BY Monday morning when he returned to town, Philip had quite made up his mind that all thought of travel by way of distraction was futile, and had determined to find in work, the hardest and most continuous, a succession of hours of forgetfulness, so far as he could secure it, of this blow that had fallen on him. Forgetfulness itself, he knew well he could not hope to secure, but by hard application of the brain to work, he hoped that for this hour and for that he would be able to put that which had so stricken and embittered him on a second and more remote plane of consciousness. True, at any relaxation, at any interval in which his brain was not actively employed, it would start out again like the writing on the wall; but for the working hours of the day, and these he determined should be long and fully filled, he believed he could to some extent crush the other out of his consciousness. In work, at any rate, he believed his best chance lay, and the attempt, though perhaps desperate, was one which none but a strong man could have made.
He occupied at present while in London a flat in Jermyn Street, modest in dimensions, but containing all he wanted. There was a spare room there which his mother always used on her rather rare visits to town, but otherwise it held only the necessary accommodation for two servants and himself. He had already given his landlord notice that he was going to quit, but to-day he went to the estate office to ask if he could renew his tenancy since his bachelor days were not yet over. All this was horribly uncomfortable; he felt that the clerk in the office knew what had happened, and would, after his departure, talk it and him over with the other clerks, and though their criticism and comments could not possibly matter to him, he felt that some deformity, some malformation or scar of his own body was being publicly shown the world, and he hated the world for looking at it. Then also he hadto say that he should not require the house for which he was in contract in Berkeley Square, to complete which nothing really remained except the signing of the lease. It was all a business so unexpectedly disagreeable that he wished he had conducted it by letter.
To-day promised to be very busy; he was to have dined that night with Lady Ellington, but that engagement was automatically cancelled, and he left word at his flat that he would be there that night, and would dine alone. That done, he drove straight down to the City, where he expected that there would be awaiting him a report of an agent of his with regard to certain South African mining properties on which he held an extremely large option which he must take up before the end of the week, when it expired. He had not been able to make his mind up about it hitherto, and had wired for the report, putting off his decision until the last possible minute.
The report in question had arrived, and, without further delay, he proceeded to master it. The problems it contained were of a complicated order; the dip and depth of the reef, the assay value of it, the cost of working, the reduction which might be obtained in this by the use of Chinese labour, all these were things which had to be considered. Should he not exercise his option, the right, that is, of buying his shares at the figure agreed on, he would lose, of course, what he had spent in purchasing that right. It was by a careful study of this rather voluminous report on the property that he had to make up his mind whether he would exercise it or not.
Now the problems of finance, that extraordinary and ubiquitous game in which the most acute brains in the world are pitted against each other for the acquisition of those little yellow metal counters, which in this present world are so undeniably potent to procure for their owner a comfortable journey through it, had at all times an immense attraction for Philip, and he found that even to-day they were no less absorbing than they had ever been. He found, too, that, in spite of the frightful shock that he had undergone, his reasoning and deductive faculties had not been shaken or dulled, and he felt himself as capable as ever of weighing the evidence which should decide his course. The reportitself was fairly satisfactory, and he was inclined to believe that the shares which he could call up were worth the price, which to-day stood steady at the figure which he would have to pay for them. His money, which ran into six figures, would perhaps be locked up for a time, but he did not particularly object to that. On the other hand, supposing he bought, the effect on the market would certainly be to send the value of the shares up, so that he could probably, if he wished, clear out again, realising a small profit. This was all plain sailing enough; the report was good enough to justify his exercising his option. But the market altogether, as he well knew, was, in consequence of the Russo-Japanese war, in a rather excitable and nervous state, and the more difficult problem must claim his attention—what would be the effect on it if he did not buy? It was known, of course, that his option was a considerable one, and dealers in these shares were awaiting any news as to his movements with some anxiety.
The report had fallen rustling to the ground, and Philip sat there staring in front of him, with his elbows on the table and eyes fixed intently on nothing. Every now and then some clerk came in with a paper for his signature, or a letter for his consideration; every now and then he was rung up on the telephone that stood by his elbow. But he had that rarest of gifts, a mind that can detach itself from one thing and attach itself in its entirety to another, and he gave his whole attention to these interruptions when they occurred, and transferred it all back to the problem he was digging at when he had dealt with them. The way he pursued was narrow and winding, but step by step he traced it out.
It took him not less than an hour of hard thinking to make up his mind definitely on the point: there were so many things to consider, for, as he always held, there was hardly an event that took place in the world which did not have its definite and certain effect on the money-market; and the sole and only office of the financier was to be able, on the basis of what had happened before, to conjecture what was going to happen now (for things followed an invariable rule), and estimate what the effect of his conjectured events would be. And nothing in the world was more engrossing than that; there was no bit of knowledge a man mightpossess concerning human nature, however fragmentary and hard to fit in, that did not have its place in the puzzle he had to put together. Above all, Philip did not believe in chance in these affairs; it might, indeed, be chance whether he himself correctly estimated how future events would shape themselves, but the element of luck here was only, if one ran it to the ground, his own ignorance; for if his knowledge of the past could be complete, so also would his knowledge of the future be, for in the City of all places is it most true that the future is only the past entered through another door.
His mind, then, was made up, but once more he ran through the data upon which his conclusion was based. These goldfields of Metiekull on which he held an option, were a company that had aroused a good deal of comment when brought out, and it had been held in level-headed quarters that the shares which had been run up to 4 had reached that figure without there having been produced any guarantee that they were worth half that. But, as is the inscrutable way of the Stock Exchange, they had, for no particular reason, been turned into a gambling counter, and there was no venture which enjoyed a freer or more fluctuating market. Things, however, had steadied down when it was known that Philip Home had bought this option of 30,000 shares, and just at this moment, as has been stated, there was considerable interest felt in the question of whether he would exercise it or not. If he did not, it meant a loss to him of about £7,000; whereas if he did, it might be regarded as certain that the shares, since gambling in them was just now, like bridge, a favourite method of losing money, would enjoy a very substantial rise, and, as usual, it was highly likely that Philip would reap a profit worth reaping, should he choose to sell during this.
So much, of course, all the world could see, but Philip saw a little further. He took into consideration the excitable state of the South African market, the uncertainty with regard to the Japanese war which would certainly make French speculators nervous, and French speculators, as he knew, had been very busy over the goldfields of Metiekull. Then came in the question of the report which he had been reading; on the whole it was good, and his sober opinion was that the shares were worth buying at the price. Yet he proposednot to take up his option, but to lose at once £7,000. But he would also let it be freely known that he had received a detailed report from his agent on the spot.
He decided, therefore—so the market would say—to abandon his option after the receipt of this report. What was the inference? That the report was unfavourable. Then all the other factors he had been considering added their weight to the scale; there was a nervous market, there was likely to be stringency of money, there was the vast hovering thundercloud of war in the East. If he knew anything about the ways of the City, it was an absolute certainty that there would be a slump in Metiekull. He would let it slump; he would even, by selling, assist it to slump; a hundred little bears—Philip detested the small operator—would sell, and when they had committed themselves pretty deeply, he would buy not only the original 30,000 shares of his option, but somewhere near twice that number; for there was no question as to the value of the property, and he would be picking up his shares at something like rubbish price.
The chain of reasoning was complete, he took his elbows off the table, and turned to light a cigarette. Then suddenly his heart sank, he felt sick and empty, for the concentration of thought was relaxed, and from a thousand spouting weir-gates the thought from which he had obtained an hour’s respite flooded his whole soul. Forgetfulness of that? It was as if he had just slept in his chair for an hour, and awoke again in full consciousness of the horror of life. It was no slow awakening, it was a stab that made a deep and dreadful wound out of which flowed the black blood of his hatred and resentment, not against those two alone, but against the world. To this hatred he gave himself up with a hideous sort of luxury in the overpowering intensity of it. He suffered himself, by no fault of his; well, others should suffer, too, and if by his manipulation of the market, which was according to the principles which governed it perfectly legitimate, others were ruined, it was not his fault but theirs for competing with him.
Then a thought blacker than these, because it was more direct, more personally full of revenge, entered his mind. Surely not so long ago someone had consulted him as to an investment. Yes, it was Evelyn—Evelyn, in a sudden burstof prudence—who had decided not to buy a motor-car, but to put away a big cheque that had just been paid him. Philip had refused to give him advice professionally, since he was not a broker, but had told him that he had himself bought a large option in Metiekull. He remembered the interview perfectly, and knew that he had recommended Evelyn not to dabble, since he did not know the game, but to put his money into something safe. What he had eventually done with it Philip did not know. But for a week afterwards his studio had been littered with financial papers, and he talked the most absurd nonsense about giving up the artistic career and taking offices in the City, since he felt sure that his real chance of brilliant achievement lay there.
Now, bitter suffering like that which Philip was now undergoing cannot but have a very distinct effect on the sufferer. And in such a nature as his, the particular kind of suffering he had to bear could scarcely have had any effect but that of the worst. His circle of friends, those to whom he showed all that was best in him, was but small, and numbered four only. By two of these he had been betrayed, and that impulse which at the first moment of his knowledge did just flicker within him, the impulse of generosity, of taking the big and sky-high line of which for the moment he had been capable when he dismissed the motor three days ago near Evelyn’s studio, had been crushed, if not out of life, at any rate into impotence and unconsciousness by the ingrained hardness of his nature shown to the world at large. That hardness covered him now and indurated him; he could feel neither pity nor softening for any, least of all for one who had so bitterly injured him. His power of hurting, it is true, might be small compared to the hurt that had been done him, but such as it was, he would use it. He was hurt himself, but he would not scream, he would just strike back where and when he could.
London meantime was busy with its thousand tongues in discussing what had happened, and, as was to be expected, it took a very decided line over it all. This sort of thing was really impossible, and not to be tolerated. Why, even the bridesmaids had received their presents, and everybody’s plans, for everybody had settled to go to the wedding, were absolutely upset. Besides, the whole thing was an insult hurled at the sacred image of Society, a bomb-shell whichhad exploded in the very middle of the temple. And though Gladys Ellington had only one, not a thousand tongues, she used that one to the aforesaid effect so continuously that it really seemed impossible that flesh and blood could stand the wear and strain. She was using it now to Lady Taverner, to whom she always told things in confidence when she wanted them repeated. Lady Taverner, it may be remarked, was the pink and butter-coloured lady, to emphasize whose charms Evelyn had studied purple clematis.
“Of course, dear Alice,” she was saying, “I can say these things to you, because I know you won’t repeat them, and, of course, we all want it talked about as little as possible. But Madge has really behaved too abominably; it’s all very well to say you must follow the dictates of your own heart, but if your heart tells you to commit really an indecency, as this is, I should say it was better not to follow it. But Madge is so odd: it is only a few weeks ago that she told me how devoted she was to Philip—esteem, affection, and all that. Well, what sort of esteem and affection has she shown? My dear, three days before the wedding.”
Lady Taverner sighed.
“Of course, I won’t talk about it,” she said, “but I shall never speak to Madge again. And my portrait was being done by Mr. Dundas, which makes it very awkward. Of course, I want it finished, but howcanI go to sit to him again?”
This was a new light which Gladys had not yet considered.
“Of course, he has ruined himself,” she said cheerfully. “Nobody will go to be painted by him now. And consider his relation to Philip! Why, he was his best friend. I haven’t dared to see Madge’s mother yet, but I understand she is mad with rage, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. And they were married, I hear, on Saturday, and have left London. How can people be such fools!”
This last remark was a genuinecri du cœur, for Gladys was absolutely unable to perceive how any interior impulse could possibly prove too strong for discretion, forsavoir faire—she was fond of scraps of French—for any rending of or throwing out of window those social pads and cushions which alone ensure a passage through life that will be free from succession of bumps and jars. That was why she wasalmost universally considered so charming: she always said the pleasant thing, and did the agreeable one (for everybody had to assist the pads and cushions), unless she was quite safe from detection. Then, it is true, the sheathed claws occasionally popped out, when it was quite dark, but before the return of light they were always sheathed again, and the velvet touch was in evidence.
“Imagine the marriage!” she went on. “A sexton and a sextoness were probably the witnesses, and they probably came—the happy pair, I mean—in a hansom and went away in a four-wheeler. Such nonsense to wreck your life like that. And a wreck is a crime; it is a danger to other shipping unless it is blown up.”
Now what Gladys said so directly, all London was thinking, if not with the same precision, at any rate with the same general trend. There had been a violation of its social codes, flagrant and open, and for the time, at any rate, it was disposed to visit the offence with the full severity of its displeasure. As Gladys had remarked: “How could they be such fools!” and the children of this world, being wiser in their generation than the children of light, are the first to punish folly. And it is very foolish to openly break the rules which Society has laid down if you wish to continue to occupy your usual arm-chair in that charming club. For the rules are so few, and so very easy to remember, and Evelyn and Madge had quite distinctly broken one of the most elementary of them. And Society, however accommodating in many lines, never forgives, at once anyhow, any such open violation of its laws as this. But just at present neither of the sinners cared nearly so much for all these laws as they cared for a single moment of this blue, fresh-winded day.
They had been married, as Gladys had said, on a Saturday, and had left England that same afternoon to spend a fortnight on the coast of Normandy, and there at this moment they were, on the very coast itself, with the blue, crisp ripples of the English Channel hissing gently on the sand. Evelyn had spent most of the morning constructing a huge sand-castle of Gothic design, but the rising tide half an hour ago had driven him from the last of its fortifications, and he was now sitting on the sand with Madge by his side. All this week he had been in the most irresponsible, irrepressiblespirits, which any thought of the unhappiness that had been caused seemed powerless to dull; any suggestion of it passed in a moment like breath off a mirror. With the huge egotism of his nature he had determined quite satisfactorily to himself that what had happened was inevitable. He knew how ardent was his own love for Madge, he knew it was returned, he knew too, for she had told him how different was this from the quiet, sober affection she felt for Philip. Her marriage with him could not have taken place: she felt that herself, whereas nothing in the world was strong enough to pull them apart. And with the great good sense that so often characterises egotism, Evelyn, though he was very sorry for Philip, could not either be ashamed of himself, or on the other hand be sorry for Philip long. He faded from his mind almost the moment he thought of him. He could not bring his mind to bear on Philip when Madge was with him.
He had been wading during the building and the subsequent occupation of the Gothic sand-castle, and his feet were still bare, and his flannel trousers rolled up to his knees. Also a dead bee had been washed ashore in the foam of the ripples, and search must be made for a suitable coffin, since burial with all possible honour must be given to a honey-maker from those on the honey-moon. A pink bivalve shell was eventually discovered, which he considered worthy of containing the honoured corpse. Its grave was dug above high-water mark, a mound of sand in pyramid form raised over it, and the sides of this decorated with concentric circles of pebbles. A small passage constructed of shell, and flat stones led to the tomb-chamber itself, and the door of this was hermetically sealed. In front a small stone altar was raised, and offerings of sea-weed laid on it.
“And so,” said Evelyn, in conclusion of the short panegyric which, in capacity of preacher as well as architect, undertaker, and mason, he pronounced when the rites were over, “we commit to rest this follower of the fragrant life, who made his living among the flowers, and extracted honey and nothing less sweet than that from the summer of his days. My brethren, may we constantly follow this example of the perfect life. Amen. Say ‘Amen,’ Madge.”
Madge laughed.
“I don’t think I ever saw anyone so ridiculous,” she said; “and it appears you can go on being ridiculous all the time.”
“All the time I am happy,” said he.
“And you’re happy now?” she asked.
“Absolutely. I want nothing more. All this week I could have said to every moment: ‘Stay, thou art fair.’ And, oh! how fair you are, Madge. Smile, please—no, not the sad smile with all the sorrows of the world behind it.”
Madge ceased smiling altogether.
“Oh, Evelyn, I am so happy, too!” she said. “But I can’t forget all the scaffolding, as it were, in which our house of love was built, which now lies scattered about in bits.”
Evelyn sat up quickly, demolishing the altar he had made with such care.
“Ah! don’t think of that,” he said. “We agreed that what has happened had to happen. Now pity and sorrow when you can’t help in any way seems to me a wasted thing.”
“But if you can’t help pitying and being sorry?” she asked.
Evelyn gave a little click of impatience.
“You must go on trying till you do help it,” he said. “Of course, if one dwells on the matter, one is sorry for Philip; I am awfully sorry for Philip when I think of him. I hate the idea of anybody being wounded and hurt as he must have been, and since he was my friend, it is the more distressing. Only it is an effort for me to think of him at all. I can only think of one person, and of one thing—you and my love for you.”
This time Madge’s smile was more satisfactory, and with his bright eager eyes he looked at her as the eagle to the sun.
“Ah, you are absolutely adorable!” he cried.
The wind, such as there was of it, had veered round at the time of high tide, and blew no longer off the sea, but breathed gently from the land. A mile away on the right were the tall, dun-coloured houses of Paris-plage, perched at the edge of the sea, and the sands there were dotted with the costumes of the bathers, like polychromatic ants who crawled about the beach. The sea itself was full of shifting greens and blues, and far out a fleet of boats like grey-winged gulls hovered, fishing. Even the shrill ecstasies of the bathers of Paris-plage, whose bathing appeared to be of a partial description, but who made up for that by dancingin the ripples, and splashing each other with inimitable French gaiety, were inaudible here; nothing stirred but the light, noiseless wind, warm with its passage over the sand-dunes, and faintly aromatic with the pungent scent of the fir-woods over which its pleasant path had lain. All things paused in this hour of the glory of the fulfilled noontide, that seemed equally remote from both past and future, so splendid and so real was the one present moment. If there had been hurricane in the morning, it was forgotten now; if there was to be a tempest to-night, it would be time to think about tempests when the winds began to blow, and it was mere futility to waste a moment of what was so perfect in contemplation, whether retrospective or anticipatory, of what had been or yet might be. There was just the hushed murmur of blue, breaking ripples, their sh-sh as they were poured out on to the golden sand, white gulls hung in the air, white boats drifted over the sea. And by Madge’s side sat her lover, the man whom her whole nature hailed as its complement, its completion. Whatever he did, whatever he said, she felt that she had herself dreamed that in remote days. Various and unexpected as were his moods, they were all fiery; the sand-castle as it first stood triumphant against the incoming tide had been to him a monument of more than national import, its gradual fall a tragedy that beggared Euripides. The bee, too—if he had been burying her he could not have shown a tenderer interest. But she was not so sure that she agreed with the sermon that had been preached over the grave. And in spite of the completeness of the noonday, she could not help going back to it.
“Evelyn,” she said, “were you really serious when you said that the honey-gatherer, who looked only for what was sweet, was the example of our lives? Something like that you said, anyhow.”
But he continued just looking at her, as he looked when he said: “You are adorable,” with eyes gleaming and mouth a little open. He did not even seem to hear that she had asked him a question. But she repeated it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How am I to know whether I am serious or not? I suppose one says a hundred stupid things that are based on something one believes. I am only serious about one thing in the world.”
She did not affect not to know his meaning.
“I know—we love each other,” she said. “But we have breakfast and lunch just the same.”
He looked doubtful.
“Do we?” he asked. “But they don’t matter!”
Suddenly to Madge the hush of the noonday and the arrest of “before and after” ceased. It was as if she had been asleep and was suddenly awakened from a dream by a hand that shook her. The dream was still there, but also, dimly, there was the wall-paper, a brass knob at the end of the bed, a counterpane.
“Ah! with all my heart I wish they didn’t matter. I wish nothing mattered, I ask for nothing better than to sit here with you, to go on living as we have lived this last week. But the time must come when we shall have to consider what we shall do next. Are we going back to London, or what?”
“It is August,” said he. “London in August——”
“What then? Shall we stop here?”
Then Evelyn was puerile.
“Of course, if you are tired of this,” he began.
But she let the puerilities go no further.
“Oh, don’t be a baby,” she said. “Ah, such a dear baby, I grant you! But, Evelyn, it is life we are living.”
Evelyn stroked his chin with a hugely pompous air.
“‘Life is real,’” he said, “‘life is earnest.’ Now, Madge, Poet Longfellow said that, therefore he must be right.”
“And so Painter Dundas agrees with him?” she said.
“Oh, certainly! Life is undoubtedly real and earnest, but what then? Am I never to talk nonsense any more? Shall we unbury the bee? Dear me, the unburial of the bee. How unspeakable pathetic and terrible! But what I have buried I have buried. So I shall draw your profile in the sand with one finger and all my heart.”
But she still remained serious.
“Tell me when you have finished,” she said.
Evelyn was already absorbed.
“With a helmet on,” he remarked, “because she has to meet and defeat the realities of life, and the corners of her mouth turned down because life is earnest, and just winking with the other eye; the one you see, in fact, because she wants to signal to her friend, which is me, that it’s all a huge joke really, only she mustn’t talk in church.”
There was a compelling fascination for her in the nimblefinger that traced a big outline so deftly in the sand, and since she was upside down to it, where she sat, it followed that she got up, and went round to see what manner of a caricature this was. Hopelessly funny she found it, and hopelessly like, so much so that she danced a war-dance all over the outline, and sat down again on the middle of her own face.
“Now attend!” she said to her husband.
“After you have ruined the picture of my life,” said he. “It was more like you than anything. You are being consumed with moral responsibility for me. I object to that, you know; you can be consumed by your own moral responsibility, or you can consume it, like you consume your own smoke, but mine is mine.”
“Evelyn, am I your wife?” she asked.
“I have reason to believe so. I was told so in church.”
“Very well—your conscience is kept in the kitchen; when I go to order dinner I look at it—I order more if we are likely to run short. So give me the cheque, please, there is a bill for conscience owing, and we must have a fresh supply.”
“I don’t understand one word,” said Evelyn, rubbing the sand off his legs preparatory to turning his trousers down again. “Not one word. Does it matter?”
Madge’s face grew quite grave again; smiles had spurted as with explosions from eyes and mouth when she saw his sand-sketch of her, but these had ceased.
“Yes, it does matter,” she said, “for unless you propose that we should remain at Le Touquet quite indefinitely, it will be necessary some day to become definite. I suggest that we should become definite now. Everything,” and she dug impatiently in the sand with scooping fingers—“everything has been left at a tag-end. We can’t forever leave things frayed like that——”
Evelyn interrupted her.
“Oh, I know so well!” he exclaimed; “the metal thing comes off the end of a lace, and you have to push it through the holes; a little piece only comes through, and what does not come through gets thicker and won’t follow. Then one has to take it out and begin again.”
Madge leaned forward.
“Yes, it is exactly that,” she said. “That has happened to us. When that happens, what do you do?”
“I take off the boot in question,” said Evelyn gravely, “and ring the bell. When answered, I tell them to take away the boot and put in another lace. That is done: then I put the boot on. But I don’t wrestle with laces which have not tags. You are wrestling, you know.”
For the second time this morning a feeling as if she was dealing with a child seized Madge. The child was a very highly-developed man, too. This was a handicap to her; a heavier handicap was that she loved him. Even now, as he sat most undignifiedly wiping the sand from his feet, preparatory to getting his socks on again, she felt this immensely.
“The sand will be rubbed through the skin, and cause mortification,” he remarked to himself.
Madge turned on him with some indignation.
“Ah, can’t you see,” she cried, “that I am serious? And you talk about the sand between your toes! You are rather trying.”
Evelyn paused in his toilet.
“Dearest, I am sorry,” he said. “I thought we were still playing the fool! But we are not—you, at any rate, are not. What is it then?”
This completeness of surrender was in itself disarming, and her tone was gentle.
“It is just this,” she said—“that you and I are lost in a golden dream. But the dream can’t go on forever. What are we to do? Shall we go back to London? Will you go on painting just as usual? People, perhaps, will be rather horrid to us, you know.”
Everything now, even to him, had become serious.
“Do you mind that?” he asked.
“No, of course not, if you don’t,” she said. “But I have been wondering, dear, whether if by your marriage with me you have hurt your career.”
“You mean that pink Jewesses who want to be fashionable won’t come to ask me to paint their portraits any more?” he said.
“No, not that, of course. What does that matter?”
Evelyn finished putting his shoes and socks on.
“Then, really, I don’t understand what you do mean,” he said, “by my career, if you don’t refer to the class of person who thinks it a sort ofcachetto be painted by me—though Heaven knows why she can think that. What are we talking about? How otherwise can my career, which is only my sense of form and colour, be touched?”
Madge’s eyes dreamed over the sea for a little at this.
“No, I was wrong,” she said. “Taken like that, it can’t matter. But we must (though I was wrong there, I am right here)—we must settle what we are going to do. We must go back some time; you must begin working again.”
Evelyn finished tying the last lace.
“Romney painted Lady Hamilton forty-three times,” he said. “I could paint forty Madges of the last hour. You never look the same for two minutes together, and I could paint all of you. Let’s have an exhibition next spring called ‘Some Aspects of the Honourable Mrs. Dundas. Artist—her husband.’”
“They would all come,” said Madge.
There was no more discussion on this present occasion about the future. Evelyn being again properly clothed, they went back by a short cut across the sand-dunes to the clearing in the forest behind, which was known as Le Touquet. For a space of their way, after they had got out of the pitiless sun on the sand, their path led through the primeval pine forest, where the air was redolent and aromatic, and the footfall went softly over the carpet of brown needles. Then other growths began, the white poplar of France shook tremulous leaves in fear of the wind that might be coming, young oak-trees stood sturdy and defiant where poplars trembled, and away from the pines the bare earth showed a carpet of excellent green. Then, as they approached the hotel, neat white boards with black arrows displayed signs in all directions, and a rustic bridge over a pond, by which stretched a green sward of lawn on which it was ‘defended to circulate,’ led to the gravel sweep in front of the hotel.
A broad verandah in the admirable French style sheltered those who lunched there from the sun; small tables were dotted about it, and from the glare of the gravel sweep it was refreshment to be shielded from the heat. Their tablewas ready spread for them, and the obsequious smile of the head-waiter hailed them.
But for the first time Madge was not content. Evelyn still sat opposite her; all was as it had been during the last week. Yet when he said: “Oh, how delicious, I am so hungry!” she felt she was hungry, too, but not in the way he meant. She was hungry, as women always are and must be, for the sense of largeness in the man, and she asked herself, but quenched the question before it had flamed, if she had given herself to just a boy. Yet how she loved him! She loved even his airy irresponsibility, though at times, as this morning, she had found it rather trying. She had lived so much in a world that schemed and planned, and was for ever wondering what the effect of doing this or avoiding that would be, that his utter want of calculation, of considering the interpretation that might be placed on his acts, was as refreshing as the breath of cool night air on one who leaves the crowded ball-room. And for very shame she could not go on just now pressing him to make decisions; she would return to that again to-morrow, for to-day seemed so made for him and his huge delight in all that was sunny and honey-gathering. To-morrow, also, she would have to mention another question that demanded consideration, namely, that of money. They were living here, with their big sitting-room and the motor-car they had hired—and, as a matter-of-fact, did not use—on a scale that she knew must be beyond their means; and since she was perfectly certain that Evelyn had never given a thought to this question of expense, any more than the price of the wine which he chose to drink concerned him, it was clearly time to remind him that things had to be paid for. He had loaded her, too, with presents; she felt that if she had expressed a desire for the moon, he would have ordered the longest ladder that the world had ever seen in order, anyhow, to make preliminary investigations with regard to the possibility of securing it. He apparently had not the slightest notion of the value of money, no ideas of his were connected with it, and though this argued a certain defective apparatus in this money-seeking world, as if a man went out to walk in a place full of revolver-armed burglars with no more equipment than a penny cane, she could not help liking hisinsouciance. Once shetaxed him with his imprudence, and he had told her, with great indignation, how he had read nothing but financial papers for a whole week earlier in the summer, and at the end, instead of spending a couple of thousand pounds in various delightful ways, he had invested it in some South African company in which—well, a man who was very acute in such matters was much interested. And yet she called him imprudent!
After lunch they strolled across to the lawn where circulation was forbidden.
“We won’t be breaking any rules,” said he, “unless the word applies to the currents of the blood, because we will sit under a tree and probably sleep. I can think of nothing which so little resembles circulation as that.”
Letters and papers had arrived during lunch, and Evelyn gave a great laugh of amusement as he opened one from Lady Taverner, asking if he would be in London during October, and could resume—this was diplomatic—the sittings that had been interrupted.
“Even that branch of my career hasn’t suffered,” he observed.
There was nothing more of epistolary interest, and he opened the paper. There, too, the world seemed to be standing still. There had been a skirmish between Russian and Japanese outposts at a place called something like Pingpong, fiscalitis seemed to be spreading a little, but otherwise news was meagre.
“Is there nothing?” asked Madge, when he had read out these headings.
“No, not a birth or death even. Oh, by-the-way, you called me imprudent the other day! Now we’ll find the money-market, and see what my two thousand pounds is worth. Great Scott, what names they deal in—Metiekull, that’s it.”
There was a long silence. Then Evelyn laughed, a sudden little, bitter laugh, which was new to Madge’s ears.
“Yes, I bought them at 4,” he said. “They are now 2. That was a grand piece of information Philip gave me.”
He got up.
“Oh, Evelyn, how horrible!” she cried. “Where are you going?”
“Just to telegraph to them to sell out,” he said. “I can’tafford to lose any more. I’ll be back in a minute. And when I come back, dear, please don’t allude to this again. It is unpleasant; and that is an excellent reason for ceasing to think about it. In fact, it is the best reason.”
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IT was perhaps lucky as regards the future of Madge and her husband that thisdebaclehad taken place so near to the end of the season. Many people, indeed, had waited in London only for the marriage, for the season was already over, and for the last three days there had been nothing but this to detain them. Genuine sympathy was at first felt for Philip, but it very soon was known that he was at his office again every day and all day, worked just as hard if not harder than usual, and was supposed, by way of signalising his own disappointment, to have made some greatcoupover a South African company, thereby inflicting a quantity of very smart disappointments on the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange. He had dealt these blows out with an impartial hand; first there had been some staggering smacks which had sent the bulls flying like ninepins, while the bears stood round and grinned, and profited by the experience of their fraternal enemies. Then Philip, it seemed, had seen them grinning, and had done the same for them.
In other words, things had come off in exactly the way he had anticipated. The knowledge that he had bought a very large option had induced many operators less substantial than he to buy also, and the sudden news that he had received a detailed report from the spot, and had subsequently not exercised his option, landed many of these buyers in awkward places. Then, as was natural, the bears saw their opportunity, sold largely, on the strength of the inference that Philip’s report was highly unfavourable, bringing prices down with a run. Then, with the same suddenness with which he had decided not to take up his option, he bought at this very much lower price a vastly increased number of shares, and within a week of the original slump Metiekull was considerably higher than it had ever been. The £7,000 he had forfeited over not taking up his option was but abagatelle to his subsequent gains, and the market generally at this conclusion remarked, among other things not worth repeating, that there was a good deal to be said in favour of long spoons; while that not inconsiderable part of more westerly London which is always burning its fingers in this City fire of the Stock Exchange, said with a somewhat cynical smile that since Philip could still hit so hard, he had not, perhaps, been so hard hit himself. Perhaps, in fact, Madge had not made such a very terrible mistake, after all, for Mr. Dundas was undeniablythemost fascinating person, whereas Philip, so it appeared, did not let the most dreadful affair of the heart interfere in the slightest with the stuffing of the money-box.
But in this they utterly mistook him, for this steady, concentrated application to work was, perhaps, the only thing in the world which could have prevented him breaking down or losing his mental balance altogether. Even as it was, it partook only, as far as he could see, of the nature of a temporary alleviation, for in the very nature of things he could not go on working like this indefinitely. And what would happen to him when he relaxed he could not imagine, he only knew that the hours when he was not at the office were like some nightmare repeated and again repeated. Nor did they lose, at present, the slightest edge of the intensity of their horror. This week was as bad as last week; last week was no better than the week before, all through this hot August when he remained in town, not leaving it even for his usual week end on the river, but seeing its pavements grow hotter and dustier and emptier as more and more of its toiling crowds escaped for a week or two to the sands or the moors.
The worst time of all was the early morning, for though he usually went to sleep from sheer weariness when he went to bed, he began to wake early, while still Jermyn Street was dusky and dewy, and as yet the sparrows in the plane trees opposite his window had not begun to tune up for the day. Morning by morning he would watch “the casement slowly grow a glimmering square,” or if it was, as often, absolutely unbearable to lie in bed, he would get up and go into his sitting-room, where the wan light but brought back to him the dreadful hours he had passed there the evening before. The glass from which he had drunk stood on the little table by the sofa, and by it lay the unread eveningpaper. The beloved Reynolds prints, Mrs. Carnac, Lady Halliday, Lady Stanhope, Lady Crosbie, all first impressions, smiled meaninglessly on the wall, for all the things he had loved and studied had lost their beauty, and were blackened like dahlias in the first autumn frosts. Sometimes a piece of music stood on the piano, from which he had played a bar or two the night before, but had then stopped, for it, too, conveyed nothing to him; it was but a jangle of senseless chords. Sometimes in these dreadful morning hours he would doze a little on the sofa, but not often; and once he had poured out into the glass a stiff dose of whisky, feeling that even an alcohol-purchased oblivion would be better than more of this wakefulness. But he had the sense left not to take to that; if he did that to-day he would do it to-morrow, and if he admitted the legitimacy of such relief, he knew he would find less and less reason every day for not letting himself sink in that slough. Besides, he had to keep himself clear-headed and alert for the work of the day.
Two passions, to analyse a little further, except when he was at work, entirely possessed him, one his passion for Madge, of which not one jot, in spite of what had happened, was abated. It was not, nor ever had been, of the feverish or demonstrative sort, it did not flicker or flare, it burned steadily with a flame that was as essential a part of his life as breathing or the heart-beat. And the other, existing strangely and coincidently with it, was the passion of hate—hatred for her, hatred for Evelyn, a red flame which shed its light on all else, so that in the glare of it he hated the whole world. Two people only stood outside of it—his mother and Tom Merivale; for these he did not feel hate, but he no longer felt love; he was incapable of feeling that any longer except for Madge. But he did not object to them, he thought of them without resentment, but that was all.
Then, as his nerves began to suffer under this daily torture, the hours of enforced idleness became full of alarm. What he feared he did not know, he only knew that he was apprehensive of some further blow that might be dealt him from a quarter as unexpected as that from which this had come. Everything had been so utterly serene when this bolt from the blue struck him, he could not have conjectured it; and now he could not conjecture what he expected next.
But all this London did not know: it only knew that thisvery keen man of business was as acute as ever, to judge by the Metiekull episode, and began to reason that since he was so callous to what had happened, Madge had really not behaved so outrageously as had been supposed. She had found—this was the more human and kindly view induced by the cessation of the late London hours, and the substitution of a great deal of open air for the stifling ballroom of town—she had found that she really was in love with Mr. Dundas, and that Philip on closer acquaintance was what he had proved himself to be, business man first, lover afterwards. And really Mr. Dundas’s pictures this year had been stupefyingly clever. They made one just gasp. Surely it would be silly to get somebody else to “do” one instead of him, just because Madge had found out her mistake in time, and he had assisted at the correction of it. He was certain to have heaps of orders in any case, so it would be just as well to be painted by him as soon as possible. Of course that implied that one accepted his marriage in a sort of way, but, after all, why not? Besides—here the world’s tongue just tended to approach the cheek—it would be a kindness to old Lady Ellington to smooth things over as much as possible, and that dear little thing, Gladys, whom everybody liked so much, would be so pleased to find that Madge was not hardly thought of. Yes, quite so, and has the dressing-gong sounded already? And Tom killed a stag, and they had a good day among the grouse, and Jack killed a salmon, so there will be fish for dinner. What a blessing!
One of these mornings which saw Philip in the gloaming of dawn hearing the sparrows beginning their chirruping in the plane-trees, saw Tom Merivale also, not only hearing but listening to the twitter of half-awakened birds in his garden. He had slept in the hammock slung in the pergola, and after the coolness of the clear night following on the intense heat of the day before, the dew had been heavy. His blanket was shimmering with the seed-pearls of the moisture, his hair also was wet with it, and on the brick of the pergola path it lay like the condensation of the breath of the spirit of woodland itself. The cleanness and purity of this hour of dawn was a thing that every morning more astounded him. Whether a clear and dove-coloured skybrooded as now overhead, or whether morning came wrapped in rain-clouds, it always brought to one who slept with the sky for a roof a sense of renewal and freshness which it was impossible to get used to. Everything was rested and cleaned, ready to begin again on the hundred joyful businesses of day.
Just as a stone falling through the air moves with a speed that is accelerated each moment by double the acceleration of the last, so Merivale felt that every day his communion with and absorption in Nature made progress out of all proportion to what he had achieved before. It was so few months ago that he had himself wondered at the mysterious and silent telepathy that ran through all Nature, the telepathy that warns birds and beasts of coming storm, that makes the bats wake and begin their eerie flittings even at the hour when sunset is brightest, knowing that the darkness is imminent, that connects man, too, as he had proved, if man only will be quiet and simple instead of fretful and complicated, with birds and beasts, so that they know he is their brother and will come to his silent call to them. But of late that had become such a commonplace to him that he only wondered how it could ever have been otherwise than obvious. He remembered, too, how so few weeks ago he had for the first time heard the sound of the glass flute in the woods above Philip’s house at Pangbourne, but now not a day passed, often not an hour, in which that unending melody, the eternal and joyful hymn of Nature and of life, was not audible to him. Whether what he heard was really a phenomenon external to himself or only the internal expression, so to speak, of those thoughts which filled his entire consciousness, both waking and sleeping, he did not care to ask himself, for it did not in the least seem to him to matter. Wherever that melody came from, whether it was born in his own brain and telegraphed from there to his ears, or whether it was really some actual setting of the joy of life to song, external to him, and heard just as a railway whistle or the bleat of a sheep is heard and conveyed from his ears to his brain, he did not even wish to know, for wherever coined, it was of royal minting, the secret and the voice of Life itself was there.
The woods of Pangbourne—Philip. He had heard from Mrs. Home of the catastrophe, and in answer to a furtherletter of his he had learned that Philip remained in London slaving all day at the office, seeing no one but his clerks, silent, alone, giving no sign even to her. This letter had come only last night, and ended with an imploring cry that if Tom thought he could help him in any way, his mother besought him to do what he could. Philip had been down to see her once only, immediately after his engagement was broken off, and he had been utterly unlike himself—hard, terrible, unforgiving. Could Merivale not do something? Philip had never had but four friends in the world, two of these had turned enemies (Mrs. Home had crossed out in a thin, neat line the last two words and substituted “ceased to be friends”), and there were left only himself and she. And she had tried, and could do nothing.
Tom Merivale thought over all this as the twitter of birds grew more coherent in the bushes, passing from the sound like the tuning-up of an orchestra into actual song. The resemblance, indeed, was curiously complete, for after the tuning-up had ceased, while it was still very faintly light, there was a period of silence before song began, just such a silence as ensued when the strings of a band had found the four perfect fifths, and there was the hush and pause over singers and audience alike until the conductor took his place. Day was the conductor here, and to-day it would be the sun who would conduct his great symphony in person at dawn, the approach of which to Philip but meant the hard outlining of the square of window, but to Tom all the joy of another day, a string of round and perfect pearls of hours. The East was already in the secret, for high above the spot where dawn would break rosy fleeces of clouds had caught the light, while nearer to the horizon the nameless green of dawn, that lies between the yellow of the immediate horizon itself and the blue of the zenith, was beginning to melt into blue. Then, how well he knew it, the skeins of mist along the stream below would dissolve, the tintless, hueless, darknesses of clear shadow that lay beneath the trees would grow green from the sun striking through the leaves. These things were enough to fill this hour with ecstasy, and every hour to him brought its own. There would be the meal prepared by himself, the work in the garden, claiming fellowship and friendship every moment with the green things of the earth, the mid-day bathe, when he was one with theimperishable water, the long communing with eyes half-shut on the sunny heather, where even the stealthy adder was no longer a thing of aversion, and then for the sake “of his sister, the body,” as the old Saint said, a walk that might cover twenty miles before he returned at dusk. Oh, how unutterably good, and how unutterably better each day!
A wind came with the dawn itself, that scattered more dew on to him from the rose-sprays overhead, and he slid out of the hammock to go into the house to make his breakfast, stretching himself once or twice before he went in to feel his muscles, the rigging of the ship of the body, all twang sound and taut. Nor did it seem to him in any way unworthy that even this physical fitness of his should give him such joy: it would, indeed, have been a disgrace if it had been otherwise. For all the sensations and functions of life were on one plane, and whether the sweat poured from him as he dug the garden, or his teeth crushed a nuthusk, or the great thigh-muscles strained as he mounted a hill, or his ear was ravished with the fluting of a bush-bowered thrush, it was all one; each was a function of life, and the sum of them was just joy.
But Philip; this morning he could not get Philip out of his head, for detached from the world of men and women as he was, he could not help pitying the blind, meaningless suffering of his old friend. For all suffering to him was meaningless, he did not in himself believe that any good could come out of it considered merely as suffering: much more good, that is to say, would have come out of joy; this was withheld by suffering, a thing almost criminal to his view. But he could realise, and did, that all that Philip loved best had gone from him; it was as if in his own case the sun and the moon had been plucked from the sky, or water had ceased to flow, as if something vital in the scheme of things was dead.
It seemed to him, then, with his mind full of Philip, very natural that there should be a letter from him when the post came in that morning. It ran thus: