From the door of the galleries where the dancing was done, a confused uproar overflowed into the passages, as if several men of powerful physique were banging a number of pokers against a number of saucepans, and blowing whistles, and occasional catcalls, and now and then beating a drum and several sets of huge cymbals, and ceaselessly twanging at innumerable banjos, and at the same time singing in a foreign language, and shouting curses or exhortations or street-cries, or imitating hunting-calls or the cry of the hyena, or uniting suddenly in the final war-whoop of some pitiless Indian tribe. It was a really terrible noise. It hit you like the breath of an explosion as you entered the room. There was no distinguishable tune. It was simply an enormous noise. But there was a kind of savage rhythm about it, which made John think immediately of Indians and fierce men and the native camps which he had visited at the Earl's Court Exhibition. And this was not surprising; for the musicians included one genuine negro and three men with their faces blacked; and the noise and the rhythm were the authentic music of a negro village in South America; and the words which some genius had once set to the noise were an exhortation to go to the place where the negroes dwelt.
To judge by their movements, John thought, many of the dancers had in fact been there, and carefully studied the best indigenous models. They were doing some quite extraordinary things. No two couples were doing quite the same thing for more than a few seconds; so that there was an endless variety of extraordinary motions and extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along the edge of the room, their faces tense, their shoulders swaying faintly like reeds in a light wind, their progress almost imperceptible; they did not rotate, they did not speak, but sometimes the tremor of a skirt or the slight stirring of a patent leather shoe showed that they were indeed alive and in motion, though that motion was as the motion of a glacier, not to be measured in minutes or yards. And some, in a kind of fever, rushed hither and thither among the thick crowd, avoiding disaster with marvellous dexterity; and sometimes they revolved slowly and sometimes quickly, and sometimes spun giddily round for a moment like gyroscopic tops. Then they too would be seized with a kind of trance, or, it may be, with sheer shortness of breath, and hung motionless for a little in the centre of the room, while the mad throng jostled and flowed about them like the leaves in autumn round a dead bird. And some did not revolve at all, but charged straightly up and down; and some of these thrust their loves for ever before them, as the Prussians thrust the villagers in the face of the enemy, and some for ever navigated themselves backwards like moving breakwaters to protect their darlings from the rough seas of tangled women and precipitate men. Some of them kept themselves as upright as possible, swaying gracefully like willows from the hips, and some of them contorted themselves into hideous and angular shapes, now leaning perilously forward till they were practically lying upon their terrified partners, and now bending sideways as a man bends who has water in one ear after bathing. All of them clutched each other in a close and intimate manner, but some, as if by separation to intensify the joy of their union, or perhaps to secure greater freedom for some particularly spacious manœuvre, would part suddenly in the middle of the room and, clinging distantly with their hands, execute a number of complicated side-steps in opposite directions, or aim a series of vicious kicks at each other, after which they would reunite in a passionate embrace, and gallop in a frenzy round the room, or fall into a trance, or simply fall down; if they fell down they lay still for a moment in the fearful expectation of death, as men lie who fall under a horse; and then they would creep on hands and knees to the shore through the mobile and indifferent crowd.
Watching them you could not tell what any one couple would do next. The most placid and dignified among them might at any moment fling a leg out behind them and almost kneel in mutual adoration, and then, as if nothing unusual had happened, shuffle solemnly onward through the press; or, as though some electric mechanism had been set in motion, they would suddenly lift a foot sideways and stand on one leg, reminding the observer irresistibly of a dog out for a walk; or, with the suggestion of an acrobat nerving himself for the final effort of daring, the male would plant himself firmly on both feet while his maiden laboriously leapt a half-circle through the air about the tense figure of her swain. It was marvellous with what unanimity these eccentricities were performed. So marvellous, John thought, that it was impossible to think of them as spontaneous, joyous expressions of art. He imagined the male issuing his orders during the long minutes of shuffling motion, carefully manœuvring into position, sizing up like a general the strategic situation, and then hoarsely whispering the final "Now!" And after that they moved on with all the nonchalance of extreme self-consciousness, thinking, no doubt, "It cost me a lot to learn that—but it was worth it."
The look of their faces confirmed this view, for nearly all were set and purposeful and strained, as men who have serious work in hand; not soulful, not tense with emotion, but simply expressive of concentration. With few exceptions there was nothing of the joy of life in those faces, the rapture of music or of motion. They meant business. And this was the only thing that could absolve many of them from the charge of public indecency; for it was clear that their motions and the manner of their embraces were not the expression of licence or affection so much as matters of technique.
Upon this whirlpool John Egerton embarked with the gravest misgivings, especially as he was conscious of a strange Miss Atholl clinging to his person. Young George Tarrant had immediately plunged into the storm with her sister, and his fair head was to be seen far off, gleaming and motionless like a lighthouse above the tossing heads and undulant shoulders. Stephen had secured Muriel Tarrant, and poor John was very miserable. If he had been less shy, or more intimate with Miss Atholl, he might have comforted himself with the comedy of it all. And if he had been more ruthless he might have bent Miss Atholl to his will and declined to attempt anything but his own primitive two-step. But he became solemn and panic-stricken, and surrendered his hegemony to her, suffering her to give him intricate advice in a language which was meaningless to him, and to direct him with ineffectual tugs and pushes which only made his bewilderment worse. The noise was deafening, the atmosphere stifling, the floor incredibly slippery. The four black men were now all shouting at once, and playing all their instruments at once, working up to the inconceivable uproar of the finale, and all the dancers began to dance with a last desperate fury and velocity. Bodies buffeted John from behind, and while he was yet looking round in apology or anger, other bodies buffeted him from the flank, and more bodies buffeted his partner and pressed her against his reluctant frame. It was like swimming in a choppy sea, where there is no time to recover from the slap and buffets of one wave before the next one smites you.
Miss Atholl whispered, "Hold me tighter," and John, blushing faintly at these unnatural advances, tightened a little his ineffectual grip. The result of this was that he kicked her more often on the ankle and trod more often on her toes. Close beside him a couple fell down with a crash and a curse and the harsh tearing of satin. John glanced at them in concern, but was swept swiftly onward with the tide. He was dimly aware now that the black men were standing on their chairs bellowing, and fancied the end must be near. And with this thought he found himself surprisingly in a quiet backwater, a corner between two rows of chairs, from which he determined never to issue till the Last Banjo should indeed sound. And here he sidled and shuffled vaguely for a little, hoping that he gave the impression of a man preparing himself for some vast culminating feat, a sidestep, or a "buzz," or a double-Jazzspin, or whatever these wonders might be.
Then the noise suddenly ceased; there was a burst of perfunctory clapping, and the company became conscious of the sweat of their bodies. John looked round longingly for Muriel.
But Muriel was happily chattering to Stephen Byrne in a deep sofa surrounded by palms. Stephen, like John, had surveyed the new dancing with dismay, but his dismay was more artistic than personal. He was as much amused as disgusted, and he did not intend, for any woman, to make himself ridiculous by attempting any of the more recent monstrosities.
But, unlike John, he had the natural spirit of dancing in his soul; so that he was able to ignore the freakish stupidities of the scene, and extract an artistic elemental pleasure of his own from the light and the colour and excitement, from the barbaric rhythm of the noise and the seductive contact of Muriel Tarrant. So he took her and swung her defiantly round in an ordinary old-fashioned waltz; and she, because it was the great Stephen Byrne, felt no shame at this sacrilege.
When they had come to the sofa, she talked for a little the idle foolishness which is somehow inseparable from the intervals between dances, and he thought, "I wonder whether she always talks like this. I wonder if she reads my poems. I wonder if she likes them." He began to wish that she would pay him a compliment about them, even an unintelligent compliment. It might jar upon him intellectually, but, coming from her, it would still be pleasing. For it is a mistake to suppose that great artists are so remote from the weaknesses of other men that they are not sometimes ready to have their vanity tickled by a charming girl at the expense of their professional sensibilities.
But she only said, "It's a ripping band here. I hope you'll come here again, Mr. Byrne." And he thought, "What a conversation!" How could one live permanently with a conversation like this? But old John could!
But as she said it she looked him in the eyes very directly and delightfully, and once again there was the sense of a secret passing between them.
Then they went to look for John, and Muriel determined that she would be very nice to him. The next dance was, nominally, a waltz, and that was a rare event. John asked if he might waltz in the ancient fashion, and though she was being conscientiously sweet and gracious to him, and though she had made no murmur when Stephen had done as John would like to do, some devil within her made her refuse. She said that he must do the Hesitation Waltz as other people were doing. The chief point of this seemed to be that you imitated the dog, not by spasms, but consistently. Even the most expert practitioner failed to invest this feat with elegance and dignity, and the remainder, poising themselves pathetically with one leg in the air, as if waiting for the happy signal when they might put it down, would have looked ridiculous if they had not looked so sad. Stephen, revolving wearily with the younger Miss Atholl, wished that the Medusa's head might be smuggled into the room for the attitudes of this dance to be imperishably recorded in cold stone. Then he caught sight of the unhappy John, and was smitten with an amused sympathy. John's study of the habits of dogs had evidently been superficial, and he did not greatly enjoy his first dance with his love. He held her very reverently and loosely, though dimly aware that this made things much more difficult, but he could not bring himself to seize that soft and altogether sacred form in the kind of intimate clutch which the other men affected—Stephen, he noticed, included. It was a maddening complexity of emotion, that dance—the incredible awe and rapture of holding his adored, however lightly, in his arms, the intoxication of her nearness the fragrance of her dress, and the touch of her hair upon his face—and all this ruined by the exasperating futility of the actual dance, the vile necessity of thinking whether he was in time with the music and in time with Muriel, and if he was going to run into the couple ahead, and if there was room to reverse in that corner, and whether he should cock his leg up farther, or not so far, or not at all. He envied bitterly the easy accomplishment of the circling youths about him, who, for all the earnestness of their expressions, had each of them, no doubt, time to appreciate the fact that they held on their arms some warm and lovely girl.
Yet Muriel was very kind and forbearing and instructive, and at the end of it he did feel that he had made some progress, both with his hesitating and his suit. They sat in the interval on the same sofa, and Muriel was still gracious. She told him that he would pick it up very quickly, that it was all knack, that it was all balance, that it was all practice, that no practice was needed. And John believed everything and was much excited and pleased. He thanked her for her advice, and vowed that he would take lessons and become an expert. And Muriel thought, "He will never be able to dance; could I live permanently with a man like that?" She thought what a prim, funny "old boy" he was. But he was a nice "old boy," and that rumour about the maid-servant was positively ridiculous.
The next dance she had promised to Stephen. The four black men were playing a wild and precipitate tune. A certain melody was distinguishable, and it had less of the lunacies of extravagant syncopation than most of their repertoire. But it was a wicked tune, a hot, provocative, passionate tune, that fired a man with a kind of fever of motion. Faster and faster, and louder and louder, the black men played; and though it was impossible for the dancers to move much faster because of the press, their entranced souls responded to the gathering urgency of the music, and they clutched their partners more tightly, and they were conscious no more of the sweat upon their bodies, of their sore toes, or disordered dresses, they forgot for a moment the technical details of the movements of their feet, and they were whirled helplessly on in a savage crescendo of noise and motion and physical rapture towards the final Elysium of licence to which this dance must surely lead them.
Stephen Byrne felt the fever and enjoyed it. He enjoyed it equally as a personal indulgence and as an artistic experience. He held Muriel very close, and found himself dancing with an eager pleasure which surprised him. Yet as he danced, he was noticing his own sensations and the faces of the people about him, the intense faces of the men, the drugged expressions of the women. He saw oldish men looking horribly young in their animal excitement, and oldish women looking horrible in their coquettishness. And he saw them all as literary material. He thought, "This is good copy."
Muriel, he knew, was enjoying it too. Her eyes were half-closed, her face, a little pale, had the aspect of absolute surrender which can be seen in churches. But sometimes she opened her eyes wide and smiled at Stephen. And this excited him very much, so that he watched for it; and when she saw that she blushed. Then he was swept with a hot gust of feeling, and he realized that he was dangerously attracted by this girl. He thought of Margery and the late vows he had made, and he was ashamed. But the mad dance went on, with ever-increasing fury, and the black men returned with a vast tempestuous chord and a shattering crash of cymbals to the original melody, and all those men and women braced themselves to snatch the last moment of this intoxication. Those who were dancing with bad partners or dull partners were filled with bitterness because they were not getting the full measure of the dance; and those who held the perfect partners in their arms foresaw with sorrow the near end of their rapture, and began, if they had not already begun, to conceive for each other a certain sentimental regard. Stephen thought no more of Margery, but he thought tenderly of Muriel and the moment when the dance must end. For when it ended all would be over; he might not hold her in his arms any more, he might not enjoy her loveliness in any way, because he was married, and she was dedicated to John. She was too good for John. But because he was married he must stand aside and see her sacrificed to John or to somebody like John. He must not interfere with that. But he would like to interfere. He would like to kiss her at the end of the dance.
The dance was finished at last, and while they sat together afterwards, hot and exhausted, Muriel said suddenly, "What's all this about Mr. Egerton—and—that maid of yours—? There are some horrid stories going round—Mrs. Vincent—Mother said she wouldn't listen to any of them."
Stephen was silent for a little. Then he said, in a doubtful, deliberate manner:
"Well, I've known John as long as anybody in The Chase, and I know he's a jolly good fellow, but—but—It was an extraordinary affair, that, altogether. I don't know what to make of it." He finished with a sigh of perplexity.
Then he sat silent again, marvelling at himself, and Muriel said no more.
John came up and stood awkwardly before them. He wanted to ask Muriel for the next dance, but he was too shy to begin. His dress-suit was ill-fitting and old, his hair ruffled, his tie crooked, and as she lay back on the sofa Muriel could see a glimpse of shirt between the top of his trousers and the bottom of the shrunken and dingy white waistcoat, where any pronounced movement of his body caused a spasmodic but definite hiatus. His shirt front had buckled into a wide dent. Of all these things poor John was acutely conscious as he stood uncertainly before the two.
Stephen said heartily, "Hallo, old John, you look a bit the worse for wear. How did you get on that time?"
John stammered, "Not very well—I want Miss Tarrant to give me some more—some more instruction." And he looked at Muriel, an appealing, pathetic look. He wished very fiercely that Stephen was not there—so easy and dashing, and certain of himself.
And Muriel had no smile for him. She glanced inquiringly at Stephen, and said, with the hard face of a statue, "I'm sorry, I'm doing the next with Mr. Byrne." And Stephen nodded.
She danced no more with John that night. Sometimes as he sat out disconsolately with one of the Atholl women, she brushed him with her skirt, or he saw her distantly among the crowd. And he looked now with a new longing at the adorable poise of her head upon her shoulders, at the sheen and texture of her hair, at the grace and lightness of her movements, as she swam past with Stephen. He looked after her till she was lost in the press, trying to catch her eye, hoping that she might see him and smile at him. But if she saw him she never smiled. And when he was sick with love and sadness, and hated the Atholls with a bitter hatred, he left the building alone, and went home miserably by the Underground.
July drew on to a sultry end. In the little gardens of Hammerton the thin lawns grew yellow and bare: and there, by the river-wall, the people of The Chase took their teas and their suppers, and rested gratefully in the evening cool. One week after the dance the Byrnes were to go away into the country, and Margery had looked forward eagerly to the 27th of July. But Stephen said on the 25th that he could not come: he had nearly finished the poem "Chivalry," and he wanted to finish it before he went away; and he had much business to settle with publishers and so on: he was publishing a volume ofCollected Poems, and there were questions of type and paper and cover to be determined; and he had a long article forThe Epochto do. All these things might take a week or they might take a fortnight; but he would follow Margery as soon as he might—she could feel sure of that.
Against this portentous aggregate of excuses Margery argued gently and sorrowfully but vainly. And sorrowfully she went away with Nurse and Joan and Michael Hilary. She went away to Hampshire, to the house of an old friend—a lovely place on the shore of the Solent. You drove there from Brockenhurst through the fringes of the New Forest, through marvellous regiments of ancient trees, and wild stretches of heathery waste, and startling patches of hedge and pasture, where villages with splendid names lurked slyly in unexpected hollows, and cows stood sleepily by the rich banks of little brooks. And when you came to the house, you saw suddenly the deep blue band of the Solent, coloured like the Dardanelles, and quiet like a lake. Beyond it rose the green foothills of the Island, patched with the brown of ploughlands and landslides by the sea, and far-off the faint outline of Mottistone Down and Brightstone Down, little heights that had the colour and dignity of great mountains when the light caught them in the early morning or in the evening or after the rain. On the water small white boats with red sails and green sails shot about like butterflies, and small black fishing-craft prowled methodically near the shore. And sometimes in the evening a great liner stole out of Southampton Water and crept enormously along the farther shore, her hull a beautiful grey, her funnel an indescribable tint, that was neither pink nor scarlet nor red, but fitted perfectly in the bright picture of the land and the sea. And all day there were ships passing, battleships and aged tramps and dredgers and destroyers, and sometimes a tall sailing-ship that looked like an old engraving, and big yachts with sails like snow, and little yachts with sails like cinnamon or the skin of an Arab boy. At low tide there were long stretches of mudflats and irregular pools, before the house and far away to the west; and these at sunset were places of great beauty. For the sunset colours of the tumbled clouds, and the subtle green of the lower sky and the bold blue of the cloudless spaces above were in these pools and in the near shallows of the sea perfectly recaptured. In this delicate mosaic of golden pools and rose pools and nameless lights herons moved with a majestic stealth or stood like ebony images watching for fish; and little companies of swans swam up and down with the arrogant beauty of all swans and the unique beauty of swans in sea water: and all the sea-birds of England circled and swooped against the sun or clustered chattering on the purple mud and saffron patches of sand, with a strange quietness, as if they, too, must do their reverence to the stillness and the splendour of that hour.
The sun went down and all those colours departed, but for a sad glow over Dorsetshire and the deep green of the Needles Light that shot along the still surface almost to your feet as you stood in the thick grass above the shore.
Then you went with the sensation of awe into the house; and the house was old and comforting and spacious, with a mellow roof of gentle red; and it was rich with the timber of Hampshire trees. There was a lawn in front of it and a tangled screen of low shrubs and sallow trees; and when Margery stood in the wide window of her room there was nothing but these between herself and the sea; and there was no building to be seen nor the work of any man, only the friendly ships and their lights, and the far smoke of a farm upon the Island, and at night the blinking lamp of a buoy-light in the Channel. To Margery it would have been the perfect haven of contentment and rest—if Stephen had come with her. But he had not come. At night the curlews flew past the windows with the long and sweet and musical cry which no other bird can utter and no man imitate, nor even interpret—for who can say from the sound of it if it be a cry of melancholy or a song of hope or rejoicing or love? But to Margery in those weeks it was a song of absolute sadness, of lost possibilities and shattered dreams, and it was the very voice of her disappointment, her protest against the exquisite tantalization of her coming to this exquisite retreat—and coming alone.
And Stephen in London worked on at "Chivalry." He was beginning to be tired of it now as the end of it came in sight, and it was true that he wanted to be able to leave the whole burden of it behind him when he went away. But that was not the whole reason of his staying at home, and what the whole reason was he had not consciously determined; but faintly he knew that Muriel Tarrant was part of it.
He was tired of the poem now, and was eager to be done—eager to be done with the long labour of execution of an idea no longer fresh with the first fury of inspiration. And now that so much was achieved he was urgent to finish it quickly and give it to the world, lest some other be before him. For poets and all authors suffer something of the terrors of inventors and scientific creators, toiling feverishly at the latest child of their imagination, while who knows what other man may not already have stolen their darling, may not this very hour be hurrying to the Patent Office, filching rights and the patronage of rich men, ruining perhaps for ever by their folly or avarice or imperfection the whole glory of the conception.
Stephen had this sort of secret fear. They seemed so obvious now, his idea and his scheme of execution, though at their birth they had seemed so strange and bold and original. Surely some other man had long since thought of writing a poem like his, was even now correcting his proofs, some mean and barren artist who could never do justice to the theme, but would make it for ever a stale and tawdry thing. Or maybe in the winter there would be a paper shortage or a printers' strike or a revolution, and if his masterpiece had not seen the light by then it would never see the light at all; or at best there would be long months of intolerable waiting, and it would be given to the world at the wrong season, when the world was no longer inspired with the sense of chivalry, when the critics were bored with chivalry, at Christmas time when men looked for lighter fare, or in the spring, when men wanted nothing but the spring.
So all that August he worked, thinking little of Margery, thinking little of any one. But though there was this fever of purpose and anxiety driving him on, day by day the labour grew more wearisome and difficult. Men who go out to offices or factories to do their work think enviously sometimes of the gentler lot of the author, bound by no regulations or hours or personal entanglements, but able to sit down at his own time at his own desk and put down without physical labour or nervous strain the easy promptings of his brain. They do not know with how much terror and distaste he may have to drag himself to that desk, with what agony of mind he sits there. The nervous weariness of writing, the physical weariness of writing, the mental incubus of a great conception that must be carried unformed in the heavy mind month after weary month, for ever growing and swelling and bursting to be born, yet not able to be born, because this labour of writing is so long, the hideous labour of writing and rewriting and correcting, of futile erasions and vacillations and doubt, of endless worryings over little words and tragic sacrifices and fresh starts and rearrangements—these are terrible things. An author is to his work as a rejected lover his love, for ever drawn yet for ever repelled. Stephen sometimes in the morning would almost long to be transformed into a clerk, or a railway porter, some one who need ask little of himself since little is asked of him but the simple observance of a routine; he would have to force himself to sit on at his work, as a man forces himself to face danger or bear pain; he would even welcome interruptions, yet bitterly resent them; for when the words would not come or would not arrange themselves, when nothing went absolutely right, any distraction was sweet which legitimately for a single hour released him from the drudgery of thought; and yet it was hateful, for it postponed yet another hour the end of that drudgery, and in that precious hour—who knows?—the divine ease and assurance might have returned, the maddening difficulties melted away, so strange and fitful are the springs of inspiration.
So all these weeks he worked and saw nobody; he did not see Muriel, though the Tarrants were still at home, and he did not see John, who had gone away to Devonshire with a fellow Civil Servant. But at last in the third week the labour was finished. It was finished at sunset on a breathless evening; he finished it with a glowing sense of contentment with good work done. Then he read it over, from beginning to end. And as he read the glow faded, the contentment departed. The mournful disillusion of achievement began. Here and there were phrases which stirred, passages which satisfied; but for the most part he read his work with a sort of sick shame and disappointment. Who in the wide world could read these stale and wearisome lines? Each of them at one time had seemed the fresh and perfect expression of a fine thought; each of them was the final choice of numberless alternatives; but so often he had read them, so often written them, so often in his head endlessly recited them, in the streets and on the river or in the dark night, that they were all old now, old and dull.
He had learned by long experience to discount a little this gloomy and inevitable reaction, and now as he turned over the final page of spidery manuscript, he tried hard to restore his faith, reminding himself that the world would see his work as he saw it first himself, and not as he saw it now. Anyhow, it was done, and could not be mended any more. Perhaps it would be better when it was typed. But then the drudgery would begin again—the reading and re-reading and alteration and doubt, the weary numbering of pages, the weary correction of typist's lunacies. And after that there would be proofs and the correcting of proofs; then new doubts would discover themselves, and the old doubts would live again; and he would hate it. Yet it would be better then—it would be better in print. Now he was tired of it and would forget it. He felt the impulse to relaxation and indulgence and rest which drives athletes to excesses when their race is run, their long discipline over. He went out into the garden and into the boat, and paddled gently upstream with the tide, under the bank. It was nearly ten and the sun was long down. There was no moon and it was dark on the river with the brilliant darkness of a starry night. He paddled gently past John's house, scarcely moving the oars; past Mr. Farraday's and the two moored barges at the Bakery wharf. He drifted under the fig-tree by the Whittakers', and came near to the house of the Tarrants. The Tarrants' house, like his own, was on the river side of the road, and their garden ran down to a low wall over the water. As he came out from under the fig-tree he looked up over his shoulder at the house; and Muriel Tarrant was in his mind. There was a figure in a white dress leaning motionless over the wall, and as he looked up the figure stirred sharply. Then he began to tremble with a curious excitement, for he saw that it was Muriel herself. He dipped the oars in the water and stopped the boat under the wall.
She said, very softly, "Mr. Byrne?"
He said, "Muriel," and his voice was no more than a whisper. But she heard.
Then there was an intolerable silence, and they stared at each other through the gloom; and nothing moved anywhere but the smooth, hurrying water chuckling faintly round the boat and against the oars and along the wall. They were silent, and their hearts beat with a guilty urgency; and in the thoughts of both was the same riot of doubt and scruple and exquisite excitement.
Stephen said at last,—and in his voice there was again that stealthy hoarseness,—"Come out in the boat!"
She hesitated. She looked quickly over her shoulder at the house, which was quite dark, because her mother and their only servant had gone early to bed. Then without a word she came down the steps. She gave him a hot hand that quivered in his as he helped her down. Quietly he pushed off the boat; but on the Island a swan heard them and flew away with a startling clatter, looking very large against the stars. Still in silence they drifted away under the trees past the Tathams' and past the brewery, and past the Petways' and the ferry and the church. There was something in this silence very suggestive of wrong, making them already confessed conspirators. Muriel somehow felt this, and said at last:
"Mother's gone to bed. I mustn't be long."
Her voice and her words and her low delightful laugh broke the spell of self-conscious wickedness which had held them. They felt at last that they really were in this boat with each other under the stars; it was no fantastic dream but an amusing and, after all, quite ordinary adventure, nothing to be ashamed of or furtive about—a gentleman and a lady boating in the evening on the Thames.
So Stephen steered out into mid-stream and pulled more strongly now, away past the empty meadows, and the first low houses of Barnes, and under the big black bridge, and round the bend by the silent factories. Then there were a few last houses, very old and dignified, and you came out suddenly into a wide reach where there moved against the stars a long procession of old elms, and the banks were clothed with an endless tangle of willows and young shrubs, drooping and dipping in the water. The tide lapped among thick reeds, and there was no murmur of London to be heard, and no houses to be seen nor the lights of houses. It was a corner of startling solitude, forgotten somehow in the urge of civilization; as if none had had a heart to build a factory there or a brewery or a wharf, but had built them resolutely to the east or to the west and all around, determined, if they could, to spare this little relic of the old country Thames.
And here Stephen stopped rowing, and tied his boat to a willow branch; and Muriel watched him, saying nothing. Then he sat down beside her in the wide stern-seat. She turned her head and looked at him, very pale against the trees. And he put his arm about her and kissed her.
It was very hot in that quiet place, and the night lay over them like a velvet covering, heavy and sensuous and still. In each of them there was the sense that this had been inevitable. They had known that it must happen in that breathless moment at the garden wall. And this was somehow comforting to the conscience.
So they sat there for a little longer, clinging tremorously in an ecstasy of passion. A tug thrashed by; there was a sudden tumult of splashing in the willows and in the reeds and the boat rocked violently against the branches. Stephen fended her off.
Then they sat whispering and looking at the stars. It was a clear and wonderful sky and no star was missing. Stephen told her the names of stars and the stories about them. And she murmured dreamily that she saw and understood; but she saw nothing and understood nothing but the marvellous completeness of her conquest of this man, and the frightening completeness of his conquest of her. She had never meant that things should go so far.
And he, as he looked at the stars and the freckled gleam upon the waters and the hot white face of the girl at his side, thought also, "I did not mean it to go so far. But it is romance, this—it is poetry, and rich experience—so it is justified." And what he meant was, "It is copy."
The tide turned at last, and they drifted softly and luxuriously down to Hammerton Reach, and stole at midnight under the hushed gardens of The Chase to the Tarrants' wall. And there again they kissed upon the steps. He whispered hotly, "Tomorrow!" and she whispered, "Yes—if I can—" and was gone.
In the morning there came a letter from Margery, beseeching him to come to her as soon as he could—a pathetic, gentle little letter. She drew a picture of the peace and beauty of the place, and ended acutely by emphasizing its possibilities as an inspiration to poetry.
"Do come down, my darling, as soon as you can. I do want you to be here with me for a bit. I know you want to finish the poem, but this is such a heavenly place, I'm sure it would help you to finish it; I sometimes feel like writing poetry myself here! Joan says that Daddymustcome quick!"
Stephen wrote back, with a bewildered wonder at himself, that he had nearly finished, but could not get away for at least a week. That day he wrote a love-song—dedicated "To M." He had never written anything of the kind before, and it excited him as nothing in "Chivalry" had ever excited him.
All that week the tide was high in the evenings, and on the third day the moon began. And every night, when all Hammerton had gone to their early beds, he paddled secretly to the Tarrants' steps, still drunk with amorous excitement and the sense of stealthy adventure. Every night Muriel was waiting on the wall, slim and tremulous and pale; and they slipped away under the bank to the open spaces where none could see. And each day they said to themselves that this must be the last evening, for disaster must surely come of these meetings and these kisses; and each day looked forward with a hot expectancy to the evening that was to come, that must be the end of this delicious madness. Yet every night he whispered, "Tomorrow?" and every night she whispered, "If I can." And each day he wrote a new love-song—dedicated "To M."
On the seventh day young George came down to see his sister, and, greatly daring, Stephen proposed a long expedition down the river in his motor-boat. So those three set out at noon and travelled down river in the noisy boat through the whole of London. They saw the heart of London as it can only be seen from London's river, the beauty of Westminster from Vauxhall and the beauty of the City from Westminster. And as a man walks eastward through Aldgate into a different world, they left behind them the sleek dignity of Parliament and the Temple and the Embankment and shot under Blackfriars Bridge into a different world—a world of clustering, untidy bridges and sheer warehouses and endless wharves. They felt very small in the little boat that spun sideways in the bewildering eddies round the bridges and was pulled under them at breathless speed by the confined and tremendous tide. They came through London Bridge into a heavy sea, where the boat pitched and wallowed and tossed her head and plunged suddenly with frightening violence in the large waves that ran not one way only but rolled back obliquely from the massed barges by the banks, and dashed at each other and made a tumult of water, very difficult for a small boat to weather. Tugs dashed up and down and across the river with the disquieting quickness and inconsequence of taxi-cabs in the narrow space between the barges and the big steamers huddled against the wharves. The men in them looked out and laughed at the puny white boat plunging sideways under Tower Bridge. There was then an ocean-going steamer moving portentously out, and Muriel was frightened by the size of the ship, and the noise and racket of the wharves, and the hooting tugs, and the mad water splashing and heaving about them. But they came soon past Wapping into a wide and quieter reach; and here there were many ships and many barges, some anchored and some slowly moving, like ships in a dream. All of them were bright with colour against the sky and against the steel-blue water and the towering muddle of wharves and tall chimneys and warehouses upon the banks. The sails of the barges stood out far off in lovely patches of warm brown, and their masts shone like copper in the sun. Tucked away among the wharves and cranes were old, mysterious houses, balconies and lady-like windows looking incongruously over coal-barges.
But it was all mysterious and all beautiful, Stephen thought, in this sunny market of the Thames. He liked the strange old names of the places they passed, and told them lovingly to Muriel—Limehouse Causeway, the Wapping Old Stairs, and Shadwell Basin, and Cherry Garden Pier; and he loved to see through inlets here and there the high forests of masts, and know that yonder were the special mysteries of great docks; for for such things he had the romantic reverence of a boy. But Muriel saw no romance and little beauty in the Pool of London, and her brother George saw less. She saw it only as a strange muddle of dirty vessels and ugly buildings, strongly suggestive of slums and the East End. It was noisy sometimes, and she had been splashed with water which she knew was dirty and probably infected; she felt that she preferred the westward stretches of the Thames, where navigation was less anxious and Stephen was not so preoccupied with his surroundings.
Stephen perceived this and was aware of a faint disappointment. Only when they rounded a bend and saw suddenly the gleaming pile of Greenwich Hospital, brilliant against the green hill behind, did Muriel definitely admire. And then, Stephen thought, it was not because she saw that the building was so beautiful from that angle and in that light, but because it had such an air of cleanliness and austere respectability after the orgy of raffish and commercial scenery which she had been compelled to endure. Or perhaps it was because at Greenwich Pier they were going to get out of the boat.
They came home in the gathering dusk on the young flood. And because of this and because it was Saturday evening they had the river to themselves, and moved almost alone through the silent and deserted Pool. They followed slowly after the sun and saw the Tower Bridge as a black scaffolding framing the last glow of yellow and gold. All the undiscovered colours of sunset and half-darkness lay upon the water, smooth now and velvety, and they fled away in front of the boat as the glow departed. At Blackfriars the moon had not yet come, and Nature had made thick darkness; but man had made a marvel of light and beauty upon the water that left Stephen silent with wonder. The high trams swam along the Embankment, palaces of light, and they swam yet more admirably in the water. There were the scattered lights of houses, and the brilliant lights of theatres, and the opulent lights of hotels, and the regimented lights of street-lamps, and the sudden little lights of matches on the banks, and the tiny lights of cigarettes, where men hung smoking on the Embankment wall, and sometimes a bright, inexplicable light high up among the roofs; and the lights of Parliament, and at last the light of the young moon peeping shyly over a Lambeth brewery—and all these lights were different and beautiful in the dark, and made a glory of the muddy water. The small boat travelled on in the lonely darkness of mid-stream, and to Stephen it seemed a wonderful thing that no other but he and Muriel and her brother George could look as they could upon those magical lights and the magical patterns that the water had made of them. He had a sense of remoteness, of privileged remoteness from the world; yet he had a yearning for pleasant companionship, and itched for the moment when young George was to leave them to go to his Club.
Young George left them at Westminster Pier, and those two went on together in the boat. The lights of Chelsea were as beautiful as the lights of Westminster, and Stephen thought suddenly of Margery's description of evening by the Solent. It was hardly necessary to go so far for loveliness, he thought. He was glad that Muriel was with him, because she too was lovely, but when she clung to him in the old passionate way he kissed her very gently and without fire. For the poetry of all that he had seen that day had somehow purged him of the extravagant fever of the previous nights; and he imagined, unreasonably, that she too would be ready for this refinement of their relations. But she was not. She was tired with the long day, with trying to share an enthusiasm which she did not understand, for colours which she did not see, and lights which after all were only the ordinary lights she saw in the streets on the way to dances; she wanted to have done with that kind of thing now that they were alone again; she wanted to be hotly embraced and hotly kissed. For the end of this adventure was terribly near now. After tomorrow her brother was coming to live at home again; after that there would be no more safety. Tomorrow would be the last night.
Of all this Stephen was but vaguely sensible. She was still a sweet and adorable companion, and his soul was still bursting with poetry and romance, but it was the poetry of the moonlit Thames rather than the poetry of a furtive passion. And because of this, and because he was dimly conscious that she looked for some more violent demonstration than he was able in the flesh to give, he thought suddenly of the Love-Songs which he had made to her, but never mentioned: and he wondered if they would please her. He stopped the engine and let the boat drift. Then, very softly, in a voice timid at first with self-consciousness, but gathering body and feeling as he went on, he spoke for her the words of his Love-Songs. At the end he felt that they were very good, better than he had thought, and waited anxiously to hear what she would say. And she listened in bewilderment. She was flattered in her vanity that a poet should have written them for her; but she did not understand them, and she was not moved or deeply interested.
She said at last: "Hownice, Stephen! Did you really make up all that about me?"
And at that the last flicker of the fire which had burned in him for so many days went out. He saw clearly for the first time the insane unfitness of their intimacy. In the first fascination of his senses, in the voluptuous secrecy of their meetings under the moon, he had asked nothing of her intellect; he had been content with the touch of her hands, with the warm seduction of her kisses. And these, too, were still precious, but they were not enough. They were not enough to a poet on a night of poetry now that his senses were almost satisfied.
So all the way home he held her gently and talked to her tenderly, as he might have talked to Margery. And Muriel saw that she must be content with that for this night, and was happy and quiet beside him.
But when they parted under the wall it was she who whispered, "Tomorrow—the last time," and it was he who whispered, "Yes."
In the morning he woke with a vague sense of distaste for something that he had to do. All that day he had this restless, dissatisfied feeling. And this was in part the first stirring of the impulse to write which came always when he had no work in progress and no great effort forming in his mind.
The weary reaction from the finishing of "Chivalry" was over, and the creative itch was upon him, which could not be satisfied by the making of little Love-Songs. And he felt no more like the making of Love-Songs.
He wished almost that he might hurry immediately down to Hampshire. But his promise for the evening prevented that.
He sat down in the sunny window-seat and thought, pondering gloomily the wild events of these summer months. And as he brooded over them with regret and sadness, and the beginnings of new resolutions, there flashed from them, with the electric suddenness of genuine inspiration, the bright spark of a new idea, a new idea for the new work which he was aching to begin. Thereon his mood of repentance faded away, and the moral aspect of the things he had done dissolved into the background—like fairies at a pantomime; and there was left the glowing vision of a work of art.
He was excited by this vision, and immediately was busy with a sheet of paper—like a painter capturing a first impression—jotting down in undecipherable half-words and initials the rough outline of his plan, even the names of his characters and a few odd phrases. There moved in his mind a seductive first line for the opening of this poem, and that line determined in the end the whole question of metre; for it was an inspired line, and it was in exactly the right metre.
All the afternoon he sat in the shady corner of the garden over the river, dreaming over the structure of this poem. In the evening he began to work upon it; and all the evening he worked, with a feverish concentration and excitement. At about ten o'clock the moon was well up, and the rising tide was lapping and murmuring already about the wall and about the boats. And he did not forget Muriel; he did not forget his promise. He knew that she was waiting for him, silent on the wall. He knew that he was bound in honour, or in dishonour, to go to her. But he did not go. He had done with that. And he had better things to do tonight.
So Muriel leaned lonely over the wall, looking down the river past the fig-tree and the barges, looking and listening. The moon rose high over Wimbledon, and the twin red lights of theStorkwere lit, and the yellow lights twinkled in the houses and bobbed along the bridge, and the great tide rolled up with a rich suggestion of fulfilment and hope. Quiet couples drifted by in hired boats and were happy. But Stephen did not come. And Muriel waited.
St. Peter's clock struck eleven, and still she waited, in a flame of longing and impatience. The dew came down, and she was cold; the chill of foreboding entered her heart. And still she waited. She would wait till half-past eleven, till a quarter of twelve, till midnight. She knew now that she loved this man with a deep and consuming love; it had begun lightly, as a kind of diversion, but the game had turned to bitter earnest. And still she waited.
It was slack water now, and the river stood still, holding its breath. Men passed singing along the towpath on the outer side; the song floated over the water, in sentimental tones of exquisite melancholy. From the Island a wild-duck rose with his mate, and bustled away with a startling whir to some sweet haunt among the reeds. A cat wailed at its wooing in a far garden—a sickly amorous sound. The last pair of lovers rowed slowly past, murmuring gently. Then all was still, and Muriel was left alone, alone of the world's lovers thwarted and forgotten.
Midnight struck, and she crept into the house and into her bed, sick with longing and the rage of shame.
Stephen at midnight went in contentment to his bed. He had written a hundred lines.
Lying in bed he made up his mind to go down to Margery the following Tuesday. But Margery, too, had been making up her mind. She wired at lunch time, and arrived herself at tea. She was tired, she said, of living alone in her Paradise. But she did not scold or question or worry him; so glad she was to be at home again with her Stephen. Stephen also was very glad, astonishingly glad, he felt. He greeted her and kissed her with a tender warmth which surprised them both. This sudden home-coming of his wife, of chattering Joan and bubbling Michael and comfortable old Nurse, and all that atmosphere of staid domesticity which they brought with them into the house seemed to set an opportune seal on his new resolutions, on the final renunciation which he had made last night. It was the one thing he wanted, he felt, to confirm him in virtue.
He took little Joan into the garden to see the rabbits. She was two and a half now, a bright and spirited child, with her mother's fairness and fragile grace, and something of Stephen's vitality. She greeted with delighted cries her old friends among the bunnies, Peter and Maud and Henry, and all their endless progeny, little grey bunnies and yellow bunnies and black bunnies and tiny little brown bunnies that were mere scurrying balls of fur, coloured like a chestnut mare. The rabbit Peter and the rabbit Maud ran out of their corners and sniffed at her ankles, their noses twitching, as she stood in the sun. She stroked them and squeezed them and kissed them, and they bore it patiently in the expectation of food. But when they saw that she had no food, they stamped petulantly with their hind legs and ran off. Then she laughed her perfect inimitable laugh, and tried to coax the tiniest bunnies to come to her with a piece of decayed cabbage; and they pattered towards her in a doubtful crescent, their tiny noses twitching with the precise velocity of their parents' noses, their ears cocked forward in suspicion. When they had eddied back and forth for a little, like playful children defying the sea, they saw that the bait was indeed a rotten one, unworthy of the deed of daring which was asked of them, and they scuttled finally away into corners, where they lay heaving with their eyes slewed back, looking for danger. The rabbit Maud was annoyed by the clatter they made, and, chased them impatiently about the run, nipping them viciously at the back of their necks; and the rabbit Peter, excited beyond bearing by the commotion, pursued the rabbit Maud as she pursued their young. Then they all stopped suddenly to nibble inconsequently at old bits of cabbage, or scratch their bellies, or scrabble vainly on the stone floor, or stamp with venom in the hutches, or lie full length and operate their noses. Little Joan loved them whatever they did, and Stephen, listening and watching while she gurgled and exclaimed, was sensible as he had never been before of the pride and privilege of being a father. The sight of his daughter playing with the young rabbits, young and playful and innocent as they, stirred him to an appropriate and almost mawkish remorse. For the great writer who, by his gifts of selection and restraint, can keep out from his writings all sentimentality and false emotion, cannot by the same powers keep them from his mind. Stephen Byrne, looking at innocence and thinking of his own wickedness, forgot his proportions, forgot the balanced realism which he put into everything he wrote, and swore to himself that by this sight he was converted, that by this revelation of innocence, he, too, would be innocent again.
So they began again the quiet routine of domestic content, and Margery was very happy, putting out of her mind as an artist's madness the strange failure of Stephen to join her in the country. In the third week of September there were printed in the autumn number of a literary Quarterly "Six Love-Songs," by Stephen Byrne, which he had sent in hot haste to the editor on the morning of the Greenwich expedition. There was printed above them the dedication "To M.," and Margery as she read them was touched and melted with a great tenderness and pride. She would not speak of them to him, but she looked up, blushing, at the end of them and said only "Stephen!" And Stephen cursed himself in a hot shame for having thought them and written them and sent them to the paper. But since she liked them so well, and appreciated them as Muriel had never done, and since he persuaded himself that at this moment he might have written the same songs to his wife, so tenderly did he think of her now, he slowly came to forget the vicious squalor of their origin; and in time, when literary friends spoke of them and congratulated him (for they made a great stir) the shame had all gone, and he answered with a virtuous and modest pride, as if indeed they had been written to his wife—and so in fact he almost believed.
All September he worked steadily at the new poem. Very soon Margery asked if she might read as much as he had written. And first he hesitated, and then he said she might not.
Not till that moment did he realize the true character of what he was doing. The idea of the poem was very simple. He had taken the base history of his own life in this amazing summer, and was making of it a romantic and glorious poem. Everything was there—Emily and his cruelty to Emily and the chivalry of John Egerton and his treachery to John, Margery, and Muriel, and his betrayal of both of them, and the second treachery to John in the stealing of Muriel. They were all there, and the deeds were there. But the names they bore were the names of old knights and fine ladies, moving generously through an age of chivalry and gallant ways; and the deeds he had done were invested with so rich a romance by the grace of and imagery and humanity of his verse, and by the gracious atmosphere of knighthood and adventure and forest battles which he wrapped about them, that they were beautiful. They were poetry. Himself in the story was a brave and legendary figure, Gelert by name, and Margery, the Princess, was his fair lady. And he had slain Emily by mischance in a forest encounter with another knight. He had hidden her body in a dark mysterious lake in the heart of the forest; this lake was beautifully described. John, his faithful companion, was present and helped him, and because of the honour in which he held the Princess, he engaged to stay in the forest and do battle with the people of Emily if they should discover the crime, while Gelert rode off on some secret venture of an urgent and noble character. So John stayed, and was grievously wounded. But Gelert rode off to the castle of John's love and poisoned her mind against John, and wooed her and won her and flung her away when he was tired of her; but she loved him still too well to love any other from that day; and when John came to her she cast him out. More, because he was the companion-at-arms of Gelert, and she would do anything to wound Gelert, she sent word to the people of Emily that it was John indeed who had slain Emily, and they sought him out and slew him. But Gelert went home to his castle and swore great vows in passages of amazing dignity, and was absolved from his sins, and ruled the land for a long time in godly virtue, helping the weak and succouring the oppressed. And so finely was all this presented that at the end of it you felt but a conventional sympathy for the unfortunate John, while Gelert remained in the mind as a mixed, but on the whole a knightly character.
It was a lunatic excess of self-revelation, and Stephen was afraid of it. Nothing would have persuaded him to modify in any way his artistic purpose, and in his heart he flattered himself that the romantic disguise of his story was strong enough to protect it from the suggestion of reality. It would stand that test, he was sure. Yet he was not sure—not at any rate just now, with the sordid facts still fresh in his mind. Later, no doubt, when the thing was complete, and he could polish and prune it as a whole, he would be able to make himself absolutely safe. But just now, while the work was still shadowy and formless, he shrank from risking the revelations it might convey. To Margery most of all. Also, maybe, he was a little afraid that she would laugh at him.
And Margery said nothing, but wondered to herself what it might mean.
John came home in the middle of September, and called the same evening at the Tarrants' house. But he was told after a long wait that they were not at home.
The next morning, as he walked to the station, he passed in the street a parcel delivery van. On the front of it were the twin red posters ofI Say, a weekly organ of the sensational patriotic type. It was a paper which did in fact a great deal of good in championing the cause of the under-dog, yet at the same time impressing upon the under-dog the highest constitutional principles. But it had to live. And it lived by the weekly promises of sensation which blazed at the public from the red posters all over England, and travelled everywhere on the front of delivery vans and the backs of buses. There was seldom more than a single sensation to each issue. But the very most was made of it by an ingenious contrivance of the editor, who himself arranged the wording of the posters; for each sensation he composed two and sometimes three quite different posters, cunningly devised so that any man who saw all three of them was as likely as not to buy the paper in the confident belief that he was getting for his penny three separate sensations.
The two posters that John saw ran as follows: one "A Civil Servant's Name," and the other "Our Rotten Detectives." At the station he saw another one specially issued to the West London paper stalls—"Mystery of Hammerton Chase." And at Charing Cross there was yet another—"Who ought to be Hanged?"
John had no doubt of what he would find in the paper. He had wondered often at the long quiescence of the Gaunt family. Clearly they had taken their tale to the editor ofI Say, and had probably been suitably compensated for their trouble and expense in bringing to the notice of the people's champion a shameful case of oppression and wrong.
So John walked on to the station with a strange feeling of lightness in the head and pain in his heart. At Hammersmith there was no copy ofI Sayto be had; at Charing Cross he bought two. The week's sensation was dealt with in a double-page article by the editor, diabolically clever. It set out at length the sparse facts of "The Hammerton Mystery" as revealed at the inquest, with obsequious references to "the genius of Stephen Byrne, the poet and prophet of Younger England"; and it contained some scathing comments on "the crass ineptitude of our detective organization." But it attacked no person, it imputed nothing. The sole concern of the editor was that "months have passed and a hideous crime is yet unpunished. This poor girl went forth from her father and mother, and the young man who had promised to share her life; she went out into the world, innocent and fresh, to help her family in the battle of life with the few poor shillings she could earn by menial services in a strange house. It was not her fault that she was attractive to a certain type of man; but that attraction was no doubt her undoing. She took the fancy of some amorous profligate; she resisted his unknightly attentions; she was done to death. Her body was consigned in circumstances of the foulest indignity to a filthy grave in the river ooze.
"We are entitled to ask—What are the police doing? The matter has faded now from the public memory—has it faded from theirs? It is certain that it has not faded in the loyal hearts of the Gaunt family. At the time of the inquest the public were preoccupied with national events of the first importance, and the murder did not excite the attention it deserved. We have only too good reason to believe that our Criminal Investigation mandarins, supine as ever until they are goaded to activity by the spur of popular opinion, are taking advantage of that circumstance to allow this piece of blackguardly wickedness to sink for ever into oblivion. We do not intend that it should sink into oblivion, etc. etc."
But in the tail of the article lay the personal sting, cleverly concealed.
"But there is another aspect of this vile affair which we are compelled to notice. While the family of the murdered girl are nursing silently their broken hearts; while our inspectors and chief inspectors and criminal investigators are enjoying their comfortable salaries, there is a young man in Hammerton, a public servant of high character and irreproachable antecedents, over whom a black cloud of suspicion is hanging in connection with this crime. We cannot pretend that his evidence at the inquest was wholly satisfactory either in substance or in manner; it was shiftily given, and in the mind of any men less incompetent than the local coroner and the local dunderheads who composed the jury, would have raised questions of fundamental importance. But we are confident that John Egerton is innocent; and we say that it is a reproach to the whole system of British justice that he should still be an object of ignorant suspicion owing to the failure of the police-force to hound down the villain responsible for the crime.
"The fair name of a good citizen is at stake. It must be cleared."
At the office there were whisperings and curious looks; and John's chiefs conferred in dismay on a position of delicacy that was unexampled in their official experience.
John went home early, with hisI Say'scrumpled in his pocket. And there he found the Rev. Peter Tarrant striding about impatiently with a copy open on the table before him. His head moved about like a great bat just under the low roof; his jolly red face was as full of anger as it could ever be.
"Look here, John," he roared, "what are you going to do about this—thisMuck?"
"Nothing."
In truth he had thought little of what he was going to do; he had been too angry and bewildered and ashamed. Only he had sworn vaguely to himself that whatever happened he would stand by his old determination to keep this business from Margery. And, now that the question was put to him, the best way of doing that was clearly to do nothing. He began to think of reasons for doing nothing.
The Rev. Peter thundered again, "Nothing?But youmust—you must do—something." He stuttered with impotent rage and brought his fist down onI Saywith a titanic force, so that the table jumped and the wedgwood plate clattered on the dresser. "You can't sit down under this sort of thing—you must bring an action—"
"Can't afford it; it would cost me a thousand if I won—and five thousand if—if I lost."
"If youlost!" The Rev. Peter looked at him in wonder. John tried to look him straight in the face, but his glance wavered in the shy distress of an innocent man who suspects the beginnings of doubt in a friend's mind.
"Yes—you know what a Law Court is—anything may happen—and I should never make a good show in the witness box, if I stood there for ever."
"I don't care—you can't sit down under it. You'll lose your job, won't you—for one thing?"
"No—I don't know—I can't help it if I do."
"Well, if you don't lose that you'll lose Muriel." The Rev. Peter lowered his voice. "Look here, I want you two to fix things up. I've just been to see her—she looks unhappy—she's lonely, I believe, with that damned old mother of hers. But you can't expect her to marry you with this sort of thing going about uncontradicted."
And at that John wavered. But he thought of Margery and his knightly vow, and he thought of the witness box; of himself stammering and shifting hour after hour in that box; of pictures in the Press; of columns in the Press; of day after day of public wretchedness—the inquest over again infinitely enlarged. And he thought of the open, perhaps inevitable, ignominy of losing a libel action. And he was sure that he was right.
They argued about this for a long time, and the Rev. Peter yielded at last.
But he bellowed then, "Well, you must write them a letter at once. Sit down now, and I'll dictate it. Sit down, will you? By God, it makes me sweat, this!"
John sat down meekly and wrote to the editor ofI Say, as the Rev. Peter commanded. The Rev. Peter dictated in round tones of a man practising a speech:
"'Dear Sir:"'I have seen your infamous article. It is a cruel and disgusting libel. I wish to state publicly that I had nothing to do with the death of Emily Gaunt; that so far as I know no suspicion does rest upon me here or elsewhere; and that, if indeed there is suspicion, it is not in the minds of any one whose opinion I value, and I can therefore ignore it. In any case I should prefer to do without your dirty assistance.'"
"'Dear Sir:
"'I have seen your infamous article. It is a cruel and disgusting libel. I wish to state publicly that I had nothing to do with the death of Emily Gaunt; that so far as I know no suspicion does rest upon me here or elsewhere; and that, if indeed there is suspicion, it is not in the minds of any one whose opinion I value, and I can therefore ignore it. In any case I should prefer to do without your dirty assistance.'"
"Can't say 'dirty'—can we?" said John.
"Why not? Theyaredirt—filth—muck! Well, then—put 'dishonouring'—'your dishonouring assistance.' Go on:
"'I am not a rich man, and I cannot afford to bring an action for libel against you. A successful suit would cost me far more money and trouble than I should like to waste upon it. You, on the other hand, could easily afford to lose and would probably be actually benefited by a substantial increase in your circulation."'I must ask you to print this letter in your next issue and insist also on an unqualified apology for your use of my name."'I am sending this letter to the local Press.'"
"'I am not a rich man, and I cannot afford to bring an action for libel against you. A successful suit would cost me far more money and trouble than I should like to waste upon it. You, on the other hand, could easily afford to lose and would probably be actually benefited by a substantial increase in your circulation.
"'I must ask you to print this letter in your next issue and insist also on an unqualified apology for your use of my name.
"'I am sending this letter to the local Press.'"
The editor ofI Saydid not print this letter, as the Rev. Peter had fondly imagined he would, but he referred in his second article, which was similar to the first, only more outspoken, to "the receipt of an abusive letter from the suspected person."
Slowly that week a copy ofI Sayfound its way into every house in The Chase; and the article was read and discussed and argued about, and the whole controversy of May, which had been almost forgotten, sprang into life again. And the following week the local papers were bought and borrowed and devoured, and John's spirited and courageous letter was admired and laughed at and condemned. The Chase fell again into factions, though now the Whittaker (pro-John) faction was the stronger. For nobody likedI Say, though it was always exciting to read when there was some special excuse for bringing it into the house. Besides, the honour of The Chase was now at stake.
John and the Rev. Peter had reckoned without the generosity and communal feeling of the people of The Chase. They were never so happy as when they had some communal enterprise on foot, a communal kitchen, or a communal crèche or a communal lawsuit, some joint original venture which offered reasonable opportunities for friendly argument and committee meetings and small subscriptions. This spirit had of course unlimited scope during the war, and perhaps it was the communal Emergency Food-Kitchen that had been its most ambitious and perfect expression. But it lived on vigorously after the war. Several of the busiest and earliest workers among the men shared a communal taxi into town every day. There was a communal governess, and one or two semi-communal boats. There was also a kind of communal Housing Council, which met whenever a house in The Chase was to be let or sold, and exerted pressure on the outgoing tenant as to his choice of a successor. Outside friends of The Chase who desired and were desired to come into residence were placed upon a roster by the Housing Council, and when the Council's edict had once gone forth, the outgoing tenant was expected at all costs to see that the chosen person was enabled to succeed him, and if he did not, or if he allowed the owner of the house to enter into some secret arrangement with an outsider, unknown and unapproved by the Council, it was a sin against the solidarity of The Chase.
And there had already been a communal lawsuit, that great case ofStimpson and OthersversusThe Quick Boat Company—an action for nuisance brought by the entire Chase, because of the endless and intolerable noise and smell of the defendant company's motor-boats, which they manufactured half a mile up the river and exercised all day snorting and phutting and dashing about with loud and startling reports in the narrow reach between the Island and The Chase.
Nine gallant champions had stood forward with Stimpson for freedom and The Chase. But all The Chase had attended the preliminary meetings; all The Chase had subscribed; all The Chase and all their wives had given evidence in Court; and before this unbroken, or almost unbroken, front (for there were a few black sheep) the Quick Boat Company had gone down heavily. Judgment for the plaintiffs had been given in the early spring.
So that when it was widely understood that for lack of money John Egerton, a member of The Chase, was unable to defend himself from a scurrilous libel in a vulgar paper, the deepest instincts of the neighbourhood were aroused. A small informal Committee met at once at the Whittakers' house—Whittaker and Mr. Dimple (for legal advice) and Andrews and Tatham and Henry Stimpson. Stephen Byrne was asked to come, but had an engagement.
Mr. Dimple's advice was simple. He said that subject to certain reservations—as to which he would not bother the Committee, since they related rather to the incalculable niceties of the law, and lawyers, as they knew, were always on the nice side (laughter—but not much)—and assuming that Mr. Egerton won his case, as to which he would express no opinion, though as a man he might venture to say that he knew of no one in The Chase—he had almost said no one in London—of whom it would be more unfair—he would not put it stronger than that, for he liked to assume that even a paper such asI Saywas sincere and honest at heart—to make the kind of suggestion which he knew and they all knew had been made in that paper, about Mr. Egerton—a quiet, God-fearing, honest citizen—but they all knew him as well as he did, so he would say no more about that—subject then to what he had said first and assuming what he had just said—and bearing in mind the proverbial—he thought he might say proverbial (Dickens, after all, was almost a proverb) uncertainties and surprises of his own profession, he thought they would not be wildly optimistic or unduly despondent—and for himself he wanted to be neither—if they estimated the costs of the action at a thousand pounds, but of course—
Waking up at the word "pounds"—the kind of word for which they had been subconsciously waiting—the Committee began the process of unravelling which was always necessary after one of Mr. Dimple's discourses. And their conclusion was that it was up to The Chase to subscribe as much of the money as possible, as much at any rate as would enable John Egerton to issue a writ without the risk of financial ruin.
Henry Stimpson was naturally deputed to collect the money. Stimpson was an indefatigable man, a laborious Civil Servant who worked from 10 till 7.30 every day (and took his lunch at the office), yet was not only ready but pleased to spend his evenings and his week-ends, canvassing for subscriptions, writing whips for meetings, or working out elaborate calculations of the amount due to Mrs. Ambrose in money and kind on her resigning from the communal kitchen after paying the full subscription and depositing a ham in the Committee's charge which had been cooked by mistake and sent to Mrs. Vincent. He genuinely enjoyed this kind of task, and he did it very, very well.
Henry Stimpson duly waited on the Byrnes and explained the position. Stephen Byrne had read the articles inI Say, and Margery had read them. And a gloom had fallen upon Stephen, for which Margery was unable wholly to account as a symptom of solicitude for his friend's troubles—especially as they never seemed to see each other nowadays. To her knowledge they had not met at all since the summer holidays.
Nor had they. They avoided each other. This resurrection of the Emily affair, these articles and the new publicity, and now on top of that the prospect of a libel action, was to Stephen like a slap in the face. He had almost forgotten his old anxieties in the absorption of work and the soothing atmosphere of his new resolutions. But he would not go to John; he had been lucky before; he might be lucky again; he would wait. Old John might be trusted to do nothing precipitate.
So he promised to subscribe to the fund for the defence of John Egerton's good name, and Stimpson went away. The money was to be collected by that day week, and on the following Thursday there would be a general meeting to consider a plan of campaign. Stimpson's eyes as he spoke of "a general meeting" were full of quiet joy.