"Ah, you don't know Francis," said Christopher. "It's all romantic impulses that set him going—Rachel romantic impulse on one side, getting back to the family romantic impulse on the other. He knew if he went off with her that getting back to the family would be over for ever as far as he was concerned. He knew that he'd never cease to regret it.... John Beaminster coming to him gave him what he'd been waiting for, longing for. He seized it——"
"Yes, but it was more than that," said Roddy slowly. "It all lies with Rachel. He never got close to her any more than I've done. I know now that she's fond of me, but it's by the child I'll hold her and by my helplessness, nothin' else. And she'll have her wild moments when myself and everythin' about me will seem simply impossible, just as if she'd gone off with Breton she'd have had her comfortable domestic sort of longin's and hatedhimand everythin' abouthim. I believe Breton knew—just as I knew—that never tryin' to hold her was the way to keep her, and he'd havehadto have her if he'd gone off with her....
"Anyway, Rachel wouldn't be so adorable if there wasn't a lot of her that no one man could master. But I've been given all the tricks in the game by bein' laid up like this—just when I thought I'd lost all worth havin' in life and never a chance of a kid again!... Funny thing, Life!
"But she's mine! Christopher, and no one can take her. Breton's got his idea of her; thereisa bit of her that he stirred that I never could touch, but it don't matter—she's the most wonderful creature on this earth and I'm the luckiest beggar."
"She'll be quieter," said Christopher, "now that the Duchess is gone. They were always conscious of one another...."
"And now there'll be the kid instead. If he's a boy I swear he shall be the best rider, the best sportsman in this bloomin' old world—not that I'd mind a girl, either. I'd like to have a girl—just the time for a woman nowadays. Whichever way it is I'll be contented. Not, you know," he added hastily, "that I'm going to be a sort o' blessed angel with domestic bliss and never wantin' to get off this old sofa and the rest—not abitof it—it's damned tryin' and I curse hours together often enough. Peters has the benefit of it. I wasn't born an angel and I shan't die one...."
"Nobody wants you to," said Christopher.
"Well, you needn't worry. But it's funny how I get talkin' nowadays—never used to say a word—now I gas away.... Well, cheers for the new generation, cheers for young Roddy Secundus.... Long life to him!"
"There's one thing," said Christopher, looking at him. "Whatever inspired you, that day you had the scene here, to behave to Frank Breton as you did? To give them both carte blanche—it wouldn't be the way of most husbands confronted with such a question—it was theonlyway for Rachel ... but how did you know her well enough? You'll forgive my saying so, your method as a rule is to drive straight in, let fly all round, and then count the bits."
"If you love anybody," said Roddy, with confusion and hesitation, "as much as I love Rachel you become wonderfully understandin'.... Look here," he broke off, "don't let's talk any more rot. Just drop all jaw about feelin's and such. There's been an awful lot of it lately."
He would say no more; they got the war map and, very happily for the next quarter of an hour, moved flags up and down its surface.
Then came Rachel and, after her, tea. They were a quiet but very happy company during the next half-hour.
"How's Aunt Adela?" asked Roddy.
"Very well, considering," said Rachel. "Of course she's confused and lost her bearings rather. She misses the Portland Place house more than anything, I think—she was there so long. But Uncle Vincent was right; it would have been very bad for her if she'd stayed in it.... She's quiet and depending a lot upon Lizzie——"
When tea was ended Rachel said, "Dr. Chris, I've got something to say to you. I'm going to tear you away from Roddy for five minutes if you'll come upstairs."
"Well, that's a nice sort of thing——" protested Roddy.
"I won't keep him." She took him up to the little drawing-room and as they sat there by the window together he thought of that day when he had told her the Duchess was downstairs with Roddy. They had all travelled a long way since then.
"There's a favour I want you to grant me."
"Anything in the world."
"It's about Francis—" She gave him the name with a little hesitation and with an air of restraint as though about the very whisper penalties could linger.
"You're the best friend that he's got—the best friend any man could have—and I want you to care for him, to look after him, to watch over him. I know," she went on hurriedly, "that you always have done that, but I want you to feel now that you're doing it a little for my sake as well as your own. I want you to be the one link that I've still got with him."
"But Roddy asked him——" began Christopher.
"Oh yes! I know—Roddy was splendid. But of course that can't be. We can't meet, at any rate for years. Besides, that time is so utterly done with. There's only Roddy now for me in all the world. But I know, better, I expect, than you think, how weak Francis is, how much he depends upon what the people whom he cares for say to him—and so I want you——"
"But of course," Christopher said. "He knows that he can count on me whatever happens—he's always known that."
He stopped and waited for her to continue; he saw that she had more to say.
"It's so strange," she said, staring, her eyes deep and black seeing into sacred places that were known only to her, "how grandmother's death has cleared, amazingly, the air. The motive for almost everything has gone. I didn't see—I hadn't the least idea—how all my thoughts and actions and wishes and impulses came from my sense of opposition to her. Francis saw that—knowing that we both hated her—and that was why I was so difficult with Roddy, because I thought that grandmother had arranged the marriage and had him under her thumb—I had no idea of the kind of person Roddy was."
"Nor had I—nor had anyone," said Christopher.
"That whole affair with Francis was in idea—always—more than in fact. I knew, and I believe that he knew, that it was simply a piece of wild rebellion on my part; and on his—well, he's like that, romantic, rebellious, responding in a minute to everything, but wanting, really, all the time to be safe and proper. That day we met in his rooms, we both knew, at heart, that something was missing—something one had to have if one was going to break away altogether. He was always a rebel by force of circumstances, never by real inclination."
She put her hand on Christopher's knee and drew very close to him. "Chris dear, I'm terrified now when I think of how near I was to absolute, complete disaster. If it hadn't been for Roddy's accident and for Lizzie ... Lizzie's been to all of us everything in the world.
"Do you remember once telling me about Mr. Brun's Tiger? I've often thought of it since and it seems to me now that to all of us—for Roddy and Francis and Lizzie and me—the moment of our consciousness came. Ever since that day when they carried Roddy back to Seddon each one of us has had to wait, just holding ourselves in.... But, you know, Dr. Chris, that's the secret of the whole matter. It wasn't I, or Breton, or even Lizzie or Roddy that defeated grandmother—it was simply Real Life. First the War, then Roddy's accident—Roddy's accident most of all. We had, all five of us, been leading sham lives, then suddenly God, Fate, Providence, what you will, steps in, jerks us all back, takes away from all of us what we thought we wanted most, puts us in line with the real thing—our Tiger, if you like. Grandmother simply couldn't stand it. Lizzie and Roddy are real—half of Breton and me, and most of grandmother unreal—Well, Lizzie and Roddy have just put things straight quietly.... Grandmother's generation saw things 'through a glass darkly'—They're gone. It's all going to be 'face to face' now."
Christopher looked at her, smiling. She was so young, so adorably young with her seriousness.
She broke in—"What rot I'm talking! It only comes to this, that I wish now, like anything, that I'd been nicer to grandmamma. One sees things always too late.... I'd like to have another try, to begin with grandmamma again, to be more tolerant, to hate her less. But I expect in the end it would be the same. She'd have had me tied up, without a will of my own, without a word to say!... that was her idea of controlling us all. It's over, it's done with—no one, I expect, will have her kind of power again.... But she was fine! I only see now how fine she was!
"No one, I expect, will have her kind of power again...."
Now she stood away from Christopher, looking at him and also beyond him, as though she were finally, once and for all, surveying, cataloguing that same power—
"She wasn't terrible, she wasn't fine, she wasn't really anything except a kind of peg for all sorts of traditions to hang on to. In herself she was just a plucky, theatrical, obstinate old woman. It was simply the idea of her that frightened us all. I remember the first time that I saw Yale Ross's picture of her—He'd caught all the ceremony and the terror. It was then that I had the first faint suspicion that she didn't, in herself, live up to the picture in the least.
"I suppose," she went on, coming up closer to him, "that that's why no one will ever be like her again—because no one will ever be taken in so completely by shams again, never by the empty shell of anything. But that's just how she influenced us—all of us. Myself, you, Lizzie, Roddy, Francis ... we were all mixed up in it—
"And then the first moment that we really came into contact with her she wasn't anything—wasn't simply there. Do you know, Dr. Chris, seeing her now, just an old sick woman, conscious that everyone was escaping her, I almost love her!... I do indeed!"
She sprang up and stood before him and laughed, crying—
"I'm grown up, Dr. Chris, I'm grown up! It's taken a time, but it's happened at last! Meanwhile I shall be the most perfect wife, the most perfect mother, and when the Tiger is restive there'll be the youngest Seddon to put it all into. Oh! What a child that child will be! Roddy and his impatience, me and my tempers——"
She laughed and for an instant her old fierce defiance was there then, as though some spirit had flashed, before his eyes, through the window into space and freedom it was gone. She herself proclaimed its dismissal.
"It's gone—it's all gone—Dr. Chris. I'm the happiest woman in England!"
But even as she spoke her eyes were wistful; half-seen, half-recalled, eloquent with a colour, a flame that was too fierce for her present world, hung before her the memory of a moment when, in a darkened room, she had caught a letter to her lips, had sunk upon her knees before a passion whose face she had scarcely seen but whose voice she had heard and still now, in her new life, remembered. She had had her moment ... the last strains of its dying music were still in her ears. She caught her breath, then, turning, dismissed it; and, standing back from Christopher, gave him her last word—
"But look after Francis. Be with him as much as you can.... He needs all that you can spare—He's got to be—he's simplygotto be—the success of the family!"
"Third Apparition—A Child Crowned ..."Macbeth.
"Third Apparition—A Child Crowned ..."
Macbeth.
Late on the evening of May 17th Christopher heard of the relief of Mafeking. It was too advanced an hour, he understood, for the town to display its triumph that evening. Let Christopher wait.
The following night Brun, whom he had not seen for many months, appeared. The clocks had struck nine and Christopher was finishing his dinner, when the little man, shining and dapper, pleased and impersonal, was shown in.
"Hullo!" cried Christopher; "thought you were abroad somewhere."
"I saw you at the Duchess's funeral. Of course I was there. What do you suppose? Meanwhile come out now and see your fine people make manifestations."
"Is there a noise?"
"A noise!Mon Dieu!But come and look!"
They went out together. Harley Street was silent and deserted and above it a night sky, scattered with stars, was serenely still. But, beyond the further roofs and chimneys, golden light hovered and a confused murmur, like the buzzing of bees, hummed upon space.
Through Oxford Street a great crowd of people was passing, but it was a crowd hurrying to find some other crowd. Oxford Street was plainly not the meeting-place. There was a good deal of shouting and singing; young men, five abreast, passed, girls with "ticklers" and whistles screamed and laughed and sang; merry bells were ringing, lights flared in the windows and now and again a rocket with a whiz and a shriek flashed into the sky and broke with a little angry splutter into coloured stars.
They crossed into Bond Street, down which other people were hurrying; sometimes a roaring echo of a multitude of discordant voices would be carried to them and then would be hidden again as though some huge door in front of them were swinging to and fro.
At the end of Bond Street, suddenly, as they might turn the corner of some sea road and, instantly, be confronted with the crash of a plunging surf, they met the crowd.
"Look out!" cried Brun, clutching hold of Christopher's arm. "We don't want to get drawn into this!"
Although they had apparently been walking quietly down Bond Street with no crowd about them, they now were pursued, upon all sides, by people. They raised themselves on to a doorstep, hanging there, bending their feet forward, and feeling that if the crowd in front of them were for a moment to give way down they would go!
Meanwhile, along Piccadilly, towards the clubs and Hyde Park Corner, a thick mass of human beings was pressing. This gathering seemed, of itself, to lack all human quality.
A face, a voice, a hand, a cry——these things might now and again, as fish flash in a stream, detach themselves; sometimes a light from a flaring window or an illumination would fling into pale, unreal relief a bundle of faces that represented, at that instant, a piece of human history, but sank instantly back again into chaos.
One might fancy that this was no crowd of human beings, but some new, unknown creature, dragging its coils from the sluggish bed of some hidden river, stamping to destruction as it went.
Then as though one were watching a show, with a click, the human element was back again. There two girls, their hats pushed aside, their hair half uncoiled, their cheeks flushed, their eyes partly bold and partly frightened, were screaming:
"Oo're yer 'itting? Don't again then. Good old England! Gawd save——"
It was not on the whole a crowd stirred only by national joy and pride. It may, in its units, when it first left its many homes, have announced its intention of giving "a jolly 'ooray" for our splendid country and our Beloved Queen, but, once in a position from which there was no returning, once in the hands of a force that was stronger than any felt before, it had forgotten the country and its defeats and successes. Only two courses open. Either admit fear, feel that the breath of you is slowly but quite surely in process of being crushed out of you, feel that your arms and legs are being torn from you, that your ribs are being smashed into powder and that your heart is being pressed as flat as a pancake, let then panic overwhelm you, fight and scream to get out and away from it, see yourself finally falling, trampled, kicked, your face squashed to pulp, your eyes torn out, your breath strangled in your body ... so much for Fear. Or, on the other hand arouse Frenzy!
Be above and beyond your body, scream and shout, rattle rattles and blow whistles, trample upon everything that is near you, smack faces with your hand, pull off clothing and scatter hats and bonnets, scream aloud, no matter what it is that you are screaming, let your voice exclaim that at length, at length, you, a miserable clerk on nothing a week, in the City, are, for the first time in your existence, the Captain of your soul, the ruthless master of a wretched, law-making tyrannous world.... So much for Frenzy!
Either way, be it Frenzy or Fear, the Country has not much to say to it at all. With every moment it seems that from the Circus more bodies, more arms and legs are being pressed and crushed and packed; with every moment the clanging of the bells is louder, the fire in the sky higher and wilder, the singing, the screaming, the oaths and the curses are nearer, the defiance that loss of individuality gives.
"Let's get back," said Brun. He turned, but, at that moment, someone from behind him cried, "Oo are yer shoving there?" He was pushed, with Christopher, half falling, half clutching at arms and shoulders, forward into the street.
They righted themselves, Brun fastened upon Christopher's arm, shouting into his ear, "We'd better go along with the crowd for a bit. We'll get a chance of cutting up Half Moon Street. Can't do anything else."
They were pressed forward. Now, received into the bosom of the crowd, they were conscious both of the human element and of the stronger composite spirit that was mightier than anything human, a creation of the City against whose walls they were now so riotously shouting.
Next to Christopher was a young man in evening dress; his hat had disappeared, his collar was torn, sweat was pouring down his forehead and at the top of his voice he screamed again and again:
"Good old England! Good old England! Good old Bobs! Good old Bobs!" Squeezed up against Christopher's arm was a stout body that looked as though it had once belonged to some elderly gentleman who liked white waistcoats and brass buttons. From somewhere, in obvious connection with these buttons, came a weak, breathless voice: "You'll excuse me hanging on so, sir. It's familiar—not my way—but this crowd ..."
A girl, with crimson face, leant against Christopher, put her arm round his neck, tickled his face with a feather; she screamed with laughter: "Oo-ray! Oo-ray—Oo-bloody-ray!"
"Look out, you swine!" somebody shouted.
"And 'e shouted out, did BobsCome along, you stinking nobs,We will show you—"
"And 'e shouted out, did BobsCome along, you stinking nobs,We will show you—"
Around them, above them, below them there tossed a whirlpool of noise, something outside and beyond the immediate sounds that they were making. Bells, voices, shouts that seemed to have no human origin, the very walls and stones of the City crying aloud.
Then, opposite the entrance to Half Moon Street another crowd seemed to meet them. There was pause. "Get out of it!" "Go the other way." "Damn yer eyes, step off it." "Go back, carn't yer?"
It was then that for the briefest moment and for the first time in his life Christopher was afraid. Someone was pressing into his back until surely it would break, some other was leaning, and driving his chest in, driving it so that the breath flooded his face, his eyes, his nose. Colours rose and fell; someone's evil breath burnt upon his cheeks. Light flashed before him in broad, steady flares.
"Brun, Brun," he cried.
"All right," a voice from many miles away answered him.
He was seized with the determination to survive. They thought that they could "down" him, but they should see that they were mistaken; his rage rising, he was no longer Dr. Christopher of Harley Street, but something savage, lawless beyond even his own control. He drove with his arms; curses met him and someone drove back into him and a ridiculous face with staring eyes that stupidly pleaded and a nose that was white and trembling and a mouth that dribbled at the corners came up against his.
"Keep back, can't you?" someone shouted.
"Brun, Brun," he called again, and then was conscious that bodies were giving way before him. His hand met a stomach covered with cloth and little hard buttons, and then coming against a woman's arm soft and warm, Christopher had instantly gained possession of his soul once more.
"Hope I didn't hurt you," he heard himself saying, then, some barrier of legs and bodies yielding, found that he was flung out, away, stumbling, in spite of himself, on to his knee.
He caught someone by the arm, and it was Brun.
"Good Lord!" said Christopher.
"It's all right," answered Brun. "We're in Half Moon Street. We're out of it."
Somewhere in the peaceful retirement behind the clubs they surveyed one another and then laughed. Brun—the dapper perfect Brun—had a bleeding cheek, a torn waistcoat, and a large and very unbecoming tear in his trousers. He was half angry and half amused—finally a survey of Christopher, with mud on his nose and his collar hanging from one button and revealing a fat red neck, restored his good temper.
"You'd better come back with me," said Christopher, "and be cleaned up."
They went back to Harley Street and half an hour later were sitting quietly in easy chairs, with the house as though it were made of cotton-wool, so silent and hidden was it, about them.
Both men were excited; Christopher had been changed by the events of the last few weeks, and Brun, if he had not been so personally involved, had seen enough to excite his most eager curiosity and speculation.
Brun's sharp little eyes, flashing across the tip of his cigar, sought Christopher's large comfortable face, fell from there over his large comfortable body, down at last to his large comfortable boots.
"Well ... First time I've seen a Continental crowd in England."
"Continental?"
"Always your Englishman, however excited and of whatever rank, knows there are things a gentleman doesn't do. Those people to-night had not that knowledge. Very interesting," he added.
Christopher peacefully smoked, his body well spread out in the chair, his broad rather clumsy-looking fingers clutching devotedly at his pipe.
"So you were at the funeral the other day?"
"I was. I expect I mourned her more sincerely than any of you. I'd never seen her, but she meant a lot to me—as a symbol. And I like symbols better than human beings."
He pulled his body together with a little jerk and leaned forward: "Christopher, do you remember, a long while ago, going into a gallery in Bond Street and meeting Lady Adela Beaminster there and Lady Seddon? It was just after Ross's portrait was first shown."
"I remember," said Christopher, nodding his head. "You were there."
"I was. I was there with Arkwright the African explorer man. I only mention the day because Arkwright was interested in Lady Seddon, wanted to know all about her, and I talked a bit, I remember. My point to him was that there was a situation between that girl and her grandmother that would be worth anybody's watching. I followed it myself for a while and then I lost it. But you're a friend of the family—tell me, Christopher, what happened between those two."
"Nothing," Christopher said, laughing.
"Oh, nonsense," Brun answered. "They were all in it. Something went on. Then Seddon had that accident ... Breton was in it."
But Christopher only smiled.
"Well, if you won't—n'importe—I have my own idea of it all. That girl was a fine girl, and the old woman was fine too—
"But how they must have hated one another!"
He chuckled; then sitting back in his chair, his little eyes on the ceiling, he said almost to himself—"Once, years ago, when I was very, very young and romantic—almost—just for a year or two I loved your Shelley. He was everything—I could quote him by the page.... He's gone from me now, or most of him has, but there was one line that seemed to me then the most romantic thing I had ever read and has remained with me always. It went—'And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood'—It's in the letter to Maria Gisborne, I think—I've quite forgotten what the context is now—it's all pretty trivial and unimportant, but those were the days when I made pictures—I saw it! Lord, Christopher, how it comes back! The wood, very thick, very large, very black, no sun—very still, and the great house behind it, huge and white, with long gardens and green lawns and peacocks, and the Grand Duke, with his powdered wig, and diamond-buckled shoes, his gorgeous suit, his jewelled sword, his snuff and his wine, his silly little dried-up yellow face.
"Then the rabble—dirty, smelling, ill-conditioned fellows—breaking through the silence, tearing up the Wood, knocking down the palace, hanging the Grand Duke from a tree, last of all, setting the whole thing into the most splendid blaze!... Oh! of course that wasn't Shelley's context—hiswas all about boiling a kettle or something—but that's the way I saw it—just like that." Nothing stirred Brun like the sound of his own voice and now he was getting very excited indeed and was waving his hands.
"Yes," said Christopher placidly. "Very dramatic. What does it all mean?"
"Well, this. It seems to me that that's just what's been happening over here. Your Duchess is dead and instead there is to-night's crowd. The Grand Duke is gone and all that was his—now for the fires!"
Christopher, filling his pipe, paused, and then, his voice grave and serious: "Romantics aside, Brun, for a minute. Do you remember your Tiger idea you delivered to me once? I've often thought of it since. You said then that the reason why the Duchess and her times—the Grand Duke and his wood—had got to go was because their policy had been to give the Tigers of the world no liberty—to pretend indeed that they weren't there, and that now the time had come when every man should declare his Tiger, should give it liberty and, whether he restrained it or no, acknowledge its existence.... Well, now—what I want to know is this. What to your thinking is going to come of it all? I'm old-fashioned. I like the old settled laws and customs and the rest of it, and yet I'm not afraid of this new Individualism; but what I expect and what you expect to come of it all are sure to be mightily different things."
"They are," said Brun, laughing. "You see, Christopher, as I've often said to you before, you're a sentimentalist—people matter to you; you're concerned in their individual good or bad luck. Now none of that is worth anything to me. I observe from the outside—always. What I want to see is less muddle, more brain, less waste of time, more progress. I believe the loosing of the Tiger is going to bring that about. That's why I welcome it—I don't care one little damn about your individual—let him be sacrificed every time for the general wisdom. Your Duchess, she was good for her age. Now she is against progress. She vanishes. That crowd of to-night has swept her away.... There'll be a chaos here for a time—people like the Ruddards will mix things up; a woman like Mrs. Strode will destroy as many good people as she can. But the time will come; out of that crowd that we got into to-night a world, ruled by brain, by common sense, by understanding, not by sentiment and confusion, will arise.... May I not be with the good God!"
"'Sentiment and confusion,'" said Christopher, smiling. "That's me, I suppose."
"Well, youaresentimental," said Brun. "You're stuffed with it."
"Do you yourself ..." asked Christopher, "is there no one—no one in the world—who matters to you?"
"Nobody," said Brun. "No one in the world. I think I like you better than anybody; you're the honestest man I know and yet one of the most wrong-headed. Yes, I like you very much; but it would not be true to say that it would leave any great blank in my life if you were to die. Women! Yes, there have been women! But—thank the good God! for the moment only. The Heart—no—The Brain—yes——"
"Well, then," said Christopher, "that's all clear enough. It isn't very wonderful that we differ. People are to me everything. Love the only power in the world to make change, to work miracles; I don't mean only sensual love, or even sexual love, but simply the love of one human being for another, the love that leads to thinking more of your neighbour than yourself—self-denial.
"Self-denial; the only curb for your Tiger, Brun. I've been watching it in a piece of private history, all this last year and a half. There might have been the most horrible mess; self-denial saved it all the time. You'll say that all this is so vague and loose that it's worth nothing."
"Not at all," said Brun politely. "Go ahead."
"Well, then, the reason why I, old-fashioned and Philistine as I am, hail the passing of the Grand Duke with joy—and I cared for the old woman, mind you—is just this. I see some chance at last for the plain man—not the clever man, or the especially spiritual man or the wealthy man—but simply the ordinary man. When I say Brotherhood I don't mean anything to do with associations or meetings or rules—Simply that I believe in an age when a man's neighbour will matter to a man more than himself, when it won't be priggish or weak to help someone in worse plight than yourself, when it will simply be the obvious thing ... when, above all, there'll be no jealousy, no getting in a man's way because he does better than you, no knocking a man down because he sees the world—this world and the next—differently. That's my Individualism, my Rising City, and if you had watched the lives of a few friends of mine during the last year or two as I've watched them you'd know that 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' is the fire that's going to burn all the Grand-Ducal woods in the world in time."
Brun laughed. "You'll be taken in horribly one of these days, Christopher."
"You speak as though I were a chicken," Christopher broke out indignantly. "Man alive, haven't I lived all these years? Haven't I seen the poorest and rottenest and feeblest side of human nature time and time again? But this I know: That it's losing the thing you prize most that pays, it's the pursuit, the self-denial, the forgetting of self that scores in the material, practical world as well as the spiritual, heavenly one. That's where the Millennium's coming from. Brains as well perhaps, but souls first."
"We'll see," said Brun. "A bit of both, I dare say. Anyhow, it's the next generation that's going to be interesting. All kinds of people free who've never been free before, all sorts of creeds and doctrines smashed that seemed like Eternity. The old woods flaming already.Après la Duchesse!...But as for your Love, your Brotherhood, Christopher, I've a shrewd suspicion that human nature will change very little. Unselfishness? Very fine to talk about—but who's going to practise it? Every man for his own hand, now as ever."
"We'll see," answered Christopher. "I'm not clever at putting things into words. If I were to go along to the man in the street and say, 'Look here, I've made a discovery—I've got something that's going to make everything straight in the world,' and he were to say, 'What's that?' and then I were to answer, 'Self-denial. Unselfishness—Love of your neighbour,' he would, of course, instantly remind me that Someone greater than myself had made the same remark a few thousand years ago. He'd be right.... There's nothing new in it. But it's coming new to the world just because the laws and conventions that covered it are breaking. The Tiger in Every Man and Self-denial to curb it ... That's my prophecy, Brun."
Brun gave himself a whisky-and-soda. "No idea you were such a talker, Christopher.... But I'm right all the same."
He held up his glass.
"Here's to the Tiger in the next generation." He drank, then held it up again. "And here," he cried, "to the memory of the last Great lady in England!"
When Brim had gone it seemed that he had left that last toast of his in the air behind him.
Christopher was haunted by the thought of the Duchess, he felt her with him in the room; she stirred him to restlessness so that at last, desperately, he took his hat and went out.
His steps took him, round the corner, to Portland Place; here all was very quiet, a few cabs in the middle of the street, a few lights in the windows, the silver field of stars, in the distance the sky golden, fired now and again into life as a rocket rose shielding beneath its glow all that stirring multitude. Sounds rose—a cry, a shout, singing—then died down again.
He was outside No. 104. He thought that he would ring and see whether Mrs. Newton were in; perhaps she had gone to bed, it was after eleven, but, if she were there, he would take one last look at the Portrait before it was packed up and sent down to Beaminster.
Mrs. Newton unbolted the door and smiled when she saw him—"I was just going to bed—There's only myself and Louisa here—and the watchman."
"I won't keep you, Mrs. Newton," he said. "The fancy just took me to look at some of the pictures once more before they're packed up. Lady Seddon told me that a good many of them were to be packed up to-morrow; they won't look quite the same at Beaminster."
"No, that they won't, sir," said Mrs. Newton. "I shall miss the old house. Just to think of the years; and now, all of us scattered!"
She lit a lamp for him and he went up the stone staircase, found the long drawing-room, and there, on the farther wall, the Portrait.
The furniture, shrouded in brown holland, waited like ghostly watchers on every side of him. The huge house, always a place of strange silences and vast disturbances, multiplied now in its long mirrors and its air of cold suspense as though it were waiting for something to happen, showed its recognition of death and death's consequences.
But the Portrait was alive! As he held the lamp up to it the face leapt into agitation, the eyes were bent once again sharply upon him, the mouth curved to speak, the black silk rustled against the chair.
A host of memories crowded the room, he was filled with a regret more poignant than anything that he had felt since her death.
"Shewasfine! I miss her more than I had any notion that I would! She stirred one up, she made one alive!"
He put the lamp upon the floor and sat down for a minute amongst the shrouded furniture.
His mind passed from Brun's generalizations to the little bundle of people whom he knew—Rachel, Francis, Roddy, Lizzie Rand. To all of them the Tiger's moment had come; and out of it all, out of the stress and suffering and struggle, Rachel's child was to be born—instead of the Duchess the new generation. Instead of this old house, the hooded furniture, the anger at all freedom of thought, the jealousy of all enterprise, the slander and the malice, an age of a universal Brotherhood, of unselfishness, restraint, charity, tolerance ...
Perhaps after all, hewasan old, sentimental fool. There had always been those at every birth and every death who had had their dreams of new human nature, new worlds, new virtues and moralities....
He looked his last at the Portrait—
"I'm nearly as old as you. I shall go soon. But I miss you ... you'd be yourself surprised if you knew how much!"
He took up the lamp and left her.... He said good night to Mrs. Newton and closed the door behind him.
Standing on the steps of the house he looked about him. Portland Place was like a broad river running silently into the dark trees at the end of it. There was a great rest and quiet here.
Southwards the sky flamed, the noise of a great multitude of people came muffled across space with the rhythm in it of a beating song. Rockets slashed the sky, broke into golden stars; the bells from all the churches in the town clashed and, from some great distance, guns solemnly booming rolled through the air.
Christopher, standing there, smiled as he thought of Brun's little picture.
Brun springing up, of course, at the right moment, to point his moral. Brun, who appeared, like some Jack-in-the-box, in city after city, with his conclusion, his prophecy, neat and prepared.
"And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's Wood..."
There was the Wood, there the mob, there the Grand Duke, dead and buried—
Christopher shrugged his shoulders; whatever Brun might say human beings were more than summaries, prophecies, conclusions.
As he looked towards the trees and felt a little breeze caress his face with, he could swear, some salt of the sea, he thought of the human beings who were his friends—Rachel, Roddy, Lizzie, Francis.
And then it seemed to him that, out of the trees, down the shining surface of Portland Place, a figure came towards him—the figure of Rachel's child.
THE WOODEN HORSEMARADICK AT FORTYTHE GODS AND MR. PERRIN
THE WOODEN HORSEMARADICK AT FORTYTHE GODS AND MR. PERRIN
THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTUREFORTITUDE
THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTUREFORTITUDE
1. THE DUCHESS OF WREXE2. THE GREEN MIRROR(In preparation)
1. THE DUCHESS OF WREXE2. THE GREEN MIRROR(In preparation)