungle and peeped anddashed back rustling into stillness. Always in the sluggishly drifting,opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles camechuckling up light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict andtragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logsbasking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken onlyby insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our progress, by thecalling of the soundings and the captain's confused shouts; but inthe night as we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought athousand swampy things to life and out of the forest came screaming andhowlings, screaming and yells that made us glad to be afloat. And oncewe saw between the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or threevillages landward, and brown-black women and children came and stared atus and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat from a creek andhailed us in an unknown tongue; and so at last we came to a great openplace, a broad lake rimmed with a desolation of mud and bleached refuseand dead trees,
free from crocodiles or water birds or sight or soundof any living thing, and saw far off, even as Nasmyth had described, theruins of the deserted station, and hard by two little heaps of buff-huedrubbish under a great rib of rock, the quap! The forest receded. Theland to the right of us fell away and became barren, and far on acrossnotch in its backbone was surf and the sea.

  We took the ship in towards those heaps and the ruined jetty slowly andcarefully. The captain came and talked.

  "This is eet?" he said.

  "Yes," said I.

  "Is eet for trade we have come?"

  This was ironical.

  "No," said I.

  "Gordon-Nasmyth would haf told me long ago what it ees for we haf come."

  "I'll tell you now," I said. "We are going to lay in as close as we canto those two heaps of stuff--you see them?--under the rock. Then we aregoing to chuck all our ballast overboard and take those in. Then we'regoing home."

  "May I presume to ask--is eet gold?"

  "No," I said incivilly, "it isn't."

  "Then what is it?"

  "It's stuff--of some commercial value."

  "We can't do eet," he said.

  "We can," I answered reassuringly.

  "We can't," he said as confidently. "I don't mean what you mean. Youknow so liddle--But--dis is forbidden country."

  I turned on him suddenly angry and met bright excited eyes. For a minutewe scrutinised one another. Then I said, "That's our risk. Trade isforbidden. But this isn't trade.... This thing's got to be done."

  His eyes glittered and he shook his head....

  The brig stood in slowly through the twilight toward this strangescorched and blistered stretch of beach, and the man at the wheelstrained his ears to listening the low-voiced angry argument that beganbetween myself and the captain, that was presently joined by Pollack. Wemoored at last within a hundred yards of our goal, and all through ourdinner and far into the night we argued intermittently and fiercely withthe captain about our right to load just what we pleased. "I will hafnothing to do with eet," he persisted. "I wash my hands." It seemed thatnight as though we argued in vain. "If it is not trade," he said, "itis prospecting and mining. That is worse. Any one who knowsanything--outside England--knows that is worse."

  We argued and I lost my temper and swore at him. Pollack kept cooler andchewed his pipe watchfully with that blue eye of his upon the captain'sgestures. Finally I went on deck to cool. The sky was overcast Idiscovered all the men were in a knot forward, staring at the faintquivering luminosity that had spread over the heaps of quap, aphosphorescence such as one sees at times on rotting wood. And aboutthe beach east and west there were patches and streaks of something likediluted moonshine....

  In the small hours I was still awake and turning over scheme afterscheme in my mind whereby I might circumvent the captain's opposition. Imeant to get that quap aboard if I had to kill some one to do it. Neverin my life had I been so thwarted! After this intolerable voyage! Therecame a rap at my cabin door and then it opened and I made out a beardedface. "Come in," I said, and a black voluble figure I could just seeobscurely came in to talk in my private ear and fill my cabin with itswhisperings and gestures. It was the captain. He, too, had been awakeand thinking things over. He had come to explain--enormously. I laythere hating him and wondering if I and Pollack could lock him inhis cabin and run the ship without him. "I do not want to spoil disexpedition," emerged from a cloud of protestations, and then I was ableto disentangle "a commission--shush a small commission--for specialrisks!" "Special risks" became frequent. I let him explain himself out.It appeared he was also demanding an apology for something I had said.No doubt I had insulted him generously. At last came definite offers. Ibroke my silence and bargained.

  "Pollack!" I cried and hammered the partition.

  "What's up?" asked Pollack.

  I stated the case concisely.

  There came a silence.

  "He's a Card," said Pollack. "Let's give him his commission. I don'tmind."

  "Eh?" I cried.

  "I said he was a Card, that's all," said Pollack. "I'm coming."

  He appeared in my doorway a faint white figure joined our vehementwhisperings.

  We had to buy the captain off; we had to promise him ten per cent. ofour problematical profits. We were to give him ten per cent. on what wesold the cargo for over and above his legitimate pay, and I found in myout-bargained and disordered state small consolation in the thought thatI, as the Gordon-Nasmyth expedition, was to sell the stuff to myself asBusiness Organisations. And he further exasperated me by insisting onhaving our bargain in writing. "In the form of a letter," he insisted.

  "All right," I acquiesced, "in the form of a letter. Here goes! Get alight!"

  "And the apology," he said, folding up the letter.

  "All right," I said; "Apology."

  My hand shook with anger as I wrote, and afterwards I could not sleepfor hate of him. At last I got up. I suffered, I found, from an unusualclumsiness. I struck my toe against my cabin door, and cut myself as Ishaved. I found myself at last pacing the deck under the dawn in amood of extreme exasperation. The sun rose abruptly and splashed lightblindingly into my eyes and I swore at the sun. I found myself imaginingfresh obstacles with the men and talking aloud in anticipatory rehearsalof the consequent row.

  The malaria of the quap was already in my blood.

  V

  Sooner or later the ridiculous embargo that now lies upon all the coasteastward of Mordet Island will be lifted and the reality of the depositsof quap ascertained. I am sure that we were merely taking the outcropof a stratum of nodulated deposits that dip steeply seaward. Those heapswere merely the crumbled out contents of two irregular cavities in therock; they are as natural as any talus or heap of that kind, and themud along the edge of the water for miles is mixed with quap, and isradio-active and lifeless and faintly phosphorescent at night. But thereader will find the full particulars of my impression of all this inthe Geological Magazine for October, 1905, and to that I must refer him.There, too, he will find my unconfirmed theories of its nature. If I amright it is something far more significant from the scientific pointof view than those incidental constituents of various rare metals,pitchblende, rutile, and the like, upon which the revolutionarydiscoveries of the last decade are based. Those are just littlemolecular centres of disintegration, of that mysterious decay androtting of those elements, elements once regarded as the most stablethings in nature. But there is something--the only word that comes nearit is CANCEROUS--and that is not very near, about the whole of quap,something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying; anelemental stirring and disarrangement, incalculably maleficent andstrange.

  This is no imaginative comparison of mine. To my mind radio-activityis a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. Itspreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others andthose too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out ofcoherent existence. It is in matter exactly what the decay of our oldculture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assuredreactions. When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent centres thathave come into being in our globe--these quap heaps are surely by farthe largest that have yet been found in the world; the rest as yet merespecks in grains and crystals--I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of theultimate eating away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world. Sothat while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will changeand crumble from beneath him. I mention this here as a queer persistentfancy. Suppose, indeed, that is to be the end of our planet; no splendidclimax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements, butjust--atomic decay! I add that to the ideas of the suffocating comet,the dark body out of space, the burning out of the sun, the distortedorbit, as a new and far more possible end--as Science can see ends--tothis strange by-play of matter that we call human life. I do not believethis can be the end; no human soul can believe in such an end and go onliving, but to it science points as a possible thing, sc
ience and reasonalike. If single human beings--if one single ricketty infant--can beborn as it were by accident and die futile, why not the whole race?These are questions I have never answered, that now I never attempt toanswer, but the thought of quap and its mysteries brings them back tome.

  I can witness that the beach and mud for two miles or more either waywas a lifeless beach--lifeless as I could have imagined no tropical mudcould ever be, and all the dead branches and leaves and rotting deadfish and so forth that drifted ashore became presently shrivelled andwhite. Sometimes crocodiles would come up out of the water and bask, andnow and then water birds would explore the mud and rocky ribs that roseout of it, in a mood of transitory speculation. That was its utmostadmiration. And the air felt at once hot and austere, dry andblistering, and altogether different the warm moist embrace that had metus at our first African landfall and to which we had grown accustomed.

  I believe that the primary influence of the quap upon us was to increasethe conductivity of our nerves, but that is a mere unjustifiablespeculation on my part. At any rate it gave a sort of east wind effectto life. We all became irritable, clumsy, languid and disposed tobe impatient with our languor. We moored the brig to the rocks withdifficulty, and got aground on mud and decided to stick there and towoff when we had done--the bottom was as greasy as butter. Our effortsto fix up planks and sleepers in order to wheel the quap aboard were asill-conceived as that sort of work can be--and that sort of work can attimes be very ill-conceived. The captain had a superstitious fear of hishold: he became wildly gesticulatory and expository and incompetent atthe bare thought of it. His shouts still echo in my memory, becoming aseach crisis approached less and less like any known tongue.

  But I cannot now write the history of those days of blundering and toil:of how Milton, one of the boys, fell from a plank to the beach, thirtyfeet perhaps, with his barrow and broke his arm and I believe a rib,of how I and Pollack set the limb and nursed him through the fever thatfollowed, of how one man after another succumbed to a feverish malaria,and how I--by virtue of my scientific reputation--was obliged to playthe part of doctor and dose them with quinine, and then finding thatworse than nothing, with rum and small doses of Easton's Syrup, of whichthere chanced to be a case of bottles aboard--Heaven and Gordon-Nasmythknow why. For three long days we lay in misery and never shipped abarrow-load. Then, when they resumed, the men's hands broke out intosores. There were no gloves available; and I tried to get them, whilethey shovelled and wheeled, to cover their hands with stockingsor greased rags. They would not do this on account of the heat anddiscomfort. This attempt of mine did, however, direct their attention tothe quap as the source of their illness and precipitated what in theend finished our lading, an informal strike. "We've had enough of this,"they said, and they meant it. They came aft to say as much. They cowedthe captain.

  Through all these days the weather was variously vile, first a furnaceheat under a sky of a scowling intensity of blue, then a hot fog thatstuck in one's throat like wool and turned the men on the planks intocolourless figures of giants, then a wild burst of thunderstorms,mad elemental uproar and rain. Through it all, against illness, heat,confusion of mind, one master impetus prevailed with me, to keep theshipping going, to maintain one motif at least, whatever else aroseor ceased, the chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek of thebarrows, the pluppa, pluppa, pluppa, as the men came trotting along theswinging high planks, and then at last, the dollop, dollop, as the stuffshot into the hold. "Another barrow-load, thank God! Anotherfifteen hundred, or it may be two thousand pounds, for the saving ofPonderevo!..."

  I found out many things about myself and humanity in those weeks ofeffort behind Mordet Island. I understand now the heart of the sweater,of the harsh employer, of the nigger-driver. I had brought thesemen into a danger they didn't understand, I was fiercely resolved toovercome their opposition and bend and use them for my purpose, and Ihated the men. But I hated all humanity during the time that the quapwas near me.

  And my mind was pervaded, too, by a sense of urgency and by the fearthat we should be discovered and our proceedings stopped. I wanted toget out to sea again--to be beating up northward with our plunder. I wasafraid our masts showed to seaward and might betray us to some curiouspasser on the high sea. And one evening near the end I saw a canoewith three natives far off down the lake; I got field-glasses from thecaptain and scrutinised them, and I could see them staring at us. Oneman might have been a half-breed and was dressed in white. They watchedus for some time very quietly and then paddled off into some channel inthe forest shadows.

  And for three nights running, so that it took a painful grip upon myinflamed imagination, I dreamt of my uncle's face, only that it wasghastly white like a clown's, and the throat was cut from ear to ear--along ochreous cut. "Too late," he said; "Too late!..."

  VI

  A day or so after we had got to work upon the quap I found myself sosleepless and miserable that the ship became unendurable. Just beforethe rush of sunrise I borrowed Pollack's gun, walked down the planks,clambered over the quap heaps and prowled along the beach. I wentperhaps a mile and a half that day and some distance beyond the ruinsof the old station. I became interested in the desolation about me, andfound when I returned that I was able to sleep for nearly an hour. Itwas delightful to have been alone for so long,--no captain, no Pollack,no one. Accordingly I repeated this expedition the next morning and thenext until it became a custom with me. There was little for me to doonce the digging and wheeling was organised, and so these prowlings ofmine grew longer and longer, and presently I began to take food with me.

  I pushed these walks far beyond the area desolated by the quap. On theedges of that was first a zone of stunted vegetation, then a sort ofswampy jungle that was difficult to penetrate, and then the beginningsof the forest, a scene of huge tree stems and tangled creeper ropesand roots mingled with oozy mud. Here I used to loaf in a state betweenbotanising and reverie--always very anxious to know what was up above inthe sunlight--and here it was I murdered a man.

  It was the most unmeaning and purposeless murder imaginable. Even as Iwrite down its well-remembered particulars there comes again the senseof its strangeness, its pointlessness, its incompatibility with any ofthe neat and definite theories people hold about life and the meaning ofthe world. I did this thing and I want to tell of my doing it, but why Idid it and particularly why I should be held responsible for it I cannotexplain.

  That morning I had come upon a track in the forest, and it had occurredto me as a disagreeable idea that this was a human pathway. I didn'twant to come upon any human beings. The less our expedition saw of theAfrican population the better for its prospects. Thus far we had beensingularly free from native pestering. So I turned back and was makingmy way over mud and roots and dead fronds and petals scattered from thegreen world above when abruptly I saw my victim.

  I became aware of him perhaps forty feet off standing quite still andregarding me.

  He wasn't by any means a pretty figure. He was very black and nakedexcept for a dirty loin-cloth, his legs were ill-shaped and his toesspread wide and the upper edge of his cloth and a girdle of string cuthis clumsy abdomen into folds. His forehead was low, his nose veryflat and his lower lip swollen and purplish-red. His hair was short andfuzzy, and about his neck was a string and a little purse of skin. Hecarried a musket, and a powder-flask was stuck in his girdle. It was acurious confrontation. There opposed to him stood I, a little soiled,perhaps, but still a rather elaborately civilised human being, born,bred and trained in a vague tradition. In my hand was an unaccustomedgun. And each of us was essentially a teeming, vivid brain, tenselyexcited by the encounter, quite unaware of the other's mental content orwhat to do with him.

  He stepped back a pace or so, stumbled and turned to run.

  "Stop," I cried; "stop, you fool!" and started to run after him,shouting such things in English. But I was no match for him over theroots and mud.

  I had a preposterous idea. "He mustn't get a
way and tell them!"

  And with that instantly I brought both feet together, raised my gun,aimed quite coolly, drew the trigger carefully and shot him neatly inthe back.

  I saw, and saw with a leap of pure exaltation, the smash of my bulletbetween his shoulder blades. "Got him," said I, dropping my gun and downhe flopped and died without a groan. "By Jove!" I cried with note ofsurprise, "I've killed him!" I looked about me and then went forwardcautiously, in a mood between curiosity and astonishment, to look atthis man whose soul I had flung so unceremoniously out of our commonworld. I went to him, not as one goes to something one has made or done,but as one approaches something found.

  He was frightfully smashed out in front; he must have died in theinstant. I stooped and raised him by his shoulder and realised that. Idropped him, and stood about and peered about me through the trees. "Myword!" I said. He was the second dead human being--apart, I mean, fromsurgical properties and mummies and common shows of that sort--that Ihave ever seen. I stood over him wondering, wondering beyond measure.

  A practical idea came into that confusion. Had any one heard the gun?

  I reloaded.

  After a time I felt securer, and gave my mind again to the dead I hadkilled. What must I do?

  It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to bury him. At any rate, I oughtto hide him. I reflected coolly, and then put my gun within easy reachand dragged him by the arm towards a place where the mud seemed soft,and thrust him in. His powder-flask slipped from his loin-cloth, and Iwent back to get it. Then I pressed him down with the butt of my rifle.

  Afterwards this all seemed to me most horrible, but at the time it wasentirely a matter-of-fact transaction. I looked round for any othervisible evidence of his fate, looked round as one does when one packsone's portmanteau in an hotel bedroom.

  When I got my bearings, and carefully returned towards the ship. I hadthe mood of grave concentration of a boy who has lapsed into poaching.And the business only began to assume proper proportions for me as Igot near the ship, to seem any other kind of thing than the killing of abird or rabbit.

  In the night, however, it took on enormous and portentous forms. "ByGod!" I cried suddenly, starting wide awake; "but it was murder!"

  I lay after that wide awake, staring at my memories. In some odd waythese visions mixed up with my dream of in my uncle in his despair.The black body which saw now damaged and partly buried, but which,nevertheless, I no longer felt was dead but acutely alive andperceiving, I mixed up with the ochreous slash under my uncle's face. Itried to dismiss this horrible obsession from my mind, but it prevailedover all my efforts.

  The next day was utterly black with my sense of that ugly creature'sbody. I am the least superstitious of men, but it drew me. It drew meback into those thickets to the very place where I had hidden him.

  Some evil and detestable beast had been at him, and he lay disinterred.

  Methodically I buried his swollen and mangled carcass again, andreturned to the ship for another night of dreams. Next day for all themorning I resisted the impulse to go to him, and played nap with Pollackwith my secret gnawing at me, and in the evening started to go and wasnear benighted. I never told a soul of them of this thing I had done.

  Next day I went early, and he had gone, and there were human footmarksand ugly stains round the muddy hole from which he had been dragged.

  I returned to the ship, disconcerted and perplexed. That day it was themen came aft, with blistered hands and faces, and sullen eyes. When theyproclaimed, through Edwards, their spokesman, "We've had enough of this,and we mean it," I answered very readily, "So have I. Let's go."

  VII

  We were none too soon. People had been reconnoitring us, the telegraphhad been at work, and we were not four hours at sea before we ranagainst the gunboat that had been sent down the coast to look for us andthat would have caught us behind the island like a beast in a trap. Itwas a night of driving cloud that gave intermittent gleams of moonlight;the wind and sea were strong and we were rolling along through a driftof rails and mist. Suddenly the world was white with moonshine. Thegunboat came out as a long dark shape wallowing on the water to theeast.

  She sighted the Maud Mary at once, and fired some sort of popgun toarrest us.

  The mate turned to me.

  "Shall I tell the captain?"

  "The captain be damned" said I, and we let him sleep through two hoursof chase till a rainstorm swallowed us up. Then we changed our courseand sailed right across them, and by morning only her smoke was showing.

  We were clear of Africa--and with the booty aboard I did not see whatstood between us and home.

  For the first time since I had fallen sick in the Thames my spiritsrose. I was sea-sick and physically disgusted, of course, but I feltkindly in spite of my qualms. So far as I could calculate then thesituation was saved. I saw myself returning triumphantly into theThames, and nothing on earth to prevent old Capern's Perfect Filamentgoing on the market in fortnight. I had the monopoly of electric lampsbeneath my feet.

  I was released from the spell of that bloodstained black body all mixedup with grey-black mud. I was going back to baths and decent food andaeronautics and Beatrice. I was going back to Beatrice and my real lifeagain--out of this well into which I had fallen. It would have neededsomething more than sea-sickness and quap fever to prevent my spiritsrising.

  I told the captain that I agreed with him that the British were the scumof Europe, the westward drift of all the people, a disgusting rabble,and I lost three pounds by attenuated retail to Pollack at ha'penny napand euchre.

  And then you know, as we got out into the Atlantic this side of CapeVerde, the ship began to go to pieces. I don't pretend for one moment tounderstand what happened. But I think Greiffenhagen's recent work onthe effects of radium upon ligneous tissue does rather carry out my ideathat emanations from quap have rapid rotting effect upon woody fibre.

  From the first there had been a different feel about the ship, and asthe big winds and waves began to strain her she commenced leaking. Soonshe was leaking--not at any particular point, but everywhere. She didnot spring a leak, I mean, but water came in first of all near thedecaying edges of her planks, and then through them.

  I firmly believe the water came through the wood. First it began toooze, then to trickle. It was like trying to carry moist sugar in a thinpaper bag. Soon we were taking in water as though we had opened a doorin her bottom.

  Once it began, the thing went ahead beyond all fighting. For a day orso we did our best, and I can still remember in my limbs and back thepumping--the fatigue in my arms and the memory of a clear little dribbleof water that jerked as one pumped, and of knocking off and the beingawakened to go on again, and of fatigue piling up upon fatigue. Atlast we ceased to think of anything but pumping; one became a thing oftorment enchanted, doomed to pump for ever. I still remember it as purerelief when at last Pollack came to me pipe in mouth.

  "The captain says the damned thing's going down right now;" he remarked,chewing his mouthpiece. "Eh?"

  "Good idea!" I said. "One can't go on pumping for ever."

  And without hurry or alacrity, sullenly and wearily we got into theboats and pulled away from the Maud Mary until we were clear of her,and then we stayed resting on our oars, motionless upon a glassy sea,waiting for her to sink. We were all silent, even the captain was silentuntil she went down. And then he spoke quite mildly in an undertone.

  "Dat is the first ship I haf ever lost.... And it was not a fair game!It wass not a cargo any man should take. No!"

  I stared at the slow eddies that circled above the departed Maud Mary,and the last chance of Business Organisations. I felt weary beyondemotion. I thought of my heroics to Beatrice and my uncle, of my prompt"I'LL go," and of all the ineffectual months I had spent after thisheadlong decision. I was moved to laughter at myself and fate.

  But the captain and the men did not laugh. The men scowled at me andrubbed their sore and blistered hands, and set themselves to row.... />
  As all the world knows we were picked up by the Union Castle liner,Portland Castle.

  The hairdresser aboard was a wonderful man, and he even improvised me adress suit, and produced a clean shirt and warm underclothing. I had ahot bath, and dressed and dined and drank a bottle of Burgundy.

  "Now," I said, "are there any newspapers? I want to know what's beenhappening in the world."

  My steward gave me what he had, but I landed at Plymouth still largelyignorant of the course of events. I shook off Pollack, and left thecaptain and mate in an hotel, and the men in a Sailor's Home until Icould send to pay them off, and I made my way to the station.

  The newspapers I bought, the placards I saw, all England indeedresounded to my uncle's bankruptcy.

 

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