‘Once in the wind of morningI ranged the thymy wold;The world-wide air was azureAnd all the brooks ran gold.’ ”
‘Once in the wind of morningI ranged the thymy wold;The world-wide air was azureAnd all the brooks ran gold.’ ”
‘Once in the wind of morningI ranged the thymy wold;The world-wide air was azureAnd all the brooks ran gold.’ ”
‘Once in the wind of morning
I ranged the thymy wold;
The world-wide air was azure
And all the brooks ran gold.’ ”
“That’s fromA Shropshire Lad,” cried Olivia.
“Of course. So why shouldn’t you have come from the wind of morning, the azure world-wide air or the golden brook?”
“That’s beautiful of you,” said Olivia. “Well, why shouldn’t I? It’s more romantic and imaginative than the commonplace old sea. The sea has been overdone. I used to look at it once a year, and, now I come to think of it, it always seemed to be self-conscious, trying to live up to its reputation. But ‘the wind of the morning——’ Anyhow, here I am.”
“Blown to London by the wind of a Shropshire morning.”
Olivia’s spirit danced in the talk. With his national touch on the lighter emotions, Mauregard drew from her an exposition of the Dryad’s sensations on sudden confrontation with modern life. To talk well is a great gift; to compel others to talk well is a greater; and the latter gift was Mauregard’s. Olivia put food into her mouth, but whether it was fish or flesh or fowl she knew not. When her host broke the spell by an announcement in her ear that he had a couple of boxes for “Jazz-Jazz,” she became aware that she was eating partridge.
Mr. Sydney Rooke talked of women’s clothes, of which he had an expert knowledge. Lady Barraclough chimed in. Olivia, fresh from the welter, spoke as one in authority. Now and again she caught Lydia’s eye across the table and received an approving nod. The elderly General regarded her with amused admiration. She began to taste the first-fruits of social success. She drove in a taxi to the theatre with the Barracloughs and Mrs. Fane Sylvester and sat with them in a box during the first act of the gay revue. For the second act there was a change of company and she found herself next to the General. He had served in India and was familiar with the names of her mother’s people. What Anglo-Indian was not? Long ago he had met an uncle of hers; dead, poor chap. This social placing gave her a throb of pleasure, setting her, at least, in a stranger’s eyes, in her mother’s sphere. The performance over, they parted great friends.
General Wigram and Mrs. Fane Sylvester excusing themselves from going on to Percy’s, the others crowded into Sydney Rooke’s limousine. The crash of jazz music welcomed them. Already a few couples were dancing; others were flocking in from the theatres. They supped merrily. Sydney Rooke pointed out to Olivia’s wondering eyes the stars of the theatrical firmament who condescended to walk the parquet floor of the famous night club. He also indicated here and there a perfectly attired youth as a professional dancer.
“On the stage?”
He explained that they had their professional partners and gave exhibition dances, showing the new steps. They also gave private lessons. It was the way they made their living. Olivia knitted a perplexed brow.
“It doesn’t seem a very noble profession for a young man.”
Sydney Rooke shrugged his shoulders politely.
“I’m with you a thousand times, my dear Miss Gale. The parasite,per se, isn’t a noble object. But what would you have? The noble things of the past few years came to an end a short while ago, and, if I can read the times, reaction has already begun. In six months’ time the noble fellow will be a hopeless anachronism.”
“Do you mean,” asked Olivia, “that all the young men will be rotten?”
He smiled. “How direct you are! Disconcerting, if I may say so. So positive; while I was approaching the matter from the negative side. There’ll be a universal loss of ideals.”
Olivia protested. “The young man has before him the reconstruction of the world.”
“Oh no,” said Rooke. “He has done his bit. He expects other people to carry out the reconstructing business for him. All he cares about is to find a couple of sixpences to jingle together in his pocket.”
“And have these young men who devote their lives to foxtrotting done their bit?”
He begged the question. “Pray be guided by my prophecy, Miss Gale. Next year you mustn’t mention war to ears polite. These young men are alive. They thank God for it. Let you and me do likewise.”
This little supper-table talk was the only cloud on a radiant night. The Vicomte de Mauregard took her to dance. At first she felt awkward, knowing only the simple steps of five years ago. But instinct soon guided her, and for two hours she danced and danced in an unthinking ecstasy. The clattering and unmeaning din which had dazed her on her entrance to the Savoy was now pregnant with physical significance. The tearing of the strings, the clashing of the cymbals, the barbaric thumping of the drum, the sudden raucous scream from negro throats, set vibrating within her responsive chords of an atavistic savagery. When each nerve-tearing cacophony came to its abrupt end, she joined breathlessly with the suddenly halting crow in eager clapping for the encore. And then, when the blood-stirring strings and cymbals crashed out, overpowering the staccato of hand beating hand, she surrendered herself with an indrawn sigh of content to her partner’s arm—to the rhythm, to the movement, to the mere bodily guidance, half conscious of the proud flexibility of her frame under the man’s firm clasp, to something, she knew not what, far remote from previous experience. Strange, too, the personality of the man did not matter. Paul Barraclough, Sydney Rooke, Mauregard, she danced with them all in turn. In her pulsating happiness she mixed them all up together, so that a flashing glance, liable to be misinterpreted, proceeded from a mere impulse of identification. Now and then, in the swimming throng of men and women, and the intoxication of passing raiment impregnated with scent and cigarette smoke, she exchanged an absent smile with Lydia and Lady Barraclough. Otherwise she scarcely realized their existence. She was led panting by Mauregard to a supper table while he went in search of refreshment. He returned with a waiter, apologizing for the abomination of iced ginger ale and curled orange peel, which was all that the laws of the land allowed him to offer. Horse’s neck, it was called. She laughed, delighted with the name, and, after drinking, laughed again, delighted with the cool liquid so tingling on her palate.
“It’s a drink for the gods,” she declared.
“If you offered it, the unfortunate Bacchus would drink it without a murmur.”
“Do you really think it’s so awful?”
“Mon Dieu!” replied the young Frenchman.
Then Lydia came up with a dark-eyed, good-looking boy in tow, whom she introduced, as Mr. Bobbie Quinton and Olivia was surprised to recognize as one of the professionals. She accepted, however, his invitation to dance and went off on his arm. She found him a boy of charming manners and agreeable voice, and in the lightness and certainty of his dancing he far outclassed her other partners. He suggested new steps. She tried and blundered. She excused herself.
“This is the first time I’ve danced for four years.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said he. “You’re a born dancer. You only need a few lessons to bring you up to date. What I find in so many of the women I teach is that they not only don’t begin to understand what they’re trying to do, but that they never try to understand. You, on the other hand, have it instinctively. But, of course, you can’t learn steps in a place like this.”
“I wonder if you could give me some lessons?”
“With all the pleasure in life, Miss Gale,” replied Mr. Bobbie Quinton promptly.
About two o’clock in the morning Sydney Rooke and Lydia deposited Olivia at the front door of Victoria Mansions. Rooke stood hat in hand as she entered.
“I hope you’ve not been too bored by our little evening.”
“Bored! It has been just one heaven after another opening out before me.”
“But not the seventh. If only I could have provided that!”
“I’ll find it in the happiest and soundest night’s rest I ever had,” said Olivia.
THISwas life; magical, undreamed of in her wildest Medlow dreams. And thanks to Lydia, she had plunged into it headlong, after a mere fortnight’s probation. There had been no disillusion. She had plunged and emerged into her kingdom. London conspired to strew her path with roses. The Barracloughs invited her to a dinner party at their home in Kensington. General Wigram offered her dinner and theatre and convened to meet her an old Indian crony, General Philimore, and his young daughter, Janet. Philimore had known her grandfather, Bagshawe of the Guides, when he was a subaltern, infinite ages ago. The world was a small place, after all. Olivia, caring little for grandfathers beyond their posthumous social guarantee, found youth’s real sympathy in Janet, who held open for her their flat in Maida Vale. Young Mauregard, after their first lunch together at the Carlton, seemed prepared to provide her with free meals and amusements for the rest of time. It is true he was madly in love with a Russian dancer, whose eccentric ways and abominable treatment of him formed the staple of the conversation which he poured into her very interested and compassionate ear. And, last, Bobbie Quinton gave her dancing lessons at the flat at the rate of a guinea apiece.
Christmas caused a break in these social activities. Lydia took her off to Brighton, where, meeting various acquaintances of her chaperone and making others of her own, she motored and danced and danced and motored, and in the pursuit of these delights discovered, with a fearful joy, that she could hold her own in the immemorial conflict of sex. Sydney Rooke, having driven down for the day, occasionally flashed through the hotel, the eternal smile of youth on his dark, lined face and his gestures unceasingly polite. As he passed, the heavens opened and rained champagne and boxes of chocolate and hot-house fruits and flowers and embroidered handbags, and once, a Pekinese dog for Lydia. Once again, an automobile seemed about to fall, but at Lydia’s protests it melted in the ether.
“A dog and a rose and a glass of wine,” said she, “are a woman’s due for amusing a man. But a motor-car is profiteering. Besides, it’s bound to drive you somewhere in the end—either to the flat of shame or the country house of married respectability: it only depends on who is at the wheel.”
“I see,” said Olivia. But she didn’t. Sydney Rooke was a mystery; and Lydia’s attitude towards him was more than her inexperience could understand.
Still, there she was in the pleasant galley and she did not question what she was doing in it. In a dim way she regarded it as the inevitable rescue vessel after universal shipwreck. Her eyes were blinded by its glitter and her ears deafened by its music to the welter of the unsalved world.
Just before New Year she received a letter from Bobby Quinton. It began: “Dearest of Ladies.” Never before having been thus apostrophized, she thought it peculiarly graceful and original. The writing was refined and exquisitely clear. To his dearest of ladies the young man bewailed her absence; life was dreary without her friendship and encouragement; all this Christmastide he was the loneliest thing on earth; he suggested that there was no one to love him—no mother or sisters to whom he could apply for comfort; this terrible night life to which he, poor demobilized soldier of fortune, was condemned in order to earn his bread, weighed upon his spirits and affected his health; he envied his dearest of ladies’ sojourn by the invigorating sea; he longed for the taste of it; but such health-restoring rapture he gave her, in the most delicate way, to understand, was for fairy princesses and not for the impecunious demobbed; he counted the days till her return and prayed her to bring back a whiff of ozone on her garments to revive the ever faithful one who had the temerity to try to teach her to dance.
A most piteous epistle. Bobby Quinton, by his ingratiating ways and his deference and his wit, had effaced her original conception of the type of young men who danced at night clubs for their living. She liked him. He seemed so young and she, through her long companionship with sorrow, so old in comparison; he seemed so foolish and impossible, and she so wise; to her, remembering the helpless dependence of her father and brothers, he seemed (motherless and sisterless as he was) lost in a hostile world. Besides, he was not a nameless adventurer. His father (long since deceased) had been a Colonial Governor. He had been to one of the great public schools. In short, he had the birth and breeding of a gentleman. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went with the letter to Lydia, full of maternal purpose.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. Their rooms had a communicating door. She found Lydia daintily attired in boudoir cap and dressing-jacket, having breakfast in bed.
“The poor boy’s dying for a breath of sea air. It would do him an enormous amount of good. Do you think we—of course, it really would be me—but it would be better if it appeared to be a joint affair—do you think we could, without offending him, ask him to come down here for a couple of days as our guest?”
Lydia, who had read the letter with a smile round her lips, replied drily:
“As far as Bobby is concerned—I really think we could.”
“And as far as we are concerned,” flashed Olivia, “why should the silly fact of being a woman prevent us from helping a lame dog over a stile?”
“A he-dog,” said Lydia.
“What does it matter?” Olivia asked stoutly.
Lydia laughed in her half-cynical, tolerant way.
“Do as you like, dear. I don’t mind. You’re out for experience, not I. I’d only have you remark that our he-dog friend Bobby is sitting up and begging for the invitation——”
“Oh! Ah!” cried Olivia, with a fling of her arm, “you’re horrid!”
“Not a bit,” smiled Lydia. “I face facts, as you’ll have to do, if you want to find comfort in this matter-of-fact world. Have your Bobby down by all means. Only keep your eye on him.”
“He’s not my Bobby,” said Olivia indignantly.
“Our Bobby, then,” said Lydia, with good-natured indulgence.
So Olivia, with the little palpitation of the heart attendant on consciousness of adventurous and (in Medlow eyes, preposterous) well-doing, wrote to Bobby Quinton a letter whose gracious delicacy would not have wounded the susceptibilities of a needy Hidalgo or an impoverished Highland chieftain, and received in reply a telegram of eager acceptance.
Bobby appeared immaculately vestured, his heart overflowing with gratitude at the amazing sweetness of his two dear ladies. Never had man been blessed with such fairy godmothers. By the fresh frankness of his appreciation of their hospitality he disarmed criticism. A younger son hanging on to the court of Louis XIII never received purses of gold from his lady love with less embarrassed grace. He devoted himself to their service. He had the art of tactful effacement, and of appearance at the exact moment of welcome. He enlivened their meals with chatter and a boyish brightness that passed for wit.
To Olivia, the dearest of his dear ladies, he confided the pathetic history of his life. A sunny, sheltered corner of the Pier, both sitting side by side well wrapped in furs, conduced to intimacy. How a young man in such a precarious financial position could afford to wear a fur-lined coat with a new astrachan collar it did not strike Olivia to enquire. That he, like herself, was warm on that sun-filled morning, with the sea dancing and sparkling away beyond them, and human types around them exuding the prosperity of peace, seemed sufficient for the comfortable hour. He spoke of his early years of ease, of his modest patrimony coming to an end soon after the war broke out; of his commission in a yeomanry regiment; of his heart-break as the months went on and the chance of the regiment being sent to the front grew less and less; of his exchange into a regiment of the line; of the rotten heart that gave out after a month in France; of his grief at being invalided out of the army and his struggles and anxieties when he returned to civil life, branded as physically unfit. He had tried the stage, musical comedy, male youth in the manless chorus being eagerly welcomed; then, after a little training, he found he had the dancer’s gift. “So one thing led to another,” said he, “and that’s my history.”
“But surely,” said Olivia, “all this dancing and these late hours must be very bad for your heart.”
He smiled sadly. “What does it matter? I’m no use to anybody, and nobody cares whether I’m dead or alive.”
Olivia protested warmly. “The world is crying out for young men of three-and-twenty. You could be useful in a million ways.”
“Not a crock like me.”
“You could go into an office.”
“Yes. In at one door and out of another. Hopeless.”
He drew from a slim gold case a Turkish cigarette—Olivia, minutely hospitable, had put a box of a hundred in his room—and tapped it thoughtfully.
“After all, which is better—to carry on with life like a worm—which anyhow perisheth, as the Bible tells us—or to go out like a butterfly, with a bit of a swagger?”
“But you mustn’t talk of going out,” cried Olivia. “It’s indecent.”
Bobby lighted his cigarette. “Who would care?”
“I, for one,” she replied.
Her health and sanity revolted against morbid ideas. He stretched out his hand, and, with the tips of his fingers, touched her coat, and he bent his dark brown eyes upon her.
“Would you really?” he murmured.
She flushed, felt angry she scarce knew why, and put herself swiftly on the defensive.
“I would care for the life of any young man. After a million killed it’s precious—and every decent girl would care the same as I.”
“You’re wonderful!” he remarked.
“I’m common sense incarnate,” said Olivia.
“You are. You’re right. You’re right a thousand times,” he replied. “I’ll always remember what you have said to me this morning.”
At his surrender she disarmed. A corpulent, opulent couple passed them by, the lady wearing a cheap feathered hat and a rope of pearls outside a Kolinsky coat, the gentleman displaying on an ungloved right hand, which maintained in his mouth a gigantic cigar, an enormous ruby set in a garden border of diamonds.
“At any rate,” said Bobby, “I’m not as some other men are.”
So they laughed and discussed the profiteers and walked back to the hotel for lunch with the sharpened appetites of twenty.
When Bobby Quinton left them, Olivia reproached herself for lack of sympathy. The boy had done his best. A rotten, and crocky heart, who was she to despise? But for circumstance he might have done heroic things. Perhaps in his defiance of physical disability he was doing a heroic thing even now. Still. . . . To Lydia, in an ironically teasing mood, she declared:
“When I do fall in love, it’s not going to be with any one like Bobby Quinton. I want a man—there would be a devil of a row, of course, if he tried—but one capable of beating me.”
“Bobby would do that, right enough, if you gave him the chance,” said Lydia.
Olivia reflected for a while. “Why have you got your knife into him like that?” she asked abruptly.
“I haven’t, my dear child. If I had, do you think I would have allowed him to come down? I live and let live. By letting live, I live very comfortably and manage, with moderate means, to have a very good time.”
Olivia, already dressed for dinner, looked down on the easy, creamy, handsome, kimono-clad woman, curled up like a vast Angora cat on the hotel bedroom sofa, and once more was dimly conscious of a doubt whether the galley of Lydia Dawlish was the one for her mother’s daughter to row in.
Still,vogue la galère. When she returned to London there was little else to do. Eating and dancing filled many of her days and nights. She tried to recapture the pleasure of books which had been all her recreation for years; but, although her life was not a continuous whirl of engagements—for it requires a greater vogue as a pretty and unattached young woman than Olivia possessed to be booked for fourteen meals and seven evenings every week of the year—she found little time for solitary intelligent occupation. If she was at a loose end, Lydia’s hat shop provided an agreeable pastime. Or, as a thousand little odds and ends of dress demanded attention, there was always a sensuous hour or two to be spent at Pacotille’s and Luquin’s or Deville’s. Tea companions seldom failed. When she had no evening engagements she was glad to get to bed, soon after the dinner in the downstairs restaurant, and to sleep the sleep of untroubled youth. And all the time the spell of London still held her captive. To walk the crowded streets, to join the feminine crush before the plate-glass windows of great shops, to watch the strange birds in the ornamental water in St. James’s Park, to wander about the Abbey and the Temple Gardens, to enter on the moment’s impulse a Bond Street picture gallery or a cinema—all was a matter of young joy and thrill. She even spent a reckless and rapturous afternoon at Madame Tussaud’s. Sometimes Janet Philimore accompanied her on these excursions round the monuments of London. Janet, who had mild antiquarian tastes and a proletarian knowledge of London traffic, took her by tubes and buses to the old City churches and the Tower, and exhibited to her wondering gaze the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange and Guildhall up the narrow street. For sentimental interest, there was always Bobby Quinton, who continued to maintain himself under her maternal eye. And so the new life went on.
It was one night in April, while she was standing under the porch of a theatre, Mouregard, her escort, having gone in search of his dinner-and-theatre brougham—for those were days when taxis were scarce and drivers haughty—that she found herself addressed by a long-nosed, one-armed man, who raised his hat.
“Miss Gale—I’m sure you don’t remember me.”
For a second or two she could not place him. Then she laughed.
“Why—Major Olifant!” She shook hands. “What are you doing here? I thought you were buried among your fossils. Do tell me—how are the hot-water pipes? And how is the parrot? Myra has no faith in your bachelor housekeeping and is sure you’ve eaten him out of desperation.”
He returned a light answer. Then, touching the arm of a man standing by his side:
“Miss Gale—can I introduce Mr. Alexis Triona.”
Triona bowed, stood uncovered while he took the hand which Olivia held out.
“This is my landlady,” said Olifant.
“He is privileged beyond the common run of mortals,” said Triona.
“That’s very pretty,” laughed Olivia, with a swift, enveloping glance at the slight, inconspicuous youth who had done such wonderful things. “I’ve not thought of myself as a landlady before. I hope I don’t look like one.”
Visions of myriad Bloomsbury lodging-houses at whose doors he had knocked after he had left the tiny room in Cherbury Mews, and of the strange middle-aged women of faded gentility whom he had interviewed within those doors, rose before Triona’s eyes, and he laughed too. For under the strong electric light of the portico, unkind to most of the other waiting women, showing up lines and hollows and artificialities of complexion, she looked as fresh and young as a child on a May morning. The open theatre wrap revealed her slender girlish figure, sketchily clad in a flame-coloured garment; and, with the light in her eyes and her little dark head proudly poised, she stood before the man’s fancy as the flame of youth.
She turned to Olifant.
“Are you in town?”
“For a few days. Getting rid of cobwebs.”
“I’d lend you quite a nice broom, if you could find time to come and see me. Besides, I do want to hear about my beloved Polly.”
“I shall be delighted,” said Olifant.
They arranged that he should come to tea at the flat the following day.
“And if so famous a person as Mr. Triona would honour me, too?”
“Dare I?” he asked.
“It’s on the fifth floor, but there’s a lift.”
She saw Mauregard hurrying up. With a “Four-thirty, then,” and a smile of adieu, she turned and joined Mauregard.
“Shall we go on to Percy’s?” asked the young Frenchman, standing at the door of the brougham.
Olivia conceived a sudden distaste for Percy’s.
“Not unless you particularly want to.”
“I? Good Lord!” said he.
“Why do you ever go, if it bores you like that?” she asked as the brougham started Victoria-wards.
“Ce que femme veut, Mauregard le veut.”
“I suppose that is why you’ve never made love to me.”
“How?” he asked, surprised out of his perfect English idiom.
“I’ve wanted you not to make love to me, and you haven’t.”
“But how could I make love to you, when I have been persecuting you with the confessions of my unhappy love affairs?”
“One can always find a means,” said Olivia. “That’s why I like you. You are such a good friend.”
“I hope so,” said he. Then, after a short silence: “Let me be frank. What is going on at the back of your clever English mind is perfectly accurate. I am tempted to make love to you every time I see you. What man, with a man’s blood in his veins, wouldn’t be tempted, no matter how much he loved another woman? But I say to myself: ‘Lucien, you are French to the marrow of your bones. It is the nature of that marrow not to offend a beautiful woman by not making love to her. But, on the other hand, the Lady Olivia whose finger-tips I am unworthy to kiss’—he touched them with his lips, however, in the most charming manner—‘is English to the marrow ofherbones, and it is the nature of that marrow to be offended if a man makes obviously idle love to her.’ So, not wishing to lose my Lady Olivia, whose friendship and sympathy I value so highly, I accept with a grateful heart a position which would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of my fellow-countrymen.”
“I’m so glad we’ve had this out,” said Olivia after a pause. “I’ve been a bit worried. A girl on her own has got to take care of herself, you know. And you’ve been so beautifully kind to me——”
“It’s because I am proud to call myself your humble and devoted servant,” replied Mauregard.
Olivia went to bed contented with this frank explanation. Men had already made love to her in a manner which had ruffled her serene consciousness, and she found it, not like Lydia Dawlish, a cynical game of wit, but a disagreeable business, to parry their advances. Bobby Quinton, of course, she could put into a corner like a naughty child, whenever he became foolish. But Mauregard, consistently respectful and entertaining, had been rather a puzzle. Now that way was clear.
For a while she did not associate her meeting Blaise Olifant with her distaste for the night club. In the flush of her new existence she had almost forgotten him. There had been no reason to correspond. His rent was paid through the Trivett and Gale office. His foraminiferous pursuits did not appeal to a girl’s imagination. Now and then she gave a passing thought to what was happening in her old home, and vaguely remembered that the romantically named traveller was there as a guest. But that was all. Now, the presence of Olifant had suddenly recalled the little scene in her mother’s room, when she had suddenly decided to let him have the house; he had brought with him a breath of that room; a swift memory of the delicate water-colours and the books by the bedside, thePensées de PascalandThe Imitation of Christ. . . . Besides, she had felt a curious attraction towards the companion, the boy with the foreign manner and the glistening eyes and the suffering-stricken face. Both men, as she conceived them, belonged to the higher intellectual type that had their being remote from the inanities of dissipation. So, impelled by a muddled set of motives, she suddenly found herself abhorring Percy’s. She read herself into a state of chastened self-approbation, and then to sleep, with Rupert Brooke’s poems.
OLIVIAsat by her little table, dispensing tea and accepting homage with a flutter of pleasure at her heart. She had been oddly nervous—she who had entertained the stranger Olifant, at Medlow, with the greatest self-confidence, and had grown to regard tea parties at the flat as commonplaces of existence. The two men had drifted in from another sphere. She had reviewed her stock of conversation and found it shop-worn after five months’ exposure. The most recent of her views on “Hullo, People!” and on the food at the Carlton had appeared unworthy of the notice of the soldier-scientist and the adventurous man of letters. She had received them with unusual self-consciousness. This, however, a few moments of intercourse dispelled. They had come, they had seen and she had conquered.
“At first I didn’t recognize you,” said Olifant. “I had to look twice to make sure.”
“Have I changed so much?” she asked.
“It was a trick of environment,” he said, with a smile in his dark blue eyes.
The feminine in her caught the admiration behind them and delightedly realized his confusion, the night before, at her metamorphosis from the prim little black-frocked quakeress into the radiant creature in furs and jewels and flame-coloured audacity.
“And now you’re quite sure it is me—or I—which is it?”
“I’m quite sure it’s my charming landlady who for the second time feeds the hungry wanderer. Miss Gale, Triona, makes a specialty of it.”
“Then, indeed, I’m peculiarly fortunate,” said Triona, taking a tomato sandwich. “Will you feed me again, Miss Gale?”
“As often as you like,” she laughed.
“That’s rather a rash promise to make to a professional vagabond like myself. When he has begged his way for months and months at a time, he comes to regard other people’s food as his by divine right.”
“Have you done that?” she asked.
“Much worse. You don’t keep chickens?”
“Not here.”
“That’s a good thing. I think I’m the world’s champion chicken-stealer. It’s a trick of legerdemain. You dive at a chicken, catch it by its neck, whirl it round and stick it under your jacket all in one action. The unconscious owner has only to turn his back for a second. Then, of course, you hide in a wood and have an orgy.”
“He is not the desperate character he makes himself out to be,” said Olifant. “He spent two months with me at ‘The Towers’ without molesting one of your hens.”
“Then you’re not still there?” she asked Triona.
“Alas, no,” he replied. “I suppose I have the fever of perpetual change. I had a letter from Finland saying that my presence might be of use there. So I have spent this spring in Helsingfors. I am only just back.”
“It seems wonderful to go and come among all these strange places,” said Olivia.
“One land is much the same as another in essentials,” replied Triona. “To carry on life you have to eat and sleep. There’s no difference between a hard-boiled egg in Somerset and a hard-boiled egg in Tobolsk. And sleep is sleep, whether you’re putting up at Claridge’s or the Hotel of the Beautiful Star. And human nature, stripped of the externals of habits, customs, traditions, ceremonials, is unchanging from one generation, and from one latitude or longitude, to another.”
“But,” objected Olivia, with a flash of logic, “if London’s the same as Tobolsk, why yearn for Tobolsk?”
“It’s the hope of finding something different—theignis fatuus, the Jack o’ Lantern, the Will-o’-the-Wisp——” He was silent for a moment, and then she caught the flash of his eyes. “It’s the only thing that counts in human progress. The Will-o’-the-Wisp. It leaves nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand floundering in a bog—but the thousandth man wins through to the Land of Promise. There is only one thing in life to do,” he continued, clenching his nervous hands and looking into the distance away from Olivia, “and that is never to lose faith in yourignis fatuus—to compel it to be your guiding star. Once you’ve missed grip of it, you’re lost.”
“I wish I had your Russian idealism,” said Olifant.
“When will you learn, my dear friend,” said Triona quietly, “that I’m not a Russian? I’m as English as you are.”
“It’s your idealism that is Russian,” said Olivia.
“Do you think so?” he asked, deferentially. “Well, perhaps it is. In England you keep your ideals hidden until some great catastrophe happens, then you bring them out to help you along. Otherwise it is immodest to expose them. In Russia, ideals are exposed all the time, so that when the time for their application comes, they’re worn so thin they’re useless. Poor Russia,” he sighed. “It has idealized itself to extinction. All my boyhood’s companions—the students, theintelligentsia, as they called themselves, who used to sit and talk and talk for hours of their wonderful theories—you in England have no idea how Russian visionary can talk—and I learned to talk with them—where are they now? The fortunate were killed in action. The others, either massacred or rotting in prisons, or leading the filthy hunted lives of pariah dogs. The Beast arose like a foul shape from the Witch’s cauldron of their talk . . . and devoured them. Yes, perhaps the stolid English way is the better.”
“What about your Will-o’-the-Wisp theory?” asked Olivia.
He threw out his hands. “Ah! That is the secret. Keep it to yourself. Don’t point it out to a thousand people, and say: ‘Join me in the chase of the Will-o’-the-Wisp.’ For the thousand other people will each see anignis fatuusof their own and point it out, so that there are myriads of them, and your brain reels, and you’re swallowed up in the bog to a dead certainty. In plain words, every human being must have his own individual and particular guiding star which he must follow steadfastly. My guiding star is not yours, Miss Gale, nor Olifant’s. We each have our own.”
Olifant smiled indulgently. “Moscovus loquitur,” he murmured.
“What’s that?” asked Olivia.
“He says, my dear Miss Gale, that the Russian will ever be talking.”
“I’m not so sure that I don’t approve,” said she.
Triona laid his hand on his heart and made a little bow. She went on, casting a rebuking glance at Olifant, who had begun to laugh:
“After all, it’s more entertaining and stimulating to talk about ideas than about stupid facts. Most people seem to regard an idea as a disease. They shy at it as if it were smallpox.”
Olifant protested. He was capable of playing football with ideas as any man. Self-satirical, he asked was he not of Balliol? Olivia, remembering opportunely a recent Cambridge dinner neighbour’s criticism of the famous Oxford College—at the time it had bored her indifferent mind—and an anecdote with which he drove home his remarks, that of a sixth-form contemporary who had written to him in the prime flush of his freshman’s term: “Balliol is not a college; it is a School of Thought,” cried out:
“Isn’t that rather a crude metaphor for Balliol?”
They quarrelled, drifted away from the point, swept Triona into a laughing argument on she knew not what. All she knew was that these two men were giving her the best of themselves; these two picked men of thought and action; that they were eager to interest her, to catch her word of approval; that some dancing thing within her brain played on their personalities and kept them at concert pitch.
She was conscious of a new joy, a new sense of power, when the door opened and Myra showed in Lydia Dawlish. She entered, enveloped in an atmosphere of furs and creamy worldliness. Aware of the effect of implicit scorn of snobbery, she besought Olifant for news of Medlow, dear Sleepy Hollow, which she had not seen for years. Had he come across her beloved eccentric of a father—old John Freke? Olifant gave her the best of news. He had lately joined the committee of the local hospital, of which Mr. Freke was Chairman; professed admiration for John Freke’s exceptional gifts.
“If he had gone out into the world, he might have been a great man,” said Lydia.
“Heisa great man,” replied Olifant.
“What’s the good of being great in an overlooked chunk of the Stone Age like Medlow?”
She spoke with her lazy vivacity, obviously, to Olivia’s observant eye, seeking to establish herself with the two men. But the spell of the afternoon was broken. As soon as politeness allowed, Olifant and Triona took their leave. Had it not been for Lydia they would have stayed on indefinitely, forgetful of time, showing unconscious, and thereby all the more flattering, homage to their hostess. In a mild way she anathematized Lydia; but found a compensating tickle of pleasure in the lady’s failure to captivate.
To Olifant she said:
“Now that you know where your landlady lives, I hope you won’t go on neglecting her.”
But she waited for Triona to say:
“Shall I ever have the pleasure of seeing you again?”
“It all depends whether you can be communicated with,” she replied. “Alexis Triona, Esq., Planet Earth, Solar System, is an imposing address; but it might puzzle the General Post Office.”
“The Vanloo Hotel, South Kensington, is very much more modest.”
“It’s well for people to know where they can find one another,” said Olivia.
“That you should do me the honour of the slightest thought of finding me——” he began.
“We’ll fix up something soon,” Lydia interrupted. “I’m Miss Gale’s elderly, adopted aunt.”
Olivia felt a momentary shock, as though a tiny bolt of ice had passed through her. She sped a puzzled glance at a Lydia blandly unconscious of wrong-doing.
“I shall be delighted,” said Triona politely.
When the door had closed behind the two—
“What nice men,” said Lydia.
“Yes, they’re rather—nice,” replied Olivia, wondering why, in trying to qualify them in her mind, this particular adjective had never occurred to her. They were male, they spoke perfect English, they were well-mannered—and so, of course, they were nice. But it was such an inadequate word, completing no idea. Lydia’s atrophied sense of differentiation awoke the laughter in her eyes. Nice! So were Bobby Quinton, Sydney Rooke, Mauregard, a score of other commonplace types in Lydia’s set. But that Blaise Olifant and Alexis Triona should be lumped with them in this vaguely designated category, seemed funny.
Lydia went on:
“Major Olifant, of course, I knew from your description of him; but the other—the young man with the battered face—I didn’t place him.”
“Triona—Alexis Triona.”
“I seem to have heard the name,” said Lydia. “He writes or paints or lectures on Eugenics or something.”
“He has written a book on Russia,” replied Olivia drily.
“I’m fed up with Russia,” said Lydia dismissively. “Even if I wasn’t—I didn’t come here to talk about it. I came in about something quite different. What do you think has happened? Sydney Rooke has asked me to marry him.”
Olivia’s eyes flashed with the interest of genuine youth in a romantic proposal of marriage.
“My dear!” she cried. “How exciting!”
“I wish it were,” said Lydia, in her grey-eyed calmness. “Anyhow, it’s a bit upsetting. Of course I knew that he was married—separated years and years from his wife. Whether he couldn’t catch her out, or she couldn’t catch him out, I don’t know. But they couldn’t get a divorce. She was a Catholic and wouldn’t stand for the usual arrangement. Now she’s dead. Died a couple of months ago in California. He came in this morning with Lady Northborough—introducing her—the first time I had seen the woman. And he sat by and gave advice while she chose half a dozen hats. His judgment’s infallible, you know. He saw her to her car and came back. ‘Now I’ve done you a good turn,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’ll do me one. Give me five minutes with you in your cubby-hole.’ We went into my little office, and then he sprang this on me—the death of his wife and the proposal.”
“But itmusthave been exciting,” Olivia protested. “Yet——” she knitted her brow, “why the Lady Northborough barrage?”
“It’s his way,” said Lydia.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I would give him my answer to-night.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. He’s charming. He’s rolling in money—you remember the motor-car I turned down for obvious reasons—he knows all kinds of nice people—he’s fifty——”
“Fifty!” cried Olivia, aghast. To three and twenty fifty is senile.
“The widow’s ideal.”
“It’s exciting, but not romantic,” said Olivia.
“Romance perished on the eleventh of November, 1918. Since then it has been ‘Every woman for herself and the Devil take the hindmost.’ Are you aware that there are not half enough men to go round? So when a man with twenty thousand a year comes along, a woman has to think like—like——”
“Like Aristotle or Herbert Spencer, or the sailor’s parrot,” said Olivia. “Of course, dear. But is he so dreadfully wealthy as all that? What does he do?”
“He attends Boards of Directors. As far as I can make out he belongs to a Society for the Promotion of Un-christian Companies.”
“Don’t you care for him?”
Lydia shook her exquisitely picture-hatted head—she was a creamy Gainsborough or nothing.
“In that way, not a bit. Of course, he has been a real good friend to me. But after all—marriage—it’s difficult to explain——”
In spite of her cynicism, Lydia had always respected the girlhood of her friend. But Olivia flung the scornful arm of authority.
“There’s no need of explanation. I know all about it.”
“In that case——” said Lydia. She paused, lit a cigarette, and with her large, feline grace of writhing curves, settled herself more comfortably in the corner of the couch—“I thought you would bring a fresh mind to bear upon things. But no matter. In that case, dear, what would you advise?”
Before the girl’s mental vision arose the man in question—the old young man, the man of fifty, with the air and manner and dress of the man of twenty-five; his mark of superficial perfection that hid God knew what strange sins, stoniness of heart and blight of spirit. She saw him in his impeccable devotion to Lydia. But something in the imagined sight of him sent a shiver through her pure, yet not ignorant, maidenhood: something of which the virginal within her defied definition, yet something abhorrent. The motor-car had failed; now the wedding-ring. She recaptured the fleeting, disquieting sense of Lydia on her first evening in London—the woman’s large proclamation of sex. Instinctively she transferred her impression to the man, and threw a swift glance at Lydia lying there, milk and white, receptive.
A word once read and forgotten—a word in some French or English novel—sprang to her mind, scraped clear from the palimpsest of memory. Desirable. A breath-catching, hateful word. She stood aghast and shrinking on the edge of knowledge.
“My darling child, what on earth is the matter with you?”
Olivia started at the voice, as though awakening from a dream.
“I think it’s horrible,” she cried.
“What?”
“Marrying a man you can no more love than—— Ugh! I wouldn’t marry him for thousands of millions.”
“Why? I want to know.”
But the shiver in the girl’s soul could not be expressed in words.
“It’s a question of love,” she said lamely.
Lydia laughed, called her a romantic child. It was not a question of love, but of compatible temperament. Marriage wasn’t a week-end, but a life-end, trip. People had to get accustomed to each other in dressing-gowns and undress manners. She herself was sure that Sydney Rooke would wear the most Jermyn Street of dressing-gowns, at any rate. But the manners?
“They’ll always be as polished as his finger-nails,” said Olivia.
“I don’t see why you should speak like that of Sydney,” cried Lydia, with some show of spirit. “It’s rather ungrateful seeing how kind he has been to you.”
Which was true; Olivia admitted it.
“But the man who is kind to you, in a social way, isn’t always the man you would like to marry.”
“But it’s I, not you,” Lydia protested, “who am going to marry him.”
“Then you are going to marry him?”
“I don’t see anything else to do,” replied Lydia, and she went again over the twenty thousand a year argument. Olivia saw that her hesitations were those of a cool brain and not of an ardent spirit, and she knew that the brain had already come to a decision.
“I quite see,” said Lydia half apologetically, “that you think I ought to wait until I fall in love with a man. But I should have to wait till Doomsday. I thought I was in love with poor dear Fred. But I wasn’t. I’m not that sort. If Fred had gone on living I should have gone on letting him adore me and have been perfectly happy—so long as he didn’t expect me to adore him.”
“Doesn’t Mr. Rooke expect you to adore him?” asked Olivia.
Lydia laughed, showing her white teeth, and shook a wise and mirthful head.
“I’m convinced that was the secret of his first unhappy marriage.”
“What?”
“The poor lady adored him and bored him to frenzy.”
The clock on the mantelpiece struck the half-hour after six. Lydia rose. She must go home and dress. She was dining with Rooke at Claridge’s at eight.
“I’m so glad we’ve had this little talk,” she said. “I felt I must tell you.”
“I thought you wanted my advice,” said Olivia.
“Oh, you silly!” answered Lydia, gathering her furs around her.
They exchanged the conventional parting kiss. Olivia accompanied her to the landing. When the summoned lift appeared and its doors clashed open, Lydia said:
“You wouldn’t like to take over that hat shop at a valuation, would you?”
“Good heavens, no!” cried the astounded Olivia.
Lydia laughed and waved a grey-gloved hand and disappeared downwards, like the Lady of the Venusberg in an antiquated opera.
Olivia re-entered the flat thoughtfully, and sat down in an arm-chair by the tiny wood fire in the sitting-room grate. Lydia and Lydia’s galley, and all that it signified, disturbed her more than ever. They seemed not only to have no ideals even as ballast, but to have flung them overboard like so many curse-ridden Jonahs. To what soulless land was she speeding with them? And not only herself, but the England, of which she, as much as any individual, was a representative unit? Was it for the reaching of such a haven that her brothers had given their lives? Was it that she should reach such a haven that her mother, instinct with heroic passion, had sent Stephen Gale forth to death? Was it to guide the world on this Lydian path that Blaise Olifant had given an arm and young Triona had cheerfully endured Dantesque torturings?
Myra came in and began to remove the tea-things—Myra, gaunt, with her impassive, inexpressible face, correct in black; silk blouse, stuff skirt, silk apron. Olivia, disturbed in her efforts to solve the riddle of existence, swerved in her chair and half-humorously sought the first human aid to hand.
“Myra, tell me. Why do you go on living?”
Myra made no pause in her methodical activity.
“God put me into the world to live. It’s my duty to live,” she replied in her toneless way. “And God ordained me to live so that I should do my duty.”
“And what do you think is your duty?” Olivia asked.
“You, of all people in the world, ought to know that,” said Myra, holding the door open with her foot, so as to clear a passage for the tea-tray.
Olivia rested her elbows on the arms of the chair and put her finger-tips to her temples. She felt at once rebuked and informed with knowledge. Never before had the Sphinx-like Myra so revealed herself. Probably she had not had the opportunity, never having found herself subjected to such direct questioning. Being so subjected, she replied with the unhesitating directness of her nature. The grace of humility descended on Olivia. What fine spirit can feel otherwise than humble when confronted with the selfless devotion of a fellow-being? And further humbled was she by the implicit declaration of an ideal, noble and purposeful, such as her mind for the past few months had not conceived. This elderly, spinsterly foundling, child of naught, had, according to her limited horizon, a philosophy—nay, more—a religion of life which she unswervingly followed. According to the infinite scale whereby human values ultimately are estimated, Olivia judged herself sitting in the galley of Lydia Dawlish as of far less account than Myra, her butt and her slave from earliest infancy.
She rose and looked around the prettiness of taste and colour with which she had transformed the original dully-furnished room, and threw up her arm in a helpless gesture. What did it all mean? What was she doing there? On what was she squandering the golden hours of her youth? To what end was she using such of a mind and such of a soul as God had given her? At last, to sell herself for furs and food and silk cushions, and for the society of other women clamorous of nothing but furs and food and silk cushions, to a man like Sydney Rooke—without giving him anything in return save her outward shape for him to lay jewels on and exhibit to the uninspiring world wherein he dwelt?
Far better return to Medlow and lead the life of a clean woman.
Myra entered. “You’re not dining out to-night?”
“No, thank God!” said Olivia. “I’ll slip on any old thing and go downstairs.”
She dined in her little quiet corner of the restaurant, and after dinner took up Triona’s book,Through Blood and Snow, which she had bought that morning, her previous acquaintance with it having been made through a circulating library. In the autumn she had read and been held by its magic; but casually as she had read scores of books. But now it was instinct with a known yet baffling personality. It was two o’clock in the morning before she went to bed.
THEtastes of Alexis Triona were not such as to lead him into extravagant living on the fruits of his literary success. To quality of food he was indifferent; wine he neither understood nor cared for; in the use of other forms of alcohol he was abstemious; unlike most men bred in Russia he smoked moderately, preferring the cigarettes he rolled himself from Virginia tobacco to the more expensive Turkish or Egyptian brands. His attire was simple. He would rather walk than be driven; and he regarded his back-bedroom at the top of the Vanloo Hotel as a luxurious habitation.
He had broken away from the easeful life at Medlow because, as he explained to Blaise Olifant, it frightened him.
“I’m up against nothing here,” said he.
“You’re up against your novel,” replied Olifant. “A man’s work is always his fiercest enemy.”
Triona would not accept the proposition. He and his novel were one and indivisible. Together they must fight against something—he knew not what. Perhaps, fight against time and opportunity. They wanted the tense, stolen half-hours which he and his other book had enjoyed. Would Olifant think him ungrateful if he picked up and went on his mission to Helsingfors?
“My dear fellow,” said Olifant, “the man who resents a friend developing his own personality in his own way doesn’t deserve to have a friend.”
“It’s like you to say that,” cried Triona. “I shall always remember. When I get back I shall let you know.”
So Alexis Triona vanished from a uninspiring Medlow, and two months afterwards gave Olifant his address at the Vanloo Hotel. Olifant, tired by a long spell of close work, went up for an idle week in London.
“Come back and carry on as before,” he suggested.
But Triona ran his fingers through his brown hair and held out his hand.
“No. The wise man never tries to repeat a past pleasure. As a wise old Russian friend of mine used to say—never relight a cigar.”
So after a few days of pleasant companionship in the soberer delights of town, Blaise Olifant returned to Medlow and Triona remained in his little back room in the Vanloo Hotel.
One night, a week or so after his visit to Olivia Gale, he threw down his pen, read over the last sheet that he had written, and, with a gesture of impatience, tore it up. Suddenly he discovered that he could not breathe in the stuffy bedroom. He drew back the curtains and opened the window and looked out on myriad chimney-pots and a full moon shining on them from a windless sky. The bright air filled his lungs. Desire for wider spaces beneath the moon shook him like a touch of claustrophobia. He thrust on the coat which he had discarded, seized a hat, and, switching off the light, hurried from the room. He went out into the streets, noiseless save for the rare, swift motors that flashed by like ghosts fleeing terrified from some earthly doom.
He walked and walked until he suddenly realized that he had emerged from Whitehall and faced the moonlight beauty of the Houses of Parliament standing in majestic challenge against the sky, and the Abbey sleeping in its centuries of dreams.
Away across the Square, by Broad Sanctuary, was the opening of a great thoroughfare, and, as his eyes sought it, he confessed to himself the subconscious impulse that had led him thither. Yet was it not a cheat of a subconscious impulse? Had he not gone out from the hotel in Kensington with a definite purpose? As he crossed to Broad Sanctuary and the entrance to Victoria Street, he argued it out with himself. Anyhow, it was the most fool of fool-errands. But yet—he shrugged his shoulders and laughed. To what errand could a fool’s errand be comparable? Only to that of one pixy-led. He laughed at the thought of his disquisition to Olivia on the Will-o’-the-Wisp. In the rare instances of the follower of Faith had he not proclaimed its guidance to the Land of Promise?
Three days before he had seen her. He had been impelled by an irresistible desire to see her. To call on her without shadow of excuse was impossible. To telephone or write an invitation to lunch was an act unsuggested by his limited social experience. Taking his chance that she should emerge between eleven and twelve, he strolled up and down the pavement, so that at last when fate favoured him and he advanced to meet her, they greeted each other with a smiling air of surprise. They explained their respective objectives. She was for buying a patent coffee machine at the Army and Navy Stores, he for catching an undesirable train at Victoria Station. A threatening morning suddenly became a rainy noon. He turned back with her and they fled together and just reached the Stores in time to escape from the full fury of the downpour. There he bent his mind on coffee machines. His masculine ignorance of the whole art of coffee-making, a flannel bag in a jug being his primitive conception, moved her to light-hearted mirth. The purchase made, the order given, they wandered idly through the great establishment. They were prisoners, the outside world being weltering deluge. For once in his lifetime, thought Triona, the elements warred on his side. A wringing machine, before which he paused in wonderment at its possible use, and an eager description on the part of the salesman, put Olivia on the track of a game into which he entered with devoted fervour. Let them suppose they were going to furnish a house. Oh! a great big palace of a house. In imagination they bought innumerable things, furnishing the mansion chiefly with hammocks and marquees and garden chairs and lawn-mowers and grand pianos and egg-whisks. Her heart, that morning, attuned to laughter, brought colour into her cheeks and brightness into her eyes. To the young man’s ear she seemed to have an adorable gift of phrase. She invested a rolling-pin with a humorous individuality. She touched a tray of doughnuts with her fancy and turned them into sacramental bread of Momus, exquisite Divinity of Mirth. She was so free, so graceful, so intimate, so irresistible. He followed her, a young man bemused. What he contributed to the game he scarcely knew. He was only conscious of her charm and her whipping of his wit. They stumbled into the department of men’s haberdashery. His brain conceived a daring idea.
“I’ve been trying for weeks,” said he, “to make up my mind to buy a tie.”
Olivia glanced swiftly round and sped to a counter.
“Ties, please.”
“What kind?” asked the salesman.
“Ordinary silk—sailor-knot. Show me all you’ve got.”
Before his entranced eyes she selected half a dozen, with a taste which the artist within him knew was impeccable. He presented the bill bearing her number at the cashier’s pigeon hole, and returning took the neat packet from the salesman with the air of one receiving a decoration from royalty. They made their way to the exit. She said:
“I’m afraid we’ve been criminally frivolous.”
“If such happiness is a crime I’d willingly swing for it.”
He noted a quick, uncomprehending question in her glance and the colour mounted into his pale cheeks.
“My English idiom is not yet perfect,” he said. “I ought not to have used that expression.”
Olivia laughed at his discomfiture.
“It’s generally used by dreadful people who threaten to do one another in. But the metaphor’s thrilling, all the same.”
The rain had ceased. After a few moments the mackintoshed commissionaire secured a taxi. Triona accompanied her to the door. She thrust out a frank hand.
“Au revoir. It has been delightful to find you so human.”
She drove off. He stood, with a smile on his lips, watching the vehicle disappear in the traffic. Her farewell was characteristic. What could one expect of her but the unexpected?
That was three days ago. The image of her unconsciously alluring yet frank to disconcertment, spiritually feminine yet materially impatient of sex; the image of her in the three separate settings—the dark-eyed princess in fur and flame beneath the electric light of the theatre portico; the slim girl in simple blouse and skirt who, over the pretty teacups, held so nice a balance between Olifant and himself; the gay playmate of a rainy hour, in her fawn costume (he still felt the thrill of the friendly touch of her fawn-coloured gloved hands on his sleeve)—the composite image and vision of her had filled his sleeping and waking thoughts to the destruction of his peace of mind and the dislocation of his work.
Thus, on this warm night of spring, he stood, the most foolishly romantical of mortals, at the entrance to Victoria Street, and with a shrug of his shoulders proceeded on his errand of mute troubadour. Perhaps the day of rapture might come when he would tell her how he stood in the watches of the night and gazed up at what he had to imagine was her window on the fifth floor of the undistinguished barrack that was her home. It was poetic, fantastic, Russian, at any rate. It would also mark the end of his excursion; it was a fair tramp back to South Kensington.
An unheeded taxi-cab whizzed past him as he walked; but a few seconds later, the faint sound of splintering glass and then the scrunch of brakes suddenly applied awoke him from his smiling meditations. The cab stopped, sharply outlined in the clear moonlight. The driver leaped from his seat and flung open the door. A woman sprang out, followed by a man. Both were in evening dress. Voices rose at once in altercation. Triona, suspecting an accident, quickened his pace instinctively into a run and joined the group.
“What’s up?”
But as the instinctive words passed his lips he became amazedly conscious of Olivia standing there, quivering, as white as the white dress and cloak she wore, her eyes ablaze. She flashed on him a half-hysterical recognition and clutched his arm.
“You?”
He drew himself up to his slim height and looked first at the taxi driver and then at the heavy, swarthy man in evening dress, and then at her.
“What’s the matter? Tell me,” he rapped out.
“This man tried to insult me,” she gasped.
Olivia never knew how it happened: it happened like some instantaneous visitation of God. The lithe young figure suddenly shot forward and the heavy man rolled yards away on the pavement.
“Serve him damn well right,” said the driver; “but where do I come in with my window broken?”
“Oh, you shall be paid, you shall be paid,” cried Olivia. “Pay him, Mr. Triona, and let us go.”
Triona glanced up and down the street. “No, this gentleman’s going to pay,” he said quietly and advanced to the heavy man who had scrambled to unsteady feet.
“Just you settle up with that cabman, quick, do you hear, or I’ll knock you down again. I could knock you down sixty times an hour. And so help me, God, if a copper comes in sight I’ll murder you.”
“All right, all right,” said the man hurriedly. “I don’t want a scandal for the lady’s sake.” He turned to the taxi man. “How much do you want?”
“With the damage it’ll be a matter of ten pound.”
The swarthy man in evening dress fished out his note-case.
“Here you are, you blackmailing thief.”
“None of your back-chat, or I’ll finish off what this gentleman has begun,” said the taxi man, pocketing the money.
Until he saw summary justice accomplished, Triona stood in the lee of the houses, his arm stretched protectingly in front of Olivia. Then he drew her away.
“I’ll see the lady home. It’s only a few steps.”
“Right, sir. Good night, sir,” said the taxi man.
They moved on. Immediately in the silence of the night came the crisp exchange of words.
“I’ll give you a pound to take me to Porchester Terrace.”