"I have interrupted you, Cyprian."
"Of course you have. What else have I ever existed for but to keep my temper under your interruptions, Ferlie?"
"There is so much to say," and she drank him in with happy eyes.
He ran one thumb along the edge of the paper, still faintly worried.
"But I must arrange something. You can't go without any dinner at all. I've ordered 'for one' up here and, of course, you must eat mine. I'll see if it's what you like."
There was a hint of exasperation in her voice as she checked his advance upon the bell.
"Do they allow you such small helpings? I can share your dinner when they send it up, if you will insist upon making me eat when I don't want to."
She pulled him down beside her, by his sleeve, into the other chair.
"Do you know you have not even said that you are glad to see me?"
"Glad? Why, Ferlie, you know——" he broke off to stare back at her, and then repeated, "Glad?"
"You have not changed," said Ferlie slowly, "I suppose I have?"
This was frank coquetry and she felt a little ashamed when, with unsuspecting disregard of the fact, he said,
"Stand up again. I haven't made any of the correct remarks. Why, your skirts are as short as they were before!"
"Shorter, Silly! Fashion now decrees that one must put up one's skirts and let down one's hair on leaving school."
"I am glad they have left your hair alone."
"There was not much sense in trying to 'put up' a head, bobbed by Nature, when Art was busy bobbing all Nature's long locks. This bush will never grow beyond my shoulders, if I live to be eighty. I inherit it from Aunt B. That was why she shingled, you know."
His scrutiny came to rest on the widely set grey irises, circled by their dark golden fringe.
"No. You have not grown up," he decided. "You will probably eat all the ice-cream to-night and leave me the cutlets. We were always Jack Spratt and his wife."
She nodded gravely and he added, "Also, you will not want your wine dry."
"I am ignorant enough to have imagined, hitherto, that all wine must, of necessity, be wet. However, water out of your wash-stand carafe will do for me. I expect your tooth-glass is luxuriously patterned to be in keeping with the rest of things here."
They chattered inconsequently till the lift arrived with its first burden of dishes, and not until the dessert had returned to the depths whence it had mysteriously emerged and after they had made themselves as ridiculous as two picnicking children, did Ferlie get down to the Family news.
She touched very lightly upon her "dancing partner," Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but the deepened tinge of her face did not escape Cyprian because, by then, he was finding it difficult not to look at her all the time.
"I am incredibly sorry about your father," he said, shying away from an uncomfortable idea. "You all strike me as being wonderfully plucky."
"It's worst for Peter," said Ferlie. And sat silent for a while considering the problem of Peter.
Quite by chance, Cyprian glanced at the clock and remarked in startled tones that it was past eleven.
"Is it?" she asked indifferently.
Her arms were clasped round her knees and her chin resting on them. Sometimes she rocked herself gently backwards and forwards. He smiled to himself, remembering the pose since she was seven.
"I am thinking it is about time I saw you home," he said. "Mrs. Carmichael will be wondering what on earth we are doing."
"No she will not. There is no one at home, Cyprian, and I am not expected back till to-morrow."
"But where have you arranged to spend the night?"
She gave that little shrug of the shoulders, once characteristic of fourteen-year-old Ferlie shrugging the Inessential off her horizon.
"Here, I think," she said with wide eyes on the ruby coals.
Cyprian laughed. Then he protested, in his amusement, at the simplicity of Ferlie grown-up. Presently, he sobered and began to attempt explanations; to all of which she turned a dispassionately deaf ear.
"Come on, dear," said Cyprian at last.
"Where to?"
Driving it home that this unexpected arrival on his doorstep had, in very sooth, been a Ferlie-esque escapade from which he must extricate her; if she would lend herself to extrication. He was honestly puzzled.
Of course, he realized that, since they were Themselves, and not another couple, her outlook was perfectly reasonable. Ferlie and he. A law unto themselves long ago, when she awoke at night to scream because her surroundings were dark and lonely. A law unto themselves when he received her at the hands of Martha and Mary, mistrusters of men in general, but willing to admit him into the fold on account of that farcical avuncular status. A law unto themselves in their unnaturally unusual correspondence with its sprawled confidences on one side and its restrained admissions on the other of his need of her in the background of his life.
That need was within him still, but it must be his part to limit it now that she was grown up: to take over the reins of friendship and—and normalize it.
"Well, Cyprian," said Ferlie, quietly watching him, "are you, even now, an occupant of a cage in the greater Zoological Garden, outside the walls of which I promised you, a long while ago, that I always intended to remain?"
This was utter nonsense. Ferlie, with her talk of cages at fourteen, was not to be encouraged, but Ferlie, holding similar views at eighteen, was, most distinctly, to be brought up short.
He shifted the chair impatiently and she forestalled his reply.
"I suppose," she said, "that some buy their freedom in the course of years with the big price of experience, but others are born free. If you have not bought yours yet you will some day. But I was born free. Peter, too, I think. He has the courage of his beliefs; he is no captive to past customs, nor is the fear of the neighbour the beginning of his wisdom. If we walk into cages it will be of our own free will, and not because any stale bait can tempt us from within, nor any pursuing hounds scare us from without."
"Ferlie," said the bewildered man beside her, "will you please tell me exactly what you mean?"
She shook a tangled lock out of her eyes and, at that moment, in the gilding firelight, he had an odd fancy that a man might fill his hands with sovereigns who had the courage to plunge them into her hair. Involuntarily, he touched the ruffled rebellious head.
"You and I have always understood one another," he reminded her.
She imprisoned his fingers between her two soft palms.
"It is a good many years now, Cyprian, since you and I became friends. Whenever I have had need of you and you could possibly reach me, you have always come. We have had to face separation for what has seemed a vitally long time to me since your last leave. To you, already mentally settled and developed, it may not have seemed so long. But I have been half afraid that your return would separate us more surely than, so far, has the sea. To test that fear, I came to-night, because I have need of you, Cyprian. To-night, not to-morrow. When I was little, what help could you have given me by waiting for the daylight? I used to think you could save me from the tomb which was all ready to close on me. Now it is a cage of which I am afraid. I want to stay with you until that fear is past. I want to assure myself of you; to re-learn you in the light of my increased knowledge of life. To-night, not to-morrow. For to-morrow I have to make a decision concerning that cage, and the decision depends upon what I may learn of you in the little time we have together to-night. I knew how you would shrink from offending Convention; therefore I have frustrated Convention. We have only a few more free hours in which to pick up the threads which may have got dropped and twisted. Upon the untangling of them rests my decision of to-morrow. I have gone to sleep in your arms so often that it is a very natural thing for me to remain beside you now until we can both sleep—at rest, in one another's presence again. I need you, Cyprian, just now. And I want you to realize just how much, or how little, you need me."
All but mesmerized, he listened. That which was hide-bound in him, and entirely reticent British, put up a dull fight against the naked simplicity of her words. He said weakly: "Dear, you are so young. You do not understand."
"I understand 'What a Young Girl Ought to Know,'" and she bubbled over with quick mockery. "Curiously enough, the knowledge neither distresses nor shames me. This isn't the Victorian era. But all that I understand, or misunderstand, about the threadbare 'Facts of Life,' affects neither of us with regard to this situation. We have cherished our hours in the past, scattered here and there, each like a desert oasis. We have come to another now. Later, very much later, I think I shall probably fall asleep in this chair and then you may cover me up and depart in peace, yourself, to bed. And to-morrow we can breakfast somewhere together as if I had just come upon the morning train and you had met me, and no one need hear that we spent a happy night, or thereabouts, re-discovering one another."
Stirred to the depths and vexed with himself for his susceptibility to her moods, Cyprian withdrew his hand into safety.
"You always had a way of making the unnatural seem perfectly natural and ordinary."
"What forms your opinion on what is 'natural'?" asked Ferlle, abruptly.
His brain groped around in the dark awhile before he found an answer.
"There is a daimon in every man," he insisted in low tones, speaking more to himself than to her, "which forces upon him the knowledge when a thing is not Right, even though it may be Natural."
And then, that very daimon, thus invoked, spoke to him in the ensuing silence.
The same child who had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the past was beside him now, expectant of the same "crystallized apricot" of comfort. Let him take heed that it was such comfort as healed and did not merely drug. What, for all her dreams, could she have grasped of the Powers which spin the dice for good or evil? Eighteen to thirty-nine! Supposing he yielded to this childish defiance of the Unwritten Law and anyone came to know? He got up and crossing to the window, flung it wide. The roar of London traffic rushed upwards on the rising wind. He stood, his profile directed at the struggling smoke-befogged stars; his shoulders, so moulded to desk-work, a little bowed. Far below him, the haunches of a large black draught-horse lumbered towards a mews. Its heavy deliberation touched a chord of memory: a fragment of verse—Yeats, wasn't it?—assailed him in warning.
"The years like great black oxen plough the land, While God the Ploughman gathers in" ... Gathers in ... Gathers in ... The grain?
There had been a clever fantastical novel he believed written round the theme, and he had seen it filmed.
Someone in it had found the long-desired elixir of Youth.
At the time this had not seemed impossible, but now ... "While God, the Ploughman..." Anyway, He did not hold back the great black oxen. The inexorable ploughing, sowing and garnering must go on. Eighteen to thirty-nine. How possible to take advantage of Ferlie's crystal faith and unanalysed affection? If her words veiled the faint suggestion that her need of him was as great as his need of her—wonderingly, reverently, he repeated it to himself, "his need of her"—he must pretend, for the present at any rate, that he did not hear it. He must be just to her Youth, that glorious jewel of Life which she wore with such careless indifference.
"The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the Herdsman goads them on behind."
That was it....
"Cyprian." Her voice brought him down from the clouds and he closed the window with a slight sense of chill. "Cyprian, look at me."
He raised his eyes to hers, to drop them again immediately.
"Can you tell me, honestly," she asked him, "that you consider it would be what is called a 'sin' for me to lean upon our friendship in the way I choose, to-night?"
He shook his head at that but he would not answer.
"Cyprian, look at me." Nor would he do that again. His eyelids blinked—their old short-sighted trick—over her head, at the sapphire resting against her white throat, at the dying embers, at the hearth-rug where lay, kicked free by its owner, a glass-buckled Cinderella shoe.
And she knew that she would be proved helpless against his refusal so much as to look at his conception of the Forbidden Thing: for every flutter of his eyelids was the drawing of a shutter which blocked from her another window of his soul.
* * * * * *
"And now," said Cyprian at last, his voice dry with exhaustion, "Would you mind going?"
Instantaneously, Ferlie turned her back and thrust her foot into the errant shoe. In the doorway she faced him, her cloak over her arm.
"You have never asked that of me before," she said, "and you will never be required to say it again."
Half paralysed he heard the front door bang. In another moment the wave of reaction set in. What in thunder was he thinking of to allow her to go out into Jermyn Street at this hour of the night, alone?
He snatched his hat and followed, gaining on her by the fact that he could take the lift. She was passing under the stone arch leading to the pavement as he crashed back the gates.
"Ferlie!" he called after her, "Wait." But she did not stop nor turn her head at the sound of his footsteps hurrying along behind her. A taxi crawled near with its flag up. He was just too late to prevent her getting into it. With feverish presence of mind he noted the number. Fortune favoured him, for it was caught in a block of cars returning from the theatres, as another car ejected its passenger on the other side of the road.
Cyprian, too fiercely anxious at the moment to see the humour of the situation, gave his penny-novelette directions. The driver awarded him an indifferent glance and held out his hand for earnest money. He was used to minding his own business in his profession.
Once in full pursuit of Ferlie's taxi Cyprian found himself on the verge of unnatural mirth. His third night in England; and he and Ferlie playing hide-and-seek, in and out of the London traffic, like any hardened human satyr and some nymph of the by-streets. And why? What was this intangible, invisible Thing which had suddenly interposed itself between them? A silly whim on her part, an instinct-driven refusal on his and the shadow had assumed these gigantic proportions.
Outside the Carmichaels' town residence, with its Sale-advertising boards and closed blinds, Ferlie alighted.
From the prompt departure of her driver one might divulge that she paid him without examining the fare. On her own front door-step, wrestling with her latch-key, Cyprian reached her.
"Ferlie, don't be a little goose!"
Her eyes meeting his in the reflection of the street lamp were as hard as pebbles.
"Only Beckett is here," she said, referring to the old butler, "and he has put up the chain. Since you must let me in for a silly betrayal of my unexpected return you had better come down into the basement and see if you can hoist me through his bedroom window, if he sleeps with it open. His room is next to the pantry and silver-chest. If I set an alarm going accidentally, he will only think it is a burglar at last and plunge his head further under the clothes."
"But, Ferlie——" She was half-way down the area steps and he, less familiar with the house, followed stumblingly.
Beckett's window was open and quite near it stood a rain-barrel. She tossed the cloak she had not troubled to put on into Cyprian's arms.
"I can't take that with me," she said, and, before he could recover his breath to protest, she had reached the summit of the barrel. An instant she swayed on the edge of it, balancing herself by means of a pipe running down from the bathroom window. She was now only a shadowy shape poised above him in the darkness.
"Somewhere," the coldly-spoken sentence stole down to him after she drew herself up on to Beckett's window-ledge, "I have heard it said that 'to the pure all things are impure.'"
The blank black square of her egress stared unfathomably back at Cyprian, standing below it with the loose unfolded cloak, emptied of its owner, in his arms.
Her father said, "Well, if he is a decent chap, and Ferlie likes him, she is lucky." Adding, a little later, from his pillows, his brow considerably smoother than it had been for some time past, "At any rate, he will never leave his wife a pauper."
Her mother said, "Oh, my darling! Ialwaysknew you'd come to see." ... And aye had let the tears down fall in thanksgiving that there existed no Jock o' Hazeldean to abstract the bride at the last moment.
Peter said, "There will be lots of girls ready to scratch your eyes out with envy, Old Thing."
Lady Cardew said, "My dear, I thought from the very first that it was Meant."
While, to Ferlie, Clifford said, "I was perfectly sure you would come round in the end. I know women!"
And Beckett lost his bet with the cook; perhaps because he was less inclined to put his head under the clothes at night than one might think.
Cyprian said nothing at all. He was, apparently, most tremendously busy; though, as Mrs. Carmichael justly remarked, "One would have imagined he would make an effort to come in, considering how interested he had always been in dear Ferlie as a child."
Dear Ferlie as a woman was beginning to show herself a little disconcerting. A dignified demeanour was all very well for one so soon to wear the title of Lady Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but this complete aloofness to the arrival of satin-lined boxes and sealed wooden cases was almost irritating. People were constantly coming up to the scratch, too, and relations who, in the event of the prospective bridegroom's comparative penury, would have considered pepper-pots quite suitable for the state of life unto which it had pleased God to call Ferlie, were, in present circumstances, producing eight-day clocks and jewellery.
Dear Clifford, also, was singularly blessed in a dearth of relatives who would, otherwise, have been entitled to run appraising eyes over the girl destined to assist him bear the burden of an ancient name.
"Not but that," as Ferlie's mother more than once pointed out to congratulating friends, "the Carmichaels could hold their heads as high as the Greville-Mainwarings inthatrespect." She trusted Lady Cardew had rubbed it into the Duchess. The Duchess herself, a first cousin of Clifford's father, emerged presently, from the mist of introductions, as an untidy, acidly cheerful old lady, much more interested in horse-racing than in Clifford; though she had been overheard to express a hope that his fiancée had not bitten off more than she could chew. Which vulgarity reconvinced Ferlie's mother that everybody in the Peerage had not got in, so to speak, by the front door.
The Carmichaels were unmistakably "front door" people, even though Ferlie's particular branch might remain collateral for some years to come in default of railway accidents and infantile epidemics.
There was no earthly reason to delay the wedding. The doctors had not made up their minds as to the date of Mr. Carmichael's operation and the sooner his wife was free to devote all her energies to this decision the better.
Lady Cardew advised haste on account of her own private recollection that Clifford had, more than once, been guilty of changing a matrimonially-inclined mind. Had she imparted this news to Ferlie the latter might have insisted on delay; at least until Cyprian should be completely out of her range, in Burma. As it was, he received a silver-edged invitation to the wedding with everybody else; though Mrs. Carmichael hoped to give him to understand quite clearly that he had fallen from grace, when they met face to face on the Day.
He had decided—nearly—to refuse it.
He had decided—nearly—that Ferlie could never have meant anything at all by that most particularly Ferlie-esque mood.
He had decided—nearly—that he had done Right.
But the Daimon produced nothing to demonstrate that virtue brings its own reward.
He had made two attempts to see Ferlie and arrive at some sort of an explanation, but on each occasion she had deliberately frustrated him.
He had found it impossible to make his letter of congratulation anything but stereotyped. Cyprian was not good at expressing himself except in reports where exhaustive information was required in condensed form. It would be more than necessary for him to send Ferlie a wedding present.
Nothing impersonal could prove of interest in the ancestral halls of Mainwaring. Yet, there did not seem to be any personal message that Ferlie would be likely to welcome from him at the moment. A younger man had felt more cause for resentment, that Ferlie, during the short intimate moments when she hailed their recovered friendship, had not confided in him her intention of marrying this man. Cyprian was, himself, incapable of resentment against her, however well-deserved.
By chance, he caught sight of something in a jeweller's window which attracted him for unanalysable reasons: it was a small golden apple attached to a slender gold chain. By means of a catch, cunningly concealed under the leaf, it split in half, revealing a tiny magnifying mirror and a minute powder-puff. Round the mirror was engraved the legend, "To the Fairest."
Cyprian bought the apple, caused it to be packed and sealed, and wrote the address in the shop; whence he despatched it to Ferlie, omitting even to enclose his card.
She did not acknowledge it but, at least, she did not send it back.
* * * * * *
With the dawning of her wedding day a fatalistic calm descended upon his tortured mentality, preparing him to see the thing decently through.
On account of Mr. Carmichael's illness the ceremony and reception were to be comparatively "quiet." But when Cyprian arrived, in response to exultant bells, at the fashionable church's door, whence a strip of red carpet protruded like a derisive tongue, his muffled senses perceived quite a formidable array of guests in wedding-garments who ostensibly came to pray and remained to stare.
An immaculate gentleman, blandly manipulating yards of scarlet cords suggestive of a royal lynching, inquired of him, "whether he were on the side of the bride or the bridegroom," and, receiving an inarticulate reply, pushed him into the end of the last pew and left him to his own devices with a hymn-book.
The organ blared joyously, as if the organist aimed at drowning the torrent of whispering and the squeaks of enraptured greeting uniting the pews.
Here and there, was a face known to Cyprian through the medium of the illustrated papers.
Fragments of conversation were wafted backwards through the lily-scented air.
"The mother really landed him, I believe."
"Yes, the Glennies are furious, and Mona Glennie says..."
"But he was never actually engaged to her, was he?"
"Wild oats. What young man doesn't... No. The Vane girl was older than he was. The attraction atthatestablishment was the Samaritan Actress."
"Well, it's the first time I have heard a member of the tribe of Abraham described as a Samaritan."
"You don't understand. Why, she took in the Vane when all doors..."
Cyprian sat back and opened the hymn-book at random. Did he feel things more intensely than these folk and was it a disgrace to be thin-skinned?
Muriel, and now ... Ferlie. "The One before the Last." But Muriel had figured in the life of a different man from the Cyprian who sat here watching for Ferlie. If intense desire could be construed by the high gods and accepted as prayer, he did most intensely desire Ferlie to be happy.
The buzz of conversation thickened into low murmurings and died. The bridegroom had entered by a side door and was speaking to someone in a front pew.
Almost immediately the Voluntary changed to Lohengrin's "Wedding March," and a clump of rose-coloured dresses, presumably belonging to bridesmaids in the porch, took individual form and clustered round someone in white.
From his post at the back Cyprian had not been able to gather more than that Ferlie's future husband was tall and rather thin but, on turning his head now, his eyes encountered hers fully. He was startled by the impression that he was staring into the face of a perfect stranger. How ghastly white she looked! The fraction of a moment and the eyes dropped, even as his own had dropped before hers the night she had wished to keep him at her side.
She was passing by on Peter's arm. The pair of them looked as if they ought still to be going to school.
Peter's face wore precisely the same expression as must have adorned it when he first took his place at roll-call among the sixth-form "Bloods."
The bridesmaids twittered behind large bouquets of sweet-peas.
Everybody was standing. Everybody was howling a hymn, what time all craned their necks and stealthily mounted hassocks to stare at Ferlie ... Ferlie, who hated people to see her at emotional moments.... He would wake in a little while to find her beside him, seeking shelter from the Thing which had whitened her face with terror....
"Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God..." Ah, well, if the man thought so.
Cyprian felt certain that, whatever God had seen fit to do in Cana of Galilee, He was not presiding amongst these wedding-guests.
Every now and then a gap in the swaying pews would give him a glimpse of Ferlie's mother dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, in token that she must be regarded as bereft of a daughter against her will. At intervals, she was, doubtless, thanking God that she had done her duty.
Cyprian again sought refuge in the hymn-book.
The mutterings up at the altar were stilled and various people had escaped from confinement to wander through the vestry-door in the wake of the chief actors in this religious farce. Or was it tragedy?
While bitter thought was crowding thus against bitter thought in his mind, his gaze became involuntarily fixed upon the lines of the hymn the choir was singing to fill in time:
"O Perfect Love, all human thought transcending!Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy Throne,That theirs may be the love that knows no endingWhom Thou for evermore doth join in one."
But—Good Gracious!—thought Cyprian, in the light of blinding revelation, he and Ferlie did not need all this to make them one. They had always known that they were one, united by some mystic Force which had its roots in a Far Beginning and its branches in the Eternities.
Then why were they building these barriers deliberately between them and their united freedom?
"With childlike trust which fears not pain nor death."
He had missed the rest of the second verse, but that last line was a perfect description of Ferlie's approach to Love in the abstract. (The woman in front of him would not stop sniffing.)
"Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;And to Life's day the glorious unknown morrowThat dawns upon eternal love and life...."
It was over. In a dream he had seen her flit by him, glancing neither to the left nor to the right, but this time she was not clinging to Peter.
With her departure the church became a happy tumult of rising sound. The organist had pulled out everything in the diapason line that his fingers could reach, and Cyprian escaped along the flower-strewn carpet, and so to his taxi, with a great longing upon him for the silence of catacombs.
The philosophic sensations which had followed his sleepless night were no proof now against his throbbing nerves. Ferlie, also, he remembered, experienced physical suffering in mental sorrow. The knowledge formed another of the cobweb-threads binding them to one another.
In Mrs. Carmichael's drawing-room people were now shaking hands with her. There was more noise and a great deal of affected laughter. Cyprian, avoiding the Family, including the uplifted Peter, slipped into an ante-room in search of whisky and soda.
He could not face Ferlie before all that crowd. He could not.
From the ante-room he made his way to an apartment containing a bowl of goldfish. He remembered it commanded a view of the stairs. If she passed up or down the staircase, unattended, he might reasonably expect to have her for a moment to himself. He waited for a long while, watching the goldfish go round and round in circles. They roused misty recollections of Ferlie's nonsensical talk of the general imprisonment of human spirits.
When she did come, although she passed right through the room in her white veil and flowing draperies, he nearly failed to step forward from that sheltered corner by the bookcase.
"Ferlie!"
She started violently and swung round.
"Oh! It's you, is it?"
She spoke on a high-pitched delirious note. Naturally, people were agreeing any girl would be over-excited who had achieved this marriage.
Her whole appearance shocked Cyprian, who knew the real Ferlie.
"I never acknowledged your gift, Cyprian. The Apple of Discord. Clever of you to think of that. Not that I needed a material reminder of the fact that you and I had at last experienced ... shall we call it a misunderstanding?"
The words raced one another to a close, and she ended on the edge of shrill laughter. He flinched as if she had struck him in the face.
The tale of their years for that instant reversed, he looked back at her with the eyes of a hurt and bewildered child. Shaded them with his hand against the pain as he replied:
"You know that is neither fair nor true."
"I no longer know what is true," said Ferlie.
Half beside himself with the sight of her thus altered, he caught her wrists and held them.
"Because you have formed a new and all-absorbing tie for the future, is it necessary to mock at that older discarded friendship which stretches out a hand to you from the past?"
A slow flush crept up her face and the grey eyes widened on a look of anger and intense pain.
"Mock? No, Cyprian, I am not Muriel Vane—kind to men in order to be cruel. If I seem to indulge in that particular vein of cruelty, it is because I know of no other way to be kind ... now."
He saw the thin gleam of a gold chain which lost itself in the folds of transparent softness near her throat, and was superseded by a visible string of pearls—"the gift of the Bridegroom."
Then she wrenched herself away and left him there, staring uncomprehendingly at the goldfish going round and round.
Cyprian did not return to the flat. He went out into the restless London streets. Block after block he passed, from the more fashionable quarters to the outskirts of the park, walking swiftly to escape pursuing Memory, until at last the damp darkness of the river divided the myriad scintillating eyes of the city.
Further along the Embankment dead forms lay huddled where the shadows lay deepest, every now and again to start erect, galvanized into life by the angry flash of a police-lantern.
As he paused to strike a match against a stone bench, shaped like an incompleted coffin, one of these corpses twitched itself upright.
"Fit ter drop!" it muttered, still in the throes of uneasy slumber; "Gawd! fer one bloody night to fergit meself in."
Cyprian replaced his pipe in his pocket and fumbled.
"Here," he said, "I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I am, but if you, too, are in need of sleep and a little forgetting, go and buy it with this, which will not buy it for me."
With the astonished gratitude of a "Gawd bless yer bleedin' eyes, Gov'ner" (even here it was God, God, God, thought Cyprian, who refused to be shut out of Man's tortured intellect even while it anathematized His works) this invisible wreck of Humanity, made in His image, slouched away to drink itself blind to sorrow for a short time in some starless rat-hole known only to its kind.
And Cyprian sat and smoked on the deserted seat, still redolent with the effluvia of rotting rags, until a suspicious arc of light searched him out in his sins and a voice, hoarse with hectorings, commanded him to move on.
Morning found him so far from home that a sleepy taxi-driver whom he hailed rolled a jaundiced eye on receiving the directions of this individual whose damp, crumpled clothes and unclean collar showed unmistakable evidence of an unusual brand of night-on-the-tiles, and Cyprian was obliged to disburse half the fare in advance.
His physical exhaustion stood him now in good stead and he slept deeply on the shabby leather cushions the whole way back to the flat. Slept again on his undisturbed bed, afterwards, till the scandalized valet roused him for tea; his first meal in twenty-four hours.
Before he set sail for the East, he made one attempt, and only one, to renew correspondence with Ferlie.
The letter conveyed nothing to her of the true state of his mind. In despair he had closed it on a pathetic admission, "I fear I have no gift of expression." She answered him, but her own methods of expression were, as usual, fantastic. In the letter she enclosed a small gold key. "A gift for a gift, Cyprian. I suppose it was inevitable that you should shut the gates upon me. I send the sign that only you can unlock them."
He placed the key upon his watch-chain, and, with Herculean efforts of self-control, refrained from any attempts to discover her meaning.
She had always been such a rebel; she had always been so sure of the light within her and, alas, she had always been so sure of the light within him.
A few weeks later, when, the honeymoon accomplished, Ferlie and her husband had returned to town, Mr. Carmichael died.
The operation proved successful enough but, somehow, he never really rallied. Perhaps the predominant feeling that his day's work was now ended lessened the incentive to live.
He smiled with grim satisfaction the afternoon Peter came to see him; a Peter who had already begun to regard the Human Form Divine in the same light as the Butcher regards the liver and kidneys which he slaps down upon the marble slab to dissect for purchasing housewives; a Peter who would be decidedly happier using the knife than saving the unwary limb that might stray his way.
Peter's hair was untidy, his eyes bloodshot, his collar unhygienic, and his finger-nails in half-mourning. His appearance was altogether unsterilized and self-assured. He cried, with a loud voice. His opinions on certain experimental operations, his criticisms on those neighbouring embryo surgeons at work on the same yellow preserved leg as himself, his versions, punctuated with spasms of hearty merriment, of the latest hospital yarn, portraying his fellow-students as a set of inquisitive young ghouls more triumphant over an eminent physician's sponge forgotten in a victim's intestines than troubled with sympathy for the latter's bereaved relatives.
"And I'll tell you exactly what they did to you, Father; it's old Gumboil's favourite amusement. First he cuts open the..."
"Peter, I am surprised at you!" broke in his horrified mother.
Thus had the path of Peter been made smooth and his way plain by Ferlie's brilliant marriage.
"I staked little enough on her," said Mr. Carmichael, relishing the jest of Martha and Mary's antiquated establishment. "Your mother was mistrustful of education for her own sex; she did quite well for herself without it, didn't she? Ferlie seems to have justified the conviction that the old-fashioned girl gets the matrimonial plums. At any rate, you will owe your sister a good deal. See that she stays happy."
Of his son-in-law, whom he only saw once, he said very little.
"Impossible to judge them by the young men of my day. This type did well enough in the War crisis."
He did not leave his wife badly off. With Peter on the way to being floated, and Ferlie secure, she had her widow's pension to herself, besides a little private means and the sum the big town-house eventually fetched when Ferlie bought it, pandering to a dream of her mother's that Peter might one day practise there and retain the Carmichael traditions in the old setting. Till that satisfactory day it could nearly always be sub-let.
Somewhat doubtful of the Christian aspect of her husband's expressed desire for cremation Mrs. Carmichael, while respecting his wishes, determined that the rest of the funeral obsequies should be sufficiently orthodox to disarm his Creator.
"No proper tombstone, you see," she complained damply to Ferlie. "The design should, so obviously, have been a severe cross, quite plain, with perhaps a weeping angel praying. Then a dove of peace hovering, and maybe a few lilies. The simpler the better, you know. And a scroll at the foot, or an open book with one of those grand old texts—Isaiah, is it, or Ecclesiasticus?—anyway, one of the Prophets—'Fear not for I have redeemed thee.' So comforting. Or else the one about panting for living waters that always makes me feel thirsty myself. Your dear father was so fond of rhetoric."
Ferlie, not quite sure whether the weeping angel was destined to wear a delicate semblance to the bereaved wife, nor convinced that the cross could be considered suitably symbolic of the faith of one who had ever regarded it as the undeserved gibbet, brought upon him by himself, of a well-meaning Eastern agitator nearly two thousand years ago, was inclined to demur.
"Father never evinced either the slightest fear of his condemnation hereafter, nor any faith in an ultimate redemption," she protested, "and I think it would have been rather hypocritical to parade a thirst for living waters after death in anyone who can hardly be described as having gasped for them during life."
Then, responding to her mother's grievously shocked demeanour, she relented into explanation.
"I think I never admired Father so much in his life as I did at his death. He closed his eyes, restfully and unfearingly, upon the consciousness of work well done and principles truly upheld. What business is it of ours if they were mistaken principles? So many people, who profess to cling to the creeds supported by the Churches, live as if they had none, and then drift out on a tide of terrified remorse and shame. But, personally, I would not feel fit to intercede for Father's 'forgiveness,' if he really requires to be forgiven for being true to his lights."
Ferlie's mother was too religious to see it, and, since it seems to follow that the brighter the hope of Eternal Life, the blacker the garb in which it must be approached, there was much melodious moaning at the bar when her husband's ashes were interred upon the shores of that Eternal Sea which brought us hither and upon which, in imagination, she had safely launched his sceptical soul.
A week later she was still sewing bands of crepe on to Peter's various coats and seeking consolation in those little details of mournful respect she was able to accord her Dead.
* * * * * *
In due course, Aunt Brillianna, returning from the uttermost ends of Italy, was overwhelmed by the volume of water which had poured under the Family Bridge during her inexcusable retirement.
As the younger relatives, who had expectations at her hands, remarked: "Anything might have happened to her at her time of life." Why, Death had happened to her nephew!
To Ferlie at the Black Towers she went: that historical country residence of long-ago Greville-Mainwarings.
The place bored Clifford, Ferlie informed her, and just now he was obliged to be in town.
Clifford let her do what she liked at Black Towers, so long as she did not offend old Jardine, the retainer who acted as head seneschal and cherished insurmountable objections to innovation of any kind.
"It's a grim-looking pile," said Aunt Brillianna, sniffing the odour of musty armour in the subdued hall. "You look as if you had been living among ghosts, child."
"It's quite natural that I should not look very well just now," said Ferlie.
And Aunt B. scolded herself for not having foreseen that it would be so. Family Name to carry on and all the rest of it.
But where was this Clifford? A flattering portrait of him—life-size, in oils—blocked one end of the dining-room. She studied it for a long time; made a few non-committal noises; reserved her opinion until she had scrutinized his Father and Grandfather in the long Gallery above. And when she had made up her mind she still reserved her opinion for the benefit of her own reflection in the bedroom mirror.
"Presentably aristocratic. On the downward grade. Will Ferlie act as a strong enough brake, even with a child in her arms? Lord! What a mouth! A few more years shall roll and then if degeneracy does not set in I'll—anyway, I'll leave Ferlie all my emeralds," resolved the old lady.
She would hardly have been reassured could she have seen the original of the portrait at that instant in Ruth Levine's flat.
"And Peter?" inquired Aunt B.
"Peter, when he is not classifying the internal machinery of some antiquated corpse, is examining Roman Catholicism."
"Whatever for?" asked Aunt B. interested.
"For the fun of listening to Mother arguing against it, I think," said Ferlie, unenthusiastically. "I told Mother that, if her views were really so strong, she had better tell him that she had no objection to his conversion."
Aunt B. chuckled. "You have become very wise in your generation, Ferlie. And did she?"
"She could not resist correcting the term to 'perversion'," said Ferlie, "and it would have been so easy to have kept it at 'vert'."
"Her father, the bishop, must often have shown himself impressively sarcastic upon the query, 'Can there any good come out of the Vatican?'" mused Aunt B. "And your mother always had an indefensible memory for things best forgotten."
"What on earth does it matter to anybody but Peter? His argument is that, as he has no time to go into the matter of a Personal God's existence thoroughly himself and is by no means convinced that the same Deity has ceased to exist at the bidding of admirable rationalists like Father, it is best for him to join a cocksure religion, wherein he knows what he has got to believe and he knows what he has got to do. I think Peter could only be held by a religion that was cocksure. And he is, also, a little mistrustful of his own judgment these days, and certainly all for strengthening the matrimonial chain."
"And your own views, Ferlie?"
"To give according as one receives," said Ferlie wearily.
Far from satisfied was Brillianna Trefusis on her way back to town. She had been told that Cyprian Sterne had shown little or no interest in Ferlie's affairs and her shrewd brain was being interrogative. What had he thought of this marriage who knew the Ferlie-nature so well?
"Perhaps—Another Woman," reasoned Aunt B., "though, somehow, the idea does not fit. I used to consider the situation dangerous because the child got such little understanding at home. But, apart from the difference in ages, those two 'belonged'."
Then she warned herself that her imagination was getting out of hand. Ferlie, at present, would have been more unnatural without moods than with them.
* * * * * *
Who could tell that, on opposite sides of the Equator, Ferlie and Cyprian were both battling against that apathy which descends, like a canopy of darkness, upon ultra-sensitive spirits who have reached their limit of controlled mental suffering, blinding a vision ordinarily (since the high gods are just) unusually clear to distinguish between immortal and merely mortal beauty, and affecting them with that terror, however diffidently one may approach the Example, which wrung a cry of agony from the Leader of all Christs, whose lips were silent in the utmost extremities of bodily pain?
And these, as yet devoid of the Christ-Power assured to every struggling heart that responds to its stirring, whose sun is withdrawn and who possesses no artificial light to relieve the paralysing blackness of the Shadowy Valleys of Self-mistrust, may well lose their way in strange unexplored by-paths before they win through into the open country to find the dawn-star shining still above the distant hills.
Up the valley, beyond the well-established mines, where Burmese, European and International pariah digs the disguised jewels from Earth's mountainous breasts, Cyprian sat limply in an office with red wooden walls, smiling to himself at the remembrance of the untravelled folk who might picture ruby-mining as a series of endless descents into Aladdin's cave.
The washing of the ruby dust was about the most interesting part. The routine work and the daily examination of the naked coolies, who had even been known to swallow promising earth-stained lumps of treasure, in the hope of secreting them later for private exploitation, very soon lost its excitement. The rough surroundings and dusty atmosphere were, in themselves, the ordinary lot of colonists and pioneers, but the average man had some purpose for their endurance.
Cyprian was conscious of none. He sometimes asked himself, seriously, what he had done in binding himself to drive, interminably, another man's plough. There appeared to be no reason why he should remain, save the natural reluctance of his type to look back before the furrow was run. And that might not be for some while yet.
His Company's mine, a small one, had been a secret discovery above the area in those wilds where the mines were supposed to reach. He contrasted the life he had chosen with that of the average business man. The roads he travelled from the green banks of the Irrawadi, more than fifty miles into the interior, lay through a bewildering loveliness of mountain pass and rocky defile.
The country on either side of the river, steaming down which one encountered the unique floating villages of the log-raftsmen, remained primitively Eastern the whole way to Bhamo, where Burma joins hands with China.
The philosophy of Gautama's fatalistic children was beginning to soak into Cyprian's ego. From this point of the valley, breathing incessantly an atmosphere of absorbing toil connected with those open workings from which the Byon, or ruby-earth, was hauled up by washers of half a dozen different nationalities, he grew almost able to persuade himself that Ferlie's England of tall houses and dignified streets humming with modern traffic, belonged to a lost pre-existence.
Nevertheless, after three more years of monotony endured on lethargic river-boat, irresponsive mule-back, or at the inexorable office-desk, always, more or less, drawn apart from his fellow-men, he suspected that it was nearing the time when he should be born again. It was so long since he had slept well at night. Sometimes he imagined the pain in his heart had lulled, but each mail-day, blank of news he did not expect, roused it again.
He could have remained longer at head-quarters now, had he so chosen, but Cyprian never really fitted in with his pioneering countrymen of the East, and round about his part of the world there were few women.
Burma had solved the problem of loneliness for the forest officers and others in her own particular way. And Cyprian, in the noonday of his life, tormented by insomnia, had begun to look upon it as an inevitable way.
A dull throbbing ache in his temples made him lay down his pen. He could take Leave, of course. The idea nauseated him. For what reason should he wish to take Leave now? Even if Ferlie were unhappy with the tall futile individual he had seen her marry, what could Cyprian do? For him the road stretched thus solitary to the end of the horizon, lengthened by the fruitless wooing of the sleep that had deserted his tired plodding brain. If he stopped working, inaction would only increase the pressure of thoughts which work held at bay.
* * * * * *
And then ... the thing happened so quickly. There was no battling with decisions; no weighing pros and cons, and the Daimon had simply held its peace.
One day as he walked up the hill to his inelaborate bungalow he began to nurse a delirious fancy that the Country, herself, was holding his head in an iron grip, and only the Country herself could draw out those claws pressing into his temples on either side.
And, when he reached the four-roomed residence, the Country Herself was awaiting him, as it had awaited, to some purpose, many another transplanted Briton whose national sense of proportion had become blunted after long rooting in alien soil.
She sat there, patiently, outside the dyed bamboo chick, a lemon-colouredlungiswathed about her hips, a white muslin jacket concealing her contours, and frangipani blossoms nestling like stars in the midnight of her hair. Her age, was, perhaps, sixteen, but her smile revealed that placidity of soul suggesting many adventurous incarnations. They called her Hla Byu, or Beauty Fair.
Her father was with her: a practical, soft-spoken, obliging old gentleman, who had heard the Thakin was a lonely Thakin, and unmarried, and thought that, for the exceptionally reasonable sum of Rs.200 something might be arranged to the mutual advantage of all parties.
Some atrophied instinct tried to whisper dead words to Cyprian's wearied spirit as he paused in the doorway, one hand separating the rattling strands of bead and bamboo, to gaze at Hla Byu with bodily, but not mental, concentration. In response to that fixed regard her smile intensified, becoming a happy thing reflected again in her eyes.
"Ohe, Thakin "—and her voice was honey-soft—"It may be in my hands to heal the river-fever."
Thus he construed the quick-spoken sentence. His smarting lids were lowered in token that he did not wish to argue the matter to its close. But he held aside the pattering curtains for her to enter and let them fall again behind him with the noise of dried leaves laughing in a hot breeze.
* * * * * *
From the first the experiment acted as a narcotic. He had never discussed with other men of his acquaintance the modes and methods employed by all who adopt what is generally known as the Burma Habit.
During the War, just after his own swift flight from the mines to the trenches, and his almost immediate rejection after that early knock-out, an opportunity had been afforded him, by chance, of observing the question from the viewpoint of the British soldier.
It clothed in an unearthly beauty what had, till then, struck Cyprian as wholly sordid and unclean. But that soldier had certainly taken part in an exceptionally pathetic human drama, which he proceeded to relate with the utmostnaiveté, flavoured by almost untranslatable epithets of Tommyese.
One travelled third in trains those days unless one was the engine-driver or had made a corner in lead before it became the staff of life.
There was a lot of khaki coming up from Southampton; tired, wet-looking khaki which had seen better days but none so worthy of its cloth. It steamed with damp because the Mother Country had greeted the shipload of travellers from across the Channel with her customary flood of hopeless tears. The slippery platforms were picturesque, after a fashion, from behind a window-pane of the lingering train. It was waiting for the hospital train to leave first.
Then three soldiers had stopped outside Cyprian's carriage window.
"'Old 'ard, mates," said a voice, checking his companions from further exploration, "this 'ere is practically hempty."
Cyprian retired behind his paper as, with squelching boots and reeking bundles, they proceeded to instal themselves.
"Bit of orl right, eh?" sighed the first with a creek of content as he settled down to scrutinize the grey streaming pane. "The very rain smells different."
Cyprian had scented an Optimist.
"Hell!" was the reply in startlingly convincing tones, "I'll be floated out o' me blasted boots if I tries to stand up again."
This was obviously the Pessimist.
"All the same, them boots could take the prize at the beauty show if Hathi's 'ere was put alongside 'em for comparison," declared the Optimist, giving a poke at the footgear of Number Three.
His were certainly gaping in all likely and unlikely places, while with the size of them one rightly connected the mode of address. The Hathi smiled absent-mindedly as a man used to exciting comment upon extremities, in more senses than one.
"'E keeps 'is like that a-purpose to show 'is Archiebald socks," commented the Pessimist, disgustedly. "I ain't 'ad so much sock on me nine toes for six months as the Hathi 'as kep' on 'is corns for the 'ole of the last push."
"You ought ter 'a kep' that missin' toe to sell, you ought," chaffed the Optimist. "We could 'ave 'ad a auction in barricks after the last big Bosch fungeral, always supposing we git barricks over our 'eads once more in the sweet By 'n By."
The Pessimist snorted.
"I wouldn't miss 'em none if we didn't," he stated flatly. "It's my belief they'll be so sick of the sight and stink of soldiers that they'll disband the bloomin' army."
"Always s'posin' there's any army left to disband," volunteered Hathi in the soft even tones of the philosopher.
"One can't but 'ope," said the Optimist, producing a square packet from an inner pocket and proceeding to unwrap it. "'Ope and smoke is all the army 'as to feed on these days."
"'Ullo!" broke from the Pessimist, as the packet revealed cigarettes; "where d'ye raise that, Rooseveldt?"
"These 'ere," returned the fortunate possessor, "was give to me by 'oo might be called a member of the yaller Fair Sex and I've 'ad 'em treasured in oilskin the best part of a year waiting for this moment."
"An' we'll 'ope for 'ooever was with you at the moment," suggested the Pessimist.
His companion shook his head sadly.
"I ain't allowed the privilege of sharin' wi' you, matey," he said, "though with a generous nature like mine the situation goes crool 'ard. Fact is, I took a oath to smoke these with me solitary self on the first day I set foot on the 'ome shores—always s'posin' I 'ad a foot left to set on 'em."
"That sort of oath is 'ated in 'eaven," said the Pessimist, incredulous.
"It's 'ated worse on earth," replied the Optimist, eyeing him speculatively.
The Philosopher spoke. "Why don't you buy a penny packet of fags if you want 'em? I see a Mother's Darling runnin' round jes' now wiv a right pritty lil tray. I wouldn't want anyone's fags 'oo didn't want me to 'ave 'em."
"You correck that," commanded the Optimist threateningly. "I tell you it's a slap-up genuine affydavid that stands in my way. 'Ave you ever known me refuse a pal me own wipe—alway' s'posin' 'e was in the kind o' trouble wot needed a wipe?"
Apparently they hadn't, for the Philosopher prodded him gently in the belt with the toe of his boot by way of stemming his rising indignation, and the Pessimist hung unresentfully out of the window.
"This way, sonny," he yelled, on sighting the said Mother's Darling. "'Urry your twinklin' tootsies!"
But the cigarette boy did not hear.
"Try 'im with 'Cuthbert'," advised the Optimist sympathetically, "or Rodney. Rodney is a nice name," he mused. "I once 'ad a gawd-child named Rodney. It died o' croup."
"O blast the bloomin' train!" (in effect) exclaimed the Pessimist impatiently as the engine showed signs of restlessness. "'Ere, you!"
But the boy sighted him too late as, with a shrill warning, the engine lurched forward and the long line of carriages rattled after it, protesting, out of the station.
The Pessimist flung himself backwards with an unprintable expression. His nerves were obviously needing a Woodbine.
"I'll have to commit perjury, I suppose," said the Optimist sadly, handing him the oilskin-guarded case. "It's punishable by law but I'll look to you and Hathi to bail me out."
"Quit foolin'," commanded the Philosopher, "and tell us, afore we help ourselves, wot's makin' you so greedy-like the very day you ought to be bustin' to share your soul with your pals?"
"Always s'posin' they ain't got none of their own," murmured the Optimist, throwing him a box of matches.
"I ain't foolin'. There's a regular romance about them cigarettes you indelicate spirits is about to enjoy without appreciatin' of."
"Regular your Granny!" growled the Pessimist. "Which of your beauty gals robbed Dadda's case for this little lot? Why, they're Burmese!" he finished in astonishment.
For answer the Optimist nodded to Hathi.
"You was up at the Daggone a fair piece?" he inquired.
Hathi reflected.
"When we was quartered at Rangoon? You bet!"
"You'll mind them festival nights afore the battalion was ordered for Bosch fightin'?"
"I mind all them festivals," broke in the Pessimist.
"You minded too many festivals if I don't mis-remember," retorted the Optimist. "I 'eard wot the sergeant said afterwards about you, my man."
"It's a temple wot makes your mouth water, that," ruminated the Philosopher, turning the discussion.
"It ain't the temple wot affects me that way," said the Optimist decisively, "it's wot sits on the steps."
"I ain't seen none to equal the Daggone lot," agreed the Pessimist.
And, in a flash, behind Cyprian's paper, light broke upon a vision of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda at festival time with its flight of steps bright with humanity in coats of many colours. Yellow-robed, shaven priests, gay-turbaned sweet-sellers, picturesque beggars and always girls, girls. Girls in soft lungis of peach-coloured silk, heliotrope, dull-rose and lemon; for unlike the Hindu woman the Burmese has an artistic sense of colour highly developed.
Cyprian had never seen a native of Burma crudely clad. His thoughts wandered.
"She 'adn't got the sort of name a parson could 'a got round his tongue at the font," the Optimist was saying when he again turned his attention to him, "Always supposin' she'd want 'im in that capacity. She wore them frangipani flowers be'ind 'er ears. Woof! Whot a jolly stink they 'ad."
The other two puffed acquiescence.
"Used ter remind me of a Putney bus on a 'ot day," soliloquized the Pessimist, "I once picked up a lady's 'andkerchief in a Putney bus. But no matter...."
"That's a tale of 'is gloomy past, that is," said the Optimist to the Philosopher with a wink. "It'll be better kep' in its cawfin."
"So'll that yarn of lil Frangipani, if I ain't much mistook," snapped the Pessimist.
A slow grin stole over the imperturbable countenance of the Philosopher, but he did not speak.
"Funny goods, wimmin!" mused the story-teller, letting the remark pass. "There's two sorts, when all's said and done—the sort a man keeps in 'is 'ome, and the sort a man keeps in 'is 'eart."
"Lil Frangipani being the 'earty kind," suggested the Philosopher.
The Optimist searched his inner garments again.
"I got 'er 'ere," he said, and half-shamefacedly produced an envelope containing a few crumpled snapshots taken with a large-sized Kodak. He handed it to the Philosopher in silence and the Pessimist peered over his shoulder.
"Why, I know 'er!" he exclaimed in triumph.
The Optimist greeted the information with scorn.
"You!" he said. "Why, she never ain't 'ad nothin' to do with a gentleman wot Gawd 'adn't blessed with blue eyes and a pleasant countenance."
"Wot's wrong with my countenance?" demanded the incensed Pessimist.
"There ain't nothin' right that I kin see," insisted the Optimist.
"'E got it at the same shop as yours came from," the Philosopher gently reminded him.
"Wherever 'e got it from 'e was 'ad," insisted the Optimist.
"Well, if you call your eyes blue—" began the Pessimist.
"I don't," interrupted the other. "But she did, and that was good enough."
"They say them extry small ones is colour-blind and stone deaf," stated the Pessimist. "It's along o' the life they lead."
"I've 'eard tell the same o' you," returned the Optimist, "but I never pays no 'eed to gossip."
Again the Philosopher interposed.
"We'll take it she wasn't neither," he said soothingly. "And anyway you 'appened to be to 'er taste and she 'appened to be to yours."
"We kep' company, as you might say," continued the Optimist, "for—'ow long was we stationed there, Hathi?"
"Best part of a year," replied the Philosopher.
"So! Gawd, 'ow time moves along. I wouldn't 'a bin on-reasonable if the lil gal 'ad kep' 'er 'and in wi' one or two of the next smartest privates in the regiment...."
"Wot's that?" ejaculated the Pessimist, but the speaker took no notice.
"But s'welp me if she looked at another blighter the 'ole time."
"S'welp me if she didn't!" came from the Pessimist. "I tells yer I knows 'er."
"And I tells yer, yer never was able to tell one gal from another, out there," contradicted the Optimist.
"I'd know that one in my sleep, anyway," went on the Pessimist.
"That's how you probably know her best," put in the Philosopher, "it's a touchin' tale of a too-trustin' little 'eart, I don't think."
"Seein' as 'ow you're smokin' her fags..." began the Optimist.
"Let 'im git on with the yarn," remonstrated the Philosopher.
"Garn!" said the Pessimist, "I was only pullin' of 'is leg. Wot 'appened to the little picture?"
"You've said it," declared the Optimist, mollified. "She were a picture; in 'er pale yellow lungi, wiv a blue scarf and the flowers all over 'er on a festival day, she could 'a walked out wiv the Prince of Wales and 'ad the folk all lookin' at 'er instead of 'im." He sighed dreamy-eyed at the view of Eastbourne Pier over the Philosopher's head. "As I say, she was mighty fond of me," he continued simply. "And I thought a 'eap too much of 'er even to 'ave a dekko at any of 'er little friends in pink and blue. There was one Chinese woman, 'oo 'ad green dragons on 'er silk coat, and she gave me the R.S.V.P. eye more'n once, but I was always goin' shoppin' wiv Mother."
"I know that Chinese woman," said the Pessimist again.
"Then don't tell Mother about it," advised the Optimist. "The Hathi 'ere, 'e knows too little about trouble, and you, you knows too much for your 'ealth. Well, my gal she 'ad been popular all 'er life and 'ad saved a tidy pile of rupees which she was for puttin' down my socks, willin'. 'See 'ere,' I told 'er, 'I can't no-'ow treat you different from as if you was a lady-maid airin' the pram in 'Yde Park,' I says. 'You keeps your chinkers, my dear'!"
"'Old 'ard," interrupted the Pessimist, "'owd you talk to 'er in that bat?"
"She knew three words of English to six words o' Urdu," explained the Optimist, "and I knowed two o' Urdu to one of Burmese. And our kind o' friendship did not need talkin' much at that o'clock."
"A he-male and a she-female under ninety niver need none at no o'clock," said the Philosopher decidedly.
"Then came the rumour that we was to shift," went on the Optimist. "I telled 'er, and she sung out somethink upsettin'. She wanted me to chuck the army and join 'er in keepin' 'ouse out Signal Pagoda way and be as 'appy as two little birds in a chimbly. She didn't see as 'ow my missus at 'ome could be reckoned a just cause or impediment neither. She'd got 'er divorce from two 'usbands easy enough in the past. Divorce is easy come by, accordin' to their rules, it seems."
"Which, takin' it all round, ain't surprisin'," said the Pessimist.
"I put it to her this way at last. 'See 'ere, Ladybird,' I sez, ''is Majesty, the Bara Raj, 'e finds 'e can't do without me sword-arm in a tamasha agoin' on agin a low-down lot o' soowar ke bachars called Bosches,' I says. 'The British Raj 'e sends a chit for Private Cobb to come along and give 'im a 'and, so naturally I replies, "Anything to oblige." Now, 'ow could you expect me to do 'im down after that?' I sez. 'Them Bosches, they've been eatin' babies and boilin' the Raj's own Aunties in oil," I sez. That kind o' soothed 'er and she begins to see I'd 'ave to go. 'You not come back,' she says. ''Course I come back,' I sez (for you know 'ow one 'as to work wiv wimmin) 'I come back with a necklace o' Boschy teeth,' I sez, 'and you can wear it on the next bara din to the Daggone. That took 'er fancy some but, would you believe it, she didn't swaller me all at once. 'You not remember me, 'ome," says she, 'you buljao.' 'Never, on your life!' I tells 'er, 'you ain't the sort a man forgits easy.'
"The next time I sees 'er she brings me the fags, all wrapped up in oilskin and air-tight in a little tin. She got me to promise I'd smoke 'em when I were 'ome to keep me from forgittin' 'ow I was to come back. They ain't the three-rupee a 'undred kind as you can smell a mile neither."
"The day the orders was 'eard definite I was a-wanderin' round the wharf takin' a look at the ship wot was to land the troops Gawd knowed where, when I seed someone a-hailin' me from a sampan on the river. It was jes' after them sampans 'ad been put out o' bounds because of them two blasted Crusoes in B. Company wot 'ad drowned themselves axidentally foolin' round in one. And they bein' a disgrace to the regiment in not knowin' ow to swim, to my thinkin'."