"'But,' I persisted, 'I'm not sure Iama gentleman. Really I'm not.'
"'What!' The solitary word came to me out of the shadows with startling distinctness. I nodded. I sat there on that spindley, gim-crack chair and stared contemptuously at the paraphernalia of learning and refinement on the great table, at the silver cigarette box, the bronze inkstand, the sphinxes and scarabs and cenotaphs, the bits of papyrus under glass, the books and magnifying glasses. Stared at them and defied them. I nodded.
"'It is a fact,' I said. 'I have been brought up in a genteel position and I don't consider the whole business to amount to a heap of beans.'
"I could hear him walking to and fro, and presently, as my eyes grew accustomed, I made him out, a tall phantom moving in front of other motionless phantoms. I became aware, too, of a warmth coming from that quarter and saw him stoop and open the damper of a closed stove, a studio stove, I think it was.
"'Then what can it matter to you what her parents were?' he demanded, straightening up and coming into the light.
"'I didn't say I wasn't respectable,' I told him, 'as well as curious. Anybody would be that.'
"He admitted that was so, and came and sat down.
"'The girl was born at sea, on a ship,' he observed slowly.
"'Well,' I said, 'what of that? So was I.'
"'Oh, is that so?' He looked at me again in his nervous way. Lit a cigarette and contemplated the smoke.
"'Born at sea, on a ship,' he repeated. 'Her mother came from somewhere up the Adriatic coast, Loreto, if I remember rightly. A lady's maid. She and her mistress joined the mail-boat at Port Said. They had been living at Cairo. On the voyage she died in giving birth to a child. There was some trouble, which I never fathomed, about the mistress, the Honourable Mrs. James. She did not know her maid was married when she engaged her at Venice. Letters were found in her pockets from a Sergeant Cairola. Just about this time the Italian Army was severely defeated in Abyssinia, and as far as could be ascertained the sergeant, who had married the girl at Ancona on the very point of embarking, was killed. Mrs. James was not in a condition, nor was she, I imagine, of a temperament to interest herself in the case. The girl, of course, was buried at sea, several days before we arrived here. As the vessel was British, the disposal of an Italian child was complicated. Not born on Italian soil, she was not eligible for the state institutions for orphans. I really forget the details. I had to make a declaration, of course, being the surgeon, but the captain and purser saw the authorities. On our return voyage we learned that they had found foster parents for the child, who received a grant out of the pension due to the widow had she lived. Since then, on only one occasion, a very painful one for me, I may say, have I had anything to do with the case.'
"So that I was really no forrader than before, you see. Rosa herself had told me about all of importance that was known. She had been a baby at Rebecca's, then a little girl and then a big girl. And the story, though Rosa had no part in it, the story spread. I had seen around the corner, and there were so many things I wanted to know! Things I had no right to know, come to that, if I was a gentleman. No right to ask anyway. I got up to go.
"'Thank you, doctor,' I said. 'I suppose I'll have to be satisfied with what you've given me. It won't make any difference to us, I'm glad to say. But I should have thought you would have been interested in the case, even if Mrs. James wasn't.' He shrugged his shoulders and moved his papers about, plainly anxious for me to be gone.
"'Remember, I did not settle here until some time had elapsed. I should have forgotten the whole affair but for the occasion I spoke of.'
"'I see,' I said. 'Well, good-night and thank you.'
"'Good-night,' he said nervously. 'Excuse me if I don't go down with you. I am rather busy.'
"'Literary work, I presume?' I said politely, and he nodded.
"'Yes,' he replied. 'I'm engaged on the Book of the Dead. I go to Egypt every year—next month, in fact—and I am behind in my notes.'
"I stood with my hand on the door, looking across the great chamber, and saw him hastily picking up the threads my intrusion had broken. All around the vague walls stood the painted mummy-cases of the dead, like sentinels, watching him with their brilliant, unwinking, expectant eyes. On a shelf close to me stood cats in dissipated attitudes, mere yellow bundles of swathings and fustiness. On trestles behind the door was a long packing case containing a slender shape. There was no casing here, no painted visage, only a vague impression. The sharp frontal bones had shorn clean through the rotted fabrics and I could see the snarling teeth. The small head seemed thrown back, the eyes closed, in enjoyment of some frightful joke. I looked back again and saw him writing, his head in his left hand, writing, no doubt, something in the Book of the Dead.
"Curious, wasn't it? Curious, I mean, the sort of people who had crossed one another's paths at the moment of my girl's coming so forlornly into the world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated, well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the English woman, the honourable creature whose temperament unfitted her to take any interest in an orphan whose mother had died in her service and whose father hadperished on the field of battle. Impossible, say you. It isn't at all impossible. Rich people—I mean the rich who are forever rushing about the world or hiding in Mediterranean villas or in yachts on the Dalmatian coast—are very curious people. The very nature of their mode of existence makes them monsters of selfishness. They are the logical outcome of our predatory social system. They are like the insects which we are told will some day triumph over other forms of life. At least, I think of them as such when I encounter them rushing thither and yon over the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through the air, their shiny wing-cases flashing in the sun and the sound of their progress making a buzz in the newspapers. Well! as I said, it was curious. Curious I should have found my girl in such surroundings, growing there like a straight, healthy plant, just blooming in a bed among all those old decayed and discarded people of the world. Curious, too, I thought, that these people, like old Croasan, had rejected life. Though they were, if anything, less estimable than he was, for he defied life, in his silly, senile, drunken way, while they seemed simply scared of it.
"But we weren't. We had, you may say, nothing in common, but we were not afraid of life, and that is the great thing. To me it was wonderful, the experience of courage and curiosity, because I had been brought up to shrink from contact with reality, to keep myself unspotted from the world. It may be, therefore, that I am only describing to you perfectly normal emotions. It may be that I hadprofited nothing by my long probation. It may be: I cannot tell. I am not a believer in a vicarious existence, living by proxy and tallying each minute, each crisis, by something in a book. Nobody could love literature more than I; but I am sure at the same time that, while life may chance to be literature, literature is not life. It can't be. There was the doctor with his Book of the Dead. Do I judge him? Not I. It may be he was a great genius who will be immortal as we count immortality. To him I was, possibly, a mere annoyance, an impertinent interlude in his entrancing studies of his mouldy mummies, indecorously calling his attention to the existence of a modern effete civilization. I don't know. I never took the trouble to find out. He never materialized again. He moved back into the shadows; a name, tall, pale and with a black beard, passing in his little launch, at the call of the code-flag P.
"Well, there it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness of their posthumous fame, and I—I doubt. There is a tinge of theatricality about it all. I doubt. It is not so much that I regret my own failure to copy theirexample, but rather that the stories don't tally with my own experience. Often, when I tire of a novel, I ask myself why? And the answer is, This isn't the way at all! People aren'tlikethat. Love isn't like that either. While as for hate, there is very little of it in the world, I fancy, but rather ill-temper and selfishness and indifference. These make for futility, just as our uncertainty of ambition does. We grope.
"You may imagine that I was not justified in saying in so many words that I was no gentleman, that I was prejudicing myself in that man's eyes, wantonly. I don't defend it altogether, I was eager at the time, full of the radical philosophy of the period, anxious to stand on my own feet. I saw men in the flat, so to speak. Menandwomen. They were decorative forms rather than souls like myself. My girl had been like that, too, when I first saw her, a decorative form, exquisite, pathetic, entrancing. But the magic of the business was that slowly she was emerging from among those figures of two dimensions and coming to sit beside me, a companion. I had never had one before. There might never have been such a thing happen before to anybody, it seemed so strange and so astonishingly fortunate! For years I didn't get used to it. And if I am, in a way, accustomed to the idea now, it is only the occasional veiling of a vision, a breathing on the glass, as it were. At sea it will come upon me like a dream of misfortune—if we had never met, if—if—if! Who can tell?
"Mr. Hank and Rebecca were sitting in the littleroom upstairs one evening when I came in for Rosa and I told them my adventures at the Hotel Robinson. They were drinking whisky, I remember, and talking together in a low tone, like conspirators. Rebecca laughed.
"'Ah!' said she. 'I scared him that time, eh, Oscar?'
"'You!' he answered in good-humoured contempt. 'You made a big mistake there, my dear.'
"'Well,' she retorted. 'And who was it gave me the tip? Who was it said that English doctor was worth trying, eh?'
"'I did,' said Oscar, looking at me and winking, 'but I didn't tell you to go and make a fool of yourself and spoil the game.'
"'Easy to say that after,' she grumbled, and became aware of me looking at both of them in great perplexity.
"'Non capisce', she added to her husband.
"'The doctor mentioned a painful incident,' I remarked.
"'The devil he did!' they ejaculated, looking at me in astonishment, and Rebecca went on. 'It was nothing at all, you know. I thought he was a man. There was me sitting in the tramcar with Rosa on my lap, three or four years old, and he comes in by-and-bye and sits down opposite. And Rosetta—you know how little girls will take a fancy to a gentleman—Rosetta holds out her hands and smiles at him like a little angel. He was leaning his hands on his stick and she reached out and took hold of it and says 'la-la!' And I says 'see the nice gentleman'sstick,' and she gurgles 'la-la!' again. Cunning! What a bird she was! And you'd think any human-made man 'ud give the duck a penny and say how pretty she was. Not he. He sat there like a stone until I caught his eye and bowed to him.'
"'Fancy that!' said Mr. Hank in some contempt. 'Because I told her he was the doctor of the ship when Rosa was born, she thinks he's the father and goes up to the Hotel Robinson and wants money. Clever woman!'
"'Well,' said Rebecca, 'you didn't have any more luck with your Mrs. James. You got a flea in your ear there, didn't you? You had a great ideashewas Rosa's mother.'
"'If you'd listened to what I told you, you'd never have run away with the idea there was any money in the doctor for you. There was some sense in what I did, because it would have cut both ways. But you would interfere. You look surprised, Mister,' he said to me, chuckling.
"Of course, I was surprised. I sat there open-mouthed. It is extraordinary how a man may become suddenly aware of unsuspected heights and depths in human life. It may be that I have always been less sophisticated than most. I am continually overlooking the shabbiness and rascality of the world, I find, in spite of the early apprenticeship which I served among business friends. I have often envied men this alertness of mind, this ever-present consciousness of the obliquity of human nature. And yet, I am not certain it is an enviable quality. I have a suspicion that those who have it envy uswho lack it. They seem to have for us a half-contemptuous, half-respectful liking. So with Rebecca. She patted my arm and said to her husband:
"'Let him alone. He's all right, is Rosa's sweetheart.'
"At that moment Rosa came in dressed to go out with me. She had a white boa, I remember, and a white felt hat with a broad brim. She looked from one to the other and then back at me. 'What's the matter?' she said.
"'Nothing; only saying we ought to think about getting settled soon,' I said, laughing, and we all laughed. And then, as we two passed into the narrow, twisted staircase to go down to the street, I heard Rebecca say quietly, 'Did you hear what he said, Oscar? Did you, eh?'
"But, you know, I wanted to get clear of it all. I was more than ever set upon it. I understood better than ever Rosa's vague dislike of a life spent among the people she had known. It was nothing to me that Rebecca and her husband were potential blackmailers or that little Mr. Sachs, 'representing Babbolini's,' also represented a possible life-long neighbour if we lived at Sampierdarena. It was Rosa who felt the impossibility of it, and the subtle antagonisms of her environment. She knew, though she had no words for it, that there was a fuller life for us somewhere else. She would read an Italian translation of some English book,Barnaby RudgeorThe Old Curiosity Shop, and when I came back to her she would ask me about my country. I wasoften astonished to find how little I knew about it! What I did know was out of books. Humph!
"And what little I had known was fading voyage by voyage. Only rarely was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all. Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb cathedral—theywere no kin of the men who built it or the men who prayed and worshipped in it either. Indeed, you can often find the cathedral empty and a sheet-iron shack round the corner near the railroad full of men and women shouting their heads off. And the rich people who lived in the castles had not much in common with the men who built them. It wasn't, mind you, that I was envying these people or even quarrelling with them. It wasn't that they were not orderly and hard-working and conscientious. They were all that. No, it was a curious impression they gave me of being only half alive. I used to watch them in church, in saloons, in theatres, and they seemed oppressed by some malign invisible fate standing over them and taking much of the sparkle out of their souls. I was oppressed, too, by the same influence. I used to wonder what it was.Only at the football matches did it seem to lift at all. I always enjoyed the football. It was there you could catch in their faces the light of battle and the lust of conflict. There their features were sharpened to the tenseness you find hardened into a type here in America, men who are alive! But most of the time each class was oppressed by the one above it. Away at the top was the great shipowning peer, the colossus of that particular part of the country, an ominous and omnipotent figure. Below him were other shipowners, smaller fry, living in fine houses where they had made their money, connected by marriage with the next below, still smaller shipowners and men who had built up successful repair-shops and ship-stores. Next came the retired ship-masters, living in villas named after their last commands, and skippers still at sea, their wives watching each other like cats at church on Sunday. Then, in tiny semi-detached brick boxes up narrow streets behind all these you would find mates and engineers packed like sardines. Their families, I mean. I often used to think of the abstract folly of these men calling such places 'home' when they sometimes were away years on end. Our chief mate took pity on me one week-end and invited me over to his house at Hartlepool. I forget which Hartlepool it was, it doesn't matter now. I remember, however, that we had to make several connections on branch lines to get there, and it was a continuous stampede from saloon to junction and from junction to saloon. I couldn't understand it at first, for the mate was a decent,wide-open sort of chap, and fairly sober considering he had once been master and so had an inducement to drown dull care. But I discovered that his wife wouldn't have it in the house, and he was fortifying himself against a 'dry week-end.' It certainly was dry to me. The house, partly paid for when he had a collision and lost his job in the Fort Line, was still calledFort Williamafter his ship, and I could see that the name-plate had been carved out of teak by the carpenter to please 'the old man.' How were the mighty fallen! You know, there was something pathetic to me in that man's drop from master to mate. To him it was more than pathetic, it was the next thing to the end of the world. He was just an average seaman. He had no culture, no art, no religion, no philosophy to support him or act as a substitute in such a misfortune. Even his children did not seem to compensate him. Rather they aggravated the case. They could no longer be referred to as Captain Tateham's children. He was only plain Mr. Tateham now, Fred to us; and when theCorydonwas going out through the dock-gates to make the tide, anybody who wanted might see Mr. Tateham on her forecastle head, standing glumly in the rain amid a tangle of ropes and half-boozed sailors and wisps of steam from the windlass. Here was the same thing over again as occurred in our own case. The root of it all was pride, the cursed pride that makes each class ape and envy the one above it, and stamp on the faces of the one below. Here it was, and it was England. This man had a grand little wife and three beautifulclever children winning scholarships at the grammar-school. He had a microscopic home partly paid for and a safe-enough competency. Yet, because he had slipped a cog he was damnably unhappy. His pride was bruised. Fate had given him a nasty knock. He shook his head when I spoke hopefully of him getting a command in our company. His wife said nothing. Of course, although I didn't know it then, for, as I have said, I do not naturally suspect men, the fact was she knew and the owners knew and the underwriters knew why he had had a collision. She had her reasons for keeping liquor out of the house. It was not a very happy week-end for me, for the sight of those two straight, intelligent lads and their charming, golden-haired sister turning and turning inside that tiny house just because it was Sunday and a visitor was present, got on my mind. I saw away ahead, and wondered if they would have any luck in their fight with gentility! Humph!
"No, I was not enamoured of what I saw of England. And I found I was reluctant to go to my own home. I suppose it had so many regrettable memories. Anyhow, voyage after voyage I put off my visit, and so one trip, coming home to Tyne Dock, I found I had put it off once too often. My mother, who had been living at Brighton, was dead. It is curious how the sea seems to sterilize the emotions in some natures. Perhaps I am wrong, and judge the general from the particular. Perhaps we are deficient in power to express grief. Perhaps we don't feel it. I don't know. I have known men atsea who raved about their parents' perfections and I was unable to sympathize and regale them with anecdotes about my 'old lady.' I couldn't. I don't remember ever talking to anybody about my mother. That isn't to say for a single instant, however, that I didn't esteem her. We simply were not designed to fit into the same scheme. We were of different generations. We were of cross-grained stuff, if I may say so, dour and tough and ill to match with common deal, and our roots were sunk in the restless, estranging sea.
"And so once more I came to London, a wanderer, noting what had been built and what pulled down. London! Never for a single day will they let it alone. It is like some vast cellular organism asprawl on the Thames mud, forever heaving and sweating and rotting and growing. A fungus, a sponge, sucking in the produce of continents, sending out the wealth of empires. I used to stand on London Bridge and watch the steamers loading and discharging from the grimy overhanging warehouses. A busman's holiday, you say. But there didn't seem anything else to do while I was waiting for a ship. I found my old British Museum Reading Room pass among my papers at home and I used it one day to look in upon my bygone haunts. It gave me a shock to see some of the same old grey-haired men and women reading out of the same silly old tomes. Yes! I was almost ready to swear one old girl was at the same page as I left her years before. And the suggestions in the manuscript complaint book! Good Lord! I glanced at it as I wanderedround, for it had often amused me in the past to see the weird and wonderful volumes the authorities were asked to procure. And here I found some crazy soul had demanded the first volume of the Chinese Zetetic Society's proceedings. Another complained of a lack of text-books treating of secret societies in the Tenth Century. And the world was going round outside all the time! I looked at them, these men and women—their shoulders humped as they scratched with their absurd quill-pens, their faces pallid with the light reflected from the pages. Some few, as though to show what a farce the whole business could be, had got out a perfect library of books, bastions of them, and lay back in their chairs, snoring. I couldn't bear it. I had to get out. The air was stifling me after the open sea, so I left that subsidized lunatic asylum and took the steamboat up the river to Hammersmith. It was spring, late spring, and there was a whisper in the air that meant, if I read it rightly, love and romance and youth. It was all round me as I walked out to Ealing. It was in the orchards as I rode on that old horse-omnibus that used to run between Ealing and Brentford. And next day I left the hotel and went out to where we used to live, on the Northern Heights, Gentility's last ditch before they succumbed to the onward rush of the street car and the realty agent! Spring was whispering there too, creepers were growing over new villas, new streets were scored across our old cricket and tennis ground by the church, an old tavern had been rebuilt in the very latest Mile-End-Road style. Our old househad a motor garage built on one side of it, a green-roofed shack. Many of our neighbours had For Sale boards over their gates. Some had gone. A couple of brick pillars with stone pineapples on top of them had been put up at the entrance to a farm on the other side of the railway and a board said it was the site of Ashbolton Park, a high class residential estate. Some residents, I observed, were making a stand. One old lady, who had lived all her life on the Great North Road, and who was resolved to die there, had built a brick wall right round her little estate, a brick wall with a high, narrow iron gate in the middle, through which you could see the sullen Georgian house crouching at the back, like a surly old bear. Must have been a joyous household. I looked for my old sweetheart's home. It was there, but strangers lived in it. A servant I spoke to on her way to the post told me they had been moved to Chislehurst some time. The last ditch! In a way I felt it, this crumbling and withering of the old order, the order of which my parents had vainly tried to become companions. For it was typical of England. I felt it most when I walked out on the Great North Road through Barnet and saw the huge notice-boards up over the walls of princely domains, telling me how this desirable property and that magnificent country seat was to be sold at auction at Tokenhouse Yard on such and such a date. It was hitting the seats of the mighty, you might say, this insidious growth and crumble and decay. Nothing could stand against it. The strong, stark virtues, the highcourage and honour and fine courtesy, the patronage of arts and letters and religion which was the spirit of that old order, were all gone, and now the very shell and imitation of it was going, and we must prepare for the new people and their new ways. A new world. Only the road, the Great North Roman Road, seemed never to alter. A few inches more metalling, perhaps, another generation of menders, and so on. The traffic, of course, was different, for the traffic is the world. Indeed, when you stop and reflect, you will see that a great road like this one I was walking on that warm spring day, is a pulsing artery. London, that immense heart, with its systole and diastole, its ebb and flow and putrefying growth, lay beating behind me. Ahead lay that grey, brooding North, that vast coal-field whose output had made us masters of the world. Take it how you will, you must have roads. That is America's need to day—roads. Without roads no art, no literature, no real progress. No canals or railroads will do. Canals are too slow, railroads too fast. It is true they have brought trade and prosperity to the Great North West and the Great South West and the Great Middle West and all the other wests; but you cannot build up a great civilization on railroads. You must have roads, with pilgrims, or hoboes if you like, and artists and poets on foot, and taverns and talk. Railroads are the tentacles of plutocracy. Roads are democratic things.
"I was thinking very much on these lines that day and I was in the little hollow just beyond theKingmaker's obelisk. The sun had gone down behind Mill Hill and the evening was full of blue shadows, full of the odour of smoke and sap, full of mysteriously comfortable silences. For a few moments that particular rod, pole or perch of the great road was empty save for me and a lamplighter on a bicycle, who was coming towards me, riding one hand, his torch over his shoulder, a sort of elderly Mercury illuminating an empty world. On the left the great trees stood up close to the road, great shafts, the children of those who had stood there when the legions came up out of the Thames valley and marched north into the jungle. On the right the meadows rolled away eastward towards Enfield and Cheshunt and Broxbourne, meadow and copse and cornland. The lamplighter passed me with a soft buzz and click of sprocket wheels, and looking back at him idly, I caught the sound of the church-clock at Barnet striking the hour. The chime focussed my thoughts on the great peace of the land. Here at any rate, I thought, man has topped the rise. He has accomplished all he set out to do and the result is peace and happiness. I was sentimentalizing, no doubt, for I have never been able to live in the country. But as I stood there, looking back, the spell was broken. I heard a roar of a horn, one of those ear-shattering inventions that paralyze one's faculties, a grinding of gears and a slither of rubber tyres, and then the yell of a human voice. As I turned to jump I was nearly blinded by two enormous headlights. And the voice that had yelled, a half-familiar voice, shouted, 'Whatthe blazes do you go to sleep in the middle of the bally road for, eh?' I couldn't see anything at all until I had reached the grass at the side of the road, when I made out a long automobile standing askew across the road and panting. There was a low, semicircular seat with a man in it behind a large steering wheel, a seat so slanted that its occupant was practically recumbent. He had ear-flaps and monstrous goggles. I had a momentary mental picture of him as some Roman staff-officer rushing back to the base in his chariot. He had an imperious air as he glared at me and backed his machine with one hand to straighten it. I found my voice. I said, 'I have as much right to the road as you.' 'What?' he said, in a high note. 'To stand in the middle and block the traffic. What are you? An escaped lunatic? Have you made your will, hey?' 'Oh,' I retorted, 'If you've bought the road, or the earth, I'll get off it, of course. I should have saidyouwere the escaped lunatic going along at that pace.' He laughed, a high, reedy cackle that seemed familiar, rose stiffly out of his place and stepped down as though he had cramp. 'Ouch!' he said, bending and straightening to unlimber himself. 'Where are we, hey? Barnet? Taking an evening stroll after the office?' And he took off his goggles and I saw my young brother's bright dark eyes and high-bridged nose and sarcastic mouth. He shouted with laughter, went off again into his reedy cry, and screamed, ''Pon my soul, it's Charley! Well, I'm ... Where in the wide, wide world didyouspring from? Revisiting the glimpses ofthe moon? Good heavens!' And he gripped my shoulder.
"That was how we met in after years. He was at his ease at once. I was bewildered. 'By Jove, I nearly did for you that time. Nobody but a madman would stand in the middle of the Great North Road to admire the scenery, old chap. It's suicide. An amateur would have had you in mince-meat.' He stooped to examine his brake. 'Charred, by Jove! And I expect some of the gears are stripped too. Get in.'
"'Get in!' I said in astonishment. 'What for?'
"'Why, come up to town and have dinner with me, of course,' he laughed. 'The Prodigal Son. Which of us two is the Prodigal, Charley? 'Pon my soul, I believe you are. You've been wandering all over the world, I believe. I went to the funeral—you know.' I nodded. 'And the old chap said you were in some frightful hole or other. Well, let me get in and you can sit on the step. I'll take you up to my digs.'
"And that is what he did do, at a speed I could scarcely realize save by the wind that roared past my ears. We dropped down Barnet Hill like a bullet, we rushed through the gloaming with those blinding white beams cleaving the quiet gloom ahead of us and throwing preternaturally sharp shadows that reeled into oblivion like drunken goblins. It seemed to me, after my quiet meditative stroll, a monstrous invasion. We would flash round a curve with a whoop of the horn, and those pitiless rays would suddenly reveal in stark loneliness a manand a girl, clasped in each other's arms. Or they would loom up ahead, walking and lovemaking, and the sound of the horn would strike them to attitudes of paralyzed fear. Once we overtook a party in a trap, jogging pleasantly homeward, and we left them holding for their lives and the horse rearing with terror. I was holding on for my own dear life, for that matter. My brother lay back in his seat and carried on a loud monologue directed at me. He said he had to go to Southampton that night on urgent business, but must dine first. Was going to motor. This was a Stromboli, hundred horse-power racing machine. He was agent for Stromboli's. Had sold a lot of cars at twelve hundred guineas each. Had been up in Scotland staying at a country-house. And so on. I listened, but had nothing to say. He had no interest in my affairs, and every word he said showed me we were nothing and could be nothing to each other. And yet it had so happened that he had been to our mother's funeral, he had played the proper part while I was away on the ocean, a wanderer and a prodigal. He even had, as I saw later, a band of crape on his arm, which somehow I had forgotten to wear. He made me feel insignificant and hopelessly inferior. And suddenly, as I clung there, another thought sprang up in my mind, the possibility that I might even now be on the way to a meeting with Gladys again. Not that I had any rational reason to dread such a meeting. Indeed, it was she who had left me and gone to him. But I did dread it all the same. I knew it would find me tongue-tied and foolish. Icould not rise to it and do myself justice. I am, I suppose, too self-conscious and shy.
"And soon we roared into lights and asphalt pavements and the heavy traffic. We crossed Marylebone Road and flew down Baker Street. Even I, ignorant as I was, had to admire the way my brother manœuvred his huge machine round the buses and cabs. It was skill, sheer skill, with a dash of luck that was very like genius. We were in Piccadilly soon after and then, turning into a quiet street, we stopped and the engine stopped too. A man in livery came running down from the house and I followed my brother up the steps into a richly furnished hall, with Sheraton chairs and Persian rugs and oriental vases. Frank took several letters and a telegram from a green-baize board with pink tape bands cutting it into a diamond-pattern, and beckoned me to follow him upstairs. I did so, and we went into what he had called his 'digs.'
"You must understand, of course, that I am no judge of the way the rich live. I can say truthfully that my tastes are simple. If I had millions I really don't know that I should buy very much. Most probably I should be a miser as regards my own personal expenses. But for all that I could see that my brother's apartment was extraordinarily rich in its appointments. There were so many details you could not imitate cheaply. A man could sit in those rooms, and eat in those rooms and go to bed there and feel that he was rich. He might even feel happy, for they were not only rich and convenient, but comfortable. I was left in a deep leather chair by awood fire burning in a bronze grate, in a room with chocolate-distempered walls hung with prints in black frames and one or two water-colours in white frames. I looked across at a small cabinet of books just above a writing table covered with many implements in bronze and ivory. For a moment I was reminded of those model rooms in department stores. I suppose that was unfair, but my sea-training had taught me that many tools generally mean a bad workman. Somehow, the moment the rich man blunders into any department of the world's labour, his wealth shows at a disadvantage. And gold pens and silver inkpots and jade paper-weights are as incongruous as ivory-handled sledge-hammers and rose-wood jack-planes, when you come to think of it.
"And if I were to judge such ways of living by that one experience, I should say that a man would eventually lose his sense of interior values. All these beautiful, useful and convenient things would assist him to greater achievement and finer virtue, but it would not be the same achievement and virtue that would emerge if he had stayed down in the arena and lodged with the gladiators in the back-streets. It couldn't be. Perhaps the men who could get the most out of wealthy environment are those like my brother, who simply care nothing for achievement or virtue as such, who live unconsciously for themselves and never have any sense of interior values, as I call them, at all. Their lives are like an exquisite design of nymphs and fauns and satyrs on an Etruscan jar—beautiful, rounded, complete. And inside the jar is nothing but a handful of rubbish....
"So I reflected as I sat in that deep chair and watched the wood-fire burning in the bronze grate. A silent man in a black suit came in and put a decanter and siphon at my elbow and went out again. Suddenly a phrase I had heard at sea came back to me, sharp and resonant. I was talking to old Fred Tateham, the mate, one day, he who had had a collision and lost his command, and he had been telling me his plans for his younger boy. He was going to put him in his brother's office. 'You know,' said he, 'I've a very successful brother.' I forget what this successful brother had succeeded in—some genteel profession like accountancy or attorney. It struck me as amusing at the time, a man boasting of the possession of a successful brother, just as he might proclaim his pride in a clever child or a fine garden or a good terrier. And now the phrase came back as one I could use myself. I had 'a very successful brother.' To confirm this whimsical notion, the successful brother entered the room in evening dress, with a band of crape on the arm and a black tie. He was irreproachable as he stood on the rug snapping black amber buttons into his cuffs and settling his shirt-front. He was so irreproachable that I lost my feeling of discomfort and inferiority in his presence. He leaned his head on the carved stone frame of the fire-place and stared at the flames thoughtfully.
"'You live here alone?' I asked, and he nodded.
"'For long?' He shook his head. 'I never stoplong in digs,' he remarked, 'I get sick of them, don't you know, and try fresh.'
"'Where's Gladys?' I inquired, almost without knowing what I said. I was as surprised as he was at such temerity. For an instant he did not know what I meant. 'Gladys,' said he. 'Who the——Oh! now I remember——I don't know. Yes,' he went on, turning back to the fire, 'I remember now, Charley. I don't suppose I looked very well from your point of view, but all the same you haven't come home with a dagger in your sleeve, have you?' He laughed. 'By Jove, you weren't prowling along that road to-night waiting to stab me, were you, Charley? Like some bally foreigner.'
"'You know I wasn't,' I said. 'And besides, I had no selfish reasons for asking. I thought you might be engaged.'
"'I engaged?' he said, and shook his head. 'I'm not a marrying man. I wonder if we're going to die out, we Carvilles. Rotten race, anyhow. We seem to have no luck with our women. The mater was the only one. You should have seen them at the funeral. My God! No luck with our women, Charley. A natural tendency towards the lower middle classes. Don't you ever feel it? Like splashing through mud in dress pumps. I do. It's our curse, I believe. The Curse of the Carvilles!'
"I was so dumfounded at this unexpected piece of gratuitous slander that I sat perfectly still, although the silent servant in black had come in and announced dinner, and my brother was telling meto go and have a spruce-up in his dressing room. It was like being knocked on the head with a wooden mallet. I was stunned. Even when I found myself in a small room full of bureaus and wardrobes and had nearly walked into a double full-length mirror, I still felt stunned. He wondered if we were going to die out, did he. And he assumed, with a blood-freezing fatalism, that we both had a depraved taste in women. I looked round helplessly for a wash-stand and caught sight of a bath-room beyond a blue portière. A natural tendency towards the lower-middle class, if you please! And I was just on the point of telling him about my sweetheart in Genoa! Going into the bath-room, I almost fell into a porcelain bath set in flush with the floor. A huge basin full of hot water stood ready under the nickelled faucets. Soaps of many colours lay at hand. Nail-scrubbers, manicuring tools, towels, sponges, creams, talcum powders, dentifrices, hair-lotions, blue bottles (with vermilion labels marked poison), green bottles marked ammonia, bottles with bulbs and sprays, cases of razors, festoons of strops—all these stood or lay on shelves at my elbow as I proceeded to wash my hands and face with a piece of yellow primrose soap that by some chance was among the welter of expensive brands. No luck with our women, observe. I certainly had had no luck with Gladys. But he, he, to whom women ran as though he were a necromancer, as though he had the secret of some spell that would make them forever youthful and lovely and happy—what complaint dared hemake against them? Yet he had formulated the monstrous theory that 'our family' must either succumb to the lower-middle class or die out because of our unfortunate luck with our women. It was one of those propositions which are simply preposterous in theory, but perfectly true in fact. As I washed my face in that expensive basin and rubbed it with the expensive towels and brushed my hair with the expensive ivory-backed brushes, I lighted upon this interesting feature of my brother's thesis. It was true. What I could not get over was how the dickens he had discovered it, living as he did. It struck me as a good example of the cleverness that is so much more useful than either genius or industry. I doubt if he had any clear notion of what was meant by psychology, but he had intuitively divined an obscure flaw in our complicated mentality, a flaw searching back to some unsavoury interlude in our history. Of course, by lower-middle class he meant servants. This silent chap in black, with the hair growing low by his ears, would be of that class, the lower-middle. And—here I put the ivory-backed brushes down carefully and looked at myself as though I saw a stranger in the glass—and what was more, by the same token, was not I, a seafaring man, also one of the lower-middle? Good heavens! I became so tangled up in the new points of view suddenly illuminated by my brother's outrageous remarks that I nearly stepped into his expensive porcelain bath again. And then I heard him calling to me that the soup was getting cold, andI followed the servant into a small dining room singularly bare of everything save the indispensable belongings of a meal. Even the pictures were limited to one on each wall, as though more might distract the diner from his food. Except for a light over the lift opening there were only two electric candles with lemon shades on the table, where my brother sat, bolt upright, eating soup.
"Now, you know, I laughed as I sat down, because I would not have lived in this fashion at all. My idea of comfort, I reflected, was probably lower-middle. It included a high tea, with real food to eat, and a book propped up against the tea-cosy while I ate. Once or twice in my life I have been at the mercy of atable d'hôteand I was not happy. Passenger ships, for example. They have all sorts ofpuréesandconsommésandentreésandfricasséesandsoufflés, but very little nourishing food. For some mysterious reason they serve you with a homeopathic dose of each course and then pitch about half a ton of all sorts of things down the garbage shoot into the sea, for the gulls and fishes to gorge themselves on. No doubt, as I say, my notions were wrong and my brother's were right. No use quarrelling about tastes.
"'Why do you laugh, Charley?' he inquired. 'I was thinking of what you said about our unfortunate instincts,' I replied. 'No doubt it is true, but I was wondering how you discovered it.'
"'I should say it was obvious in the past,' he answered gravely. 'As for the present—you and I you know—one has intuitions, what? And I havetalked with men of old family, and they have told me of cases they know of.'
"'And you think,' I said, 'that it is a real danger, to marry beneath you?'
"'Yes,' he said, finishing his soup. 'Youaren't contemplating it, are you, Charley?'
"'I don't look at life as you do,' I observed. 'I have become rather tired of all this talk about classes. I don't feel myself to be a blue-blooded person at all. I am a seafaring man. Plenty of my shipmates marry into their own class—the lower-middle class.'
"The silent person in black came in with a bottle in a basket, and filled our glasses with a white wine. My brother turned his glass round as he looked at me solemnly. 'I see,' he said, and began to eat his fish.
"'Of course,' I went on, 'your intuitions, as you call them, are quite correct as regards me, because when I marry, she will probably be just what you say. She would be as uncomfortable in a place like this as—as I am.'
"'Good God!' he muttered, staring at me. 'Is it as bad as that? I should have thought you would be glad to live decently when you get the chance.'
"'I have simple tastes,' I answered.
"'So have the beasts of the field,' he retorted, and fixed his eyes moodily upon his wine. I laughed.
"'Far better,' I said, 'to go each his own road and do the best he can. I've been through a good deal, Frank, since I saw you, and I dare say you've been through a lot too, only different. I've workedand been worked upon, and I've come to certain conclusions. There is no place for me in all this ordered English life, with its classes and masses and so on. I was thinking about it this afternoon when you nearly ran over me. Pride is at the bottom of half the misery in England. Personal integrity is all I ask of a man, modesty what I admire most in a woman. As for what you call splashing through mud in dress-pumps, I know what you mean and I avoid it.Worthlesswomen are to be found in all grades. Marriage, no doubt, is a lottery, not only for us, but for the women. I doubt if taking thought ever makes it any less of a lottery. You say we Carvilles have no luck with our women. I wonder what 'our women' would say if they heard you. Are we the last word in humanity? Are we flawless in our integrity and purpose and achievement?'
"My brother shook his head without looking up from his plate.
"'That's not what I meant at all,' he remarked sullenly. 'That sort of thing doesn't apply to women. I was referring to breeding. Women of breeding would not trust themselves to us.'
"'Well,' I said, 'I shan't lose any sleep about it. If I were chief of a passenger ship, the lady-passengers of breeding——'
"My brother waved his hand. 'Let us dry up,' he said. 'You don't understand.'
"But I did! I knew exactly what he meant and many a bitter hour it had cost me when I was infatuated with the convent-bred miss who had trottedafter him as soon as he had whistled 'come!' Breeding! The cant of it. The silly dishonesty of it! It is like those little three-by-two front yards you see in suburban streets, the last contemptible vestige of the rolling park-lands and fair demesnes of a far-off feudal time. It is like the silly Latin mottoes and heraldic crests you see on the doors of automobiles. It is a fetish in England. The boy from the great public schools sets the fashion, and all the little tinpot grammar-schools and academies follow suit and ape the clothes and the manners and the speech, the mincing speech, of people of breeding. And the little professional people who live in suburban villas do the same. They all worship and fear the fetish, the Collar-and-Tie god. You had better fasten a mill-stone about your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea than say or be or do anything their despicable little code considers ill-bred. Oh yes, I knew what my brother meant by breeding, but my experience had not tallied with what I had been taught. Sometimes I have fancied that some strain of chivalry had kept him under the illusion of birth and gentility. And then I have come to the conclusion that he was one of those who see things so objectively that they impress one as automatons. They don't learn, they know. They live in the world as if it was their home. They use their passions and desires as animals use their instincts. They have no diffidence before the great facts of life. And having this franchise in their pockets, so to speak, this permanent pass to every quarter of the City of the World, having this animalcandour of outlook, they are naturally inarticulate. They are easily misunderstood because self-expression is foreign to them and they have no interest in abstract propositions as such. They pick up a phrase and play with it for a while, just as a kitten will play with a ball, or a puppy will walk round with a piece of wood in his mouth, pretending it is a bone. My brother was a good example, I thought, of this. What he said sounded true, and as far as he knew was true, because he had not got it out of books. A man of 'good family' had put the idea into his head. No doubt he would forget it in a month or so. And whatever he might think or hear or say, he would go on living his very untrammelled life, unabashed by Time or the perplexities of existence, until....
"And here I stopped in my reflections, for I am giving you now my thoughts as I walked back to my lodgings in Bloomsbury. I stopped, for it occurred to me that a man whose course is untrammelled may easily get beyond the bounds set by the unimaginative laws of the community. In plain words, I stopped to wonder admiringly what would become of him, supposing he didn't break his neck in his own motor-cars. I had seen him start, the eight cylinders of his monstrous and ridiculous machine thundering their unmuffled exhaust into the night and scaring the passing cab-horses. He had moved off with a wave of the hand, rather preoccupied with a portmanteau that was strapped beside him, moved off down Piccadilly towards Chelsea and Clapham. I reflected, as I passed thesombre, crouching shadow of the Museum, now he was flying under the stars along the Surrey roads, the great beams splitting the darkness ahead of him, the dust of his passing settling on the hedgerows and soiling the wayside turf. And to what end, I wondered, did my successful brother rush headlong through the night? To achieve greater success? To preach his gospel of breeding? To succour Gentility in distress? I wondered and went to bed.
"No, I did not see him again until long afterward, and in very altered circumstances, as they say. The harm he did me on this occasion did not come home until later, when in Italy again, I read in an Italian journal some of the details of the affair. A wave of anger swept over me then, I remember, at having been so far fooled as to preach to him my gospel of integrity in men and modesty in women, while he was deep in tortuous finance and unprofitable intrigues. Mind you, I don't know now the rights of the affair. The counsel for the defence made a brilliant effort to establish a case of the chivalrous shielding of a lady. He claimed that the accused had been lured to destruction by the voices of sirens. A man of brilliant social gifts, he had been carried away, intoxicated, by his success and had promised more than he could perform. The very fact of the lady (of rank) not coming forward, but leaving the prosecution in the hands of the trustees, was a proof that the accused was more sinned against than sinning. And so on and so forth. It was all in theWeekly Times. I walked up to the Galleria Mazzini one fine evening and satin the Orpheum reading the latest performance of my successful brother. But the Italian paper which first told me about it dealt with the incident from the artistic side. There are a good many Italians in Egypt, as you know, and this paper had a correspondent in Cairo with a sharp pen that cut little cameos of the cosmopolitan life that centres round the Esbekiah Gardens. For my brother had gone to Southampton on urgent business. His business was so urgent that he crossed to France that night and went straight to Marseilles, where he sailed in a Messageries Maritimes boat to Egypt. The article in the paper was called The Flight into Egypt. The new arrival at Shepheard's Hotel was the life of the English visitors still staying on in Cairo. Parties who had been living among the Beduin in the desert came back for a week at Shepheard's and were entranced with him and his hundred-horse-power car. The daughter of a Beyrout ship-chandler who had retired and built a house at Heliopolis was infatuated with him and tried to monopolize him at the dances. Incidentally we learned that his hotel expenses were five pounds a day. This interested me keenly, because at the same time I was living in ample comfort on exactly five shillings a day. I suppose, I don't know, for I've never had the money to try it—but I suppose there is a snap and a tang about a life that costs five pounds a day, which is irresistible to some souls. Or is it that thecostof things never enters into these untrammelled people's heads at all? I wonder.
"But for all my personal interest in that Italian article and the black ending in Bow Street and a sentence of three years, I appreciated the author's treatment of his subject. He made a short story of it in the manner of Flaubert, minute, vivid and grim. He showed the weekly dances wearing thin at the end of the season, the daughters of the Levantine ship-chandlers, and Greek tobacco merchants, and Maltese petty officials, looking rather bleak at the prospect of another barren summer in Alexandria, when a new planet suddenly swims into their ken, young, rich, handsome, fascinating. They wake up again and the fight begins. You can see the Italian journalist, small, dark, with a pointed beard, pointed shoes, and sharp points of light in his dark eyes, hovering on the edge of the dance or perhaps taking a turn with the Levantine lady, observant and urbane. Things go on like this for a week or so when, the P. and O. boat from Brindisi having arrived at Port Said the day before, two English strangers arrive at the hotel. There is a dance that evening. I don't suppose this was strictly true, but I can understand the artistic pleasure it would give the Italian journalist to make little changes like that in his story. You remember Sir Walter Scott's confessed passion for giving a story 'a new hat and stick.' Well, there was a dance that evening, let us say, and the ladies, tired of the eternal English officer who never intends to let matters come to a head; tired of the French Canal clerk with his little friend in Alexandria; tired, perhaps, even of the witty and urbane Italianjournalist, who I imagine loved hisGenova la Superba, his Chianti and the keen air and heavenly blue of his Ligurian Apennines far more than he did that flat Delta full of all the half-breeds of the world—the ladies waited expectantly for the return of their new inspiration from Heliopolis, where he was gone with a party in his hundred-horse-power car. They wait in vain. Later the party return, somewhat puzzled themselves, explaining that two gentlemen had come out and interrupted the affair by drawing Mr. Carville aside and conversing with him inaudibly. And Mr. Carville makes his excuses. He apologizes to the Beyrout ship-chandler and everybody else, but he must leave with his friends for Port Said at once and catch the homeward-bound mail-boat. His presence is urgently demanded on business in London. The company gape. But our friend, the Italian journalist, doesn't go in for gaping. His business is, after all, news, and he burrows round, interviewing and telegraphing brothers of the craft until he lays bare the rather pathetic story. He doesn't tell it among his friends in the Land of Egypt. At any rate, he says he doesn't. He saves it for his home paper and lavished a lot of literary skill upon it. I imagine he got a good deal of fun out of my brother while he stayed in Cairo.
"And so, you see, my successful brother had experienced a serious set-back. I had a grim feeling that the women, 'our women,' as he had called them, would feel it far more in their seclusion in Surbiton than he would in his seclusion in—wherever he was. My feelings, in fact, were so grim that Rosa was perplexed, but I told her how my mother was now dead and I had no one in the world save herself. But at times I thought of our affairs gloomily. It seemed a poor end to our parents' fine dreams for the future—him so seriously set back, you may say, and me ploughing the ocean....
"And then it so happened that I got a chance of promotion on the spot. I'd been Second of the oldCorydona good while, when theCallisto, a cattle-boat, came in from the Argentine. The chief had taken sick and been buried at sea. The owners telegraphed I was to take the post, and they would send out another Second. It was very exciting, of course, getting in charge at last. It is extraordinary, the weight of responsibility that settles down on you all at once. Matters that you used to settle out of hand assume a new aspect when you yourself become the ultimate authority. It doesn't matter how hard a man has to work as Second, or what his troubles may be, he's always got the Chief behind him. He can sleep easy and deep, as he generally does, poor chap. But the Chief is different. He becomes a fatalist. He can't sleep. He has to make his decisions and keep his forebodings locked in his own breast. He becomes preoccupied with an absurd weight of care. He realizes that he cannot step round the corner and get the overlooker's advice. He is alone on the wide sea, and if he cannot solve his own problems, none can help him. And that is good spiritual discipline for a young man. He finds out then what he is really made of.
"And Rosa was excited too, for it meant we could soon get married and live in passable comfort almost anywhere we liked. It was a happy time for us. You see, we had grown accustomed to each other's ways and habits. We had struck a sort of average, and knew pretty well what pleased and what jarred each other. That, I imagine, is one of the secrets of living with a woman. Being simply considerate won't do, though, of course, it is necessary. But what a woman does hate is being startled with some fresh habit or idea. It spoils her illusion, her necessary illusion, that she knows all about you.
"I did not tell her anything of my successful brother's performances, though I have heard that a man always tells his sweetheart all the disreputable side of his family history. What he forgets to tell her she worms out of him after they are married. It may be so. I must be an exception, then. As I have said, Rosa was curious about England, and in trying to answer her questions I discovered I didn't know very much about England myself. But I said nothing about our family and their poor luck with their women. Perhaps I divined what an attractive tale my successful brother's escapades would seem to a romantic girl. There was a dare-devil glamour about everything my brother did that fascinates some minds. Indeed, it fascinated mine. But I was cured of glamour. My early love affair had left me a feeling of panicky fear of romance. Perhaps there is Puritan blood in us; but I feel that passion in itself is evil. I wanted no more of it. I looked forward to domestic life, my own vine and fig tree. Some day, I dreamed, I might write another little book. At night, when all was running smooth, I'd put down odds and ends.... Some day, perhaps. I don't think I shall fret, though, if nothing comes of it.
"I liked my new job. TheCallistowas a much bigger ship than theCorydon, and more modern. Certainly cattle are very unpleasant cargo, and when we came into Genoa Harbour and the ship was being cleaned up, you could smell her clear away to the Galleria Mazzini! But at sea, on the long run south to Buenos Ayres, it was none so bad. I was looking forward to my marriage, you see. I was saving money and I was beginning to forget the past. It is easier for a seaman to do that than for anyone ashore. A sailor's past is all in pieces, so to speak. He can drop it bit by bit. But when you live ashore in one place, your past is like a heavy log that you're tied to and can't quit.
"Anyway, one night in Buenos Ayres, when I went ashore to mail a letter to Rosa, I was in good spirits. I reflected that, after all, my father's dreams of founding a family were not necessarily impossible. My brother's behaviour had nothing to do with it. I was going to marry Rosa. If we had children they would have a chance. But just as Rosa would not hear of Italy, so I was resolved with all my might against living in England. My children should never come under the influence of that gentility that had spoiled our early lives. For the old families in England who have been steepedin it for centuries, for men like Belvoir, for instance, I dare say it is an admirable plan. But not for me nor for mine. I had been writing about it to Rosa and I'd put at the bottom, 'America?'
"Another thing I wanted to do ashore was to call at the Sailors' Home and see if they could give us a Mess-room Steward. The young fellow who had shipped that voyage had deserted. They are always doing it in the Argentine. Wages are very high and they all think that they can do well up country. They sign on just to get their passage free. The ship was in Number One Dock, loading grain, and I walked across the bridge, up San Juan and took a trolley car alongBalcarceto thePlaza de Mayo. It was a fine evening in September, quite cool after dark. I was rather pleased with myself, too. The boilers had opened up uncommonly well; the Second knew his work, and I had nothing to do but keep an eye on things in general. I posted my letter, and after walking up and down theAvenida de Mayofor a while, went down to theParque Colonto get a car back. The trolleys of Buenos Ayres are a bit puzzling to a stranger because the routes go by numbers. I knew nothing about the car I wanted except that it had the number 'Forty-eight' on the bows.
"TheParque Colonis a large place running parallel with the Number Three Dock, full of big trees, and the avenues through it are rather dark. Considering how close it is to the busy part of the city it is lonely. Men have been found on the seats—dead! I daresay you have heard of BuenosAyres. Like any other city where money can be made quickly, like London, like New York, Buenos Ayres is full of crooks. I believe they do their best to keep the place clean, but at that time it was pretty bad. The Skipper warned me to carry a revolver whenever I went ashore. Personally I'm against firearms. You generally find, after a row, that the dead man had a revolver in his hand. Unarmed strangers are not often touched.
"Number Forty-eight was a long while coming. Car after car came down the steep incline ofVictoriaand turning round eastward rumbled off alongPaseo Colon. I walked a few steps down one of the dark avenues and sat down on a seat to finish my cigar. It was like walking into a dark room. I could hear the roar of the city, yet at the same time I could hear some local sounds plainly. A musty smell came up on the breeze from the river. Suddenly I heard the long deep note of a steamer's whistle: the Mihanovich Mail Boat leaving for Monte Video. I sat there quietly, thinking of nothing in particular, just glancing up now and then to note the numbers of the trolleys. At the sound of the whistle, though, I fell to thinking of Mihanovich. What a romance that man's life must have been! They tell me that about forty years ago he'd landed in that place, a Russian Pole, ignorant of the language, without any money or friends, a low-down beach-comber. And here he was, a millionaire. Every tug on the river has his big M on the funnel. He had fleets of steamers, mines, railways, banks; and he was even tendering for the contract of the new docks the city wanted. No wonder others came to make their fortunes. No gentility needed to makehimsucceed. And thinking of him, somehow I began to wonder if my brother might not make good out in the colonies say, some distant part of the world. Some time before this my uncle had told me that Frank had been released. Good behaviour had reduced his time to about twenty months. Surely, if he started in some place where they didn't ask too many questions he might get another chance. And I hoped so. I had no malice against him. He was one of those who can't keep their nature down; women were the curse of him. Well, perhaps prison had changed him. My uncle had said that he was 'changed,' but that might be for the worse. And just when the old chap was deciding to pay the passage out to New Zealand—buy him a ticket and see him on board—my brother had vanished again.
"Mind you, the interest I took in the matter was, you might say, purely dispassionate. I turned the case of my brother over in my mind as you might turn over the problems of a book you are half through. I'm not sure that at the moment when I was interrupted I was not smiling at the insane life he had led. For me, in spite of my sea-going business, life was settled, sedentary, monotonous. You can talk if you like of the romance of the sea, you may call it picturesque, but you cannot call it melodramatic. Personally I dislike melodrama. I dislike violent passion of any sort. Iwas thinking of all this and, as I say, smiling, when I heard tip-toes behind me, and before I could turn round I felt my throat held between two hands and my head pulled sharp over the back of the seat."
Once again Mr. Carville paused, opened his little brass box and took therefrom his piece of twist. With meticulous precision he pared and pared the required amount for his pipe, and began to roll it between his palms, his eyes fixed reflectively upon the geranium tubs. He had pushed his hat back a little, and above his steady grey-blue eyes there shone a pink unruffled brow.
"Once or twice in my life," he went on, "I have had a severe shock. Let me explain what I mean. A man brought up as I had been, in a genteel way, gets unaccustomed to physical violence. At school fighting was barred very strictly. In the works we pupils had no need to speak to the men at all. The first time I was ever struck was when I was a pupil. One of the apprentices thought I had been at his tools, came up and hit me a terrific blow on the chin. To anybody used to fighting it would have been nothing. It made me ill for a week. Of course, at sea I'd grown a good bit harder, but I'll never forget the first time a fireman went for me. There was always with me a feeling of outrage so to speak, a feeling not at all towards the man who struck me, you understand, but against myself, against a world that had made me what I was, soft and unskilled. That seems to me a peculiar weakness in our genteel civilization. You goalong, for years perhaps, living a quiet, orderly, intellectual life, protected by law, by the Army and Navy, by the Police and by all 'the conventions of good society,' and then suddenly a man comes up and gives you a punch on the jaw! A very weak place in our civilization, I think?
"And, moreover, it brings into sharp relief another feature of our civilized life and that is our impotence to utilize our total experience. With a dog, a tiger, or a savage at the moment of attack, all his instincts, all his habits, all his intuition and ingenuity and physical advantage are automatically rushed to the front and flung upon the enemy in the most effective way possible. But the civilized man is 'all abroad.' His glasses fall off his nose, he loses his balance and his breath, he flinches, goes blind with helpless rage and indignation, and is held in contempt by the very policeman he pays to take the job off his hands and lock his enemy up. It's no exaggeration to say that some of us lack that power of instantly marshalling our faculties, maintaining a clear view and keeping the blood out of our eyes, which is called 'presence of mind.' It is a good phrase, that, because an intellectual person, when he is attacked with sudden violence, hasn't for the time being any mind at all. He is just a heap of nerves, a compound of puerile passion and hysterical protest.
"It seemed to me that my throat was held for a long time, in that grip. As a matter of fact it could not have been more than a couple of seconds. But it seemed long. It seemed to me as though the pressure, which was choking me to begin with, increased and increased. The power of it was not like the power of a machine, but evil, personal, spiteful. I remember I shut my eyes. I remember hot breath on my face. And then I remember a blank. In my memory it is like a space between inverted commas, without anything written. A blank....
"My head had slid down against the back of the seat, my knees were all cigar-dust, and my hat had fallen off, when I opened my eyes. I heard someone say, 'Sit up, for God's sake!' and I tried to do as I was told, to 'sit up for God's sake.' Somebody was sitting beside me, pulling at my shoulder. Now and again I heard him say, 'You damn fool!' He was angry with me then. I wondered what I'd done to make anybody angry. I tried to think. I'd been sitting on a seat in theParque Colon. Very good. Why was I a damn fool? I decided to argue the point with this chap. I struggled up and felt for my hat. I heard him say, 'Listen, you fool!' There he was again. Always a fool. Then he said, 'Well,lookthen, if you can't hear,' and he struck a match and held it before his face. Humph!
"He pinched the match between his fingers and we were in the dark again. He said, 'Well, Charley, old man, that was a near squeak for you, a damn near squeak. What the devil d'you go sitting round a place like this for?'
"I remember being very much amused at this. He was actually angry with me! He had nearly choked the life out of me, and he was angry with me! I had nothing to say. My tongue seemedglued to my teeth. I brushed my hat and began to look for my cigar. What I was really looking for was my wits.
"He went on talking. 'Charley,' he says, 'I'm desperate. I'm down and out. For God's sake give me some money? What are you?' he says, 'what are you doing here? I thought you were a sailor. You look prosperous. Give me—lend me some money, or I'll have to take it.'
"While he went on like this, sometimes threatening, sometimes whining, I was collecting my faculties. The feeling that some one had wrapped copper wire tight round my neck was going away. I found my cigar. I struck a match, and by the light of it I saw my brother again.
"Yes, he was down and out. He had not had a shave for a week, his hat had been picked off a rubbish-heap, his trousers were muddied and torn at the knees, his coat was buttoned up to hide his black, hairy chest. He had no shirt. He was down and out.
"I settled in my mind what had happened before I spoke. This brother of mine had apparently made an exception in my favour. He had crept up behind me with the deliberate intention of strangling me and picking my pocket. Seeing my face he had decided that he could pick my pocket without strangling me.
"The curious thing was that I had no feeling of anger towards him. What filled me with a sort of panic was the fact that my brother had come back into my life. I hadn't realized it so plainly before,but he scared me. I suppose he saw something of this in my face, for he says, 'Charley, let bygones be bygones, old man. Help me make a fresh start!'
"'Hold on,' I said. 'The last time I saw you, Frank, you had bags of money. You had my place in the house——.' 'Oh, dry up!' he says, 'never mind what I had, look at me now. Charley, look at me. I've walked every foot of the way from Rosario. I'm broke, cleaned out, desperate. I've nothing to lose.'