He did not know what he hoped, or indeed if he hoped for anything. He turned to her instinctively. And when the door of the ward opened he did, in fact, feel a faint lifting of the flat indifference which had followed on that one difficult rending surrender. He went to meet her. If she had looked at him with her usual straightness, she might have remembered the boy of whom she had been fond—a small, queer boy, who did not like having his face washed, and who came to her truculent and swaggering, with smears under his red eyes.
Even then it is doubtful whether she could have changed the course on which both of them were set.
He did not want her to see. And yet, unknown to himself, he did count on her instant understanding, on some releasing, quickening word or look that would give back life to the dead thing in him. But her eyes, preoccupied and unhappy, avoided him. He could not have appealed to her. He could not have said, as he had meant to do, "Christine is dead." He was silenced by the certain knowledge that all real communication between them had been broken off.
"No. 10 is going to pull through," she said.
They walked slowly down the corridor. He found it difficult to keep his feet. He wondered vaguely why she should talk of No. 10 when Christine was dead. He was puzzled—-confused.
"It seemed likely," he muttered. "Rogers had got his teeth into her."
"I suppose you think he was a fool to try?"
(What was she talking about? He would have to arrange for the funeral. And the money. He did not know whether there would be money enough. It was hideous—to think of a thing like that—to have to go into a shop and say to some bored shopkeeper: "I want a nice cheap coffin, please." For Christine—for whom he had never been able to buy so much as a bunch of flowers.)
"I—I don't know."
"You see, I heard what you said."
(What had he said? He tried to remember. No. 10. Better dead. Yes, of course that was it. He couldn't go back on that. His mind seemed to strain and stagger under the challenge like a half-dead horse under the whip.)
"She didn't hear me, anyway."
"I want to know—was it just—just a sort of pose—or did you mean it?"
"It was true."
"That doesn't seem to me to matter. It was a beastly thing to have thought—beastlier to have said——"
He stopped short, as though she had struck him across the face. For an instant he was blind with pain, but afterwards he steadied, grew deadly cool and clear-headed. There was a constant movement in the corridor and he turned abruptly, almost with authority, into an empty operating theatre. Instinctively he had chosen his ground. Here was symbolized everything that he trusted and believed in—a cool, dispassionate seeking, the ruthless cutting out of waste. Yet in the half-light the place surrounded them both with a ghostly, almost sinister unreality. Its stark immaculateness lay like a chill, ironic hand on their distress. It made mock of their unhappiness. It divested them of their humanity. The nauseating sweetness that still lingered in the sterilized air was like incense offered up on the grotesque sacrificial altar that stood bare and brutal beneath the glass-domed roof.
And now Robert saw Francey's face. It was white and pinched and unfamiliar, as though all her humour and whimsical laughter and loving-kindness had been twisted awry in a bitter fight with pain. But he knew her eyes of old. Long ago he had seen them with the same burning deadly anger. And he knew that it was all over. Their patient antagonism had come to grips at last over the bodies of their suffering love for one another.
Even then she held back.
"You don't know how hard life can be. It was hard for her——" But at that he burst out laughing, and she added quickly, reading his thought: "Nothing that you've gone through is of any use if it hasn't taught you pity."
"Your pity would take a half-dead rat from a terrier."
"You have no right to judge," she persisted.
He smiled with white lips.
"Oh, yes, I have! We all have. We condemn men to prison—to death."
"You do believe in God," she said bitterly. "You believe in yourself."
"It comes to this, Francey, doesn't it? You're through with me? You don't care any more?"
Her eyes narrowed with a kind of desperate humour. It was as though for a moment she had regained her old vision of him—a sad queer little boy.
"You say that because you want to shirk the truth. You're almost glad—presently you will be very glad. You never did want to care—not from the first. Caring got in your way. You will be free now." She waited, and then added very quietly, without anger: "I love you. I dare say I always shall—but I couldn't live with you—it would break my heart if we should come to hate one another. Don't think any more about it. I'll have gone to-morrow, and I'll try to arrange not to come back till you're through. It will be all right."
"Francey, it's such a foolish thing to quarrel about."
"It's everything," she said simply.
She turned to go. Even then he could have stopped her. He could have said: "Francey, Christine died this morning!" and their sad enmity might have melted in grief and pity. But what she had said was true. It was everything. And his reason, his will, rising up out of the general ruin, monstrous and powerful, stood like an admonishing shadow at his elbow.
"It's much better. There's nothing to make a coward of you now. You're free."
He half held out his hand, but it was only a convulsive, dying movement.He let her go.
1
As to Gyp Labelle, if she had known the part she played in their lives, which in the nature of things was not possible, she would have broken into that famous laugh of hers.
To her, at any rate, it would have seemed immensely, excruciatingly funny.
As the result of an exchange of two remarkably casual notes they met at Brown's for dinner. Brown's had occurred to both of them as a natural meeting-place. Cosgrave, it is true, had only dined there once and that free (as a friend of Brown's friend), but the impression made upon a stomach accustomed to Soho and tea-shop fare had been indelible. Stonehouse himself dined there as a matter of custom. Besides, there was a touch of sentiment to their choice—a rather bitter sharp-tasting sentiment like an aperitif.
Brown himself had aged considerably, and did not remember very well.
"Old friend of the doctor's, sir? Well, so am I. Getting on—getting on. But I'm waiting till I can squeeze my money's worth out of him. When's that knighthood coming, doctor? I want to be able to tell that story—as good a story as you'd read anywhere. He's got to keep me alive, sir, till it comes true."
He went off to the kitchen tittering to himself over an ancient joke which, together with his "feeling" for the psychological moment in the matter of roasts, was about all that was left him.
Stonehouse, his chin resting in his hand, studied the menu from which they had already chosen.
"When the last Honours List came out, he was quite serious and pathetic about it," he said. "Things move either too slowly or too quickly for old people. He does realize that I make quite a good story as I stand, but he wants the finishing touches—the King clasping me by the hand, or kissing me on both cheeks, or whatever he thinks happens on those occasions—and wedding bells as a grand finale."
"The place seems to have grown shabby," Cosgrave said. "Or perhaps it's only me."
"Oh, no. It is shabby. And perhaps you've noticed, they don't wait here as they used to."
Cosgrave looked directly at his companion, almost for the first time, and caught a spark in the eyes that stared into his—a rather dangerous spark, which cleverer people than himself had found difficult to make sure of. Then he laughed flatly.
"You can see how funny it is now——"
"I always did."
"—because you were so sure it would pan out—like this. How long is it?"
"About eight years."
"My word! Let's—let's look at one another and take stock."
Stonehouse sat back and bore the inspection with a faint smile. He knew himself, and how he impressed others. The eight years had done a great deal for him. His strength had cast its crudeness and had attained a certain grace—the ease of absolute control and tried confidence in itself. He still dressed badly—indifferently, rather—but his body had toned down to the level of the fine hands, which he held loosely clasped upon the table.
He looked at once very young and very fine drawn and, as Cosgrave thought, a little cruel.
"You seem—awfully well and prosperous, Robert. And a sight better looking."
Stonehouse laughed. All he said in reply was:
"And you look prosperous and ill. What was it? Enteric?"
Cosgrave shrugged his thin shoulders. He was still flamboyantly red-headed and generously freckled, but now that the first flush of excitement had ebbed, his face showed a parchment yellow. His eyes, wistful in their setting, were faded, as though a relentless tropical sun had drunk up their once vivid, boyish colouring.
"Oh yes, that and a few other trifles. I think I've housed most West African bugs in my time. Everyone had them, but I was such poor pasture that I got off better than most. Three of my superiors died of 'em, and I stepped right into their shoes. It pays, you see, if you can hold out. People like a fellow who isn't always clamouring to come home—and you bet I never did. But, finally, I took an overdue leave and a hunk of savings and trekked back. I'd always planned it—a good time, you know—but somehow it hasn't come off. I expect I left it too long. In the end I didn't really want to come at all—wanted to lie down and die, but hadn't the strength of mind to insist. I'd been in London a week before I wrote you—just drifting round—too weak-kneed to take the first step. I tore up that idiotic note three times."
"Well, as long as you posted the fourth effort," Stonehouse said, "it's all right."
They fell then unexpectedly into one of those difficult silences which beset the road of friends who have been separated too long. The past stood at their elbow like an importunate and shabby ghost. And yet it was all they had to lead them back into the old intimacy.
"We've got too much to say," Cosgrave broke out at last, with a painful effort, "too much ground to cover—and I dare say we don't want to cover it. If we'd written—but I never heard from you after that one letter—after Miss Christine's death."
"I was ill," Stonehouse explained, eating tranquilly. "I got through my finals with a temperature which would have astonished my examiners, and then I went to pieces altogether. Had to go into hospital myself. A nervous breakdown. Three months I had of it. They were very decent to me, and when I came out they got me a berth as ship's doctor on one of the smaller transatlantic liners. I got hold of things again and pulled them my way. But I didn't want to look back. My illness had made a definite break—I wanted to keep free."
Cosgrave nodded. He had been playing with his food, and now a look of disgust and weariness came into his thin face.
"I can understand that. I suppose it would have been better if I'd left well alone, and not written at all."
"It wouldn't have made much difference," Stonehouse said: "A week or two. Sooner or later we'd have run into one another. People who've been at school together always seem to. And you and I especially."
"I don't know. I was always a poor specimen—I never meant much to you."
Stonehouse looked up at him and smiled. This time it was an unmistakable smile and rather charming, like a warm line of light falling across his face.
"I was awfully glad to get your letter," he said. "I'd begun to worry rather."
Cosgrave flushed up.
"That's—that's about the nicest thing that's happened to me for a long time. I'd probably cry with pleasure—only I don't seem able to feel much anyway. It's those damn bugs, I suppose!"
"I'll pull you out of that."
"Got me diagnosed already?"
"It's not very difficult."
"I suppose—I suppose you're an awful swell, Stonehouse."
"Not yet. I'm better at my job than a great many men who are swells. But I'm young—that'll cure itself. Oh, yes—I'm all right. Things have gone on coming my way. I'll tell you about it sometime."
Cosgrave's eyes had rounded with their old solemn admiration.
"A fashionable West-End surgeon—oh, my word! I say, have you got a bed-side manner tucked away somewhere?"
"No. That's not fashionable for one thing, and for another, it wouldn't suit my style. I'm not interested in people. I'm interested in their diseases. They know it, and rather like it." A touch of chill scorn showed itself for a moment in his face. "They're frightened of me. I'm as good as an electric shock to their lethargic, overfed carcasses. They can't get over a young man with his way to make who wipes his boots on them. They have to come back for more."
Cosgrave gave his little toneless laugh.
"I wish to God you'd frighten me. You know, when I felt how rotten I was I thought of you. You always bucked me up—I believe I had a fool idea that I'd find you in some scrubby suburban practice. Shows the bugs must have got into my brain too, doesn't it? Now I suppose I'll have to ask you to reduce your fees."
"I'll let you down easy. Say, a guinea a consultation!"
"I could manage that—if you don't want to consult too often. I've got my bit saved. Not much to squander on out there, except whisky, and I never took to that. Besides—my father's dead. He didn't mean to leave me his money—you know how he loathed me—but there was a mix-up over the will that was to cut me out—not properly witnessed or something. Anyhow, I came out into a few thousand. Rather a joke on the old man, wasn't it?"
"One might almost hope for another life if one were sure he were grinding his teeth over it."
A faint perplexity flickered across the sallow face.
"Oh, I don't know. I don't seem to bear him any particular grudge now. Perhaps it would be better if I could. When one's young one judges very harshly. Parents and kids don't understand each other—not really—and don't always love each other either, if the truth were known. Why should they? The old man and I were like strangers tied to one another by the leg. I used to think if I could pay him back for all the beastly times he gave me I'd die happy. But I don't feel like that now. I expect he was pretty miserable himself. There's too much of that sort of thing for us to wish it on to one another."
"You're very tolerant," Stonehouse said. "I'm not. But then I haven't inherited anything." He stopped abruptly and his manner hardened. But Cosgrave did not pursue the subject. His interest had suddenly slumped into what was evidently an habitual apathy, and only when they had paid their bill and drifted out into the street did he revert for a moment to the past.
"And the Gang—and Frances Wilmot?" he asked. He looked shyly at his companion's profile, which showed up for a moment in a bold, tranquil outline against the lamplight. It betrayed nothing.
"We might walk back to my rooms and talk in peace. Oh—Francey Wilmot? I don't know much. She went abroad—finished her course very late—she was always a bit of a dilettante. People with money usually are."
Cosgrave said no more. He knew all he wanted to know. It saddened him. Somehow he had counted on that half-divined romance, had played with it in his fancy as with a kind of vicarious happiness.
3
On board the S.S.Launcestonthere had arrived, an hour before sailing, an American gentleman—a certain Mr. Horace Fletcher, who, having been called home suddenly, had had to take what accommodation he could get on the first available boat. Two days later he had lain unconscious, strapped to the captain's table, whilst the ship's doctor, a young man, himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat performance—under the circumstances a masterpiece.
It was the nearest possible approach to a medical advertisement. Mr. Fletcher was a member of a well-known New York family, and the papers had given the story, with fantastic details as to the ship's doctor's career, a first-page prominence. Mr. Fletcher himself had proved to be both generous and grateful. In assessing the value of his own life at 1,000 pounds, he had argued with good humour and good sense, he had erred on the side of modesty, and Robert Stonehouse, having weighed the argument gravely, had accepted its practical conclusion as just and reasonable. He had taken rooms, thereupon, if not actually in Harley Street, at least under the ramparts, fitted them out with the most modern surgical appliances that his capital allowed, and had sat down to wait. Fortunately he had learnt the art of starving before. He slept in a garret, and the bottom drawer of the handsome mahogany desk in his consulting-room knew the grim secret of his mid-day meals. But in six months the tide had turned. Doctors had remembered him from his hospital days when, if they had not liked him, they had learnt to respect his genius and his courage, and had sent him patients. The patients themselves, oddly enough, took a fancy to this gaunt, very serious young man, who so obviously cared nothing at all about them, but whose interest in their diseases was almost passionate. And within two years the tide had brought him in sight of land.
This was what he had meant by "getting hold of things again and pulling them his way." There was perhaps something rather simple in a theory of life which had necessitated so much suffering on the part of Mr. Fletcher in order that Dr. Stonehouse might take the first long stride in his career. But Cosgrave, listening to Stonehouse's own account of the incident, saw in it only an example of a strange, inexorable truth. What men called "Fate" was the shadow of themselves. They imposed their characters upon events, significant or insignificant, willingly or unwillingly. Beyond that there was no such thing as Fate at all.
They stepped back from the crowd into the shelter of the Piccadilly Tube. They had been walking the streets for an hour, and as much of their lives as they were able to tell one another had been told. Now they were both baffled and tired out. Of what had really happened to them they could say nothing, and their memories, disinterred in a kind of desperate haste ("Do you remember that row with Dickson about my hair, Robert?") had crumbled, after a moment's apparent vitality, into a heap of dust. It was all too utterly dead—too unreal to both of them. The things that had mattered so much, which had seemed so laughable or so tragic, were like the repetition of a story in which they could only force a polite interest. Their laughter, their exclamations, sounded shallow and insincere.
And yet it was borne in upon them that they did still care for one another. They had had no other friendship to compare with this. Strictly speaking, there had been no other friends. There had been acquaintances—people whom you talked to because you worked with them.
Robert Stonehouse had always known his own loneliness. His patients believed in him; his colleagues respected him. Their knowledge of him went no further than the operating theatre where they knew him best. He had reckoned loneliness as an asset. But to feel it, as he felt it now beneath this stilted exchange, was to become aware of a dull, stupid pain. He found himself staring over the heads of the people, and wishing that Cosgrave had never come back. And Cosgrave said gently, as though he had read his thought and had made up his mind to have done with insincerities:
"You're not to bother about me, Robert. It's been jolly, seeing you again and all that, but we'd better let it end here. It always puzzled me—your caring, you know, about a hapless fellow like myself. It's against your real principles. I'm a dead weight. I couldn't give anyone a solitary water-tight reason for my being alive. I think you did it because you'd got your teeth into me by accident and couldn't let go. I don't want you to get your teeth into me again."
"I don't believe," Stonehouse said, with an impatient laugh, "that I ever let go at all."
His attention fixed itself on the illuminated sign that hung from the portico of the Olympic Theatre opposite, and mechanically he began to spell out the flaming letters:
"Gyp Labelle—Gyp Labelle!" At first the name scarcely reached his consciousness, but in some strange way it focused his disquiet. It was as though for a long time past he too had been indefinitely ill, and now at an exasperating touch the poisoned blood rushed to a head of pain. He felt Cosgrave plucking at his sleeve, fretfully like a sick child, raised to a sudden interest.
"I say, Stonehouse, don't you remember?"
"The Circus? Yes, I was just thinking about it. It's not likely to be the same though."
"Why not? She was a nailer. Oh—but you didn't think so, did you? It was the woman on the horse—the big barmaid person—I forget her name—Madame—Madame——"
It was ridiculous—but even now it annoyed him to be reminded of her essential vulgarity. There was a glamour—almost a halo about her memory because of all that he had felt for her. A silly boy's passion. But he would never feel like that again.
"Well, she could ride, anyhow. I don't know what your long-legged favourite was good for."
"She made me laugh," Cosgrave said. He asked after a moment: "Have you ever wanted anything so much as you wanted to go to that Circus, Stonehouse?"
"Oh, yes—crowds of things!"
"I don't believe it somehow. I know I haven't. Oh, I say, I wish I could want again like that—anything—to get drunk—to go to the dogs—anything in the world. It's this damnable not wanting. Do you know I've been trying every night this week to drift into that show—just to see if it were really that funny kid. I felt I ought to want to. Why, even the fellows down in Angola had heard of her."
"She's probably well known in hotter places than that," Stonehouse remarked.
"Yes—so I gathered. That's what made them so keen. They used to talk of her—telling the wildest yarns, as though it did them good just to think there was someone left alive who had so much go in them. Queer, isn't it? Do you remember what a susceptible chap I used to be—that poor little Connie—what's-her-name, whom I nearly scared out of her five senses? Well, I've not cared a snap for any woman since then. And I want to—I want to. I'd be so awfully happy if I could only care for some nice girl and marry her. There was someone on the boat—such a jolly good sort—and I think if I only could have cared she'd have cared too. But I couldn't. I tried to work myself up—but it was like scratching on a dead nerve—as though something vital had gone clean out of me."
His voice cracked. Stonehouse, startled from his own reflections, became aware that Cosgrave, whose apathy had hung about them like a fog, hiding them from each other, was on the point of tears—of breaking down helplessly in the crowded entrance. And instantly their old relationship was re-born. He took him by the arm, sternly, authoritatively, as he had always done when little Rufus Cosgrave had begun to flag or cry.
"You're coming home with me. When you're fit enough we'll do the show opposite and make a night of it. We'll see what going to the devil can do for you."
"Perhaps she'd make me laugh again," Cosgrave said, quavering hysterically.
4
At any rate he had kept faith with himself. That theatre-night with Frances Wilmot had been the first and last until now, and now assuredly he did not care any more. But it made him remember. How intoxicated he had been! He had walked home like a man translated into a strange country—words had rushed past his ears in floods of music, and the silver and black streets had been magic-built. Was it his youth, or had Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment? She had gone, and he was older—but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in himself. It was in the atmosphere about him—in the stale air, stamped on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps the spirit which had driven them into these dark boxes to gaze open-mouthed, crying or laughing, through a peep-hole into a world of ideal happiness, or even ideal sorrow, was dead and gone like their faith in God and every other futile shadow which they had tried to interpose between themselves and truth. This that remained was perhaps no more than a tradition—a convention. When people were bored or unhappy they said: "Let's go to a theatre!" and when they came out they wondered why they had been, or what they had hoped for.
Reality was beginning to press hard on men. It was driving them into an iron cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape. Suicide and madness, obscure and hideous maladies of the brain herded in it. Perhaps, after all, there had been some value in those old fairy stories. And he remembered, with a faint movement of impatience, Francey Wilmot's final shaft: "If there isn't a God you'll have to make one up." But even if a man were to juggle with his own integrity, turn charlatan, there was no faith-serum which you could inject into a patient's veins.
Cosgrave sat limply in his stall, and by the reflected light from the stage Stonehouse could see his look of wan indifference. He was no better. All day long he lay on his bed in the small spare room Robert had given him and stared up at the white ceiling. There was a crack, running zig-zag from the window to the door, which reminded him, so he said, of a river in Angola, a beastly slimy thing trailing through mosquito-infested swamps and villainous-tangled jungles. When he dozed it became real, and he felt the heat descend on him like a sticky hand, and heard the menacing drone of the mosquitoes and the splash of oars as unfriendly natives who had tracked him along the water's edge shot out suddenly from under the shadow of the mango trees in their long boats—deadly and swift as striking adders.
And then, near the door, the river broke off—poured into the open sea—or fell over a cataract—he did not know what—and he woke up with a sweating start and took his medicine. He was so painstakingly docile about his medicine that Robert Stonehouse guessed he had no faith in it. Sometimes indeed he had an idea that Cosgrave was rather sorry for him, very much as old people are sorry for the young, knowing the end to all their enthusiasms. It was as though he had travelled ahead, and had found out how meaningless everything was, even his clever friend's strength and cleverness.
So he did not get better. And the forces that Robert Stonehouse had counted on had failed. He had been a successful physician outside his specialty and his sheer indifference to his patients as human beings had been one of his chief weapons. He braced them, imposing his sense of values so that their own sufferings became insignificant, and they ceased to worry so much about themselves. But with Cosgrave he was not indifferent. Some indefinable element of emotion had been thrown into the scales, upsetting the delicate balance of his judgment.
And his old influence had gone too. It had failed him from that moment in Connie Edwards' room when suddenly Cosgrave had realized the general futility of things.
"I'll see him through all the same," Stonehouse thought, with a kind of violence, "I'll pull him through."
After the first few moments he had ignored the scene before him. It was boring—imbecile. Even to him, with his contempt for the average of human intelligence, it seemed incredible that the gyrating of a few half-naked women and the silly obscenities of a comedian dressed in a humourless caricature of a gentleman should hold the attention of sane men for a minute. Now abruptly the orchestra caught hold of him, shook him and dragged him back. It was playing something which he had heard before—on a street barrel-organ, and which he disliked now with an intensity for which he could give no reason. It was perhaps because he wanted to remain aloof and indifferent, and because it would not let him be. It destroyed his isolation. His pulse caught up its beat like the rest. His personality lost outline—merging itself into the cumbrous uncouth being of the audience.
Though it was a rhythm rather than a tune it was not rag-time. Rag-time Stonehouse appreciated. He recognized it as a symptom of themal du siecle, a deliberate break with the natural rhythm of life, a desperate ennui, the hysterical pressure upon an aching cancer. Ragtime twitched at the nerves. This thing jostled you, bustled you. It was a shout—a caper—the ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay of its day, riotous and vulgar. It was the sort of thing coster-women danced to on the pavements of Epsom on Derby night.
The stage, set with a stereotyped drawing-room, was empty as the curtain rose. Two hands, dead white under their load of emeralds, held the black hangings over the centre doorway—then parted them brusquely. Stonehouse heard the audience stir in their seats, but there was only a faint applause. No one had come to the theatre for any other purpose than to see her, but they knew her history. And, after all, they were respectable people.
Cosgrave caught him by the arm.
"Oh, my word—it's her right enough!"
She stood there, motionless, her fair head with its monstrous crest of many-coloured ostrich feathers flaming against the dead background. Her dress was impudent. It winked at its own transparent pretence at covering a body which was, in fact, too slender, too nervously alive to be quite beautiful (Stonehouse remembered her legs—the long, thin legs in the parti-coloured tights, like sticks of peppermint, belabouring the rotund sides of her imperturbable pony). But her jewels clothed her. Their authentic fire seemed to blaze out of herself—to be fed by her. And each one of them, no doubt, had its romance—its scandal. That rope of pearls in itself was a king's ransom. People nudged each other. It was part of the show that she should flaunt them.
She had been a plain child, and now, if she was really pretty at all, it was after the fashion of most French women, without right or reason, by force of some secret magnetism that was not even physical. Her wide mouth was open in a rather vacant, childish smile, and she was looking up towards the gallery as though she were expecting something. "Hallo, everyone!" she said tentatively, gaily. They stared back at her, stolid and antagonistic, defying her. She began to laugh then, as she laughed every night at the same moment, spontaneously, shrilly, helplessly, until suddenly she had them. It was like a whirlwind. It spared no one. They were like dead leaves dancing helplessly in its midst. Even Stonehouse felt it at his throat, a choking, senseless laughter.
He saw Cosgrave lean forward, and in the half light he had a queer, startled look. With his thick red hair and small white face he might have been some sick thing of the woods scenting the air in answer to far-off familiar piping's. He made Robert Stonehouse see the faun in Frances Wilmot's room, the room itself and Frances Wilmot, with her chin resting in her hands, gazing into the fire. The picture was gone almost before he knew what he had seen. But it was knife-sharp. It was as though a hand fumbling over a blank wall had touched by accident a secret spring and a door had flown wide open, closing instantly.
"I'm Gyp Labelle;If you dance with meYou must dance to my tuneWhatever it be."
She jumped into the incessant music as a child jumps into a whirling skipping-rope. She had a quaint French accent, but she couldn't sing. She had no voice. And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture of good-humoured contempt and danced. But she couldn't dance either. It was a wild gymnastic—a display of incredible, riotous energy, the delirious caperings of a gutter-urchin caught in the midst of some gutter-urchin's windfall by a jolly tune. A long-haired youth leapt on to the stage from the stage-box, and caught her by the waist and swung her about him and over his shoulder so that her plumes swept the ground and the great chain of pearls made a circle of white light about them both.
"Those pearls!" Stonehouse heard a man behind him say loudly. "Prince Frederick gave them to her. And then he shot himself. They belonged to the family. He had no right, of course, but she wanted them."
He could feel Cosgrave stir impatiently.
It went on, as it seemed to him, for an incredible length of time. It was like a prairie fire that spread and blazed up, higher and brighter. And there was no escape. He had a queer conviction that his was the only static spirit in the whole theatre, that secretly, in their hearts, the audience had flung themselves into the riot with her, the oldest and staidest of them, as perhaps they had often wanted to do when they heard a jolly tune like that. It was artless, graceless. One only needed to let oneself go.
"I'm Gyp Labelle,Come dance with me."
The jaded disgust and weariness were gone. Something had come into the theatre that had not been there before. Nothing mattered either so much or so little. The main business was to have a good time somehow—not to worry or care.
She had whirled catherine-wheel fashion, head over heels from end to end of the stage. The long-haired youth swept the hair from his hot, blue-jowled face in time to catch her, and they stood side by side, she with her thin arms stretched up straight in a gesture of triumph, her lips still parted in that curiously empty, expectant smile.
Then it was over. Once the curtain rose to perfunctory applause. People settled back in their seats, or prepared to go. It was as though the fire had been withdrawn from a molten metal which began instantly to harden. A woman next to Stonehouse tittered.
"So vulgar and silly—I don't know what people see in her."
"I want to get away," Cosgrave said sharply. "It's this beastly closeness."
He looked and walked as though he had been drinking.
Although the show was not over, the majority of the audience had begun to stream out. Two men who loitered in the gangway in front of Stonehouse exchanged laconic comments.
"A live wire, eh, what?"
For some reason or other Stonehouse saw clearly and remembered afterwards the face of the man who answered. It was bloated and full of a weary, humorous intelligence.
"Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself!"
5
Cosgrave scarcely answered his companion's comments. He withdrew suddenly into himself, and after that he shirked the subject, understandably enough, for if he had had illusions on her account they must have been effectively shattered. But also he ceased to lie all day on his bed and stare up at the mosquito-infested river of his nightmare. He grew restless and shy, as though he were engaged with secret business of his own of which Stonehouse knew nothing, and of which he could say nothing. Yet Stonehouse had caught his eyes fixed on him with the doubtful, rather wistful earnestness of a child trying to make up its mind to confide. (There was still something pathetically young about Rufus Cosgrave. Now that his body was growing stronger, youth peered out of his wan face like a famished prisoner demanding liberty.)
What he did with himself during the long hours when Stonehouse was in his consulting-room or on his rounds Stonehouse never asked. At night he sat at the study window of his friend's flat (shabby and high up since all spare money was diverted to other and better purposes), and looked over the roofs of the houses opposite, smoking and watching the dull red glow that rose up from the blazing theatres westwards.
"It is a fire," he said once, "and all the cold, tired people in London come to warm their hands at it."
Robert Stonehouse went on with his writing under the lamplight.
"Are you cold?"
"Not now." He added unexpectedly: "You think I'd be all right, don't you, if only you could have a go at my tonsils or my adenoids? I believe you're just waiting to have a go at them."
"Your tonsils are septic," Stonehouse agreed gravely. "I told you so, but I wouldn't advise anything drastic until you're stronger. We'll think about it in a month or two. You're better already."
Cosgrave chuckled to himself. In the shadow in which he sat the chuckle sounded elfish and almost mocking.
"Oh, yes, I'm better!"
Stonehouse took his first holiday for three years, and carried Cosgrave off with him to a rough shooting-box in the Highlands lent him by a grateful and sporting patient, and for a week they tramped the moors together and stalked deer and fished in the salmon river that ran in and out among the desolate hills. The place was little more than a shepherd's cottage, growing grey and stubborn as a rock out of the heather, and beyond that proffered them occasionally by a morose and distrustful gillie they had no help or other companionship. They won their food for themselves, cooked it by the smoking fire, and washed heroically in the icy river water. A sting of winter was already in the wind and a melancholy and bitter rain swept the hills, giving way at evening to unearthly sunsets. They saw themselves as pioneers at the world's end. And Stonehouse, who had calculated its effect on Cosgrave, was himself caught up in the fierce, rough charm of that daily life. He who had never played since that circus night played now in passionate earnest. He proved a good shot, and, for all his inexperience, an indomitable and clever hunter. His close-confined physical energy could not shake itself. He liked the long and dogged pursuit, the cruel, often fruitless struggle up the mountain-sides, the patient waiting, the triumph of that final shot from a hand unshaken by excitement or fatigue. A stag showing itself for an instant against the sky-line called up all the stubborn purpose in him; then he would not turn back until either his quarry had fallen to him, or night had swallowed them both.
And Cosgrave, half forgotten, tagged docilely at his heels, or lay in the wet heather on the crest of a hill overlooking the world, and watched and waited with strange, wide-open eyes. But he never gave the signal. He shot nothing. His failure seemed to amuse and even please him. A faint, excited colour came into his cheeks, lashed up by the wind and rain. And once, a hare running out from under his feet, he gave a wild "halloo!" like a boy and set off in pursuit, headlong down the stony hillside, his gun at full cock, threatening indiscriminate destruction.
"You might have killed yourself," Robert said angrily. But Cosgrave laughed, his eyes narrowed to blue-grey slits as though he did not want Stonehouse to see all that was in them.
"I shouldn't have minded," he panted, "going off on the crest like that—I wanted to run—I forgot."
"Well, for the Lord's sake, don't forget."
But for an instant at least he knew what Cosgrave meant. It had been the sight of that downward rushing hill and the sudden choking exultation. He had felt it too—that night in Acacia Grove in pursuit of the Greatest Show—and once again. He could smell the scent of the trees and the young grass blowing in his face.
And at the bottom there had been a mysterious wood like a deep, green pool.
Then on the eighth day Cosgrave disappeared. He had set out in the early morning for the nearest station to fetch their letters and fresh provisions, and at dusk a village youth reached Stonehouse with a note which had been scrawled in such haste that it was almost illegible. It was as though Cosgrave had yielded suddenly and utterly to a prolonged pressure.
He had to go back to town. It was something urgent. Stonehouse was not to bother. He would be all right now.
The next day Stonehouse stalked and brought down his first "Royal." This time the chase had cost him every ounce of his endurance, and in the chill dusk he stood watching the gillie at his work on the lovely body (still so warm and lissom that one could almost see the last sorrowful heaving of its golden flanks) with a kind of stolid triumph as though now he had wiped out that other failure, for he realized that he had been both too sanguine and too impatient. When you were angling a man with a sick brain back to health, you had to go slowly—delicately.
"It's because I care," he thought, half amused and half angry. "And why do I care? It's as he said—a rotten habit."
But he returned to town. He tracked Cosgrave to his former lodging-house, where a stout, heavily-breathing landlady showed every readiness to be communicative and helpful.
"Yes, sir—he's here again—I think he was expecting you—mentioned your name—he's out now and won't be back till late—dinner at the Carlton, he said. If you'd like to leave a note, sir——"
She led him upstairs and watched him with a fat amusement as he stood silent and frowning on the threshold.
"Itisa fair mess," she admitted blandly. "I was just trying to get things a bit together when you rang, sir. I'm to throw away all that old stuff, he said. A reg'lar new start he's making—anda lively one, I don't think. Theatres and supper parties ever since he's been back, sir, and right glad I've been to see it, though I don't 'old with carryings-on, in a general way. But after them there tropiks he'd need a change. He was that down, sir, when he first came, I didn't know what to think."
The room might have belonged to a young dandy returned to London from the wilds of Central Africa. It was littered with half-open boxes, new suits, a disorderly regiment of shining, unworn boots and shoes, a pile of ties that must have been chosen for sheer expensiveness. (Stonehouse remembered the spotted affair with which Cosgrave had wooed Connie Edward's approval.) The shabby suit in which Stonehouse had first met him had been flung with the other cast-offs into a far corner. It was all very young and reckless and jolly. One could see the owner, as he rampaged about the room, whistling and cursing in a good-humoured haste.
"'Ere's 'is writing-table; I'll just make room for you, sir——"
He stopped her.
"It doesn't matter. If he's to be at the Carlton I'll probably look him up myself."
"Dining early, he said, sir—seven o'clock."
"Yes—thank you."
A folded, grey-tinted letter lay half hidden in the general melee. It had a bold, irrepressible look, as though it were aware of having blown the room to smithereens and was rather amused. Stonehouse could see the large, sprawling hand that covered it. He touched it, not knowing why—nor yet that he was angry. Something that had been asleep in him for a long time stirred uneasily and stretched itself.
"Ladies"—his companion simpered—-"always the ladies, sir."
Stonehouse laughed.
An hour later he was waiting for Cosgrave in the Carlton lounge. He had never been in the place before—or in any place like it—and it confused and astonished him. He was like a monk who had come unprepared into the crude noise and glitter of a society desperately pleasure-seeking. He could regard the men and women round him with contempt, but not with indifference, for they represented a force against which he had not yet tried himself except in theory. And they set a new standard. Here his life and his attainments were of no account. What mattered was that he wore his travelling clothes, and that he stood stockily in the gangway like a man who does not know what is expected of him. It was ridiculous, but it was true that he became ashamed.
But he held his ground stubbornly. He was not aware of any definite plan or expectation. If he had asked himself what he intended he would have said he meant to look after Cosgrave, who was in a bad way. As a friend and as a doctor he had the right. He would not have admitted that his own personality had become involved, that he had felt himself obscurely challenged.
Then he saw Cosgrave. He saw him before his companion, though for everyone else she obscured him utterly. She walked a few steps ahead, a bizarre, fantastic figure, her fair head with its deep band of diamonds lifted audaciously, the same fixed smile of childish expectancy on her oval, painted face. Her dress had left vulgarity behind. It was too much a part of herself—in its way too genuine—to be merely laughable. It was like her execrable dancing, the expression of an exuberant, inexhaustible life. As she walked, with short impatient steps, she swayed the great ostrich-feather fan and twisted her rope of pearls between her slender fingers. The open stare that greeted her seemed to amuse and please her.
And Cosgrave. Saville Row, Stonehouse reflected rapidly and contemptuously, must have been bribed to have turned out such perfection at such short notice. Too much perfection and too new. An upstart young rake. No, not quite that, either. Pain had lent an elusive beauty to the plain and freckled face, and happiness had made it lovable. It was obvious that he was trying to suppress his pride and astonishment at himself and not succeeding. The corners of his mouth quivered shyly and self-consciously, and the wide-open eyes were fixed with an engaging steadfastness on the figure in front of him as though he knew that if he looked to the right or left he would give himself away altogether. Stonehouse could almost hear his voice, high-pitched and boyish.
"Oh, I say, Robert, isn't it wonderful—isn't she splendid?"
Stonehouse himself stood right across their path. It was accidental, and now he could not move. He had grown to rely too much on his emotional inaccessibility, and the violence and suddenness of his anger transfixed him. This woman had trapped Cosgrave. She had caught him in the dangerous moment of convalescence—in that rebound from inertia which carries men to an excess incredible to their normal conscience. And she was infamous. She had broken one man after another.
She could not have overlooked Stonehouse. Apart from his conspicuous clothes, his immobility and white-set face must have inevitably drawn her attention to him. Her eyes, very blue and shadowless, met his stare with a kind of bonhomie—almost a Masonic understanding—and the uncompromising antagonism that replied seemed to check her. She hesitated, then as he at last stood back, passed on still smiling, but mechanically, as though something had surprised her into forgetting why she smiled.
Cosgrave followed her. He brushed against Stonehouse without recognition.
In that moment Stonehouse's anger ran away with him. Thrusting aside the protests of a puzzled and rather frightened waiter he chose a table that faced them both. Cosgrave, blindly absorbed, never looked towards him, but twice she met his eyes, still with a faintly puzzled amusement, as though every moment she expected to penetrate a mask of crude enmity to a no less crude admiration and desire. Then she spoke to Cosgrave laughingly, as Stonehouse knew, with the light curiosity of a woman who has met something tantalizingly novel, and Cosgrave turned, uttered an exclamation, and a moment later came across. He acted like a man suffering from aphasia. He seemed totally oblivious of the immediate past. They might have been casual friends who had met casually. He was radiant.
"What luck your being here. I didn't know you went in for frivolity of this sort—if you call it frivolous dining in solitary state. Come over and join us. We're just having a bite before the show. You remember Mademoiselle Labelle, don't you?"
Stonehouse nodded assent. He left his table at once. He seemed frigidly composed, but he was sure that she would not be deceived. She knew too much about men—that was her business—and she meant to pay him out, make him seem crude and absurd in his own eyes.
"It's Stonehouse—my old friend—I was telling you about him—we don't need to introduce you, Mademoiselle."
She gave him her hand, palm down, to kiss, and he turned it over deliberately. The fingers were loaded to the knuckles. He reflected that each of these stones had its history, tragic, comic or merely sordid. He let her hand drop. He saw that the affront had not touched her. Perhaps others had begun like that.
"Ce cher docteur—'e don't like me," she complained pathetically to Cosgrave. "'E sit opposite to me and glare like a 'ungry tiger. Believe me, I grow quite cold with fear. Tell me why you don't like me, Monsieur?"
"He was only wanting to be asked," Cosgrave broke in with his high, excited laugh. "Why, he introduced us. I was all down and out—couldn't decide which bridge to chuck myself off from—and he lugged me into your show. He said——"
"Well, what 'e say?"
Cosgrave blushed.
"He said: 'Let's see what going to the devil can do for you.'"
She jerked a jewelled thumb at him, appealing to Stonehouse.
"'E 'as cheek, that young man. 'E send in 'is card to my dressing-room, saying 'e got to meet me.Comme ca! As though anyone could just walk in! I was curious to see a young man with cheek like that. So I let 'im come.Et nous voila!" She leant across to Stonehouse, speaking confidentially, earnestly. "But you—c'est autre chose—monsieur est bien range—an artist perhaps for all that—'e see me dance and think perhaps, 'Voyons—she cannot dance at all—nor sing—nor nozzings. Just enjoy 'erself.' You think I don't deserve all I get,hein?"
"I think," said Stonehouse smiling, "that there are others in your profession less fortunate, Mademoiselle."
As, for instance, that woman in the hospital—Frances Wilmot's protegee. Queer how the memory of that ruined, frightened face peering over the bed-clothes and begging for life should come back to him after eight years. And yet the connexion was obvious enough. He looked at Mademoiselle Labelle with a new interest. It was impossible that she should have read his thoughts, but he knew by the little twist of her red mouth that she had understood his insult. She seemed to ponder over it dispassionately.
"That's true—c'est bien vrai, ca. I 'ave been lucky. I shall always be lucky. Everybody knows that. They say: 'Our Gyp, she will 'ave a good time at 'er funeral.' No, no. Monsieur Rufus, I will not drink. If I drink I might dance—'ere on this table—and ze company is so ver' respectable. Listen." She laid her hand on Stonehouse's arm as unconsciously as though he had been an old friend. "Listen. They play ze 'Gyp Gal-lop.' That is because I am 'ere. Ze conductor, 'e know me—he like 'is leetle joke.C'est drole—every time I 'ear it played I want to get up and dance and dance——" She hummed under her breath, beating time with her cigarette.
"I'm Gyp Labelle;If you dance with me. . . ."
Obviously she knew that the severely elegant men and women on either hand watched her with a covert, chilly hostility. But there was something oddly simple in her acceptance of their attitude. Therein, no doubt, lay some of her power. She was herself. She didn't care. She was too strong. She had ruined people like that—people every whit as hostile, and self-assured, and respectable—and had gone free without a scratch. She could afford to laugh at them, to ignore them, as it pleased her.
(And what would Frances Wilmot with her wrong-headed toleration, have urged in extenuation? A hard life, perhaps? Stonehouse smiled ironically at himself. The old quarrel was like an ineradicable drop of poison in the blood.)
She smoked incessantly. She ate very little. And as time went on she seemed to draw away from the two men into a kind of secret ecstasy of enjoyment like some fierce animal scenting freedom. The sentences she dropped were shallow, impatient, even stupid. And yet there was Rufus Cosgrave with his hungry eyes fixed on her, trapped by the nameless force that lay behind her triviality, her daring commonness.
She rose to go at last.
"And you take him with you,Monsieur le docteur. If 'e sit many more nights in ze front row 'e find out, too, I can't dance, and then I break my 'eart. Besides, I 'ave my reputation to think of in this ver' propaire England,hein?"
"I'm coming with you," Cosgrave said quietly.
She shrugged her shoulder.
"Eh bien, what can I do? They are all ze same. Good-bye,Monsieur le docteur. You scare me stiff. But I like you. Nest time I 'ave ze tummy-ache I ring you up.
"I shouldn't—if I were you."
"Why? You give me poison, p'raps?"
"I might," he said.
1
So Rufus Cosgrave disappeared, like an insignificant chip of wood sucked into a whirlpool, and this time Stonehouse made no attempt to plunge in after him. With other advanced and energetic men of his profession he stood committed to a new enterprise—the creation of a private hospital, which was to be a model to the hospitals of the world—and he had no time to waste on a fool who wanted to ruin himself. But though he never thought of Cosgrave, he could not altogether forget him. At night he found himself turning instinctively towards the window where the delicate, rather plaintive profile had shown faintly against the glow of the streets, and the empty frame caused him a sense of unrest, almost of insecurity, as though a ghost had risen to convince him that the dead are never quite dead, and then had vanished.
He took to returning to his consulting-rooms, where he regained his balance and his normal outlook. The sober reality of the place thrust ghosts out-of-doors. Here was no lingering shadow of poverty to recall them. The bright, cold instruments in their glass cases, the neatly ordered japanned tables, the cunning array of lights were there to remind him that he was a man who had made a record career for himself and who was going farther. In the day-time he took them as a matter of course, but now he regarded them rather solemnly. He went from one to another, handling them, testing them, switching the lights of special electrical devices on and off, like a boy with a new and serious plaything. There was no one to laugh at him, and he did not laugh at himself. He stood in the midst of his possessions, a little insolently, with his head up, as though he were calling them up one by one to bear him witness. He was self-made. He had torn his life out of the teeth of circumstance. There was not an instrument, not a chair or table in the lofty, dignified room that he had not paid for with sweat and sacrifice and deprivation. No one had given him help that he had not earned. Even in himself he had been handicapped. The boy he had been had wanted things terribly—silly, useless, gaudy things that would have ruined him as they had ruined his father. He remembered how in the twilight of Acacia Grove he had listened to the music of far-off processions, and had longed to run to meet them and march with the jolly, singing people, and how once it had all come true, and he had lied and stolen.
Once only. Then he had stamped temptation under foot. He had become master of himself. And now he was not tempted any more by foolish desires. He meant to do work that would put him in the front rank of big men.
And, thinking of the old struggle, he threw out his hand, as he had done that night when he had met Francey Wilmot, and clenched the slender, powerful fingers as though he had life by the throat, smiling a little in the cold, rather cruel way that Cosgrave knew—a theatrical gesture, had it been less passionately sincere.
It was in his consulting-room that Cosgrave found him after a prolonged, muddle-headed search that had lasted till close on midnight. Cosgrave himself was drunk—less with wine than with a kind of heady exhilaration that made him in turn maudlingly sentimental or recklessly hilarious. And yet there was a definite and serious purpose in his coming—a rather pathetic desire to "put himself right," to get Stonehouse, who leant against the mantleshelf watching him with a frank contempt, to understand and sympathise.
"Of course—you're mad with me—you've got every right to be—it was a rotten thing to do—bolting like that—beastly ungrateful and inconsiderate. It was just because I couldn't explain. I knew you thought it was the fresh air and—and hunting down those poor jolly little beggars—and all the time it was just a girl and a blessed tune running through my head."
He began to hum, beating time with tipsy solemnity, and even then the wretched song brought something riotous and headlong into the subdued room.
The door seemed to have been flung violently open with an explosive gesture, as though some invisible showman had called out: "Look who's here!" and the woman herself had catherine-wheeled into their midst, standing there in her exotic gorgeousness, with her arms spread out in salutation and her mouth parted in that rather simple smile. Robert could almost smell the faint perfume that surrounded her like a cloud. It was ridiculous—yet for the moment she was so real, that he could have taken her by the shoulders and thrust her out.
"And you did want me to get better, didn't you?" Cosgrave pleaded wistfully, "even if it wasn't with your medicine. And in a sort of way it was your medicine, wasn't it? You made me go to see her."
Stonehouse had to sit down and pretend to rearrange his papers in order to hide how impatient he felt.
"My professional vanity isn't wounded, if that's what you're getting at. If you were better I'd be very glad. As far as I can see you're only drunk."
"I know—a little—I'm not accustomed to it—but it's not that, Robert. Really, it isn't. I'm jolly all—the time—even in the early morning. Seem to have come back to life from a beastly long way off—all at once—by special aeroplane. I don't think I've felt like this since—since——"
"Since Connie Edwards' day," Robert suggested. "But I expect you've forgotten her."
Cosgrave stared, round-eyed and open-mouthed and foolish.
"Connie——? No—I haven't. You bet I haven't. Often wonder what became of her. She was a jolly good sort."
"You didn't think so by the time she'd finished with you."
"I was an ass. A giddy, hysterical ass. I didn't understand. Poor old Connie! She could just swim for herself—but not for both of us. And I scared her stiff—tying myself round her neck like that."
Stonehouse cut him short.
"Nobody could accuse Mademoiselle Labelle of being a poor swimmer," he said. (He wondered at the same moment whether there was something wrong with him. He was so intently conscious of her. He could see her lounging idly in the big chair opposite, so damnably sure of herself and amused. He wanted to insult and, if possible, hurt her.)
"You're awfully down on people, Robert. Hard on 'em. Often wonder why you haven't chucked me off long ago. But that's an old story. You ought to like her for being able to swim well. It's what you do yourself."
"I don't mind her swimming well," Robert returned. "But I understand that she's been able to drown quite a number of people better able to look after themselves than you are. As far as you're concerned, it seems—rather a pity."
Cosgrave shook his head. A certain quiet obstinacy, not altogether that of intoxication, came into his flushed face. And yet he looked sorry and almost ashamed.
"I'm not going to drown. You know—I hate standing out against you, Robert. You've been so—so jolly decent to me—and I believe in you—more than in anything in the world. Always have done. If you said 'the earth's square,' I'd say, 'Why, yes, so it is—old chap!' But this—this is different—it's like a dog eating grass—a sort of instinct."
"Instinct!" Robert echoed ironically. "If you know where most instincts lead to——" He stopped, and then went on in a cold, matter-of-fact tone, as though he were diagnosing a disease. "It's not my business—but since you've come here I'd be interested to hear what you think is going to be the end of it all. I might persuade you to look facts in the face. By position you're a little suburban nobody, who was pushed out to West Africa to become a third-rate little trader. You've survived, and you've got a little money to burn. To you it seems a fortune. But it won't pay this woman's cigarette bills. She makes you ridiculous."
"I am ridiculous," Cosgrave interrupted patiently. "I always have been, you know. I expect I always shall be. I'm the square peg in the round hole—and that's always comic. But she doesn't laugh at me. She's just let me join in like a good sport. I know I'm out of place, too, among her smart pals—you needn't rub it in—but she doesn't seem to make any difference, I might be the smartest of the lot. I tell you, when I think of the good times I've had, I feel—I feel"—absurd and drunken tears came into his eyes—"as though I were in church—I'm so awfully grateful."
"Her smart pals pay pretty dearly for their good times. It will be time to be grateful when she's had enough of you." It escaped him against his will. He knew the futility of such taunts which seemed to betray an anger too senseless to be admitted. He did not care enough to be angry.
"You—you don't understand, old chap. Seems cheek—my saying that to you. But you're not like other people—you don't need the things they have to have to keep going. And, anyhow, she's not responsible for the asses men make of themselves." He was becoming more fuddled as the warmth of the room closed over his wine-heated brain. But his eyes had changed. They had narrowed to two twinkling slits of gay secretiveness. "More things in heaven and earth than you dream of, old chap. But you don't dream, do you? Never did. Got your teeth into facts—diseases—and getting on—and all that. What's a song and a dance to you? But I wish you liked her, all the same. P'raps you do, only you won't own up. She liked you, you know. Fact is, it was she sent me along to dig you out."
At that Stonehouse was caught up sharply out of his indifference. He flushed and thrust his hands into his pockets to prevent them from clenching themselves in absurd resentment.
"What do you mean?"
Cosgrave nodded. But he looked suddenly confused and rather sulky, like a play-tired child who has been shaken out of its sleep to be cross-examined.
"Well—some people would be jolly flattered. There's to be a big beano on her birthday—a supper party behind the scenes—and she said: 'You bring along your nice, sad, little friend—ce pauvre jeune homme.' You know, Stonehouse, it made me laugh, her describing you like that. I said: 'You don't need to be sorry for Robert Stonehouse. He can keep his own end up as well as anybody.' But she said: 'Ce pauvre jeune homme.' I couldn't get her to see you were a damned lucky fellow." He dropped back into the corner of the chesterfield and yawned and stretched himself. "I want you to come too. Do you good. P'raps she's right. P'raps you've had a rotten time in your own way. Though I don't know—I'd be happy enough, if I were you—always seem to come out on top—not to care for any damn thing on earth, except that—not even Francey Wilmot—or even me—just a sort of pug-dog you trailed behind on the end of a string—a sort of mascot."
He was going to sleep. He waggled his arm feebly, groping for Stonehouse. "Say you'll come. I'd be awfully proud—show you off, you know. Always was—awfully proud—have such a pal."
He was the very figure of stupid intoxication as he lay there with his crumpled evening clothes and disordered hair—and yet not ugly either, but in some way innocent and simple. (Robert could see little Rufus Cosgrave, excited and tired out after the chase to the Greatest Show in Europe, peering through the disguise of rowdy manhood.)
Stonehouse threw a rug over him, resigning himself to the inevitable. But when he had switched off the main lights he gave an involuntary glance over the suddenly shadowed room as though to make sure that the darkness had exorcised an alien and detestable presence.
So she was sorry for him. That, at any rate, was amusing. Or perhaps she thought he was afraid of her in the obscure duel that was being fought out between them.
Cosgrave caught hold of him as he passed.
"The end of it all will be that I'll go back to my old swamp and tell the fellows that I've had a first-rate leave. I'll tell 'em about her, and they'll sit round open-mouthed—thinking I'm no end of a dog—and that they'll do the same next time they get a chance. They'll be awfully bucked to hear there's a good time going after all." He pleaded drowsily: "Say you'll come though, Robert. You're such a brick. I'm beastly fond of you, you know."
Robert Stonehouse withdrew his hand sharply from the hot, moist clasp. (How he had run that night! As though the devil had been after him instead of poor breathless little Cosgrave with his innocent confession.)
"Oh, I'll come," he said.
2
After all, nothing changed very much. Grown-up people masqueraded. They pretended to laugh at the young fools they had been and were still behind the elaborate disguise of adult reasonableness and worldly wisdom. For Robert Stonehouse, at any rate, it was ridiculously the old business over again—children whose games he despised and could not play, despising him.
It seemed that she had invited everyone and anyone whose name had come into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy, green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.