DEAR BILL,—At last I find myself with an hour or so to spare, so here goes! How are you all? Well, I hope. I received your little present on the anniversary. Many thanks, old girl. How on earth do you remember the date of everybody's birthday? Honestly, I should have let it pass without noticing if that wee book had not arrived two days before. So you see, youareof some use in the world after all! (This is a joke.) How's Mac getting on with the etching? Tell him I've taken to using only forty per cent. nitric acid in distilled water. This gives very good results for all ordinary work, much more certain than the nitrous, and doesn't make such a stink. There's no demand just now for modern work, in England at any rate. I can hardly believe what you say about the shows in New York. London's dead for etchers. Every dealer is clamorous for copies of the old masters. The rotten thing is that it pays better than doing original work, you know. I have a job on now—twenty plates at £50 a plate, simply copying Girtins and Bartolozzis. I shall do four plates a year. I take things pretty easily, work in the morning, potter round the garden in the afternoon, tennis and cycling when the weather permits. This has been a terrible summer. English weather gets worse, I believe. We had rain for a solid week inJuly. I was out on a tramp through the midlands and got caught in it, which reminds me of a most remarkable chap I met at the time. I really must tell you about him, because I don't remember anyone who has so impressed hispersonalityupon me as this man did."It was this way. I had been sketching round about Market Overton, and getting rather sick of the incessant rain, so I packed up my knapsack and started home. It really is much more jolly walking in the rain than sitting in a stuffy inn parlour waiting for it to stop. Well, at Peterboro' I heard the country eastward was flooded and farmers ruined. Of course, my road lay through March and Ely to Newmarket and Colchester, and I wouldn't believe the boys who called to me that I'd be stopped; but sure enough, not two miles east of Peterboro' the road slid under water and people were punting themselves about on doors, and cooking their grub upstairs. In the fields the hay-cocks and corn-ricks were just showing themselves above the water. It made one's heart ache for the farmers. Well, I turned back, of course, and took the London road to Huntingdon, which runs high all the way to Alconbury. I was getting jolly tired and wondering if I should find a decent bed before I reached Huntingdon, when I came to Saxon Cross. At the cross-roads stands a fine inn all by itself, and to judge by the names and addresses in the visitors' book, it is nearly as well known in America as in England. The Saxon Cross Hotel is not really a hotel at all, being a huntinginn. But it is very comfortable, with brushes hung all round the walls and fine old engravings of sporting scenes in all the rooms."At first I only went into the bar-parlour to get a drink. It was rather dark in there, for it was very near sunset and the windows were small, and I had slipped off my knapsack and dropped into a big comfortable chair before I noticed a clean-shaven man with a big hooked nose and gleaming eyes seated in the far corner. It was like the beak of a bird, that nose, and I was so fascinated by it that I didn't answer the landlord when he came in and said 'Good evening.' The man opposite said 'Good evening' too, so I suppose that it must have been just a mistaken idea of mine, but I really thought at first that he had something against me, his glance was so confoundedly malevolent. He was a tall young chap in a Norfolk suit with a soft silk collar and scarlet tie, russia-leather shoes and a watch in an alligator case on his left wrist. A gentleman evidently by the look of him and when he said to me, in the refined voice of the ordinary university man, 'Are you walking down country?' I made up my mind that he was O. K. and began to converse."One thing rather puzzled me, and that was the fact that he and the landlord did not speak to each other. While I was drinking my whisky they both talked to me and I to them, but they did not exchange a word. I thought it was strange that a landlord should ignore a guest like that, especially as the guest didn't look as if he would stand muchignoring. Indeed, there was a sort of glint in his dark eyes as he made the most ordinary remark that struck me as particularly baleful. However, we talked of the floods and my tramp and hunting, etc., and finally I decided to stop the night there. The landlord went off to order supper and my new friend came over and sat down beside me. Somehow or other I found myself talking over old times. On thinking the matter over I have come to the conclusion that it was his use of one or two words like 'tool,' meaning 'to run hard,' that led me to accept him as one of us. 'Topping' was another word. Before I was aware of it, and without his definitely stating the fact, I was treating him as a public-school man."'Do you know Surrey?' he asked me. 'It's rather jolly.'"'I know Guildford,' I said. 'I was at school there.'"'Were you really?' he replied, and he began to hum 'As I was going to Salisbury,' which is Winchester and nothing else as you will remember. That settled it, and I asked him whose house he was in. 'Jerry Bud's,' he told me. 'I was in old Martin's,' I said. 'Did you know Belvoir? He was in Bud's.'"'The wine merchant's son?' he said, and I nodded."He gave me a curious look at this, as though he was suspicious of me. 'Seen him lately?' he asked. 'Not for years,' I said. 'What became of him?' 'Oh, I don't know,' he said as thoughrelieved. 'I thought perhapsyou'dkept it up. He went into the army, I believe.'"We talked on like this, giving each other little items of information about different fellows we knew, and gradually I gave him my own history, what there is of it. There isn't much, as you know; Slade, Beaux Arts, Chelsea, and now Wigborough. He wasn't a bit interested, didn't seem to know what the wordartistmeant. Regular stereotyped public-school man in that. And he didn't offer me a drink, I noticed, after we had had a peg or two at my expense. However, when the bath was ready and I got up to go to it, he said, 'I'll take supper with you if you don't mind.' I said, 'with pleasure,' 'charmed,' of course, and all that sort of thing, and went off. I met the landlord as I was coming down and buttonholed him. He told me all about it at once."'Mr. Carville, sir? Yes, that's his name. Well, it's a rather curious case. I don't know what to make of it myself. He came down here with a party of university gentlemen about a month ago. Very nice gentlemen they were, sir, and were very free with their money, Mr. Carville especially. And then they all went off except him with a motorin' party that spent a week-end here. Mr. Carville he said they was coming back, you see, and he'd wait for 'em. Well, that's three weeks gone and he's still here as you see. He says that he expects a cheque any day, but up to the present——.'"'Why, hasn't he got any money?' I said."'Well, at present, sir, there's a month's bill.Bein' a gentleman, of course, I knew it 'ud be all right, so I let it run.'"'Perhaps he's overdrawn,' I said."'It's possible, sir,' said the landlord."Well, I went down to supper, full of the poor chap's story, and found him at the table walking into a hefty veal-and-ham pie, and with a bottle of wine at his elbow."'Come on,' he says, 'or you'll be too late.'"We went at it and made a good meal, and he accepted one of my cigars. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew nothing definite about the man. He hadn't even told me his profession. He wasn'tChurch, that was clear. He wasn't Navy. I didn't think he was Bar either. Army? Yes, but you know a chap in the army is bound to let something out about himself in the course of conversation. And, moreover, you don't find army men hiding in hunting hotels in July. Carville? Carville? And then I decided he was proud and kept quiet for fear I would offer him a loan. Poor chap!"There was no one else staying at the Saxon Cross Hotel that night, and we had the big smoking-room to ourselves. And after a time I put it to him pointblank: 'What on earth are you hanging about down here for, man?'"'Simply because,' said he, 'I haven't the cash to pay my bill, and the inland revenue has run dry.'"'Where do you bank?' I asked, and he slapped his pocket."'Pa's bank,' he replied, 'but he is in a bit of atemper with me, I think. If I could only get up to town.'"'Why didn't you explain to the landlord?' I asked him. He looked at me with a scowl. 'I don't explain anything to people of that class,' he said."'What'll you take?' I asked him, and he leaned over and put his face close to mine. 'Oh, damn the money,' he said. 'The fellow will take an IOU if you endorse it.' 'Nay,' I said. 'Let me pay it, and when your ship comes home, all right.' He took another whisky. 'Will you?' he said. 'Will you help a stranger like that?'"'An old public school man is not a stranger,' I said. 'I think your pals are rather a rotten lot to leave you in the lurch like this.' 'Fair weather friends,' he answered. 'Young men with too much money. Very decent chaps so long as you have plenty of cash. Very awkward. I have business in town as a matter of fact. Will you really take my IOU for this? It's only a few quid, you know.'"It was fourteen pounds, and took up the balance of my holiday stock. Rather foolish I know you will say, but after all we ought to stand by each other. And it was worth it. Honestly, it was worth it! That chap became the most animated creature in Huntingdonshire when the arrangement was concluded. He opened the piano and sang song after song, he jabbered at me in French, he got on the big table and danced, he took a tumbler and a napkin and did conjuring tricks, he ordered a bottle of brandy and cigars. I was rather tired when I came in, but he would have none of it. Hetold me stories, and I judged he must have traveled a good deal. He asked me if I knew anything about automobiles. I rather wondered at this. 'I am going to take up an agency,' he said. 'That's why I want to get to town.' It seemed a mad thing for a gentleman to do, and I said so. He darted a fierce look at me over his glass of brandy. 'It takes a gentleman to sell to a gentleman,' he said."I didn't lie awake very long after we did go to bed, I can assure you. We took our candles, I remember, and I told him we must breakfast together. The next thing I remember was the chambermaid knocking at my door and saying it was ten o'clock. Of course he was gone. You've been expecting me to tell you that, I suppose. So he had gone and I was fourteen pounds to the bad, unless he redeemed his IOU. He had told the landlord to drive him into Peterboro'; and as I came down to breakfast the trap returned. Of course, neither of us ever expected to see him again, and when I looked at his IOU in the cold light of the day, it seemed a very flimsy guarantee for my money. There was only one thing about that IOU. It was written on the unused page torn from a letter, and the watermark of the paper was Lydgate Bond. It was the same size as Trojan Club paper too, for you know I belong to the Trojan Club, and Trojans are not men who write to outsiders much. Not on club paper anyway. In fact, the very audacity of the man led me to blame myself for doubting him. He had not behaved just as a gentleman should, but on the other hand he had done nothing underhand. There was adamn-you look about him that made it unbelievable that he was a fraud. Soon after breakfast I set out on my tramp, and, going through Stilton and Huntingdon, made for Cambridge. All the way along I could not help thinking about my boon companion of the night before, and wondering if I should ever meet him again. It seemed very unlikely. He was so interesting, quite apart from his peculiar financial position, and he gave one such an impression of indomitable will power, with his hawk-like face and brilliant eyes, that I wished I had made some sketches of him. But he had not even asked to see my portfolio."Two or three days later I reached home, and in the general worry of getting into harness again I forgot my gentleman for a while. It so happened, however, that my dealer, about a fortnight later, asked me to run up and call at his place in the Haymarket, as he had a commission for me and his client wanted to see me. I biked into Colchester and took the train to London. Business over, I went round to look in at the Trojan's before I took a taxi for Liverpool Street. Just as I turned into Dover Street, an enormous claret-coloured car came up with a horrible noise on the horn, and stopped at the Trojan's door-step. I know there are plenty of cars of large size about, but this one was overwhelming. Everything about it was huge. The head-light was as big as a dog-kennel, and the steering-wheel was a yard across. As the car stopped, a lot of fellows got out of thetonneauand the driver followed, taking off his goggles."Yes, my dear Bill, it is just as you imagine. The driver was my companion of the Saxon Cross Hotel. He recognized me at once as I turned to enter the Club. He really was a big man and he looked much bigger in his long motoring overall than in his knickerbockers. 'Great Scott!' he exclaimed. 'It's you! Do come in. I say, you chaps,' he called. 'Here's a bit of luck. A friend of mine,' I was introduced, and he towered over me smiling, his great hook nose dividing his face and distracting one's attention from his eyes. We sat down to tea, and he told the other men the tale of our meeting, omitting any mention of the fourteen pounds, however, for which I was rather glad. I shouldn't like those chaps to think I was a bally usurer. I made a move to go, but he wouldn't hear of it. I was to go to his place to dinner. We went in the car. It was more like an omnibus than a private vehicle. I sat beside him as we flew down Dover Street, across Piccadilly and into St. James'. He told me he had sold three cars like this in a week to Lord This and the Duke of That—I forget the names. He told me, moreover, that his commission on each car was four hundred pounds. And when we reached his chambers and I saw his furniture and flowers and pictures and servants' livery, I could quite believe it. He was living at the rate of ten thousand a year. Well, we dined as we were, Carville insisting that as I was up from the country they should bar evening dress for one night. This was rather pretty in its way, and I found he was a curious mixture of prettiness and downright brutal ruthlessness. Ifound a man I knew slightly among the guests, a chap named Effon, son of the soap man, and he told me that Carville was one of the most extraordinary men he had ever met, that women would almost come to him at the crooking of his finger, and even men of mature age were dominated by him. And, as a matter of fact, soon after Effon told me this, there was a case in point. Carville's flat looked from the second floor on St. James' Street. One of the men who lived at Chislehurst wanted to catch the 12.6 at Victoria and mentioned casually to the servant to bring a car round. 'You won't catch the 12.6,' says Carville. 'Oh, yes, I shall,' said the other man. 'I bet you a fiver you won't,' says Carville. 'Done,' said the other. It was about twenty minutes to twelve then, and in the buzz of conversation and a couple of games of cards Carville forgot his bet for a moment. Suddenly he saw that the fellow was gone. He rushed to the door and found it locked. Of course we all saw the game, and believed that Carville would laugh and admit himself out-manoeuvred. Not a bit of it. He turned on us, one hand on the door handle, and his face grew absolutely black with rage. Honest Injun, I was scared of him then! He bounded across the room, opened the window, sprang out upon the big stone coping and ran along to the next flat. Here he opened the window—(I've heard afterward that the people were just getting into bed)—stepped in, explained he was doing it for a bet, ran to the door, down the stairs, and taking a flying leap from thetop step landed with both feet on the bonnet of the car just as it was starting. Of course, he smashed the sparking plugs, ignition gear and a lot of other details. We all crowded to the window and looked out. He had won his bet."He came back smiling and assuring the chap that the morning would do just as well for Chislehurst. The party broke up soon after and we went to bed. At breakfast the next morning he was charming, wrote me a cheque for the money, sitting in a gilt chair and writing on a Louis Seize secretaire."'I forgot about you,' he told me. 'I had to rush round rather when I came to town, and it put the matter out of my head. You don't go in for motoring, I suppose, down in Essex?' I said, no, I was working. He looked at his watch. 'I race to-day at three,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'I'd like to go to see it.' 'Ashby-de-la-Zouch,' he answered. 'It takes just three hours to run down.' Of course, I couldn't go down into Leicestershire, and said so. He smiled 'another time.' We exchanged cards again and his man called a cab for me. A chauffeur came up with a prodigiously long-bonneted and low-seated machine, and Carville followed me down stairs. He got in and waved his hand. With a spring the car leaped from the kerb—no other word will describe the starting of that car. I suppose it must have been at least a hundred horse power. In a flash it was round the corner and gone. I climbed into my cab and made my humble way to Liverpool Street,eventually reaching Wigborough, and taking up the daily round and the common task."Now what do you think of that chap, Bill? I think you will disapprove, because for all your wild-West adventures, San Francisco earthquakes, etc., you are a steady-going old girl and object to such rampaging persons as this Carville. But I have been thinking that after all, if one is an artist, everything in the world has a certain 'value.' I don't quite know how to explain what I really do feel, but anyhow men like Carville appear to me as vivid bits ofcolourin the composition of life. Taken by themselves they are all out of drawing, and too loud, but in the general arrangement they fit in perfectly. They inspire one's imagination too, don't you think? I shall never forget that chap's black rage, his blazing eyes, his hooked nose as he stood by the locked door. I wonder what the people next door thought, just getting into bed!"This is a letter, eh! Well, I must dry up, or I shall never get to bed. If I see any more of my strange friend I'll let you know. Love to all at Netley as usual. When are you coming home to dear old rainy England?"Yours ever,"Cecil."P. S.—If you could get me some of those jolly little paper fans you sent me from Chinatown last Christmas, please do."Cecil."
DEAR BILL,—At last I find myself with an hour or so to spare, so here goes! How are you all? Well, I hope. I received your little present on the anniversary. Many thanks, old girl. How on earth do you remember the date of everybody's birthday? Honestly, I should have let it pass without noticing if that wee book had not arrived two days before. So you see, youareof some use in the world after all! (This is a joke.) How's Mac getting on with the etching? Tell him I've taken to using only forty per cent. nitric acid in distilled water. This gives very good results for all ordinary work, much more certain than the nitrous, and doesn't make such a stink. There's no demand just now for modern work, in England at any rate. I can hardly believe what you say about the shows in New York. London's dead for etchers. Every dealer is clamorous for copies of the old masters. The rotten thing is that it pays better than doing original work, you know. I have a job on now—twenty plates at £50 a plate, simply copying Girtins and Bartolozzis. I shall do four plates a year. I take things pretty easily, work in the morning, potter round the garden in the afternoon, tennis and cycling when the weather permits. This has been a terrible summer. English weather gets worse, I believe. We had rain for a solid week inJuly. I was out on a tramp through the midlands and got caught in it, which reminds me of a most remarkable chap I met at the time. I really must tell you about him, because I don't remember anyone who has so impressed hispersonalityupon me as this man did.
"It was this way. I had been sketching round about Market Overton, and getting rather sick of the incessant rain, so I packed up my knapsack and started home. It really is much more jolly walking in the rain than sitting in a stuffy inn parlour waiting for it to stop. Well, at Peterboro' I heard the country eastward was flooded and farmers ruined. Of course, my road lay through March and Ely to Newmarket and Colchester, and I wouldn't believe the boys who called to me that I'd be stopped; but sure enough, not two miles east of Peterboro' the road slid under water and people were punting themselves about on doors, and cooking their grub upstairs. In the fields the hay-cocks and corn-ricks were just showing themselves above the water. It made one's heart ache for the farmers. Well, I turned back, of course, and took the London road to Huntingdon, which runs high all the way to Alconbury. I was getting jolly tired and wondering if I should find a decent bed before I reached Huntingdon, when I came to Saxon Cross. At the cross-roads stands a fine inn all by itself, and to judge by the names and addresses in the visitors' book, it is nearly as well known in America as in England. The Saxon Cross Hotel is not really a hotel at all, being a huntinginn. But it is very comfortable, with brushes hung all round the walls and fine old engravings of sporting scenes in all the rooms.
"At first I only went into the bar-parlour to get a drink. It was rather dark in there, for it was very near sunset and the windows were small, and I had slipped off my knapsack and dropped into a big comfortable chair before I noticed a clean-shaven man with a big hooked nose and gleaming eyes seated in the far corner. It was like the beak of a bird, that nose, and I was so fascinated by it that I didn't answer the landlord when he came in and said 'Good evening.' The man opposite said 'Good evening' too, so I suppose that it must have been just a mistaken idea of mine, but I really thought at first that he had something against me, his glance was so confoundedly malevolent. He was a tall young chap in a Norfolk suit with a soft silk collar and scarlet tie, russia-leather shoes and a watch in an alligator case on his left wrist. A gentleman evidently by the look of him and when he said to me, in the refined voice of the ordinary university man, 'Are you walking down country?' I made up my mind that he was O. K. and began to converse.
"One thing rather puzzled me, and that was the fact that he and the landlord did not speak to each other. While I was drinking my whisky they both talked to me and I to them, but they did not exchange a word. I thought it was strange that a landlord should ignore a guest like that, especially as the guest didn't look as if he would stand muchignoring. Indeed, there was a sort of glint in his dark eyes as he made the most ordinary remark that struck me as particularly baleful. However, we talked of the floods and my tramp and hunting, etc., and finally I decided to stop the night there. The landlord went off to order supper and my new friend came over and sat down beside me. Somehow or other I found myself talking over old times. On thinking the matter over I have come to the conclusion that it was his use of one or two words like 'tool,' meaning 'to run hard,' that led me to accept him as one of us. 'Topping' was another word. Before I was aware of it, and without his definitely stating the fact, I was treating him as a public-school man.
"'Do you know Surrey?' he asked me. 'It's rather jolly.'
"'I know Guildford,' I said. 'I was at school there.'
"'Were you really?' he replied, and he began to hum 'As I was going to Salisbury,' which is Winchester and nothing else as you will remember. That settled it, and I asked him whose house he was in. 'Jerry Bud's,' he told me. 'I was in old Martin's,' I said. 'Did you know Belvoir? He was in Bud's.'
"'The wine merchant's son?' he said, and I nodded.
"He gave me a curious look at this, as though he was suspicious of me. 'Seen him lately?' he asked. 'Not for years,' I said. 'What became of him?' 'Oh, I don't know,' he said as thoughrelieved. 'I thought perhapsyou'dkept it up. He went into the army, I believe.'
"We talked on like this, giving each other little items of information about different fellows we knew, and gradually I gave him my own history, what there is of it. There isn't much, as you know; Slade, Beaux Arts, Chelsea, and now Wigborough. He wasn't a bit interested, didn't seem to know what the wordartistmeant. Regular stereotyped public-school man in that. And he didn't offer me a drink, I noticed, after we had had a peg or two at my expense. However, when the bath was ready and I got up to go to it, he said, 'I'll take supper with you if you don't mind.' I said, 'with pleasure,' 'charmed,' of course, and all that sort of thing, and went off. I met the landlord as I was coming down and buttonholed him. He told me all about it at once.
"'Mr. Carville, sir? Yes, that's his name. Well, it's a rather curious case. I don't know what to make of it myself. He came down here with a party of university gentlemen about a month ago. Very nice gentlemen they were, sir, and were very free with their money, Mr. Carville especially. And then they all went off except him with a motorin' party that spent a week-end here. Mr. Carville he said they was coming back, you see, and he'd wait for 'em. Well, that's three weeks gone and he's still here as you see. He says that he expects a cheque any day, but up to the present——.'
"'Why, hasn't he got any money?' I said.
"'Well, at present, sir, there's a month's bill.Bein' a gentleman, of course, I knew it 'ud be all right, so I let it run.'
"'Perhaps he's overdrawn,' I said.
"'It's possible, sir,' said the landlord.
"Well, I went down to supper, full of the poor chap's story, and found him at the table walking into a hefty veal-and-ham pie, and with a bottle of wine at his elbow.
"'Come on,' he says, 'or you'll be too late.'
"We went at it and made a good meal, and he accepted one of my cigars. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew nothing definite about the man. He hadn't even told me his profession. He wasn'tChurch, that was clear. He wasn't Navy. I didn't think he was Bar either. Army? Yes, but you know a chap in the army is bound to let something out about himself in the course of conversation. And, moreover, you don't find army men hiding in hunting hotels in July. Carville? Carville? And then I decided he was proud and kept quiet for fear I would offer him a loan. Poor chap!
"There was no one else staying at the Saxon Cross Hotel that night, and we had the big smoking-room to ourselves. And after a time I put it to him pointblank: 'What on earth are you hanging about down here for, man?'
"'Simply because,' said he, 'I haven't the cash to pay my bill, and the inland revenue has run dry.'
"'Where do you bank?' I asked, and he slapped his pocket.
"'Pa's bank,' he replied, 'but he is in a bit of atemper with me, I think. If I could only get up to town.'
"'Why didn't you explain to the landlord?' I asked him. He looked at me with a scowl. 'I don't explain anything to people of that class,' he said.
"'What'll you take?' I asked him, and he leaned over and put his face close to mine. 'Oh, damn the money,' he said. 'The fellow will take an IOU if you endorse it.' 'Nay,' I said. 'Let me pay it, and when your ship comes home, all right.' He took another whisky. 'Will you?' he said. 'Will you help a stranger like that?'
"'An old public school man is not a stranger,' I said. 'I think your pals are rather a rotten lot to leave you in the lurch like this.' 'Fair weather friends,' he answered. 'Young men with too much money. Very decent chaps so long as you have plenty of cash. Very awkward. I have business in town as a matter of fact. Will you really take my IOU for this? It's only a few quid, you know.'
"It was fourteen pounds, and took up the balance of my holiday stock. Rather foolish I know you will say, but after all we ought to stand by each other. And it was worth it. Honestly, it was worth it! That chap became the most animated creature in Huntingdonshire when the arrangement was concluded. He opened the piano and sang song after song, he jabbered at me in French, he got on the big table and danced, he took a tumbler and a napkin and did conjuring tricks, he ordered a bottle of brandy and cigars. I was rather tired when I came in, but he would have none of it. Hetold me stories, and I judged he must have traveled a good deal. He asked me if I knew anything about automobiles. I rather wondered at this. 'I am going to take up an agency,' he said. 'That's why I want to get to town.' It seemed a mad thing for a gentleman to do, and I said so. He darted a fierce look at me over his glass of brandy. 'It takes a gentleman to sell to a gentleman,' he said.
"I didn't lie awake very long after we did go to bed, I can assure you. We took our candles, I remember, and I told him we must breakfast together. The next thing I remember was the chambermaid knocking at my door and saying it was ten o'clock. Of course he was gone. You've been expecting me to tell you that, I suppose. So he had gone and I was fourteen pounds to the bad, unless he redeemed his IOU. He had told the landlord to drive him into Peterboro'; and as I came down to breakfast the trap returned. Of course, neither of us ever expected to see him again, and when I looked at his IOU in the cold light of the day, it seemed a very flimsy guarantee for my money. There was only one thing about that IOU. It was written on the unused page torn from a letter, and the watermark of the paper was Lydgate Bond. It was the same size as Trojan Club paper too, for you know I belong to the Trojan Club, and Trojans are not men who write to outsiders much. Not on club paper anyway. In fact, the very audacity of the man led me to blame myself for doubting him. He had not behaved just as a gentleman should, but on the other hand he had done nothing underhand. There was adamn-you look about him that made it unbelievable that he was a fraud. Soon after breakfast I set out on my tramp, and, going through Stilton and Huntingdon, made for Cambridge. All the way along I could not help thinking about my boon companion of the night before, and wondering if I should ever meet him again. It seemed very unlikely. He was so interesting, quite apart from his peculiar financial position, and he gave one such an impression of indomitable will power, with his hawk-like face and brilliant eyes, that I wished I had made some sketches of him. But he had not even asked to see my portfolio.
"Two or three days later I reached home, and in the general worry of getting into harness again I forgot my gentleman for a while. It so happened, however, that my dealer, about a fortnight later, asked me to run up and call at his place in the Haymarket, as he had a commission for me and his client wanted to see me. I biked into Colchester and took the train to London. Business over, I went round to look in at the Trojan's before I took a taxi for Liverpool Street. Just as I turned into Dover Street, an enormous claret-coloured car came up with a horrible noise on the horn, and stopped at the Trojan's door-step. I know there are plenty of cars of large size about, but this one was overwhelming. Everything about it was huge. The head-light was as big as a dog-kennel, and the steering-wheel was a yard across. As the car stopped, a lot of fellows got out of thetonneauand the driver followed, taking off his goggles.
"Yes, my dear Bill, it is just as you imagine. The driver was my companion of the Saxon Cross Hotel. He recognized me at once as I turned to enter the Club. He really was a big man and he looked much bigger in his long motoring overall than in his knickerbockers. 'Great Scott!' he exclaimed. 'It's you! Do come in. I say, you chaps,' he called. 'Here's a bit of luck. A friend of mine,' I was introduced, and he towered over me smiling, his great hook nose dividing his face and distracting one's attention from his eyes. We sat down to tea, and he told the other men the tale of our meeting, omitting any mention of the fourteen pounds, however, for which I was rather glad. I shouldn't like those chaps to think I was a bally usurer. I made a move to go, but he wouldn't hear of it. I was to go to his place to dinner. We went in the car. It was more like an omnibus than a private vehicle. I sat beside him as we flew down Dover Street, across Piccadilly and into St. James'. He told me he had sold three cars like this in a week to Lord This and the Duke of That—I forget the names. He told me, moreover, that his commission on each car was four hundred pounds. And when we reached his chambers and I saw his furniture and flowers and pictures and servants' livery, I could quite believe it. He was living at the rate of ten thousand a year. Well, we dined as we were, Carville insisting that as I was up from the country they should bar evening dress for one night. This was rather pretty in its way, and I found he was a curious mixture of prettiness and downright brutal ruthlessness. Ifound a man I knew slightly among the guests, a chap named Effon, son of the soap man, and he told me that Carville was one of the most extraordinary men he had ever met, that women would almost come to him at the crooking of his finger, and even men of mature age were dominated by him. And, as a matter of fact, soon after Effon told me this, there was a case in point. Carville's flat looked from the second floor on St. James' Street. One of the men who lived at Chislehurst wanted to catch the 12.6 at Victoria and mentioned casually to the servant to bring a car round. 'You won't catch the 12.6,' says Carville. 'Oh, yes, I shall,' said the other man. 'I bet you a fiver you won't,' says Carville. 'Done,' said the other. It was about twenty minutes to twelve then, and in the buzz of conversation and a couple of games of cards Carville forgot his bet for a moment. Suddenly he saw that the fellow was gone. He rushed to the door and found it locked. Of course we all saw the game, and believed that Carville would laugh and admit himself out-manoeuvred. Not a bit of it. He turned on us, one hand on the door handle, and his face grew absolutely black with rage. Honest Injun, I was scared of him then! He bounded across the room, opened the window, sprang out upon the big stone coping and ran along to the next flat. Here he opened the window—(I've heard afterward that the people were just getting into bed)—stepped in, explained he was doing it for a bet, ran to the door, down the stairs, and taking a flying leap from thetop step landed with both feet on the bonnet of the car just as it was starting. Of course, he smashed the sparking plugs, ignition gear and a lot of other details. We all crowded to the window and looked out. He had won his bet.
"He came back smiling and assuring the chap that the morning would do just as well for Chislehurst. The party broke up soon after and we went to bed. At breakfast the next morning he was charming, wrote me a cheque for the money, sitting in a gilt chair and writing on a Louis Seize secretaire.
"'I forgot about you,' he told me. 'I had to rush round rather when I came to town, and it put the matter out of my head. You don't go in for motoring, I suppose, down in Essex?' I said, no, I was working. He looked at his watch. 'I race to-day at three,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'I'd like to go to see it.' 'Ashby-de-la-Zouch,' he answered. 'It takes just three hours to run down.' Of course, I couldn't go down into Leicestershire, and said so. He smiled 'another time.' We exchanged cards again and his man called a cab for me. A chauffeur came up with a prodigiously long-bonneted and low-seated machine, and Carville followed me down stairs. He got in and waved his hand. With a spring the car leaped from the kerb—no other word will describe the starting of that car. I suppose it must have been at least a hundred horse power. In a flash it was round the corner and gone. I climbed into my cab and made my humble way to Liverpool Street,eventually reaching Wigborough, and taking up the daily round and the common task.
"Now what do you think of that chap, Bill? I think you will disapprove, because for all your wild-West adventures, San Francisco earthquakes, etc., you are a steady-going old girl and object to such rampaging persons as this Carville. But I have been thinking that after all, if one is an artist, everything in the world has a certain 'value.' I don't quite know how to explain what I really do feel, but anyhow men like Carville appear to me as vivid bits ofcolourin the composition of life. Taken by themselves they are all out of drawing, and too loud, but in the general arrangement they fit in perfectly. They inspire one's imagination too, don't you think? I shall never forget that chap's black rage, his blazing eyes, his hooked nose as he stood by the locked door. I wonder what the people next door thought, just getting into bed!
"This is a letter, eh! Well, I must dry up, or I shall never get to bed. If I see any more of my strange friend I'll let you know. Love to all at Netley as usual. When are you coming home to dear old rainy England?
"Yours ever,
"Cecil.
"P. S.—If you could get me some of those jolly little paper fans you sent me from Chinatown last Christmas, please do.
"Cecil."
I folded up the thin crackling sheets of paper and handed them to Bill, who took them without comment, and for some time we sat rocking in the twilight, absorbed in our own thoughts. It must not be imagined for a moment that we, and least of all I, an experienced and professional author, accepted this contribution to our investigations without reserve. A lengthy apprenticeship to life warned us that "things do not happen that way." But just for a few moments (and this was the cause of our silence) we revelled in the delicious sensation of having beheld in one of its most incredible gestures the long arm of coincidence. Swiftly we sketched out the story. Eagle-faced adventurer—marries his mistress—casts her off—leaves her penniless in New York—she blackmails him—he grants her an income—agent in New York takes charge of letters—yes, it hung together—it hung together, coincided!
Personally I was a little disappointed after the first flush of excitement. I thought it a little melodramatic and I abhor melodrama. I wanted something finer, something with a touch of great sentiment, something commensurate with the beauty and dignity of the woman's bodily frame, something that would explain and gild with delicate interest the expression of sombre and uncommunicativemelancholy that hung like a cloud over her face. I felt reluctant to delve further into a history that was footed upon so unsatisfactory a foundation as this enigmatic creature who had blazed suddenly upon the painter-cousin's vision, a mere spendthrift man of pleasure, inarticulate save in his startlingly decadent behaviour. After all, what had he done, this fine gentleman with an eagle face and iron will? Sold a few automobiles to the aristocracy. Pooh! In America he would pass as a hustling business man with unconventional ideas. In grey, feudal old London, no doubt, he appeared as a meteoric genius, a veritable Napoleon of salesmanship, a marvel. But here——!
"Well," I said, at length, "what do you think of it?"
Bill slipped out of her chair and prepared to go in and get the dinner ready. We dine at six.
"I think," said she, "that there is nothing in it. It's hardly likely that—well, is it?" she asked, vaguely.
"No," we agreed, "it isn't."
"Still," I added, "it is a most interesting commentary upon our own little problem. It only shows how indefinitely one might extend the ramifications of a trivial tale. Of course, the children believe implicitly in the statement that he is at sea. If that be a legend, it is clever. But then—it is impossible."
"It's not a common name," remarked Mac, filling his pipe.
"It's a very easily assumed one," I argued. "It's a name you can't argue about. It might be Irish,French, Italian, Spanish or American. It tells you nothing."
Bill paused at the door.
"I don't suppose he had anything to do with giving the children those awful names," she suggested.
"Oh, as for that, I have known plenty of mothers who claim that right," I responded. "That does not amount to much. No. There are two points that seem to me to invalidate the claim of this gentleman to any connection with our neighbours, but that is not one of them."
"What are they?" inquired Mac. Bill opened the door and went in. I cleared my throat.
"First," I said, "there is the entirely fanciful argument that such a man as Cecil has described would not be attracted by such a woman as—Mrs. Carville. I can't explain in so many words why I think so, but I do. I don't believe she would attract him. If you consider a moment, you will see it. The English gentleman of good family and birth, when he has once broken out of his own social world, does not show much taste and discrimination in the choice of a wife or mistress."
"Well," said Mac.
"Second, we have the incontestable fact that Benvenuto Cellini, though sharing his illustrious brother's features and histrionic talent, has blue eyes and fair hair. Where did he get them?"
"Something in that," my friend admitted, throwing his match into the darkness. "We'll have to hunt round for atertium quid, so to speak."
"You put it pithily," I asserted. "Personally I am coming to the conclusion that Cecil's story, while certainly interesting in itself, does not help us at all with our own difficulty. I am inclined to think that he is of our nation and fair complexion. Really, when you reflect, it is unjust to assume yourtertium quidand complicate the story—yet. We have no actual evidence of her—obliquity."
"No," said Mac. "Let's wait."
"We must," I replied. "The children themselves will no doubt provide us with plenty of food for conjecture if they go on as they have begun. We are good friends now, they and I."
"You surpassed yourself as an Indian," he laughed.
"Hostile," I corrected. "Did you notice the realistic way in which Giuseppe Mazzini fell?" He nodded.
"You'll have to be a cow-boy to-morrow," he remarked. "You might suggest rounding up their confounded chickens and set them to repairing that fence."
"I shall be a cow-boy with enthusiasm," I said. "Under my breast beats an adventurous heart, believe me. As for the fence, I would rather not get into trouble by interfering with their affairs."
"She didn't seem any too friendly."
"Hostile would describe it better."
"Still, if you could get a word with her, it might elucidate the mystery?" "Yes," I said, as the gong tinkled within.
"Chop," said he, and we went in to dinner.
We had reached the cheese and celery before Bill contributed a piece of news that impressed us in different ways.
"I 'phoned Miss Fraenkel this morning," she said, "and asked her to come up after dinner this evening. She said she'd be tickled to death to come."
I said nothing at first, and Mac, annexing an unusually large piece of cheese, grinned.
"Say," he said, "suppose we get Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the chap with the hooked nose. She's American; she'll be sure to have an opinion."
"No doubt," I conceded. "We shall see whether we have not taken too much for granted. There's only one thing, and that is, are we not exposing Miss Fraenkel to temptation by exciting her curiosity yet more about her neighbour?"
"Oh, bunk!" said Mac. "Women don't have to be led into that sort of temptation. They take it in with their mother's milk."
"You cynical old devil!" exclaimed Bill, indignantly.
"Well, it's true," he defended himself stoutly. "I'll bet you a quarter Miss Fraenkel's already tried them and found them guilty."
"Of what?" demanded Bill.
"Oh, ask Miss Fraenkel," said he. "How should I know?"
"I think," I said, gently, "you are making a mistake. Consider! Miss Fraenkel is no doubt interested in her neighbours, like any other woman. But you make a big mistake if you imagine thatordinary people, people who are not professionally concerned with human nature, are accustomed to draw conclusions and observe character, as—as we do, for example. I have always thought," I went on, stirring my coffee, "that Jane Austen made this same mistake. She takes a small community, much like Netley, N. J., and suggests, by the conversation of the characters, that they are all as observant and as shrewd as herself. We feel it was not so. Nay, weknowit was not so, for Jane's genius in that direction was almost uncanny. Now there is, I am safe in saying, nothing uncanny about Miss Fraenkel."
"She's very nice!" said Bill, nodding blithely at me over her cup.
I am loth to give any colour to the suspicion that I am about to confuse my narrative with extraneous details; but I must confess that Bill's laconic benison had for me a personal appeal. She was, I felt, entirely and generously right. She had not overstepped the mark at all. Miss Fraenkelwasvery nice, but—it has nothing to do with my story. It is a point of honour with me to put Miss Fraenkel in her place, if I may express it so without discourtesy, and that place is certainly modest and inconspicuous. Miss Fraenkel's light was very clear and very bright, but illuminated only a small area. She wrote an admirable paper and read it clearly and impressively at the Women's Club on "The Human Touch in Ostrovsky." Indeed, for one who had read so little of Ostrovsky it was a most creditable piece of work. It was in her estimate of theEnglish character that she was, I venture to think, less successful, more narrow in fact. You see, she was naturally confused by two facts. In the first place the similarity of the English and American languages seemed to her to warrant a certain similitude between the two nations; and secondly, her intimacy with the English people was practically confined to us three, who had been in America nearly seven years, and who, in consequence, had shrouded our more salient insularities beneath a cloak of cosmopolitan aplomb. Neither our speech nor our outlook upon life could be taken as typical of our great and noble-hearted nation. Yet she did take us in that sense, with the result that in her conception of the United Kingdom it was a rather fantastic and clumsily-fashioned small-scale model of the United States.
We had first met her, not in New Jersey at all, but in New York. After the earthquake, which I have mentioned as lifting us and many others from more or less comfortable sockets in San Francisco and scattering us over the Union, we found it a matter of some difficulty to rise to our accustomed level in New York. It really seemed, what with the failure of inspiration and our lack of suitable introductions, that the mighty mill-stream of Manhattan would bear us away and fling us over the rocks to destruction before we could ever get our heads above the surface.
Of those first days in East 118th Street none of us are disposed to speak. We might have gone back to England—surely so dire a calamity, soutter a personal ruin, justified a relinquishment of our purpose. But we had not gone anyway. We could not contemplate the solicitous sympathy of friends who disliked America, who had protested against our emigration in the first place. We did not dislike America, nor did we blame her for our misfortunes. Our friends, even the painter-cousin, could not understand that we did not dislike America. They were misled by our occasional and quite natural sighs for a sight of the quiet English landscape, and our joking remarks about the customs regulations. So we stayed and fought, with our backs to the not over-clean walls of 118th Street. It was slow progress from 118th to 18th Street and from there to a real flat in Lexington Avenue, where it so happened that Miss Fraenkel had, and still has, a married sister. Bill and the married sister became warm friends, discovering in each other a common dislike of pink, and it was she who introduced us formally; though in a casual way Miss Fraenkel and I met occasionally on the stairs. And so it came about that when we felt able to abandon Lexington Avenue, in favour of a purer air and water supply, Miss Fraenkel chanted the praises of her own Netley in the Garden State, and Bill, journeying thither to spy out the land, returned an hour late for dinner, and incoherent with horticultural details.
It will be seen that though undoubtedly competent to criticize Ostrovsky or Mrs. Carvilleper se, Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the painter-cousin's discovery would be interesting only for its noveltyand irrelevance. I did not express my conviction quite as frankly as this, since my friend, though in sympathy with his wife's matrimonial plans, could not forbear to indulge in a mild hazing at my expense. I contented myself with opening the piano and pushing him into the seat. It is our custom to have music after dinner.
Only those who have written verse professionally can realize the extent to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that prodigious composition, the Overture toTannhäuser, I gave myself up to an unfettered consideration of the mystery of life and the complexity of our multitudinous contacts with one another. It is not enough, I reflected, to say that we make and pass. We make and remake, we pass and, pausing on the brink of oblivion, return to spoil our first fine careless raptures. We make and pass; but the early dawn of our making is reddened by the sunset of another's decline. We are agitated by the originality of our ideas, unaware that they are born simultaneously in a thousand minds, and are woven into the texture of our time-spirit in a thousand-times-repeated design. Von Roon, in Chelsea, used to say that "a man's mind was like a chamber papered with used postage stamps. Examine them separatelyand they were of no value; they were merely cancelled symbols of forgotten messages. View them as a whole and they formed an interesting and confusing composition." Time, and our proximity to other cancelled symbols is no guarantee of interior understanding. The Great Decorator has arranged us without regard for our individual merits or past intrinsic values, we are but points of colour in his immense and arbitrary arrangement. I was following up this thought, when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim that serves us for a knocker was vigorously sounded, and I sprang to open the door to Miss Fraenkel.
She stepped briskly into the room, looked round and smiled.
"Three times," she declared as I assisted her to remove her jacket. "But I forgive you if you'll only play that won—derful thing again!"
In person Miss Fraenkel was of middle size, admirably proportioned and situated in tone on the borderland between the blonde and the brunette. By which I mean that her hair was brown, her eye a warm hazel, and her skin of a satiny pallor that formed an effective background for a delightful flush that suffused her piquant features whenever her enthusiasm was roused. And her enthusiasm was continually being roused. To us cold Britons theabandonwith which she, in common with her countrywomen, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a picture, a book, a landscape, or for that matter of a person, was a most fascinating spectacle. American women strongly resemble champagne. At a certain age they are incomparably stimulating, but intimacy with them involves a sort of "headiness" that demands discretion; a nervous energy emanates from them that tends to relax the critical faculty. There is, moreover, a tendency to turgescence in their speech that leads the unwary into a false estimate of their intellectual range.
It was some time before the conversation could be guided round to the subject which we three at any rate had at heart. Explosive cries of delight over Mac's last etching, Bill's new waist and a Chinese print I had recently acquired, were a matter of course. In deference to an unuttered request we adjourned to the studio upstairs, for Miss Fraenkel had been from the first candidly attracted by the suggestion of bohemianism in ourménage. It was not her romantic view of an artist's life, however, that distinguished her from any other young and romantic lady, but her frankness and eloquence in acknowledging it. "It must be grand," she had told me in Lexington Avenue, "to be agrisette." We had admitted that it must, but had been unable to share her regret that she had not been a man "so that she could seeeverything." She was very charming as she was.
Of course she knew of the painter-cousin and indeed, as soon as she could think of it, gave us the needed opening.
"I saw a letter with an English postmark for you," she observed, examining the bottom of a piece of china that rested near her shoulder. "Did you get it?"
"We want you to give us an opinion about it, Miss Fraenkel," said Bill, bringing out the letter and giving it to her. She accepted the packet in some uncertainty.
"I!" she said, "give an opinion? I don't get it, I'm afraid."
"Read it," said Bill.
And she did. We sat round her, as she sat on the broad flat box that Mac called a "throne," in a semicircle, and studied the varying expressions that crossed her face as her eyes travelled down the pages. It occurred to me after I had retired to my room that night, that an English girl of twenty-one would not have weathered the concentrated gaze of three strangers with such serenity of features. An observant and invisible critic might have imagined us to have been awaiting the decision of a young and charming Sibyl, so intently did we gaze and so neglectful was she of our regard. This apparent coldness was explained to me by Bill as a characteristic of the American woman. "They like to be admired," she told me. "And so they don't mind if you do stare at them."
Miss Fraenkel looked up with a smile of comprehension.
"What a perfectly lovely letter!" she exclaimed.
Bill took the sheets and thrust them into the envelope.
"He must be a very interesting man, don't you think?"
"Surely! Oh, I should give anything to see his home. You've described it to me, so I know allabout it. Gainsborough landscape, and red tiles on the cottages!" She clasped her hands.
"I mean the man my cousin met," said Bill, gently. "Carville."
"Oh, him!" Miss Fraenkel looked at each of us for an instant to catch some inkling of our behaviour.
"Same name as——" and Mac jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
Miss Fraenkel's face did not clear.
"We thought," I said heavily, "that this man in England, you know, might have——" I stopped, dismayed by her lack of appreciation. She seemed unable to grasp the simple links of our brilliant theory. We had omitted to calculate upon the indifference of the modern American temperament to names. A foul murder had been committed a short time back by a gambler named Fraenkel, yet she would have laughed at the suggestion that such a coincidence should cause her any annoyance.
"I don't get it," she said, smiling, and we saw plainly enough that she did not get it. We were crushed. I explained in more detail the reason for which we had ventured to connect the two stories. We could see her trying to understand.
"You mean—just as if it was a photo-play," she faltered.
It does not matter now, and I admit that this put me out of humour. And yet it was true. We were really no nearer an actual andbona fidesolution of Mrs. Carville's story than if we had simply tried to make, as Miss Fraenkel said, a photo-play. The others laughed at my downcast countenance.
"Well," I said, "you said Miss Fraenkel had tried them and found them guilty, Mac."
"What I meant was, Miss Fraenkel had formed her own opinion of the business."
"Yes," she said, "I have."
"Now we shall hear something," chirped Bill.
"Listen," said Miss Fraenkel. "It's very likely an assumed name."
It was our turn to look bewildered.
"Yes?" said Bill. "What then?"
"And——" went on Miss Fraenkel, making little motions with her hands as though she were trying to catch something that eluded her grasp. "And—oh! he's being held for some game in New York. She's got away with it, you see."
Miss Fraenkel waited for this appalling development to sink into our minds. I don't think it was given to any of us at the moment to divine just what had happened to Miss Fraenkel. Even seven years in the country were not sufficient training in American psychology to realize it at once. We sat and looked at her, temporarily dazed by what we took to be a story built upon exclusive information. And she sat and looked at us, as pleased as a child at the success of her manœuvre.
"Why," stammered Bill, blankly through her glasses, "how do you know?"
"I don't know," replied Miss Fraenkel. "I just made it up, same's you." And she included us all in a brilliant flash of her hazel eyes.
We changed the subject after that. In self-defence we changed the subject, for it was plainthat when it came to making photo-plays we held a very poor hand. Moreover, we saw that Miss Fraenkel did not and could not take our ponderous interest in Mrs. Carville seriously. To argue that she ought to was no better logic than to say that since she was crazy about Chinese prints, she ought to be friendly with the Chinese laundryman in Chestnut Street. We regarded the nations of Europe as repositories of splendid traditions, magnificent even in their decay. Miss Fraenkel regarded them as rag-baskets from which the American Eagle was picking a heterogeneous mass of rubbish, rubbish that might possibly, after much screening, become worthy of civic privilege.
The wisdom of our action was proved by Miss Fraenkel herself, for not only did she make no further mention of Mrs. Carville before she rose to go, but even when I remarked (I escorted her to her home) pointing to the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we mentioned it, she would not refer to it again.
It was the evening of one of the most perfect days in an Indian summer of notable loveliness. In this refulgent weather, to quote Emerson, who knew well what he spoke of, "it was a luxury to draw the breath of life." Free equally from the enervating heat and insects of high summer, and the numbing rigour of the Eastern winter, the days passed in dignified procession, calm and temperate, roseate with the blazing foliage of autumn, and gay with geraniums and marigolds. On our modest pergola there still clung a few ruby-coloured grapes, though the leaves were scattered, and in the beds about our verandah blue cornflowers and yellow nasturtiums enamelled the untidy carpet of coarse grasses that were trying to choke them. Not far away, down by the Episcopal Church, men were playing tennis in flannels on the courts of yellow, hard-packed sand. The intense blue of an Italian sky lent a factitious transparency to the atmosphere, and the tiny irregular shadows that indicated the colossal architecture of New York seemed to float like bubbles in an azure bowl. Across the street, a vacant plot of land, neglected because of imperfect title, was cut diagonally by a footpath leading down to Broad Street, where, out of sight but not of hearing, trolley-cars between Newark and Paterson thundered at uncertain intervals.
It was our custom, as we sat on our verandah during these afternoons, to watch the gradual appearance of familiar figures upon this path. We knew that a few moments after the whistle of the five-twenty had sounded at the grade-crossing down in the valley, certain neighbours who commuted to New York would infallibly rise into view on this path. There was Eckhardt, who lived at five hundred and nine, and spent the day on the fourteenth floor of the Flatiron Building. There was Williams, immaculate of costume, who designed automobile bodies and had an office on Broadway. There was Wederslen, the art-critic of theNew York Daily News, a man whom all three of us held in peculiar abhorrence because he persisted in ignoring Mac's etchings. There was Arber, rather short of stature and rather long of lip, an Irishman who, miraculous to state, admired Burns. There was Confield, an Indianian from Logansport, who had been to Europe on a vacation tour (No. 67 Series C., Inclusive Fare $450) and invariably carried a grip plastered with hotel labels to prove it. We had met these men at tennis and at the Field Club, and in our English way esteemed them. They would come up, head-first, so to speak, out of the valley, revealing themselves step by step until they reached the street, when they would acknowledge our salutations by a lift of the hat and a wave of the evening paper, and pass on to their homes. They generally came, too, in the order in which I have given them. Eckhardt was always first, for he did not smoke, and the smoking-cars on the Erie Road were generallybehind. And Confield, of course, was likely to be last, for he had his bag.
It was so on the day of which I speak. The deep bay of the locomotive came up on the still autumn air, and a cloud of dazzling white vapour rose like a balloon above the trees and drifted slowly into thin curls and feathers against the blue sky. It was, even in this trifling detail, a homelike landscape, for Bill had told us how, from the square hall window of High Wigborough, you could see the white puffs of invisible trains on the lonely little loopline from Wivenhoe to Brightlingsea.
A few moments, and one by one, and in the case of Wederslen and Williams arm-in-arm, our neighbours hove into view out of the valley, saluted and passed. We noted the unusually friendly attitude of the two. What was Williams up to? we wondered. We knew that Williams, the ignoble designer oftonneaux, laboured under the delusion that he could paint. Of course he could not paint—we were all agreed upon that—but he had shown us various compositions done during vacation time—blood-red boulders and glass-green seas. Was it possible that he was convincing Wederslen that he could paint? We shuddered for Art as we thought of it. Their wives were not friendly, though, so Bill asserted. We placed our hopes for Art on that.
For some moments after they were gone, and Confield with his bag had passed from view down the forest path, we tried to contemplate with stoical indifference the prospect of seeing Williamshailed by the servile and blandiloquent Wederslen as a genius. Had he not said of Hooker that "he was likely, at no distant date, to be seen in all the collections of note? His rare skill with the burin, his delicate feeling for nature——" and so on. Of course we all esteemed Hooker and were glad to see him make good; but really, as Bill remarked, "A man who said Hooker had a feeling for nature would say anything." It was like speaking of Antony Van Dyck's feeling for nature. Hooker's Dutch gardens and Italian ornamental waters, his cypresses like black spearheads, his eighteenth-century precisians with their flowered waistcoats and high insteps, were as far from nature as they could conveniently get. So much for Wederslen. We might have pursued the subject indefinitely had not our attention been drawn abruptly to the path.
He came uncertainly, this new figure, pausing when he was only half revealed, as though in doubt of his direction. He wore a Derby hat, and we saw over his arm a rubber mackintosh. Making up an obviously unsettled mind, he abjured the path and struck straight across towards us, with the evident intention of inquiring the way.
There are many conceits by which men may assert their individuality in dress, even in these days of stereotyped cut. They may adhere by habit or desire to the uniform of their class, they may preserve their anonymity even to a cuff-link, yet in some occult way we are apprised of their personal fancy; we see a last-remaining vestigeof that high courage that made their ancestors clothe themselves in original and astonishing vestments. And it is this fortuitous difference, this tiny leak, one might say, of their personality, that stamps them finally as belonging to an immense mediocrity. It is this subtle and microscopic change, a sixteenth of an inch in the height of a collar, a line in the pattern of a scarf, a hair's breadth in the disposition of a crease, that the psychologists of the market-place call distinction, and labour industriously to supply.
But the man who now crossed the street and stood before us bore neither in his apparel nor in his lineaments a single detail by which he could be remembered. In everything, from his black medium-toed boots to his Derby hat of untarnished respectability, from his recently-shaven chin to his steady grey-blue eyes, he betrayed not the slightest caprice which would enable an observer to distinguish him from a particular type. It was as though he had been conscious of all this and had even sought to avoid the most trivial peculiarities. In height, in feature, in dress, he was so ordinary that he became extraordinary. His intention to be unnoticed was so obvious that it predicated, in my own mind at least, a character and possibly an occupation out of the common run.
"Can you tell me," he began in a voice that gave no hint of emotion, "can you tell me if this is Van Diemen's Avenue?"
"Yes," we said all together, studying him the while. "Yes, this is Van Diemen's Avenue."
"Thanks," he replied, and withdrew his foot from our bottom step.
It seemed as though he was about to depart and leave us guessing, when he spoke again.
"Perhaps you know the house I want," he said. "Carville's the name. I," he added as if in an afterthought, "am Mr. Carville." And he looked at us gravely, apparently unaware of the turmoil of curiosity which he had aroused.
Some one—I think it was Mac—pointed to the next house.
"That's it," we managed to say.
For a moment his eyes rested upon it casually.
"Thanks," he said again, and then, "Much obliged." He stepped back to the sidewalk and walked along to the house. None of us can recall exactly what happened when he approached his door, for we were all looking away across the valley, hastily rearranging our chaotic impressions. It is to be presumed that he knocked and was admitted. When we glanced round a few moments later he was gone.
"Great Scott!" murmured Mac, and looked at us in the growing dusk. Bill rose to get dinner.
Throughout the meal we refrained from any comment. Now that he had materialized, there was no reason, in the nature of things, why we should bother our heads any more about him. In the most natural way he had appeared and innocently demolished the photo-play romances we had constructed about him. It was a warning to us to avoid nonsense, in future, when discussingour neighbours. Miss Fraenkel had fared no better. Evidently he was not "held" for something with which his wife had "got away." We were all ridiculously wrong and ought to be ashamed of ourselves. And so we were; avoiding mention of him, and devoting our attention to the fish, for it was Friday, and we kept it religiously.
But as I drank my coffee and listened to that exquisitely mournfulbarcarollefrom theTales of Hoffmann, the whole episode took on a different aspect. I perceived, as Schopenhauer had perceived a hundred years before me, that our first judgment upon a man or principle is probably the most correct. I saw that I had been carried away by logic and numbers and had discounted my first impression. From the angle at which I now regarded Mr. Carville I could see that, after all, his case presented certain details which we could not as yet account for. Unfamiliar as I was with the life of the sea, I felt instinctively that men who had their business in great waters would bear upon their persons indications of their calling, some sign which would catch one's imagination and assist one to visualize their collective existence. But Mr. Carville had nothing. I passed in mental review the details of his appearance, his blue serge suit, his dark green tie, his greying moustache, clipped short in a fashion that might be American, English, French or German. His voice had been quiet and deferential, but by no means genteel; nor had it any hint of the roystering joviality of a sailor. More than anything else his gait, in its sedate unobtrusiveness, seemed tome utterly at variance with the rolling swagger which we conventionally associate with seamen.
Grant, however, I said to myself, that he looks a truth-telling man. Grant that he is, as his children said, at sea. Surely there is something romantic in this quiet-eyed man being married to such a woman as Mrs. Carville! Surely a man whose children bear names so bright on the rolls of fame must have something in him worthy of admiration! As thebarcarolleswelled and died away, I felt this conviction growing within me. I felt certain that so far from demolishing the real mystery, Mr. Carville had only brought it into focus. We had not seen it before. And it promised to be a mystery on a higher plane than the rather sordid affair we had been postulating.
I decided to sleep on my conclusions, however, before broaching the matter to my friends, and having some work to finish for the morning's mail, I went back to my desk. For three hours or so I worked steadily, page after page slipping to the floor as I finished them. My friends did not disturb me, and when I ascended to the studio for a "crack" before retiring, I found the big room in darkness. So! I mused and descended. A brilliant moon threw a dense black shadow in front of the house. The porch was in gloom, but the street was nearly as bright as day. I stood on the verandah for a few minutes, filling a pipe and looking across at the Metropolitan light where it shone serenely on the horizon. As I struck a match I became aware of a figure moving slowly in frontof the Carville house, up and down the gravel walk that ran below their verandah. I threw away my match and stepped down into the moonlight, intending to stroll up and down for a while on the flags of the sidewalk. I often find that if I retire immediately from a burst of writing I am unable to sleep for several hours. The pendulum of the mind should be brought to rest quietly and without shock.
I was not surprised when the figure in the shadow stepped out into the moonlight as I approached. What startled me was the undoubted resemblance to myself in figure and mass. We were both small men. Perhaps there was a shade more shoulder-breadth on his side than mine, but there was the same slight droop, the same negligible tendency to stoutness. As I turned the matter over in my mind we came face to face.
"Good evening," we said simultaneously. He waved his pipe, a corn cob, towards the east. "New York!" he remarked, and we stood side by side for a moment in silence. The simple observation seemed to me to imply a susceptibility to the sublimity of the prospect that we had not discovered to any extent among our other neighbours. To them, apparently, New York was no more than London is to Hampstead; they had the suburban sentiment in an acute form. Nevertheless I was somewhat at a loss to continue our conversation. It seemed foolish to neglect such a heaven-directed opportunity to meet this man on his own ground and obtain some light upon his career. How should I begin? ShouldI say to him, "Look here, it is very nice, no doubt; but we, your neighbours, are simply crazy to know who and what you are?" That might strike him in various ways. He might take offence, and one could not blame him. He might see humour in it, and a proof of the contemptible meanness of human nature. I decided that I lacked courage to blurt out my desire that way. He was so very much like myself that I could not rid myself of the notion that he might prefer a milder way of approach. And as I sorted out my stock of diplomacy he spoke of the matter himself.
"You are a seaman, I understand?" I remarked. He gave me a quick glance.
"I go to sea," he replied, "if that is what you mean. Yes, in the legal phrase of the Board of Trade, I'm a seaman, and my number isThree nine five, eight nine three." He laughed shortly and continued to look out towards New York.
"A picturesque life," I hazarded, regretting my total ignorance of it. Again he looked at me and laughed.
"You think so?" he queried. "You think so?"
"I speak from book knowledge only," I said. "It is usually described in those terms." We began to walk to and fro.
"Well," he admitted unexpectedly, "and so it is. I don't doubt that to anyone just looking at it, you understand, it is as you say, 'picturesque,' But when you have a number likeThree nine five, eight nine three, you have another view of it."
"You have been for a long voyage?"
"Oh no," he said; "Mediterranean and back, that's all."
I began to realize something of the man from this. I had no knowledge of the sea, but I certainly had a mind trained by years of observation and reflection to deduce certain definite data affecting human nature. And I realized dimly that a man who regarded a run round the Mediterranean and back across the Atlantic as a trivial episode scarcely worthy of mention, might have views on literature and art radically at variance with my own.
"I should have thought," I remarked, "that you would have made your home there rather than here."
"There's some who do," he said. "Lots of the Anchor Line men do. But personally I'd rather be here."
"It is very like England," I agreed, as he broke in.
"Sure," he said. "I was just thinking as I came up the hill. I come from Hertfordshire myself. Very like the Northern Heights."
"We always think," I answered, "that it is like Essex."
He pondered for a moment, enjoying his pipe.
"Well, it is," he decided. "You mean looking over Staten Island to the sea? Yes, only they're busier here than along Mersea Flats, eh? Oh yes, I used to know that part when I was a boy. There isn't much between Chipping Barnet and Hamford Water that I didn't know in those days."
"You will go back some day?" I said as weturned. A change came over his face, and he put his hand to his chin.
"No," he said. "I'll never go back there. I'm here"—he waved his pipe—"for keeps."
I looked at him in astonishment.
"Why?" I said, a little indignantly. "Are you not an Englishman?"
For a moment he did not reply to the blunt question, but looked down at the flags. His feet were cased in red velvet slippers, I noticed, and they struck me as quite indescribably bizarre in the moonlight. His hesitation was too ominous, heavy with unimaginable complexities. His voice was muffled when he spoke.
"No," he said. "I'm—an alien."
At first I was impressed by the tone more than the words. It was mournful, with a streak of satisfaction in his condition that I felt was assumed.
"You mean," I said at last, "that you intend to take out papers?"
He looked at me queerly.
"How long would it take," he inquired with a smile, "to put in five years' residence, when I'm in the country about three days every two months? No, I don't think I'll bother about papers. When I say I'm here for keeps, I mean those belonging to me."
"There is a question I would like to ask you," I said, tentatively.
"I shall be very glad to answer it if I can," he replied.
"It refers to your little boys."
"Why," he broke in, "they haven't been annoying you, have they? I hope they haven't done that!"
"Not at all. I merely had a curiosity to know why they bear such unusual names."
He smiled.
"They told you their names, did they?"
"They were good enough to commend me for the way I played Indian," I explained, and he gave me another of his quick comprehensive glances.
"It's rather a long story you've asked for," he said.
"I am interested in stories," I put in.
"Beppo said you made pictures," he mused.
"In words," I added.
He paused again. It seemed to be a part of his mode of thinking, this occasional parenthesis of silence. It was almost as though the man were leading me down a vast and dimly-lit corridor, laying his hand at times on various doors, and then withdrawing it, from some mysterious motive, and continuing upon his way.
"An author?" he said, half to himself. "Ah!"
It was borne in upon me that neither a wide experience in common everyday psychology, nor even an exhaustive knowledge of sea-life could adequately cope with the bewildering emotions implicit in that "Ah!" In its way it was the most remarkable thing he had said.
"Yes, if you like," I replied. "I am professionally interested in stories."
He felt in his pocket for matches and as theflame spurted before his face I saw the corners of his mouth betrayed a pucker of amusement. I suddenly felt the absurdity of my position. I had been led to expose myself to ridicule. I might have expected it after the behaviour of his children.
For a moment I was warm!
"You see," he said, looking at his watch, "it's this way. I'm not a very good hand at yarns, but if you like I'll step along to-morrow some time and have a talk. I don't go back to the ship till Sunday night."
"We shall be charmed," I said. "Come in to tea."
"All right," he answered. "I will. It must be nearly eight bells, I should think, twelve o'clock."
I pointed to the Metropolitan Light, glowing a deep red. He regarded it with interest.
"Think o' that!" he said, absently. "Just think o' that. Eight bells!" He roused himself. "Well, good-night to you, sir. I must turn in. I always sleep best in the Middle Watch."
And he laughed as though at some flash of memory and made his way into the darkened house.