GEORGE TARYLON and I were engaged to stay the week-end with Aubrey Carlyle at Malmanor Hall, which is four hours by car from Hyde Park Corner, though that, of course, rather depends on the kind of car. George Tarlyon’s—as that Armenian fellow had noticed—was a good car, long and low, a chap’s car, and we had run four-fifths of our distance very well: we had flashed through a town, whose name is of no interest, and had plunged into the peculiar wood of Carmion, which shrouds the southern border of the domain of Malmanor. We were therefore on the last lap, and the fact that this lay through Carmion Wood lent a certain interest to it; for although Tarlyon and I had very often stayed with Aubrey Carlyle at Malmanor, we had never, somehow, really penetrated into Carmion. I don’t know why, but it just hadn’t happened; and George Tarlyon was now running his car along the broad sweep of its central and only road becauseof a vague idea that it was a short cut as compared to the main road. It was a rotten idea, that of George Tarlyon’s.
One of the many silly legends about Carmion Wood is that only foreigners may hear the singing of the birds therein, while for Englishmen there is no sound but the rustling of the leaves and the sighing of the boughs. How that sort of nonsense ever gets hold of a countryside, I don’t know. And the fact that, as George Tarlyon rushed the car along the twilight road—for although it was a bright summer’s day, the leaves are very thick on Carmion trees—we could hear no birds singing was, without a doubt, simply because they were singing somewhere else that afternoon. “Obviously,” I said to Tarlyon, who had suggested that had I had a Spanish mother I could now be enjoying the sweet trilling of rooks and the back-chat of blackbirds, “obviously they can’t always be singing in one place.”
“Listen,” said George Tarlyon, and when you listened it really was rather curious, the silence of Carmion Wood. “Quiet we call silence, the merest word of all,” some one has written, Poe, I think; but that word applied very fully to Carmion, it was so silent! If only there had been a wind, just to givethe leaves a little fun! But there wasn’t a breath; it was a close day in August, and the wood was a crypt, that’s what it was. I said so to Tarlyon, but all he said was that he was hungry. Later on he grunted: “You and your crypts!”
“It’s a pity,” I said reasonably, “that the sun doesn’t get a bit further into this place....”
“Dolorous is the word for it,” murmured Tarlyon; and he was quite right, amazingly right. “Dolorous” was certainly the word for it.
“Open your cut-out, man!” I said at last, for that car was really too well-bred. And with a twist of his foot he opened the cut-out. What a cut-out! But it did make things seem more homely.
The car rushed on.... The straight road under the thick tapestry of leaves would take us directly to the parkland of Malmanor; through the opening at the end, for Carmion Wood ends sharply, we could see in the far distance, lying in the hollow of the county like an ancient pink jewel in a green bowl, the vast Elizabethan pile of Malmanor Hall.
The car rushed on....
“Bang!” said the car, but Tarlyon said worse than that as he pulled up.
“This,” I said, as we looked at the flattened back tyre, “this comes of taking short cuts.”
The matter with Tarlyon was that he had had no luncheon and was hungry. Now George Tarlyon is my greatest friend, but this I had against him, that he swore too much. Like many other men, decent men, he swore too much and too often. I can say “damn” with any man, I have said “bloody,” and will again when it is organic to the occasion, but what humorous writers in the magazines call scientific swearing does not amuse me. I do not wish to seem superior, but it just does not amuse me. In the Middle Ages men swore mightily on the names of the Trinity and the Saints, but then they believed mightily in the Trinity and the Saints. Now men swear and curse on the names of everything and believe in nothing. It is the habit of the modern world; it is the habit of being in a hurry; it is the habit of unholiness. And it had grown on my friend, George Almeric St. George Tarlyon, who was otherwise a reasonable sort of man.
To put on the spare tyre was only the work of a few minutes; and againthe car rushed on ... and from behind us came a cry. I looked back, and there, twenty yards behind us, stood and screamed a woman by the roadway.
Tarlyon was really remarkably fluent as he reversed. He was hungry, you see.
“We must have dropped something,” I suggested.
We drew abreast of the gesticulating woman on the coarse grass by the road. She was just a slip of an aged woman, and her hair was made of bits of grey string, and her eyes leapt hysterically out of a little, lined face. “Come, come!” she was screaming. “Come, come quick!” She smelt old, that woman.
The car had scarcely stopped abreast of her when she turned and scampered away along a little lane between the tall, still trees. It was extraordinary, the way she ran, that little old woman! “Come, come quick!”
Well, there was nothing to do but to follow.
“The girl’s mad,” snarled Tarlyon, as he strode after the little old woman. But striding was no use, it was a running job, and it was a hot day.
It was an untidy, tangled path up which she was leading us—and how quickly sheran, that little old woman, stumbling over her uncertain feet and frantic gestures, while we ploughed on behind her through the lush of the wood in August. It was an amazingly hot day; the Press for the last week or so had been full of surprise and congratulation as to the amazingly hot days we were having, and we had now an unrivalled opportunity of testing the veracity of the Press, but we would much rather have forgone it. At that moment, following that little old woman up that tangled path in Carmion Wood, George Tarlyon and I were probably the wettest men in England outside of a swimming-bath.
“What the devil is it all about?” muttered Tarlyon, and was not soothed by my suggesting that I thought it was all part of his idea of a short cut to Malmanor—while the little old woman still screamed at us to come quick, quick.
“Quick, quick....” And at her heels we burst out on to a clearing in the wood. The sun lay on that clearing like a carpet of gold.
Tarlyon and I stopped dead, and stared. We stared hard. But the little old woman,still screaming to us to follow, ran on ahead to the house. Yes, there was a house in that clearing, a little farmhouse. And the sun lay on it like a carpet of gold: that is how I saw it....
“Not our business,” muttered Tarlyon, and I heartily agreed that it wasn’t. We stood where we were, with our eyes glued on what we saw; and George Tarlyon dug his hands deep in his pockets. George Tarlyon always dug his hands deep in his pockets when he wanted frightfully to take them out.
A man was thrashing his son. I cannot explain why, but we were somehow quite certain that the thing the man was thrashing was flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. He was a huge man, with a mane of grey hair and a long grey beard, and he had on a bright red shirt. If I close my eyes now I can see the blood-red of that huge bearded man’s shirt, I can see the curve of his great shoulders and the muscles that stood out like lumps of rubber on his half-bare arm as he beat his son with a stout stick. And I can see his little old wife trying to stay his hand, begging, praying, moaning. We heard her moaning, like an old, old bird in pain. And at that Tarlyon started forward a step....
“Steady there!” cried Tarlyon sharply. “Steady, Beaver!” The cry cut across the sunlit place, the clear cry that has lit for England the darkest corners of the world, and the huge man in the red shirt stayed his cudgel and looked at us. But the little old woman still moaned, and it was quite dreadful to hear that in the summer silence. Ten yards separated us from that domestic scene, but they were yards of bright sunlight, and we could see every line on that patriarch’s face. For he was a patriarch. He was the most magnificent man I have ever seen; and Tarlyon and I, not small men, felt withered under his straight look. We stood rooted.
“Friends,” said the old man, and his was the voice of authority, “you must leave me in peace to drive the sin out of this my son. His mother is a woman, and will pardon everything in those she loves, but you are men and know the one sin that is unpardonable by all men. Go your ways in peace, and fear not to put your own houses in order....”
And still he looked at us, that remarkable old lecturer, his cudgel stayed in the air, his son at his feet; and his voice was the voice of a man who has drunk the vinegar of life, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who hasseen Christ crucified. That is why we knew for certain, Tarlyon and I, that whatever that ancient man said was true and whatever he did was right. “Come away,” I whispered.
“You are right. It is your business,” cried Tarlyon across the sunlight—and, dear God, it was! For the thing happened then. We hadn’t noticed that the son had crawled from his father’s feet. And what we saw was a spade raised high in the sunlight, a spade crashing down and cleaving the patriarch’s head like an axe, so that the blood came out of it like the sap of a tight orange. Without a cry the old man fell, and red as his shirt were the stones of the yard beneath his head. The little old woman screamed. The son and his spade lay where Tarlyon’s right hand felled him, and Tarlyon knelt by the slaughtered old man. I couldn’t move. I took up the gored spade and held it, a silly gesture. My heart beat like a bell in my ears, and I remember there rose to my lips prayers that I thought I had forgotten.
“Quiet, for one moment,” I heard Tarlyon’s voice to the screaming old woman. I stared and wondered at my friend, kneeling there on the dyed stones and listening to theheart under the red shirt. I could not have done that. I hate a lot of blood.
Then he rose and came towards me. I hated the dark damp patches on his trouser-knees.
“Quite dead,” he said. “We must fetch the police.”
Of course, I thought. And together we looked down at the son on the ground. He was gibbering. He had gone mad. “Drat the boy!” said Tarlyon thoughtfully.
“I wonder,” I heard myself whisper, “what was the one sin the old man said was unpardonable?”
Tarlyon looked from the prostrate thing to me, and I saw that those slightly frozen blue eyes of his were as miserable as the eyes of a hurt girl. You see, that old man was a very remarkable old man, and he was dead....
“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “You and I, Ralph, and our friends, have become so civilised that we don’t know what the unpardonable sins are. We simply don’tknow, old man! We are the world’s soft people, Ralph. We are so civilised that we pardon too much—both in ourselves and other people; and we call that being broad-minded, but it’s really being flabby. Butthat old man, I’m sure, was not “broad-minded,” he was as little “broad-minded” as Jehovah, and there was one sin he simply would not pardon. And we, who are civilised people, do not even know what it was....”
We stared silently at the poor gibbering thing at our feet.
“Better tie him up before leaving,” I suggested.
“Don’t you think,” said Tarlyon, “that one of us should stay here while——”
“I won’t stay here alone,” I said abruptly—and I meant it. Nothing would have induced me to stay alone in that ghastly sunlit spot, alone with that lunatic boy and the little old woman and the butchered patriarch. How she moaned, that little old woman kneeling on the blooded stones....
With a silk handkerchief for his ankles and one for his wrists, we trussed the poor boy against the kitchen door. He could not have been more than seventeen or so, and his young face was hideous with fear.
We left the place quickly; but I looked back just once at the scene, for it seemed to me very strange of the sun still to lie on it all like a carpet of gold. That is how I felt about it.
Swiftly Tarlyon put the bonnet of his car to the direction from which we had come, where lay the town whose name is of no interest.
“How far is it, d’you think, Ralph?”
“About four miles,” I ventured; and Tarlyon proceeded to eat up those four miles as a conjuror eats up yards of ribbon. It perished beneath us, that road, and the roaring cut-out tore the silence of Carmion Wood into a million bits, and may it never have found them again! Neither of us spoke. I was feeling sick.
We reached the outskirts of the town, and a piece of luck saved us from inquiring for the police station; for, approaching us on a bicycle, we saw a blue, helmeted figure, and by the stripes on his arm we knew him for a sergeant of police. Tarlyon pulled up.
“Better leave the bicycle and come with us to Carmion Wood,” he said. “Explain as we go. Urgent.”
The sergeant looked closely into Tarlyon’s face.
“Right, sir,” said he, and quickly gave the custody of his bicycle to a gnarled-looking woman in the open doorway of a labourer’s dwelling.
“What’s oop over ut Carmion?” asked she.
“You may well ask,” said Tarlyon.
No laggard was that sergeant of police. A grizzled man, with a reticent face. I sat behind and heard Tarlyon explain. The sergeant said nothing, listening intently, until the end.
“Where did you say the house was, sir?” he asked then.
“I’ve just been telling you, man! In a little clearing in the wood.”
“Very good, sir,” said the sergeant of police.
Silently we sped into Carmion Wood.
“You see, sir,” said the sergeant, “it’s a powerful long time since I’ve been here. Folk roundabout mislike the wood.”
“Don’t feel very attached to it myself,” grunted Tarlyon. “Ah, here we are!”
But it was not going to be as easy as that. For when we left the car, at the identical spot where, we were certain, the little old woman had stopped us, we somehow lost our way. We wandered about for some time, up little twisting lanes, down tangled untidy lanes, up no lanes at all: we ploughed through the growth and lush of the wood, like angry flies beating about a crypt to which the sun filtered in tortured patchesof light. We perspired enormously—and Tarlyon lost his temper. He had had no luncheon, you understand, and it was now past five; and so he was fluent in the forbidden language. But the sergeant of police was a tough and silent man, he neither sweated nor spoke.
“Where did you say the house was, sir?” asked the sergeant at last: and very amiably, I thought, considering....
“Oh,” says Tarlyon. “So you’ve heard me mention a house, have you!”
We stood very still, the three of us, and Tarlyon glared.
“Look here, sergeant,” he snarled, “if you ask me again where that house is I shall get cross.... I’ve told you, man! Body of God, if——”
“Please, sir!” said the sergeant quickly.
“What d’you mean by ‘Please, sir?’”Tarlyon was well away. It was a very warm day, you understand.
“I mean, sir,” said the sergeant of police, “please don’t swear on the name or the body of God.”
Well, we went on ... and, at last, unmistakably hit the path up which we hadfollowed the little old woman. We followed the path, Tarlyon first, then me, then the sergeant. And then we came upon the clearing, and the sun lay on it like a carpet of gold. We stared. Like idiots, we stared. For, except the sun, there was nothing in that clearing but the rust and bones of a long-ruined house.
You had, of course, suspected as much. You had known that all along. You know all about those silent woods and slaughtered men. You have been let in before, by better men. But it was curious, all the same....
“Is this where you said the house was, sir?” the sergeant’s voice came gently.
We turned and looked at him.
“Because,” he went on, “there’s been no house here for more than thirty year....”
“Ah!” said Tarlyon; that was about as much as any onecouldsay. And our eyes wandered over the clearing, and we saw, bright against the mouldy stones of the ruin, two silk handkerchiefs....
Even the law was at last affected by the heat, for he raised his helmet and passed a hand over his almost bald head.
“Yes,” said the sergeant of police. “There was a house here thirty year ago, but it was burnt down by the men of the neighbourhood because of a great crime thatwas done there. Parricide it was, but the boy was pardoned, being judged mad, and mad he must have been to kill the best and most God-fearing man in the county. Good-day, sirs. I’ll walk my way back. Yours was just an illusion, I make no doubt. The sun, maybe. But it’s always had a bad name, has Carmion.... Good-day, sirs.” And the sergeant of police went his way.
“Did you see him, did you see his face?” I gasped frantically. For the face of the sergeant of police was the grown face of the lunatic boy we had trussed up an hour before with our two silk handkerchiefs, and they lying where we must have dropped them, drooping over the ruins....
“And he has learnt his lesson,” said Tarlyon, and his face was as still as the grey water of a rock-pool. “He has learnt his lesson, Ralph—and has taught me one. For the one sin that the old man said was unpardonable by all men is blasphemy....”
IT would not have occurred to you that Mrs. Avalon was a discontented woman. It would not even have occurred to you that she could be, for what had she not? She was, of course, the wife of John Avalon, K.C. But she was more than that, she was Fay Avalon. Now of the lovely, the gracious Fay Avalon, what shall be said that has not already been said? She was a figure of the world, and in it most centrally situated. She had not pushed, but she wasthere. More, she was a figure of legend, remote and courteous. Every one knew about her, but of nothing against her, and this was so because she was a lady who never by any means sought any publicity but that which the love and respect of her wide acquaintance spread for her. She was, in fact, a darling. It was the fashion to speak well of Fay Avalon, and it is only shallow people who say that all fashions are shallow because they change. There is nothing in theworld that does not change, and if fashions change oftener than most that is because—well, it is difficult to say exactly why that is, and anyway that is not the place for it.
Now why are people like sheep? But perhaps it would be better to ask: “Why, in nearly all novels and conversations, is there one law for the rich and another for the poor?” For in nearly all novels and conversations there is a sort of asinine implication that among the rich, the social, there is no real friendship, but that real friendship exists only among the poor. For years and years and years England has been living under a tyranny, a silly tyranny: it is called the middle-class, and it is belauded by all because nearly all belong to it. Now if a writer writes of the middle-class he is said to have a sense of the Reality of Life, but if he writes of the poor wretches who continue to eke out a miserable existence on their capital in Mayfair, it is said of him that he is writing of people who do not matter, people who are not worth writing about, people among whom none of the real emotions exist, and so on. The patricians never protest, for a gentleman is one who can take abuse properly, the same, of course, applying to a lady. But the others, the Backbone of England! Oh, what a Backbone that is, and howswiftly it becomes a jawbone when it is scratched by a well-aimed bit of contumely! But what does all that matter, particularly when we were talking of Fay Avalon, and how charming she was. She had many real friends, and these confided much in her, but in them she did not confide. Fay Avalon was not capable of telling even the least of her troubles to any one, for she was shy. Beneath her polish, her wit, her grave courtesy—a rare enchantment, that—her supreme ability as a hostess at whose table enemies were notably changed to friends, she was as shy as a girl. Never, never, in all her brilliant life, and it really was a very brilliant life, had she been able to exclude the idea that she might very easily bore people, that, in fact, she was not nearly so clever and amusing as other people. That is why she never confided: she only seemed to....
One of the many secrets that Fay Avalon hid within herself was that she was romantic, deeply. She had always been romantic. John Avalon, K.C., had never been romantic, and never knew anything of his wife’s trouble. He loved his wife jealously, but being a great K.C. is, of course, a very tiring way of life, and so he spent most of his time with her in sleeping.
Romance came into the life of Fay Avalon at a time when she would sometimes say: “I am older than most women.” She was thirty-eight years old, and so she was sorry for herself, and then romance came. It was Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov who brought it. He was, of course, a refugee from Bolshevy, and it was said that before the Revolution his people had owned half of Petrograd, as was only natural, for there are countless Russians of the old order in London and Paris whose people once owned halves of Petrograd, not to speak of the Grand Dukes who made such a mess of all of it. But Prince N. P. Shuvarov was charming, and he was an artist. You knew that because people went about saying he was charming and an artist. You were asked to respect him because he earned his living, and of course you did what you were asked, although you were not aware of any particular esteem instantly alight in the eyes of those to whom you volunteered the information that you worked in the City. But life is different for Russians, they look so tragic, even when drunk, and so one went on respecting old Shuvarov for earning his living. He did this amazing feat by going about doing ghastly drawings of his friends Lady This and Lady That, which he somehow sold to the illustrated journals of theweek, where they appeared in all sorts of colours under headings like “The Third of Five Lovely Sisters” or “Popular Daughter of a Great American,” and boldly signed “Shuvarov.”
He was everywhere, in a quiet and pleasant way. Sometimes he was at Fay Avalon’s, but only sometimes at Fay Avalon’s. Superior people who had read Dostoeffsky called him Nicholas Pavlovitch, which is of course the proper way to address a Russian gentleman; while others just called him Shove-off, though not as though they meant it, for every one liked him. Women found him attractive. These Russians, they said, are so Sombre. Mrs. Mountjenkins said he had Magnetism. “One can feel it,” she said, “when he comes into a room.” Lady Carnal said he was charming and sosound.
In Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov, then, Mrs. Avalon found romance. No breath of scandal had even been breathed against her, and no such breath was breathed now. Her purity and her lovely aloofness were landmarks of London society in the second decade of this century. Colonel Repington, you will remember, remarked them in particular. During the period of the war alone he sat beside her thirty-eight times for luncheon, twenty-eight times fordinner, not to speak of the innumerable times when he said “Good-evening” to her in such a way that she not only heard him but answered him. He reports a conversation in which Fay Avalon was distinctly heard to say to the Home Secretary that she detested all secret vices like drugs and love, especially middle-aged love.
“One should live in public,” said Mrs. Avalon. “It is the private life that has ruined so many great lives and rotted so many good brains.”
“Quite,” said the Home Secretary. “Quite.” But in a few days he had to resign owing to liver trouble—so it was said—and Mrs. Avalon fell in love with Prince N. P. Shuvarov. Her one lapse, you understand. All her life she had longed for this one thing, romance; and at last it had come, in the sombre eyes of a stranger.
Mrs. Avalon did not know much about that Kind of Thing—the “private life”—but she knew a good deal about her friends, and that was a good deal more than she intended they should know about her. She organised her life to suit her love. It sounds beastly, that, but then you do not know Fay Avalon and I do, and that is why I know that nothing she did could ever be so beastly as if any one else did it, for she was a darling. As for Prince Shuvarov, he was Russian all the way and could organise nothing. She adored that....
Never, never, did they go anywhere, together: neither to the play, nor to a restaurant, nor to a ball; and only very seldom was he at her house, a guest among many. But every afternoon Fay Avalon would steal to her lover’s studio in a quiet street in Hampstead. Not, of course, in her car, but in a taxi.
And what a relief it was, to enter the dim, bare silence of that studio! The clatter of the voices of the luncheon-party she had just left faded instantly from her mind, a lovely mist came in between the unquiet delight of her heart and the usual labours of her life. She rested on a divan in a corner of that secret studio, while Shuvarov would pace about in his feverish way. It was a very bare studio, but it would not have remained so bare if she had had her way. Though, indeed, Fay Avalon, she who had so despised “the private life,” would have been shocked, she simply could not have helped being shocked, if he had not impatiently dismissed her offer to make of the studio a pavilionworthy of Babylonian lovers. “I make just enough money not to starve,” said Shuvarov. “And that is enough for any man.”
They were, of course, quite often unhappy, for Russians are like that. There were scenes, introspective and bitter, there were accusations, quarrels, reconciliations. It was some time before Mrs. Avalon realised that it is in the Slav Temperament to make violent scenes about nothing and then to yield adorably to passionate reconciliations. It was rather wearing for the nerves, she protested. “You have lived smoothly for too long,” he retorted in a harsh moment. “You have known no wretchedness, Fay, because you havefeltnothing! God, you Englishwomen! In Russia our womenlive, theyfeel....”
But Fay Avalon only sighed at that, certain that no woman anywhere could feel so much as she ... and she was a little afraid for herself, the way this thing she had not known before, this thing called love, had taken hold of her.
One day their privacy suffered a shock. Mrs. Avalon had just left the studio, in the evening, and had turned the corner into a more frequented street in search for a taxi, when a tall, shabby young man confronted her. He stood before her so that she couldnot pass, and his face mocked her, a lean face made very sinister by his nose, perhaps a fine nose once but now broken so that it inclined noticeably to one side. He examined her with a sneer in his eyes. She did not at first know it for a sneer, for no man had ever sneered at Fay Avalon before. He swept off his hat, a sardonic gesture, and he replaced it. It was a soft, dirty, dilapidated hat of the rakish sort, such as has been worn by every pirate that has ever been heard of.
“Good-evening, Mrs. Avalon,” said the shabby young man.
“I am afraid ...” doubtfully began Fay Avalon.
“Not at all!” said the shabby young man. He smiled graciously.
“It is my misfortune,” he said, “that we have not been introduced. I have not been going about very much in society lately, because of one thing and another. And I called you by your name merely to show you that I know who you are. I also know where you have been. I can’t, of course, say that I know exactly what you have been doing, but I can’t help thinking that your husband would have no doubt about it. Husbands are like that, madam. Juries are also like that. I wonder, Mrs. Avalon, ifyou will think me very boorish if I, well, insist on your lending me fifty pounds?”
The young man was very shabbily dressed, but he was so very unpleasant, so entirely and symmetrically unpleasant, that, she thought, he must once have been a gentleman. She stared at him, and she shivered a little. Perhaps, she thought, this is the first man I have ever met who has simply no desire to please me. Perhaps most men are only possible because they desire to please women. This one is unaffectedly foul....
“You are blackmailing me, then?” she asked him: and her voice did not tremble more than ever so little.
“Yes,” said the shabby young man. “And I am doing it as unpleasantly as I know how. I am sure, Mrs. Avalon, that you had rather I was unpleasant than that I made love, like the greasy blackmailers one meets in books. And, anyhow, I could not possibly compete with Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov. These foreigners, I am told, have the technique....”
She stared at him with unbelieving eyes. Could there be men such as this, so foul! To what awful depths of bitterness must this revolting man have sunk, that he could so wantonly and cruelly insult a stranger!
“I realise you dislike me very much,” saidthe young man with the broken nose. “But, even so, I should prefer that that matter of the fifty pounds should engage your attention more or less immediately.”
Mrs. Avalon shivered a little.
“Don’t, please, speak any more!” she breathed at last. “You seem to know so much that I am sure you know the address of my house. The telephone-book will, however, provide you with any details that may have escaped your attention. If you will call at noon to-morrow you will be given an envelope at the door. May I pass now, please?”
“Why, of course!” said he, and stood aside.
But somehow she did not pass immediately. She stared into his face with very wide, childish eyes, and there was a queer sort of hurt smile crucified in their depths.
“I have never been spoken to like this before,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I am the cavalier of the streets, madam,” said the tall shabby man with the broken nose. She stared at him very thoughtfully.
“And is that a good thing to be?”
The cavalier of the streets smiled curiously.
“I had thought, Mrs. Avalon, that it was I who was detaining you....”
“You see,” said Mrs. Avalon gently, “you are the vilest man I have ever met. You are probably the vilest man in the world, and so I am curious. You will have your fifty pounds. Or would you not prefer a hundred?”
But the ice of Fay Avalon did not freeze the cavalier of the streets.
“I do not accept presents from ladies,” he said. “Fifty is business, but the extra fifty is an insult to a gentleman.” He smiled right into her face. “You may pass, Mrs. Avalon.”
“You are a gentleman? You were, perhaps, you mean?”
“A gentleman,” said the shabby young man, “is a man who is neverunintentionallyrude to any one. I am a gentleman.”
He stood aside, and swept off his dilapidated hat. She took one step, two, three....
“I do hope,” she murmured swiftly, “that I will never see you again.”
The lean, weathered face with the fantastic nose mocked her. Fay Avalon had never been mocked before.
“Didn’t I tell you,” he said, “that I was the cavalier of the streets? I am alone, the solitary supporter of chivalry and all manner of outdoor manliness. Thus, it will bevery difficult to resist the pleasure of seeing you again, Mrs. Avalon, for you are, without a doubt, a darling. But I will try to resist it, really I will....”
“Please,” said Mrs. Avalon, and went swiftly.
The next afternoon Mrs. Avalon had promised to appear at a charitymatinéein a playful duologue between Cleopatra and a hearty gentleman alleged to be Mark Antony’s valet; and as she had never gone to the trouble of acquiring a reputation as unreliable—in fact, Fay Avalon was born with “careless habits of accuracy”—and though she was feeling less like Cleopatra than she had ever felt in her life, it was only after she had done her duty by the charitymatinéethat she set out for the quiet street in Hampstead.
She gave Nicholas Pavlovitch only the bald outline of the beastly happening. Blackmailer, money. He blushed furiously. Often she had seen him blush, but never as now. He was like a child who had just been smacked and knows he has not deserved it. He couldn’t, he said, bear theindecency, the shame, of it ... that, through loving him, she should have to endure this awful thing. There was only one thing to do. She must “cut him out,” that’s all! And how funnily tragic that slang sounded in his twisted Russian pronunciation.
She laughed at that. Not much, but just enough. “We do not,” she said, “take our tragedies so tragically. But scratch a Russian and you find a baby....” She kissed him.
“It is easier than that,” she explained. “You must move, dear. For weeks you have been complaining of the lighting in this studio—and now you have every excuse for taking steps about leaving it. Long steps are preferable, Nicholas. From Hampstead to Chelsea, in fact....”
Shove-off took steps at once, and these lead him to a little studio in a little street off the King’s Road, Chelsea. It was a little street like another, with a pillar-box at one end and the noise of busses at the other. Near the pillar-box was a lamp-post. And one autumn evening, as Mrs. Avalon walked from her lover’s studio into Cheyne Walk, she saw a man leaning against the lamp-post, and under a soft dilapidated hat she saw the shape of a lean face and a broken nose. He was motionless, indifferent, and he was not looking at her but at the windthat blew the leaves about the little street. Her heart jumped, and then was as still as a cut flower.
“So!” she whispered bitterly. “Blackmailers are like history, then!”
The vile person made the courteous gesture.
“Mr. Beerbohm has it,” the vile person said gravely, “that it is not history that repeats itself but historians who repeat one another. A charming writer, don’t you think?”
“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Avalon very miserably, “I thought you were vile! But I am disappointed in you. I actually thought you would leave me alone. You are even viler than I thought, you who call yourself the cavalier of the streets!”
“Perhaps,” murmured the shabby young man. “Perhaps. It seems always to have been my fate to find out the indecencies of decent people, and so, of course, decent people do not take a very liberal view of me. You find me this evening, Mrs. Avalon, in a conversational vein.”
There was a ghastly sort of subtlety in his neglect to mention why he was there, a thin, rakish hawk by the lamp-post. Impotent, she loathed him. And she passed him resolutely, with a very proud face, onestep, two, three.... And then his voice fell harshly on her back:
“You are the kind of woman men dream about in lonely moments. My life is made of lonely moments, and I think this is the loneliest of all. Go away quickly, Fay Avalon!”
Bewilderment wheeled her round.
“Whatdid you say?” she cried.
But he stood as when she had first seen him, the silhouette of a hawk with a broken nose, and he stared not at her but at the wind that blew the leaves about the little street.
“It is not worth repeating,” he said sharply into the middle air. “But to what I said, I added, ‘Go very quickly,’ and I meant it—for your sake. This is a lonely place, Mrs. Avalon, and the cavalier of the streets is as nearly an outlaw as any one outside a cinema. It is a long time since I kissed a lady, and the only thing that restrains me from doing it now is the fact that I have never in my life kissed any one who did not wish to be kissed by me. So you had better go quickly, Fay Avalon.”
She went, as swiftly as a shadow.
Mrs. Avalon, after her first horrid experience, had had the forethought to keep in her jewel-safe a roll of Bank of England notes. That evening, having sent her maid from the room, she counted out five notes from the roll. She smiled wryly.... “And so,” she thought, “this is hell. And Fay Avalon is well in it, she is in a very ghastly hell.” Very slowly, very absently, she recounted the five ten-pound notes. They were clean and crisp and delicious, marvellously above the funny stuff that passes for money in France and America. They were symbols of a spacious England, of splendid adventures and gallant merchantmen, they were symbols of all the luxuries ofraceand manners, dead now except in the hearts of a few shy people. A Bank of England note is the cleanest expression money has ever acquired, it is more than money, it decorates money. Only one of the five notes that passed through Mrs. Avalon’s fingers bore even a sign that other human hands had ever touched it, and that was but a little splash as of red ink on its back.
She put them in an envelope, wrote “To C. O. S.” across it, and privily instructed the butler that he give it into the hands ofthe person who had already called once before and whomightcall again towards noon the following morning.
“The gentleman called, madam,” said Smith the next morning, when she came in from a walk for luncheon.
“The gentleman, Smith?”
“He had that manner, madam.”
“There will be ten for luncheon, not eight, Smith.”
“Major Cypress and Mr. Trevor rang up to inquire if you expected them to luncheon, madam. They seemed, I think, disappointed that you did not.”
“They rang up together?”
“Such was my impression, madam. They said that there must be some mistake about your not expecting them to luncheon as they had not been asked to luncheon anywhere else. On asking my opinion as to whether, if they called at about half-past one, you would or would not ask them to stay, I ventured to say, madam, that it was very probable. I gather that that will make twelve for luncheon, madam.”
Mrs. Avalon smiled. “Very good, Smith.”
“The gentleman who called left this letter, madam.”
“Put it down over there. That will do, Smith, thank you.”
When she was alone she gingerly touched the letter. It was not addressed. The expression on her face was as though she was breathing the air of a pest-house.
“I see,” said the note, “that you think me even viler than I am. That is what I intended. By giving me money when I did not ask for it, you have made the profession of blackmailer an impossible one for a man of sensibility. Good-bye.”
She did not tell Nicholas Pavlovitch of this second encounter. It would, she thought, be only disturbing him for nothing, for she was quite convinced that she had now seen the last of the cavalier of the streets. She couldn’t help having a little private conceit about it. After all, not every woman would have managed that foul man so—certainly not those notoriously managing women who know how to deal with men. “Oh, dear!” she thought, “I am clever, I really am!” Even this man, so brutally undesirous to please, had been charmed back into the loathsome shades whence he had so horridly come—so impressed had he been by her original way of being blackmailed that he had been appalledinto respectful invisibility. She had, after all, allowed herself to be blackmailed charmingly, she had been as charming as any woman being blackmailed could possibly be.
It was because of such thoughts that, eleven evenings later, she was so particularly angry: for the lamp-light near the pillar-box fell on the figure of the cavalier of the streets, the careless, rakish figure at his disgusting post. By the beating of her heart, she knew him yards and yards away. Still she stood for one long moment, to quiet her heart, and then, intolerantly, she swept on. She was humiliated in a most private conceit. She was angrier than she had ever been in her life.
Swiftly she pressed on, to pass him with inexpressible contempt; but the pavement was narrow, and wide the sweep of the bad man’s hat.
“Forgive me,” said he. “I had not intended to worry you again, but——”
“You do notworryme,” said a lady to an insect.
“In that case,” said the cavalier of the streets, “I may spare you my apologies, which, I assure you, are quite dangerously insincere. I had intended not to sin against you again. But, this very afternoon, something has happened, something really ratherawkward. I do not often lose money at poker, Mrs. Avalon—in fact, I make a point of not losing money at poker, in so far, of course, as a man of honour may make a point about a hazard. But, whether it was the memory of your beauty, for I may not ever forget it, that came between me and my skill, or whether—Oh, what does it matter why it was, since the fact remains that I have lost money, and must pay what I owe or forfeit my honour....”
“Yourhonour!” she gasped. “Oh,commedia, commedia!”
“I could wish I was as privileged as you to take a comical view of it. It is only a small debt, however. A matter of twenty pounds. I have still ten left of the fifty you so kindly lent to me the other day—I wonder, Mrs. Avalon, I wonder if you could by any chance help me with the rest? I should be so grateful.”
So she had been right about him, after all! He would not have come again, in the ordinary way. She looked into his eyes, and they were as the eyes of other men. The cavalier of the streets was without his sneer.
“Yes,” she said gravely. “A debt of honour—surely you must pay a debt of honour, O cavalier of the streets! It is very commendable in you to want to.”
“It is merely good sense, madam. Like all matters of honour. If one does not pay, one does not get paid.”
Her fingers were playing within her bag. They ceased.
“I’m so afraid,” she murmured, “that I have only a few shillings....”
“Pity!” whispered the shabby young man; and he smiled curiously, as might a man whose horse has been beaten by a short head.
“I will go home,” said Fay Avalon, “and get you the money.”
“You will do nothing of the sort, Mrs. Avalon. Ridiculous to put you to that trouble for a mere ten pounds. Besides, it might cause comment if I showed myself at your door again.”
“My butler thought you charming,” she told him gravely.
“Therein he discerned your influence over me, Mrs. Avalon. No, I have a better idea! Go back to Prince Shuvarov and ask him to——”
“But he is so poor!”
“Heavens, those insufferable drawings of his must sometimes fetch some money! Try, please. It is only fair, after all, that he should contribute a little towards my support——”
“Your debt of honour, surely!”
“I am rebuked. A man’s honour would be very adequately preserved by you, Mrs. Avalon. But please do as I suggest. I will abide by the weight of Shuvarov’s pocket.”
With a quick gesture, she left him. She found Shuvarov preparing to shave, for when he was dining out he always shaved twice, like all proper men. She did not give him time to voice his surprise at her re-entrance.
“That wretch is here again,” she explained swiftly. “I know you are poor, dear, but have you just a few pounds you could lend me? Ten, for instance?”
Shuvarov began furiously, his cheeks mantling. “That man....” He waved his shaving-brush.
“Never mind that now, dear. Have you or haven’t you the money? Please, Nicholas?” She was always gentle with him. He was such a child.
Nicholas Pavlovitch shrugged his shoulders, and banged down the shaving-brush.
“You are encouraging him,” he said fatalistically. “Lucky I sold a drawing for just that amount to-day. Lucky for that man, I mean.” He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and gave her a banknote.
“Bless you, Nicholas!” she cried softly,and was going, when the light fell on the banknote in her hand so that there was visible on it a little splash as of red ink....
Slowly, she looked up at Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov. Her lips did not move, but he understood, and his thin, handsome face went as white as a soiled handkerchief.
The cavalier of the streets saw her face as she approached. She flung the note at him, so that it fell from his jacket to his feet. She passed him. But fingers swiftly clutched her arm, so that it hurt.
“That,” he said harshly, “will teach a lovely lady to love scum. I intended that it should. He and I arranged thecoup, ages ago. But when I saw you the first time, in Hampstead, I sickened. That is why I was so beastly, that you should hate me as much as I hated myself.Le coup est nul, I told Shuvarov after that. Since then your face has haunted me. So I did this—to cure you of your silly infatuation for a man who would eat into your life like a foul little worm into a lovely fruit. God, how you could ever have liked that lousy, half-baked, professional Russian! I saw him to-day, and saw that he still had the note with the red mark on it—this!” And he ground hisheel on the note on the pavement. Tighter he held her arm, and he scowled into her face. She thought of the wet-white she would have to use on her arm to hide the bruises of his fingers.
“You’re hurting me!” she cried.
“I know. I have sinned against you,” he said, “but you have done worse. You have sinned against yourself. Now go, and sin no more. And you’d better go damn quick else you’ll be very late for dinner and the old K.C. will get cross.”
“Youto talk of sin!” she cried, and laughed.
“Naturally, Fay Avalon. For only Satan can rebuke sin with authority.”
“Oh, pouf!” she laughed. “You are sentimental then!”
“Hell!” snapped the cavalier of the streets. “I am in love!” And as he swept off his dilapidated hat she could not help a thought that a plume would wave more becomingly from that particular hat than from any other hat she knew or would ever know. Romance....
“Oh, dear!” sighed Mrs. Avalon. “Good-bye.” But the cavalier was already only a distant shadow in the street.
THIS story has no point. No story that has anything to do with Hugo Cypress could have a point, for Hugo is an utterly pointless man. Dear Hugo....
I have known him since he was so high, and as I was also so high, I know him well. I could tell you of many little happenings, just to show you the sort of man he was, but one in particular, a martial one, vividly occurs to me. It was in the third year of the war, and I had been shoved into the War Office, because of a personal application of that great scientific truth to the effect that two things cannot be in the same place at once, particularly if one of them happens to be a German shell; and, one day, Hugo called. His arm was in a sling and a light was in his eye. Dear Hugo....
“Show me,” said Hugo, “a man who will give me a job of work.”
I showed him old Tornado Toby—officially known as Major-General Sir TobiasBlast, K.C.M.G., D.S.O., M.V.O., O.U. D.S., etc. I stood in a far corner, and was very silent.
“What d’you want?” said Sir Toby.
“Job of work, sir.”
“Where?”
“Commission going to Iraq, sir.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know, sir. But it’s going.”
“Idiot. Why d’you want the job?”
“Chap must have a job of work, sir.”
Tornado Toby looked him over contemptuously, and his eye roved from the crown on Hugo’s shoulder-strap to the bits of ribbon on Hugo’s sleeve and the light in Hugo’s eye.
“What’s the matter with you as you are?”
“Fired out, sir. Sick.”
Sir Toby’s eye at last came to rest on Hugo’s disabled arm. He drew a blank form towards him. I played about with a cigarette-case.
“You can smoke,” he snarled. “What are they?”
“Virginian, sir.”
“Pah! You can’t smoke.”
He looked at Hugo.
“Sit down, Major.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Sir Toby poised pencil over paper.
“Education?”
“None, sir.”
“Where were you educated?”
“Nowhere, sir.”
“Idiot. Where were you at school?”
“Eton, sir.”
“Shake,” said Sir Toby.
They shook.
“What qualifications for this job in Iraq? Think before you answer.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Hugo thought.
“Can’t think of any, sir,” he said at last.
“Languages? French?”
“Very guarded, sir.”
“Can you live on your pay?”
“Live on anything, sir.”
“Hum! Any private means?”
“Very private, sir. Never seen them.”
“How d’you live in London, then?”
“Pretty well, sir.”
Hugo got that job, and in 1919 he came back to England, very bronzed and lean and gay. But the gaiety did not last very long.
Now Hugo, in the days of his first youth, had been consumed by an ambition to be regarded as the kind of man to whom no chaste woman should be allowed to speak. But nothing ever came of that, he never even succeeded in persuading a chastewoman to cut him; wherefore in the course of time he came to think of himself as a poor harmless idiot who was liked by every one and loved by none. “Dear Hugo,” people said. That was all right in its way, said Hugo, but he was not so young as he had been and it got, he said, on his nerves a bit....
Soon after he had returned from the Near East, and when the gaiety had worn off, he discovered a pressing desire to Settle Down. And he cast a keen eye round and about the fair land of Britain, and behold! he saw Miss Shirley St. George—and, still worse, got it into his head that she had seen him. Immediately, he fell in love with Miss Shirley St. George. He had, of course, no money: she had no money. He proposed to her: she refused him. He begged: she laughed. “Dear Hugo,” she said.
Now Miss Shirley St. George was little sister to George Tarlyon, whom I think I’ve told you about.
One morning Hugo arose from his bed in the chambers, which he could not afford, and directed the valet, whom he could not afford, to send this telephone message: “Major Cypress desires to see Lord Tarlyon at his club at once.”
“Lord Tarlyon,” came the answer, “will see Major Cypress at Lord Tarlyon’s club at Lord Tarlyon’s convenience, and desires Major Cypress to stand at attention when speaking to him.”
There are many clubs in Saint James’s Street, but there is one in particular, towards the northern part, much referred to by biographers of persons oftonof more elegant times. Thither, that morning at a reasonable hour, went Major Cypress, very thoughtfully. Tarlyon was there. Tarlyon was always there, at a reasonable hour.
“Bronx or Martini, Hugo?”
“Sherry, thanks.”
“Nice morning, Hugo. Up late last night?”
“No,” said Major Cypress. “No. I was not up late last night, George. And if you really want to know, I think it is a very classy morning.”
“Well,” said Tarlyon, “you can’t say fairer than that, old man.”
Silence....
“Sir,” said Major Cypress, “have I your permission to pay my addresses to your little sister with a view to a matrimonial entanglement?”
“Ho!” said Tarlyon.
“What the devil do you mean by saying ‘Ho!’ when I ask you if I can pay my——”
“You can pay her what you like,” said Tarlyon sulkily.
“I thank you,” said Hugo.
“But,” said Tarlyon, “can you pay her anything at all? Major Cypress, are you in a position to support a wife?”
“Well, I never!” gasped Hugo. “I’m on half-pay, man!”
“Ho!” said Tarlyon. “I withdraw my consent. I hate to be unkind to majors, but I’m afraid I must. How are you going to live, man?”
“Can’t worry about cheques in Paradise, George.”
“Good for you, old Hugo! Very pretty. Bronx or Martini?”
“Sherry, thanks. George, you don’t know what love is....”
“Keep nothing from me, Hugo. What is love? Ah, what is love? I insist on being told....”
“Love,” said Hugo, “is proposing to Shirley five times in five months and being rejected five times in five months.... O God!”
“What did the girl say?”
“Say! She laughed at me, George. Fivetimes running! ‘Dear Hugo....’ That’s what she said!”
“Poor old Hugo!”
“She said, George, that she could never, never marry me....”
“Well, damn it, man, you didn’t take that lying down, did you! And you a Major!”
“I took it lightly, George. I smiled. I distinctly remember smiling. O God!”
“Iamso sorry, Hugo! I really am, you know. Honestly, old man, I’d sooner have you for a brother-in-law than any man alive—except, perhaps, a Rockefeller.”
“Money, George, isn’t everything.”
“You’re right there, old man. Your money is completely nothing, anyhow. What’s your next step? Orchids?”
“I am no good at those Dago tricks, George.”
“Shirley’s very partial to carnations, old man.”
“No, George. Not even carnations. She’d laugh at me. She’d say ‘dear Hugo’....”
“Well, old man, you might go further and hear worse. It’s purple carnations she’s especially fond of it, by the way.”
“George, I’m going to try just once again—without carnations. Just once more, oldman. And I thought I’d get your backing.”
“Full and square, Hugo, it’s with you. The cheek of that girl! Shall I ring her up and....”
“For God’s sake, don’t! But you’re a good fellow, George.... I say, if she refuses me again I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Have a drink, old man. Bronx, sherry, or Martini?”
“No more, thanks.”
“Well, best of luck, old man!”
“Thank you, George. Good-bye.”
“See you this evening?”
“Look here, old man, I don’t want to be dramatic and all that, but you may never see me again.” And Hugo was stone-cold serious. He was probably the most serious man in England at that moment. “Good-bye, old man. Thanks so much.”
“Just a moment.” And George Tarlyon went to the writing-table, rapidly wrote a short note, and put the envelope into Hugo’s hand.
“Give that to Shirley,” said he. But Hugo looked suspicious.
“It’s about the theatre to-night,” explained Tarlyon. “I’m taking her toLoyalties, to improve her mind.”
“Ah,” said Hugo. “Loyalties!Ah!Jew play. Very improving.” Hugo thought weightily.
“Look here,” said Hugo, “you know about these things—you were born to be a co-respondent, George. Got any tips to give a chap?”
“There’s only one, old Hugo—take ’em young and treat ’em rough. Hairy, primitive man business, you know. ‘Come here, woman, and I’ll learn you’ stuff. But it works better with some than with others, and it’s rather risky. You might try giving her a thick ear, though—only in fun, of course. Cat playing with mousemotif. Tender brutality’s your line, Hugo. Many a good woman’s been won by a little tender brutality tastefully applied. Just put it to her gently that you’ll give her a thick ear unless she accepts you. You can always lead the conversation to ears, somehow.... Well, good-bye. Luck, Hugo. Hey, don’t forget your hat!”
Miss Shirley St. George lived with her aunt in Audley Square, Tarlyon saying that he was no fit person for a young girl to live with, and the aunt agreeing. They adored each other, George and Shirley.
Towards Audley Square walked Major Cypress, very thoughtfully. Piccadilly had to be crossed, from the new Wolsely building to Mr. Solomon’s, the florist. Piccadilly was crossed, miraculously, for the traffic was thick, though genial. A newsboy yelled, “Execution of Erskine Childers” into his ear.
“Boy,” said Major Cypress, “you must not do that. You must not gloat on death like that, and before perfect strangers, too. And, besides, though you may not have shared Mr. Childers’s political opinions, you must admit that he did not die meanly. Here’s a shilling for you, and don’t let me hear you talking so much about executions in future.”
Major Cypress then walked away a pace or two, and stood before the flower-laden windows of Mr. Solomon. The boy watched him.
“Balmy,” said the boy.
“Mysterious disappearance of Child!” yelled the boy.
“Damn it,” thought Major Cypress. “I am in love. Oh, damn it!”
And he stared into the flower-laden windows of Mr. Solomon. Orchids there were therein, yellow and mauve and speckled. Roses, little, tight autumn roses. Pink andwhite anemones, hyacinths and jonquils, white Dutch lilacs and fat chrysanthemums in white and bronze. And there were carnations—right in the middle of that pageant was a splash of purple carnations.
“Carnations,” thought Major Cypress. “And, in particular, purple carnations. But that is not a proper way for an Englishman to win a wife. A little tender brutality is the way. But how to be tenderly brutal? Hell, I wish I was a Frenchman! A gardenia, on the other hand, may not come amiss. I will wear a gardenia. It will give me an air of high-minded depravity, which, they say, is attractive to young women.”
Major Cypress entered within, and in due course was served with a gardenia.
“For your button-hole, sir?”
“I suppose so,” said Major Cypress. “But not so much vegetable matter with it, please. I want a gardenia, not a garden. Thank you.”
“Thank you, sir. Nice morning, sir.”
“I doubt it,” said Major Cypress.
He wandered westwards, past the Berkeley. The commissionaire at the restaurant doors saluted him. Hugo liked that, and always rather sought it. Tarlyon was of opinion that the commissionaire probably mistook him for some one who had oncetipped him, but Hugo said that that was not the point, while to be saluted by commissionaires on Piccadilly was a thing that happened only to very few people.