Malvina of Brittany
by
Jerome K. Jerome
Part 3 out of 4
"No," says Mr. Parable; "he wasn't."
"Then who was he?" says Miss Bulstrode. "He must have been
something to her--fiance?"
"I am going to do the fourteen days myself," says Mr. Parable. "I
shall come out all the fresher after a fortnight's complete rest and
change."
Cook leaves the door with a smile on her face that made her look
quite beautiful, and, taking some paper from the dresser drawer,
began to write a letter.
They went on talking in the other room for another ten minutes, and
then Mr. Parable lets them out himself, and goes a little way with
them. When he came back we could hear him walking up and down the
other room.
She had written and stamped the envelope; it was lying on the table.
"'Joseph Onions, Esq.,'" I says, reading the address. "'Auctioneer
and House Agent, Broadway, Hammersmith.' Is that the young man?"
"That is the young man," she says, folding her letter and putting it
in the envelope.
"And was he your fiance?" I asked.
"No," she says. "But he will be if he does what I'm telling him to
do."
"And what about Mr. Parable?" I says.
"A little joke that will amuse him later on," she says, slipping a
cloak on her shoulders. "How once he nearly married his cook."
"I shan't be a minute," she says. And, with the letter in her hand,
she slips out.
Mrs. Meadows, we understand, has expressed indignation at our
publication of this interview, she being under the impression that
she was simply having a friendly gossip with a neighbour. Our
representative, however, is sure he explained to Mrs. Meadows that
his visit was official; and, in any case, our duty to the public
must be held to exonerate us from all blame in the matter.
* * *
Mr. Joseph Onions, of the Broadway, Hammersmith, auctioneer and
house agent, expressed himself to our representative as most
surprised at the turn that events had subsequently taken. The
letter that Mr. Onions received from Miss Comfort Price was explicit
and definite. It was to the effect that if he would call upon a
certain Mr. Quincey, of Harcourt Buildings, Temple, and acknowledge
that it was he who began the row at the Earl's Court Exhibition on
the evening of the twenty-seventh, that then the engagement between
himself and Miss Price, hitherto unacknowledged by the lady, might
be regarded as a fact.
Mr. Onions, who describes himself as essentially a business man,
decided before complying with Miss Price's request to take a few
preliminary steps. As the result of judiciously conducted
inquiries, first at the Vine Street Police Station, and secondly at
Twickenham, Mr. Onions arrived later in the day at Mr. Quincey's
chambers, with, to use his own expression, all the cards in his
hand. It was Mr. Quincey who, professing himself unable to comply
with Mr. Onion's suggestion, arranged the interview with Miss
Bulstrode. And it was Miss Bulstrode herself who, on condition that
Mr. Onions added to the undertaking the further condition that he
would marry Miss Price before the end of the month, offered to make
it two hundred. It was in their joint interest--Mr. Onions
regarding himself and Miss Price as now one--that Mr. Onions
suggested her making it three, using such arguments as, under the
circumstances, naturally occurred to him--as, for example, the
damage caused to the lady's reputation by the whole proceedings,
culminating in a night spent by the lady, according to her own
account, on Ham Common. That the price demanded was reasonable Mr.
Onions considers as proved by Miss Bulstrode's eventual acceptance
of his terms. That, having got out of him all that he wanted, Mr.
Quincey should have "considered it his duty" to communicate the
entire details of the transaction to Miss Price, through the medium
of Mr. Andrews, thinking it "as well she should know the character
of the man she proposed to marry," Mr. Onions considers a gross
breach of etiquette as between gentlemen; and having regard to Miss
Price's after behaviour, Mr. Onions can only say that she is not the
girl he took her for.
Mr. Aaron Andrews, on whom our representative called, was desirous
at first of not being drawn into the matter; but on our
representative explaining to him that our only desire was to
contradict false rumours likely to be harmful to Mr. Parable's
reputation, Mr. Andrews saw the necessity of putting our
representative in possession of the truth.
She came back on Tuesday afternoon, explained Mr. Andrews, and I had
a talk with her.
"It is all right, Mr. Andrews," she told me; "they've been in
communication with my young man, and Miss Bulstrode has seen the
magistrate privately. The case will be dismissed with a fine of
forty shillings, and Mr. Quincey has arranged to keep it out of the
papers."
"Well, all's well that ends well," I answered; "but it might have
been better, my girl, if you had mentioned that young man of yours a
bit earlier."
"I did not know it was of any importance," she explained. "Mr.
Parable told me nothing. If it hadn't been for chance, I should
never have known what was happening."
I had always liked the young woman. Mr. Quincey had suggested my
waiting till after Wednesday. But there seemed to me no particular
object in delay.
"Are you fond of him?" I asked her.
"Yes," she answered. "I am fonder than--" And then she stopped
herself suddenly and flared scarlet. "Who are you talking about?"
she demanded.
"This young man of yours," I said. "Mr.--What's his name--Onions?"
"Oh, that?" she answered. "Oh, yes; he's all right."
"And if he wasn't?" I said, and she looked at me hard.
"I told him," she said, "that if he would do what I asked him to do,
I'd marry him. And he seems to have done it."
"There are ways of doing everything," I said; and, seeing it wasn't
going to break her heart, I told her just the plain facts. She
listened without a word, and when I had finished she put her arms
round my neck and kissed me. I am old enough to be her grandfather,
but twenty years ago it might have upset me.
"I think I shall be able to save Miss Bulstrode that three hundred
pounds," she laughed, and ran upstairs and changed her things. When
later I looked into the kitchen she was humming.
Mr. John came up by the car, and I could see he was in one of his
moods.
"Pack me some things for a walking tour," he said. "Don't forget
the knapsack. I am going to Scotland by the eight-thirty."
"Will you be away long?" I asked him.
"It depends upon how long it takes me," he answered. "When I come
back I am going to be married."
"Who is the lady?" I asked, though, of course, I knew.
"Miss Bulstrode," he said.
"Well," I said, "she--"
"That will do," he said; "I have had all that from the three of them
for the last two days. She is a Socialist, and a Suffragist, and
all the rest of it, and my ideal helpmate. She is well off, and
that will enable me to devote all my time to putting the world to
rights without bothering about anything else. Our home will be the
nursery of advanced ideas. We shall share together the joys and
delights of the public platform. What more can any man want?"
"You will want your dinner early," I said, "if you are going by the
eight-thirty. I had better tell cook--"
He interrupted me again.
"You can tell cook to go to the devil," he said.
I naturally stared at him.
"She is going to marry a beastly little rotter of a rent collector
that she doesn't care a damn for," he went on.
I could not understand why he seemed so mad about it.
"I don't see, in any case, what it's got to do with you," I said,
"but, as a matter of fact, she isn't."
"Isn't what?" he said, stopping short and turning on me.
"Isn't going to marry him," I answered.
"Why not?" he demanded.
"Better ask her," I suggested.
I didn't know at the time that it was a silly thing to say, and I am
not sure that I should not have said it if I had. When he is in one
of his moods I always seem to get into one of mine. I have looked
after Mr. John ever since he was a baby, so that we do not either of
us treat the other quite as perhaps we ought to.
"Tell cook I want her," he said.
"She is just in the middle--" I began.
"I don't care where she is," he said. He seemed determined never to
let me finish a sentence. "Send her up here."
She was in the kitchen by herself.
"He wants to see you at once," I said.
"Who does?" she asked.
"Mr. John," I said.
"What's he want to see me for?" she asked.
"How do I know?" I answered.
"But you do," she said. She always had an obstinate twist in her,
and, feeling it would save time, I told her what had happened.
"Well," I said, "aren't you going?"
She was standing stock still staring at the pastry she was making.
She turned to me, and there was a curious smile about her lips.
"Do you know what you ought to be wearing?" she said. "Wings, and a
little bow and arrow."
She didn't even think to wipe her hands, but went straight upstairs.
It was about half an hour later when the bell rang. Mr. John was
standing by the window.
"Is that bag ready?" he said.
"It will be," I said.
I went out into the hall and returned with the clothes brush.
"What are you going to do?" he said.
"Perhaps you don't know it," I said, "but you are all over flour."
"Cook's going with me to Scotland," he said.
I have looked after Mr. John ever since he was a boy. He was
forty-two last birthday, but when I shook hands with him through the
cab window I could have sworn he was twenty-five again.
THE LESSON.
The first time I met him, to my knowledge, was on an evil-smelling,
one-funnelled steam boat that in those days plied between London
Bridge and Antwerp. He was walking the deck arm-in-arm with a
showily dressed but decidedly attractive young woman; both of them
talking and laughing loudly. It struck me as odd, finding him a
fellow-traveller by such a route. The passage occupied eighteen
hours, and the first-class return fare was one pound twelve and six,
including three meals each way; drinks, as the contract was careful
to explain, being extra. I was earning thirty shillings a week at
the time as clerk with a firm of agents in Fenchurch Street. Our
business was the purchasing of articles on commission for customers
in India, and I had learned to be a judge of values. The beaver
lined coat he was wearing--for the evening, although it was late
summer, was chilly--must have cost him a couple of hundred pounds,
while his carelessly displayed jewellery he could easily have pawned
for a thousand or more.
I could not help staring at him, and once, as they passed, he
returned my look.
After dinner, as I was leaning with my back against the gunwale on
the starboard side, he came out of the only private cabin that the
vessel boasted, and taking up a position opposite to me, with his
legs well apart and a big cigar between his thick lips, stood coolly
regarding me, as if appraising me.
"Treating yourself to a little holiday on the Continent?" he
inquired.
I had not been quite sure before he spoke, but his lisp, though
slight, betrayed the Jew. His features were coarse, almost brutal;
but the restless eyes were so brilliant, the whole face so
suggestive of power and character, that, taking him as a whole, the
feeling he inspired was admiration, tempered by fear. His tone was
one of kindly contempt--the tone of a man accustomed to find most
people his inferiors, and too used to the discovery to be conceited
about it.
Behind it was a note of authority that it did not occur to me to
dispute.
"Yes," I answered, adding the information that I had never been
abroad before, and had heard that Antwerp was an interesting town.
"How long have you got?" he asked.
"A fortnight," I told him.
"Like to see a bit more than Antwerp, if you could afford it,
wouldn't you?" he suggested. "Fascinating little country Holland.
Just long enough--a fortnight--to do the whole of it. I'm a
Dutchman, a Dutch Jew."
"You speak English just like an Englishman," I told him. It was
somehow in my mind to please him. I could hardly have explained
why.
"And half a dozen other languages equally well," he answered,
laughing. "I left Amsterdam when I was eighteen as steerage
passenger in an emigrant ship. I haven't seen it since."
He closed the cabin door behind him, and, crossing over, laid a
strong hand on my shoulder.
"I will make a proposal to you," he said. "My business is not of
the kind that can be put out of mind, even for a few days, and there
are reasons"--he glanced over his shoulder towards the cabin door,
and gave vent to a short laugh--"why I did not want to bring any of
my own staff with me. If you care for a short tour, all expenses
paid at slap-up hotels and a ten-pound note in your pocket at the
end, you can have it for two hours' work a day."
I suppose my face expressed my acceptance, for he did not wait for
me to speak.
"Only one thing I stipulate for," he added, "that you mind your own
business and keep your mouth shut. You're by yourself, aren't you?"
"Yes," I told him.
He wrote on a sheet of his notebook, and, tearing it out, handed it
to me.
"That's your hotel at Antwerp," he said. "You are Mr. Horatio
Jones's secretary." He chuckled to himself as he repeated the name,
which certainly did not fit him. "Knock at my sitting-room door at
nine o'clock tomorrow morning. Good night!"
He ended the conversation as abruptly as he had begun it, and
returned to his cabin.
I got a glimpse of him next morning, coming out of the hotel bureau.
He was speaking to the manager in French, and had evidently given
instructions concerning me, for I found myself preceded by an
obsequious waiter to quite a charming bedroom on the second floor,
while the "English breakfast" placed before me later in the
coffee-room was of a size and character that in those days I did not
often enjoy. About the work, also, he was as good as his word. I
was rarely occupied for more than two hours each morning. The
duties consisted chiefly of writing letters and sending off
telegrams. The letters he signed and had posted himself, so that I
never learnt his real name--not during that fortnight--but I
gathered enough to be aware that he was a man whose business
interests must have been colossal and world-wide.
He never introduced me to "Mrs. Horatio Jones," and after a few days
he seemed to be bored with her, so that often I would take her place
as his companion in afternoon excursions.
I could not help liking the man. Strength always compels the
adoration of youth; and there was something big and heroic about
him. His daring, his swift decisions, his utter unscrupulousness,
his occasional cruelty when necessity seemed to demand it. One
could imagine him in earlier days a born leader of savage hordes, a
lover of fighting for its own sake, meeting all obstacles with
fierce welcome, forcing his way onward, indifferent to the misery
and destruction caused by his progress, his eyes never swerving from
their goal; yet not without a sense of rough justice, not altogether
without kindliness when it could be indulged in without danger.
One afternoon he took me with him into the Jewish quarter of
Amsterdam, and threading his way without hesitation through its maze
of unsavoury slums, paused before a narrow three-storeyed house
overlooking a stagnant backwater.
"The room I was born in," he explained. "Window with the broken
pane on the second floor. It has never been mended."
I stole a glance at him. His face betrayed no suggestion of
sentiment, but rather of amusement. He offered me a cigar, which I
was glad of, for the stench from the offal-laden water behind us was
distracting, and for a while we both smoked in silence: he with his
eyes half-closed; it was a trick of his when working out a business
problem.
"Curious, my making such a choice," he remarked. "A butcher's
assistant for my father and a consumptive buttonhole-maker for my
mother. I suppose I knew what I was about. Quite the right thing
for me to have done, as it turned out."
I stared at him, wondering whether he was speaking seriously or in
grim jest. He was given at times to making odd remarks. There was
a vein of the fantastic in him that was continually cropping out and
astonishing me.
"It was a bit risky," I suggested. "Better choose something a
little safer next time."
He looked round at me sharply, and, not quite sure of his mood, I
kept a grave face.
"Perhaps you are right," he agreed, with a laugh. "We must have a
talk about it one day."
After that visit to the Goortgasse he was less reserved with me, and
would often talk to me on subjects that I should never have guessed
would have interested him. I found him a curious mixture. Behind
the shrewd, cynical man of business I caught continual glimpses of
the visionary.
I parted from him at The Hague. He paid my fare back to London, and
gave me an extra pound for travelling expenses, together with the
ten-pound note he had promised me. He had packed off "Mrs. Horatio
Jones" some days before, to the relief, I imagine, of both of them,
and he himself continued his journey to Berlin. I never expected to
see him again, although for the next few months I often thought of
him, and even tried to discover him by inquiries in the City. I
had, however, very little to go upon, and after I had left Fenchurch
Street behind me, and drifted into literature, I forgot him.
Until one day I received a letter addressed to the care of my
publishers. It bore the Swiss postmark, and opening it and turning
to the signature I sat wondering for the moment where I had met
"Horatio Jones." And then I remembered.
He was lying bruised and broken in a woodcutter's hut on the slopes
of the Jungfrau. Had been playing a fool's trick, so he described
it, thinking he could climb mountains at his age. They would carry
him down to Lauterbrunnen as soon as he could be moved farther with
safety, but for the present he had no one to talk to but the nurse
and a Swiss doctor who climbed up to see him every third day. He
begged me, if I could spare the time, to come over and spend a week
with him. He enclosed a hundred-pound cheque for my expenses,
making no apology for doing so. He was complimentary about my first
book, which he had been reading, and asked me to telegraph him my
reply, giving me his real name, which, as I had guessed it would,
proved to be one of the best known in the financial world. My time
was my own now, and I wired him that I would be with him the
following Monday.
He was lying in the sun outside the hut when I arrived late in the
afternoon, after a three-hours' climb followed by a porter carrying
my small amount of luggage. He could not raise his hand, but his
strangely brilliant eyes spoke their welcome.
"I am glad you were able to come," he said. "I have no near
relations, and my friends--if that is the right term--are business
men who would be bored to tears. Besides, they are not the people I
feel I want to talk to, now."
He was entirely reconciled to the coming of death. Indeed, there
were moments when he gave me the idea that he was looking forward to
it with an awed curiosity. With the conventional notion of cheering
him, I talked of staying till he was able to return with me to
civilisation, but he only laughed.
"I am not going back," he said. "Not that way. What they may do
afterwards with these broken bones does not much concern either you
or me.
"It's a good place to die in," he continued. "A man can think up
here."
It was difficult to feel sorry for him, his own fate appearing to
make so little difference to himself. The world was still full of
interest to him--not his own particular corner of it: that, he gave
me to understand, he had tidied up and dismissed from his mind. It
was the future, its coming problems, its possibilities, its new
developments, about which he seemed eager to talk. One might have
imagined him a young man with the years before him.
One evening--it was near the end--we were alone together. The
woodcutter and his wife had gone down into the valley to see their
children, and the nurse, leaving him in my charge, had gone for a
walk. We had carried him round to his favourite side of the hut
facing the towering mass of the Jungfrau. As the shadows lengthened
it seemed to come nearer to us, and there fell a silence upon us.
Gradually I became aware that his piercing eyes were fixed on me,
and in answer I turned and looked at him.
"I wonder if we shall meet again," he said, "or, what is more
important, if we shall remember one another."
I was puzzled for the moment. We had discussed more than once the
various religions of mankind, and his attitude towards the orthodox
beliefs had always been that of amused contempt.
"It has been growing upon me these last few days," he continued.
"It flashed across me the first time I saw you on the boat. We were
fellow-students. Something, I don't know what, drew us very close
together. There was a woman. They were burning her. And then
there was a rush of people and a sudden darkness, and your eyes
close to mine."
I suppose it was some form of hypnotism, for, as he spoke, his
searching eyes fixed on mine, there came to me a dream of narrow
streets filled with a strange crowd, of painted houses such as I had
never seen, and a haunting fear that seemed to be always lurking
behind each shadow. I shook myself free, but not without an effort.
"So that's what you meant," I said, "that evening in the Goortgasse.
You believe in it?"
"A curious thing happened to me," he said, "when I was a child. I
could hardly have been six years old. I had gone to Ghent with my
parents. I think it was to visit some relative. One day we went
into the castle. It was in ruins then, but has since been restored.
We were in what was once the council chamber. I stole away by
myself to the other end of the great room and, not knowing why I did
so, I touched a spring concealed in the masonry, and a door swung
open with a harsh, grinding noise. I remember peering round the
opening. The others had their backs towards me, and I slipped
through and closed the door behind me. I seemed instinctively to
know my way. I ran down a flight of steps and along dark corridors
through which I had to feel my way with my hands, till I came to a
small door in an angle of the wall. I knew the room that lay the
other side. A photograph was taken of it and published years
afterwards, when the place was discovered, and it was exactly as I
knew it with its way out underneath the city wall through one of the
small houses in the Aussermarkt.
"I could not open the door. Some stones had fallen against it, and
fearing to get punished, I made my way back into the council room.
It was empty when I reached it. They were searching for me in the
other rooms, and I never told them of my adventure."
At any other time I might have laughed. Later, recalling his talk
that evening, I dismissed the whole story as mere suggestion, based
upon the imagination of a child; but at the time those strangely
brilliant eyes had taken possession of me. They remained still
fixed upon me as I sat on the low rail of the veranda watching his
white face, into which the hues of death seemed already to be
creeping.
I had a feeling that, through them, he was trying to force
remembrance of himself upon me. The man himself--the very soul of
him--seemed to be concentrated in them. Something formless and yet
distinct was visualising itself before me. It came to me as a
physical relief when a spasm of pain caused him to turn his eyes
away from me.
"You will find a letter when I am gone," he went on, after a
moment's silence. "I thought that you might come too late, or that
I might not have strength enough to tell you. I felt that out of
the few people I have met outside business, you would be the most
likely not to dismiss the matter as mere nonsense. What I am glad
of myself, and what I wish you to remember, is that I am dying with
all my faculties about me. The one thing I have always feared
through life was old age, with its gradual mental decay. It has
always seemed to me that I have died more or less suddenly while
still in possession of my will. I have always thanked God for
that."
He closed his eyes, but I do not think he was sleeping; and a little
later the nurse returned, and we carried him indoors. I had no
further conversation with him, though at his wish during the
following two days I continued to read to him, and on the third day
he died.
I found the letter he had spoken of. He had told me where it would
be. It contained a bundle of banknotes which he was giving me--so
he wrote--with the advice to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
"If I had not loved you," the letter continued, "I would have left
you an income, and you would have blessed me, instead of cursing me,
as you should have done, for spoiling your life."
This world was a school, so he viewed it, for the making of men; and
the one thing essential to a man was strength. One gathered the
impression of a deeply religious man. In these days he would, no
doubt, have been claimed as a theosophist; but his beliefs he had
made for, and adapted to, himself--to his vehement, conquering
temperament. God needed men to serve Him--to help Him. So, through
many changes, through many ages, God gave men life: that by contest
and by struggle they might ever increase in strength; to those who
proved themselves most fit the sterner task, the humbler beginnings,
the greater obstacles. And the crown of well-doing was ever
victory. He appeared to have convinced himself that he was one of
the chosen, that he was destined for great ends. He had been a
slave in the time of the Pharaohs; a priest in Babylon; had clung to
the swaying ladders in the sack of Rome; had won his way into the
councils when Europe was a battlefield of contending tribes; had
climbed to power in the days of the Borgias.
To most of us, I suppose, there come at odd moments haunting
thoughts of strangely familiar, far-off things; and one wonders
whether they are memories or dreams. We dismiss them as we grow
older and the present with its crowding interests shuts them out;
but in youth they were more persistent. With him they appeared to
have remained, growing in reality. His recent existence, closed
under the white sheet in the hut behind me as I read, was only one
chapter of the story; he was looking forward to the next.
He wondered, so the letter ran, whether he would have any voice in
choosing it. In either event he was curious of the result. What he
anticipated confidently were new opportunities, wider experience.
In what shape would these come to him?
The letter ended with a strange request. It was that, on returning
to England, I should continue to think of him: not of the dead man
I had known, the Jewish banker, the voice familiar to me, the trick
of speech, of manner--all such being but the changing clothes--but
of the man himself, the soul of him, that would seek and perhaps
succeed in revealing itself to me.
A postscript concluded the letter, to which at the time I attached
no importance. He had made a purchase of the hut in which he had
died. After his removal it was to remain empty.
I folded the letter and placed it among other papers, and passing
into the hut took a farewell glance at the massive, rugged face.
The mask might have served a sculptor for the embodiment of
strength. He gave one the feeling that having conquered death he
was sleeping.
I did what he had requested of me. Indeed, I could not help it. I
thought of him constantly. That may have been the explanation of
it.
I was bicycling through Norfolk, and one afternoon, to escape a
coming thunderstorm, I knocked at the door of a lonely cottage on
the outskirts of a common. The woman, a kindly bustling person,
asked me in; and hoping I would excuse her, as she was busy ironing,
returned to her work in another room. I thought myself alone, and
was standing at the window watching the pouring rain. After a
while, without knowing why, I turned. And then I saw a child seated
on a high chair behind a table in a dark corner of the room. A book
of pictures was open before it, but it was looking at me. I could
hear the sound of the woman at her ironing in the other room.
Outside there was the steady thrashing of the rain. The child was
looking at me with large, round eyes filled with a terrible pathos.
I noticed that the little body was misshapen. It never moved; it
made no sound; but I had the feeling that out of those strangely
wistful eyes something was trying to speak to me. Something was
forming itself before me--not visible to my sight; but it was there,
in the room. It was the man I had last looked upon as, dying, he
sat beside me in the hut below the Jungfrau. But something had
happened to him. Moved by instinct I went over to him and lifted
him out of his chair, and with a sob the little wizened arms closed
round my neck and he clung to me crying--a pitiful, low, wailing
cry.
Hearing his cry, the woman came back. A comely, healthy-looking
woman. She took him from my arms and comforted him.
"He gets a bit sorry for himself at times," she explained. "At
least, so I fancy. You see, he can't run about like other children,
or do anything without getting pains."
"Was it an accident?" I asked.
"No," she answered, "and his father as fine a man as you would find
in a day's march. Just a visitation of God, as they tell me. Sure
I don't know why. There never was a better little lad, and clever,
too, when he's not in pain. Draws wonderfully."
The storm had passed. He grew quieter in her arms, and when I had
promised to come again and bring him a new picture-book, a little
grateful smile flickered across the drawn face, but he would not
talk.
I kept in touch with him. Mere curiosity would have made me do
that. He grew more normal as the years went by, and gradually the
fancy that had come to me at our first meeting faded farther into
the background. Sometimes, using the very language of the dead
man's letter, I would talk to him, wondering if by any chance some
flash of memory would come back to him, and once or twice it seemed
to me that into the mild, pathetic eyes there came a look that I had
seen before, but it passed away, and indeed, it was difficult to
think of this sad little human oddity, with its pleading
helplessness, in connection with the strong, swift, conquering
spirit that I had watched passing away amid the silence of the
mountains.
The one thing that brought joy to him was his art. I cannot help
thinking that, but for his health, he would have made a name for
himself. His work was always clever and original, but it was the
work of an invalid.
"I shall never be great," he said to me once. "I have such
wonderful dreams, but when it comes to working them out there is
something that hampers me. It always seems to me as if at the last
moment a hand was stretched out that clutched me by the feet. I
long so, but I have not the strength. It is terrible to be one of
the weaklings."
It clung to me, that word he had used. For a man to know he is
weak; it sounds a paradox, but a man must be strong to know that.
And dwelling upon this, and upon his patience and his gentleness,
there came to me suddenly remembrance of that postscript, the
significance of which I had not understood.
He was a young man of about three- or four-and-twenty at the time.
His father had died, and he was living in poor lodgings in the south
of London, supporting himself and his mother by strenuous, ill-paid
work.
"I want you to come with me for a few days' holiday," I told him.
I had some difficulty in getting him to accept my help, for he was
very proud in his sensitive, apologetic way. But I succeeded
eventually, persuading him it would be good for his work.
Physically the journey must have cost him dear, for he could never
move his body without pain, but the changing landscapes and the
strange cities more than repaid him; and when one morning I woke him
early and he saw for the first time the distant mountains clothed in
dawn, there came a new light into his eyes.
We reached the hut late in the afternoon. I had made my
arrangements so that we should be there alone. Our needs were
simple, and in various wanderings I had learnt to be independent. I
did not tell him why I had brought him there, beyond the beauty and
stillness of the place. Purposely I left him much alone there,
making ever-lengthening walks my excuse, and though he was always
glad of my return I felt that the desire was growing upon him to be
there by himself.
One evening, having climbed farther than I had intended, I lost my
way. It was not safe in that neighbourhood to try new pathways in
the dark, and chancing upon a deserted shelter, I made myself a bed
upon the straw.
I found him seated outside the hut when I returned, and he greeted
me as if he had been expecting me just at that moment and not
before. He guessed just what had happened, he told me, and had not
been alarmed. During the day I found him watching me, and in the
evening, as we sat in his favourite place outside the hut, he turned
to me.
"You think it true?" he said. "That you and I sat here years ago
and talked?"
"I cannot tell," I answered. "I only know that he died here, if
there be such a thing as death--that no one has ever lived here
since. I doubt if the door has ever been opened till we came."
"They have always been with me," he continued, "these dreams. But I
have always dismissed them. They seemed so ludicrous. Always there
came to me wealth, power, victory. Life was so easy."
He laid his thin hand on mine. A strange new look came into his
eyes--a look of hope, almost of joy.
"Do you know what it seems to me?" he said. "You will laugh
perhaps, but the thought has come to me up here that God has some
fine use for me. Success was making me feeble. He has given me
weakness and failure that I may learn strength. The great thing is
to be strong."
SYLVIA OF THE LETTERS.
Old Ab Herrick, so most people called him. Not that he was actually
old; the term was an expression of liking rather than any reflection
on his years. He lived in an old-fashioned house--old-fashioned,
that is, for New York--on the south side of West Twentieth Street:
once upon a time, but that was long ago, quite a fashionable
quarter. The house, together with Mrs. Travers, had been left him
by a maiden aunt. An "apartment" would, of course, have been more
suitable to a bachelor of simple habits, but the situation was
convenient from a journalistic point of view, and for fifteen years
Abner Herrick had lived and worked there.
Then one evening, after a three days' absence, Abner Herrick
returned to West Twentieth Street, bringing with him a little girl
wrapped up in a shawl, and a wooden box tied with a piece of cord.
He put the box on the table; and the young lady, loosening her
shawl, walked to the window and sat down facing the room.
Mrs. Travers took the box off the table and put it on the floor--it
was quite a little box--and waited.
"This young lady," explained Abner Herrick, "is Miss Ann Kavanagh,
daughter of--of an old friend of mine."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Travers, and remained still expectant.
"Miss Kavanagh," continued Abner Herrick, "will be staying with us
for--" He appeared to be uncertain of the length of Miss Kavanagh's
visit. He left the sentence unfinished and took refuge in more
pressing questions.
"What about the bedroom on the second floor? Is it ready? Sheets
aired--all that sort of thing?"
"It can be," replied Mrs. Travers. The tone was suggestive of
judgment reserved.
"I think, if you don't mind, Mrs. Travers, that we'd like to go to
bed as soon as possible." From force of habit Abner S. Herrick in
speaking employed as a rule the editorial "we." "We have been
travelling all day and we are very tired. To-morrow morning--"
"I'd like some supper," said Miss Kavanagh from her seat in the
window, without moving.
"Of course," agreed Miss Kavanagh's host, with a feeble pretence
that the subject had been on the tip of his tongue. As a matter of
fact, he really had forgotten all about it. "We might have it up
here while the room is being got ready. Perhaps a little--"
"A soft boiled egg and a glass of milk, if you please, Mrs.
Travers," interrupted Miss Kavanagh, still from her seat at the
window.
"I'll see about it," said Mrs. Travers, and went out, taking the
quite small box with her.
Such was the coming into this story of Ann Kavanagh at the age of
eight years; or, as Miss Kavanagh herself would have explained, had
the question been put to her, eight years and seven months, for Ann
Kavanagh was a precise young lady. She was not beautiful--not then.
She was much too sharp featured; the little pointed chin protruding
into space to quite a dangerous extent. Her large dark eyes were
her one redeeming feature. But the level brows above them were much
too ready with their frown. A sallow complexion and nondescript
hair deprived her of that charm of colouring on which youth can
generally depend for attraction, whatever its faults of form. Nor
could it truthfully be said that sweetness of disposition afforded
compensation.
"A self-willed, cantankerous little imp I call her," was Mrs.
Travers's comment, expressed after one of the many trials of
strength between them, from which Miss Kavanagh had as usual emerged
triumphant.
"It's her father," explained Abner Herrick, feeling himself unable
to contradict.
"It's unfortunate," answered Mrs. Travers, "whatever it is."
To Uncle Ab himself, as she had come to call him, she could on
occasion be yielding and affectionate; but that, as Mrs. Travers
took care to point out to her, was a small thing to her credit.
"If you had the instincts of an ordinary Christian child," explained
Mrs. Travers to her, "you'd be thinking twenty-four hours a day of
what you could do to repay him for all his loving kindness to you;
instead of causing him, as you know you do, a dozen heartaches in a
week. You're an ungrateful little monkey, and when he's gone
you'll--"
Upon which Miss Kavanagh, not waiting to hear more, flew upstairs
and, locking herself in her own room, gave herself up to howling and
remorse; but was careful not to emerge until she felt bad tempered
again; and able, should opportunity present itself, to renew the
contest with Mrs. Travers unhampered by sentiment.
But Mrs. Travers's words had sunk in deeper than that good lady
herself had hoped for; and one evening, when Abner Herrick was
seated at his desk penning a scathing indictment of the President
for lack of firmness and decision on the tariff question, Ann,
putting her thin arms round his neck and rubbing her little sallow
face against his right-hand whisker, took him to task on the
subject.
"You're not bringing me up properly--not as you ought to," explained
Ann. "You give way to me too much, and you never scold me."
"Not scold you!" exclaimed Abner with a certain warmth of
indignation. "Why, I'm doing it all--"
"Not what _I_ call scolding," continued Ann. "It's very wrong of
you. I shall grow up horrid if you don't help me."
As Ann with great clearness pointed out to him, there was no one
else to undertake the job with any chance of success. If Abner
failed her, then she supposed there was no hope for her: she would
end by becoming a wicked woman, and everybody, including herself,
would hate her. It was a sad prospect. The contemplation of it
brought tears to Ann's eyes.
He saw the justice of her complaint and promised to turn over a new
leaf. He honestly meant to do so; but, like many another repentant
sinner, found himself feeble before the difficulties of performance.
He might have succeeded better had it not been for her soft deep
eyes beneath her level brows.
"You're not much like your mother," so he explained to her one day,
"except about the eyes. Looking into your eyes I can almost see
your mother."
He was smoking a pipe beside the fire, and Ann, who ought to have
been in bed, had perched herself upon one of the arms of his chair
and was kicking a hole in the worn leather with her little heels.
"She was very beautiful, my mother, wasn't she?" suggested Ann.
Abner Herrick blew a cloud from his pipe and watched carefully the
curling smoke.
"In a way, yes," he answered. "Quite beautiful."
"What do you mean, 'In a way'?" demanded Ann with some asperity.
"It was a spiritual beauty, your mother's," Abner explained. "The
soul looking out of her eyes. I don't think it possible to imagine
a more beautiful disposition than your mother's. Whenever I think
of your mother," continued Abner after a pause, "Wordsworth's lines
always come into my mind."
He murmured the quotation to himself, but loud enough to be heard by
sharp ears. Miss Kavanagh was mollified.
"You were in love with my mother, weren't you?" she questioned him
kindly.
"Yes, I suppose I was," mused Abner, still with his gaze upon the
curling smoke.
"What do you mean by 'you suppose you were'?" snapped Ann. "Didn't
you know?"
The tone recalled him from his dreams.
"I was in love with your mother very much," he corrected himself,
turning to her with a smile.
"Then why didn't you marry her?" asked Ann. "Wouldn't she have
you?"
"I never asked her," explained Abner.
"Why not?" persisted Ann, returning to asperity.
He thought a moment.
"You wouldn't understand," he told her.
"Yes, I would," retorted Ann.
"No, you wouldn't," he contradicted her quite shortly. They were
both beginning to lose patience with one another. "No woman ever
could."
"I'm not a woman," explained Ann, "and I'm very smart. You've said
so yourself."
"Not so smart as all that," growled Abner. "Added to which, it's
time for you to go to bed."
Her anger with him was such that it rendered her absolutely polite.
It had that occasional effect upon her. She slid from the arm of
his chair and stood beside him, a rigid figure of frozen femininity.
"I think you are quite right, Uncle Herrick. Good night!" But at
the door she could not resist a parting shot:
"You might have been my father, and then perhaps she wouldn't have
died. I think it was very wicked of you."
After she was gone Abner sat gazing into the fire, and his pipe went
out. Eventually the beginnings of a smile stole to the corners of
his mouth, but before it could spread any farther he dismissed it
with a sigh.
Abner, for the next day or two, feared a renewal of the
conversation, but Ann appeared to have forgotten it; and as time
went by it faded from Abner's own memory. Until one evening quite a
while later.
The morning had brought him his English mail. It had been arriving
with some regularity, and Ann had noticed that Abner always opened
it before his other correspondence. One letter he read through
twice, and Ann, who was pretending to be reading the newspaper, felt
that he was looking at her.
"I have been thinking, my dear," said Abner, "that it must be rather
lonely for you here, all by yourself."
"It would be," answered Ann, "if I were here all by myself."
"I mean," said Abner, "without any other young person to talk to
and--and to play with."
"You forget," said Ann, "that I'm nearly thirteen."
"God bless my soul," said Abner. "How time does fly!"
"Who is she?" asked Ann.
"It isn't a 'she,'" explained Abner. "It's a 'he.' Poor little chap
lost his mother two years ago, and now his father's dead. I
thought--it occurred to me we might put him up for a time. Look
after him a bit. What do you think? It would make the house more
lively, wouldn't it?"
"It might," said Ann.
She sat very silent, and Abner, whose conscience was troubling him,
watched her a little anxiously. After a time she looked up.
"What's he like?" she asked.
"Precisely what I am wondering myself," confessed Abner. "We shall
have to wait and see. But his mother--his mother," repeated Abner,
"was the most beautiful woman I have ever known. If he is anything
like she was as a girl--" He left the sentence unfinished.
"You have not seen her since--since she was young?" questioned Ann.
Abner shook his head. "She married an Englishman. He took her back
with him to London."
"I don't like Englishmen," said Ann.
"They have their points," suggested Abner. "Besides, boys take
after their mothers, they say." And Abner rose and gathered his
letters together.
Ann remained very thoughtful all that day. In the evening, when
Abner for a moment laid down his pen for the purpose of relighting
his pipe, Ann came to him, seating herself on the corner of the
desk.
"I suppose," she said, "that's why you never married mother?"
Abner's mind at the moment was much occupied with the Panama Canal.
"What mother?" he asked. "Whose mother?"
"My mother," answered Ann. "I suppose men are like that."
"What are you talking about?" said Abner, dismissing altogether the
Panama Canal.
"You loved my mother very much," explained Ann with cold
deliberation. "She always made you think of Wordsworth's perfect
woman."
"Who told you all that?" demanded Abner.
"You did."
"I did?"
"It was the day you took me away from Miss Carew's because she said
she couldn't manage me," Ann informed him.
"Good Lord! Why, that must be two years ago," mused Abner.
"Three," Ann corrected him. "All but a few days."
"I wish you'd use your memory for things you're wanted to remember,"
growled Abner.
"You said you had never asked her to marry you," pursued Ann
relentlessly; "you wouldn't tell me why. You said I shouldn't
understand."
"My fault," muttered Abner. "I forget you're a child. You ask all
sorts of questions that never ought to enter your head, and I'm fool
enough to answer you."
One small tear that had made its escape unnoticed by her was
stealing down her cheek. He wiped it away and took one of her small
paws in both his hands.
"I loved your mother very dearly," he said gravely. "I had loved
her from a child. But no woman will ever understand the power that
beauty has upon a man. You see we're built that way. It's Nature's
lure. Later on, of course, I might have forgotten; but then it was
too late. Can you forgive me?"
"But you still love her," reasoned Ann through her tears, "or you
wouldn't want him to come here."
"She had such a hard time of it," pleaded Abner. "It made things
easier to her, my giving her my word that I would always look after
the boy. You'll help me?"
"I'll try," said Ann. But there was not much promise in the tone.
Nor did Matthew Pole himself, when he arrived, do much to help
matters. He was so hopelessly English. At least, that was the way
Ann put it. He was shy and sensitive. It is a trying combination.
It made him appear stupid and conceited. A lonely childhood had
rendered him unsociable, unadaptable. A dreamy, imaginative
temperament imposed upon him long moods of silence: a liking for
long solitary walks. For the first time Ann and Mrs. Travers were
in agreement.
"A sulky young dog," commented Mrs. Travers. "If I were your uncle
I'd look out for a job for him in San Francisco."
"You see," said Ann in excuse for him, "it's such a foggy country,
England. It makes them like that."
"It's a pity they can't get out of it," said Mrs. Travers.
Also, sixteen is an awkward age for a boy. Virtues, still in the
chrysalis state, are struggling to escape from their parent vices.
Pride, an excellent quality making for courage and patience, still
appears in the swathings of arrogance. Sincerity still expresses
itself in the language of rudeness. Kindness itself is apt to be
mistaken for amazing impertinence and love of interference.
It was kindness--a genuine desire to be useful, that prompted him to
point out to Ann her undoubted faults and failings, nerved him to
the task of bringing her up in the way she should go. Mrs. Travers
had long since washed her hands of the entire business. Uncle Ab,
as Matthew also called him, had proved himself a weakling.
Providence, so it seemed to Matthew, must have been waiting
impatiently for his advent. Ann at first thought it was some new
school of humour. When she found he was serious she set herself to
cure him. But she never did. He was too conscientious for that.
The instincts of the guide, philosopher, and friend to humanity in
general were already too strong in him. There were times when Abner
almost wished that Matthew Pole senior had lived a little longer.
But he did not lose hope. At the back of his mind was the fancy
that these two children of his loves would come together. Nothing
is quite so sentimental as a healthy old bachelor. He pictured them
making unity from his confusions; in imagination heard the patter on
the stairs of tiny feet. To all intents and purposes he would be a
grandfather. Priding himself on his cunning, he kept his dream to
himself, as he thought, but under-estimated Ann's smartness.
For days together she would follow Matthew with her eyes, watching
him from behind her long lashes, listening in silence to everything
he said, vainly seeking to find points in him. He was unaware of
her generous intentions. He had a vague feeling he was being
criticised. He resented it even in those days.
"I do try," said Ann suddenly one evening apropos of nothing at all.
"No one will ever know how hard I try not to dislike him."
Abner looked up.
"Sometimes," continued Ann, "I tell myself I have almost succeeded.
And then he will go and do something that will bring it all on
again."
"What does he do?" asked Abner.
"Oh, I can't tell you," confessed Ann. "If I told you it would
sound as if it was my fault. It's all so silly. And then he thinks
such a lot of himself. If one only knew why! He can't tell you
himself when you ask him."
"You have asked him?" queried Abner.
"I wanted to know," explained Ann. "I thought there might be
something in him that I could like."
"Why do you want to like him?" asked Abner, wondering how much she
had guessed.
"I know," wailed Ann. "You are hoping that when I am grown up I
shall marry him. And I don't want to. It's so ungrateful of me."
"Well, you're not grown up yet," Abner consoled her. "And so long
as you are feeling like that about it, I'm not likely to want you to
marry him."
"It would make you so happy," sobbed Ann.
"Yes, but we've got to think of the boy, don't forget that," laughed
Abner. "Perhaps he might object."
"He would. I know he would," cried Ann with conviction. "He's no
better than I am."
"Have you been asking him to?" demanded Abner, springing up from his
chair.
"Not to marry me," explained Ann. "But I told him he must be an
unnatural little beast not to try to like me when he knew how you
loved me."
"Helpful way of putting it," growled Abner. "And what did he say to
that?"
"Admitted it," flashed Ann indignantly. "Said he had tried."
Abner succeeded in persuading her that the path of dignity and
virtue lay in her dismissing the whole subject from her mind.
He had made a mistake, so he told himself. Age may be attracted by
contrast, but youth has no use for its opposite. He would send
Matthew away. He could return for week-ends. Continually so close
to one another, they saw only one another's specks and flaws; there
is no beauty without perspective. Matthew wanted the corners rubbed
off him, that was all. Mixing more with men, his priggishness would
be laughed out of him. Otherwise he was quite a decent youngster,
clean minded, high principled. Clever, too: he often said quite
unexpected things. With approaching womanhood, changes were taking
place in Ann. Seeing her every day one hardly noticed them; but
there were times when, standing before him flushed from a walk or
bending over him to kiss him before starting for some friendly
dance, Abner would blink his eyes and be puzzled. The thin arms
were growing round and firm; the sallow complexion warming into
olive; the once patchy, mouse-coloured hair darkening into a rich
harmony of brown. The eyes beneath her level brows, that had always
been her charm, still reminded Abner of her mother; but there was
more light in them, more danger.
"I'll run down to Albany and talk to Jephson about him," decided
Abner. "He can come home on Saturdays."
The plot might have succeeded: one never can tell. But a New York
blizzard put a stop to it. The cars broke down, and Abner, walking
home in thin shoes from a meeting, caught a chill, which, being
neglected, proved fatal.
Abner was troubled as he lay upon his bed. The children were
sitting very silent by the window. He sent Matthew out on a
message, and then beckoned Ann to come to him. He loved the boy,
too, but Ann was nearer to him.
"You haven't thought any more," he whispered, "about--"
"No," answered Ann. "You wished me not to."
"You must never think," he said, "to show your love for my memory by
doing anything that would not make you happy. If I am anywhere
around," he continued with a smile, "it will be your good I shall be
watching for, not my own way. You will remember that?"
He had meant to do more for them, but the end had come so much
sooner than he had expected. To Ann he left the house (Mrs. Travers
had already retired on a small pension) and a sum that, judiciously
invested, the friend and attorney thought should be sufficient for
her needs, even supposing--The friend and attorney, pausing to dwell
upon the oval face with its dark eyes, left the sentence unfinished.
To Matthew he wrote a loving letter, enclosing a thousand dollars.
He knew that Matthew, now in a position to earn his living as a
journalist, would rather have taken nothing. It was to be looked
upon merely as a parting gift. Matthew decided to spend it on
travel. It would fit him the better for his journalistic career, so
he explained to Ann. But in his heart he had other ambitions. It
would enable him to put them to the test.
So there came an evening when Ann stood waving a handkerchief as a
great liner cast its moorings. She watched it till its lights grew
dim, and then returned to West Twentieth Street. Strangers would
take possession of it on the morrow. Ann had her supper in the
kitchen in company with the nurse, who had stayed on at her request;
and that night, slipping noiselessly from her room, she lay upon the
floor, her head resting against the arm of the chair where Abner had
been wont to sit and smoke his evening pipe; somehow it seemed to
comfort her. And Matthew the while, beneath the stars, was pacing
the silent deck of the great liner and planning out the future.
To only one other being had he ever confided his dreams. She lay in
the churchyard; and there was nothing left to encourage him but his
own heart. But he had no doubts. He would be a great writer. His
two hundred pounds would support him till he had gained a foothold.
After that he would climb swiftly. He had done right, so he told
himself, to turn his back on journalism: the grave of literature.
He would see men and cities, writing as he went. Looking back,
years later, he was able to congratulate himself on having chosen
the right road. He thought it would lead him by easy ascent to fame
and fortune. It did better for him than that. It led him through
poverty and loneliness, through hope deferred and heartache--through
long nights of fear, when pride and confidence fell upon him,
leaving him only the courage to endure.
His great poems, his brilliant essays, had been rejected so often
that even he himself had lost all love for them. At the suggestion
of an editor more kindly than the general run, and urged by need, he
had written some short pieces of a less ambitious nature. It was in
bitter disappointment he commenced them, regarding them as mere
pot-boilers. He would not give them his name. He signed them
"Aston Rowant." It was the name of the village in Oxfordshire where
he had been born. It occurred to him by chance. It would serve the
purpose as well as another. As the work progressed it grew upon
him. He made his stories out of incidents and people he had seen;
everyday comedies and tragedies that he had lived among, of things
that he had felt; and when after their appearance in the magazine a
publisher was found willing to make them into a book, hope revived
in him.
It was but short-lived. The few reviews that reached him contained
nothing but ridicule. So he had no place even as a literary hack!
He was living in Paris at the time in a noisy, evil-smelling street
leading out of the Quai Saint-Michel. He thought of Chatterton, and
would loaf on the bridges looking down into the river where the
drowned lights twinkled.
And then one day there came to him a letter, sent on to him from the
publisher of his one book. It was signed "Sylvia," nothing else,
and bore no address. Matthew picked up the envelope. The postmark
was "London, S.E."
It was a childish letter. A prosperous, well-fed genius, familiar
with such, might have smiled at it. To Matthew in his despair it
brought healing. She had found the book lying in an empty railway
carriage; and undeterred by moral scruples had taken it home with
her. It had remained forgotten for a time, until when the end
really seemed to have come her hand by chance had fallen on it. She
fancied some kind little wandering spirit--the spirit perhaps of
someone who had known what it was to be lonely and very sad and just
about broken almost--must have manoeuvred the whole thing. It had
seemed to her as though some strong and gentle hand had been laid
upon her in the darkness. She no longer felt friendless. And so
on.
The book, he remembered, contained a reference to the magazine in
which the sketches had first appeared. She would be sure to have
noticed this. He would send her his answer. He drew his chair up
to the flimsy table, and all that night he wrote.
He did not have to think. It came to him, and for the first time
since the beginning of things he had no fear of its not being
accepted. It was mostly about himself, and the rest was about her,
but to most of those who read it two months later it seemed to be
about themselves. The editor wrote a charming letter, thanking him
for it; but at the time the chief thing that worried him was whether
"Sylvia" had seen it. He waited anxiously for a few weeks, and then
received her second letter. It was a more womanly letter than the
first. She had understood the story, and her words of thanks almost
conveyed to him the flush of pleasure with which she had read it.
His friendship, she confessed, would be very sweet to her, and still
more delightful the thought that he had need of her: that she also
had something to give. She would write, as he wished, her real
thoughts and feelings. They would never know one another, and that
would give her boldness. They would be comrades, meeting only in
dreamland.
In this way commenced the whimsical romance of Sylvia and Aston
Rowant; for it was too late now to change the name--it had become a
name to conjure with. The stories, poems, and essays followed now
in regular succession. The anxiously expected letters reached him
in orderly procession. They grew in interest, in helpfulness. They
became the letters of a wonderfully sane, broad-minded, thoughtful
woman--a woman of insight, of fine judgment. Their praise was rare
enough to be precious. Often they would contain just criticism,
tempered by sympathy, lightened by humour. Of her troubles,
sorrows, fears, she came to write less and less, and even then not
until they were past and she could laugh at them. The subtlest
flattery she gave him was the suggestion that he had taught her to
put these things into their proper place. Intimate, self-revealing
as her letters were, it was curious he never shaped from them any
satisfactory image of the writer.
A brave, kind, tender woman. A self-forgetting, quickly-forgiving
woman. A many-sided woman, responding to joy, to laughter: a merry
lady, at times. Yet by no means a perfect woman. There could be
flashes of temper, one felt that; quite often occasional
unreasonableness; a tongue that could be cutting. A sweet, restful,
greatly loving woman, but still a woman: it would be wise to
remember that. So he read her from her letters. But herself, the
eyes, and hair, and lips of her, the voice and laugh and smile of
her, the hands and feet of her, always they eluded him.
He was in Alaska one spring, where he had gone to collect material
for his work, when he received the last letter she ever wrote him.
They neither of them knew then it would be the last. She was
leaving London, so the postscript informed him, sailing on the
following Saturday for New York, where for the future she intended
to live.
It worried him that postscript. He could not make out for a long
time why it worried him. Suddenly, in a waste of endless snows, the
explanation flashed across him. Sylvia of the letters was a living
woman! She could travel--with a box, he supposed, possibly with two
or three, and parcels. Could take tickets, walk up a gangway,
stagger about a deck feeling, maybe, a little seasick. All these
years he had been living with her in dreamland she had been, if he
had only known it, a Miss Somebody-or-other, who must have stood
every morning in front of a looking-glass with hairpins in her
mouth. He had never thought of her doing these things; it shocked
him. He could not help feeling it was indelicate of her--coming to
life in this sudden, uncalled-for manner.
He struggled with this new conception of her, and had almost
forgiven her, when a further and still more startling suggestion
arrived to plague him. If she really lived why should he not see
her, speak to her? So long as she had remained in her hidden
temple, situate in the vague recesses of London, S.E., her letters
had contented him. But now that she had moved, now that she was no
longer a voice but a woman! Well, it would be interesting to see
what she was like. He imagined the introduction: "Miss Somebody-
or-other, allow me to present you to Mr. Matthew Pole." She would
have no idea he was Aston Rowant. If she happened to be young,
beautiful, in all ways satisfactory, he would announce himself. How
astonished, how delighted she would be.
But if not! If she were elderly, plain? The wisest, wittiest of
women have been known to have an incipient moustache. A beautiful
spirit can, and sometimes does, look out of goggle eyes. Suppose
she suffered from indigestion and had a shiny nose! Would her
letters ever again have the same charm for him? Absurd that they
should not. But would they?
The risk was too great. Giving the matter long and careful
consideration, he decided to send her back into dreamland.
But somehow she would not go back into dreamland, would persist in
remaining in New York, a living, breathing woman.
Yet even so, how could he find her? He might, say, in a poem convey
to her his desire for a meeting. Would she comply? And if she did,
what would be his position, supposing the inspection to result
unfavourably for her? Could he, in effect, say to her: "Thank you
for letting me have a look at you; that is all I wanted. Good-bye"?
She must, she should remain in dreamland. He would forget her
postscript; in future throw her envelopes unglanced at into the
wastepaper basket. Having by this simple exercise of his will
replaced her in London, he himself started for New York--on his way
back to Europe, so he told himself. Still, being in New York, there
was no reason for not lingering there a while, if merely to renew
old memories.
Of course, if he had really wanted to find Sylvia it would have been
easy from the date upon the envelope to have discovered the ship
"sailing the following Saturday." Passengers were compelled to
register their names in full, and to state their intended movements
after arrival in America. Sylvia was not a common Christian name.
By the help of a five-dollar bill or two--. The idea had not
occurred to him before. He dismissed it from his mind and sought a
quiet hotel up town.
New York was changed less than he had anticipated. West Twentieth
Street in particular was precisely as, leaning out of the cab
window, he had looked back upon it ten years ago. Business had more
and more taken possession of it, but had not as yet altered its
appearance. His conscience smote him as he turned the corner that
he had never once written to Ann. He had meant to, it goes without
saying, but during those first years of struggle and failure his
pride had held him back. She had always thought him a fool; he had
felt she did. He would wait till he could write to her of success,
of victory. And then when it had slowly, almost imperceptibly,
arrived--! He wondered why he never had. Quite a nice little girl,
in some respects. If only she had been less conceited, less
self-willed. Also rather a pretty girl she had shown signs of
becoming. There were times-- He remembered an evening before the
lamps were lighted. She had fallen asleep curled up in Abner's easy
chair, one small hand resting upon the arm. She had always had
quite attractive hands--a little too thin. Something had moved him
to steal across softly without waking her. He smiled at the memory.
And then her eyes, beneath the level brows! It was surprising how
Ann was coming back to him. Perhaps they would be able to tell him,
the people of the house, what had become of her. If they were
decent people they would let him wander round a while. He would
explain that he had lived there in Abner Herrick's time. The room
where they had sometimes been agreeable to one another while Abner,
pretending to read, had sat watching them out of the corner of an
eye. He would like to sit there for a few moments, by himself.
He forgot that he had rung the bell. A very young servant had
answered the door and was staring at him. He would have walked in
if the small servant had not planted herself deliberately in his
way. It recalled him to himself.
"I beg pardon," said Matthew, "but would you please tell me who
lives here?"
The small servant looked him up and down with growing suspicion.
"Miss Kavanagh lives here," she said. "What do you want?"
The surprise was so great it rendered him speechless. In another
moment the small servant would have slammed the door.
"Miss Ann Kavanagh?" he inquired, just in time.
"That's her name," admitted the small servant, less suspicious.
"Will you please tell her Mr. Pole--Mr. Matthew Pole," he requested.
"I'll see first if she is in," said the small servant, and shut the
door.
It gave Matthew a few minutes to recover himself, for which he was
glad. Then the door opened again suddenly.
"You are to come upstairs," said the small servant.
It sounded so like Ann that it quite put him at his ease. He
followed the small servant up the stairs.
"Mr. Matthew Pole," she announced severely, and closed the door
behind him.
Ann was standing by the window and came to meet him. It was in
front of Abner's empty chair that they shook hands.
"So you have come back to the old house," said Matthew.
"Yes," she answered. "It never let well. The last people who had
it gave it up at Christmas. It seemed the best thing to do, even
from a purely economical point of view.
"What have you been doing all these years?" she asked him.
"Oh, knocking about," he answered. "Earning my living." He was
curious to discover what she thought of Matthew, first of all.
"It seems to have agreed with you," she commented, with a glance
that took him in generally, including his clothes.
"Yes," he answered. "I have had more luck than perhaps I deserved."
"I am glad of that," said Ann.
He laughed. "So you haven't changed so very much," he said.
"Except in appearance.
"Isn't that the most important part of a woman?" suggested Ann.
"Yes," he answered, thinking. "I suppose it is."
She was certainly very beautiful.
"How long are you stopping in New York?" she asked him.
"Oh, not long," he explained.
"Don't leave it for another ten years," she said, "before letting me
know what is happening to you. We didn't get on very well together
as children; but we mustn't let him think we're not friends. It
would hurt him."
She spoke quite seriously, as if she were expecting him any moment
to open the door and join them. Involuntarily Matthew glanced round
the room. Nothing seemed altered. The worn carpet, the faded
curtains, Abner's easy chair, his pipe upon the corner of the
mantelpiece beside the vase of spills.
"It is curious," he said, "finding this vein of fancy, of tenderness
in you. I always regarded you as such a practical, unsentimental
young person."
"Perhaps we neither of us knew each other too well, in those days,"
she answered.
The small servant entered with the tea.
"What have you been doing with yourself?" he asked, drawing his
chair up to the table.
She waited till the small servant had withdrawn.
"Oh, knocking about," she answered. "Earning my living."
"It seems to have agreed with you," he repeated, smiling.
"It's all right now," she answered. "It was a bit of a struggle at
first."
"Yes," he agreed. "Life doesn't temper the wind to the human lamb.
But was there any need in your case?" he asked. "I thought--"
"Oh, that all went," she explained. "Except the house."
"I'm sorry," said Matthew. "I didn't know."
"Oh, we have been a couple of pigs," she laughed, replying to his
thoughts. "I did sometimes think of writing you. I kept the
address you gave me. Not for any assistance; I wanted to fight it
out for myself. But I was a bit lonely."
"Why didn't you?" he asked.
She hesitated for a moment.
"It's rather soon to make up one's mind," she said, "but you seem to
me to have changed. Your voice sounds so different. But as a boy--
well, you were a bit of a prig, weren't you? I imagined you writing
me good advice and excellent short sermons. And it wasn't that that
I was wanting."
"I think I understand," he said. "I'm glad you got through.
"What is your line?" he asked. "Journalism?"
"No," she answered. "Too self-opinionated."
She opened a bureau that had always been her own and handed him a
programme. "Miss Ann Kavanagh, Contralto," was announced on it as
one of the chief attractions.
"I didn't know you had a voice," said Matthew.
"You used to complain of it," she reminded him.
"Your speaking voice," he corrected her. "And it wasn't the quality
of that I objected to. It was the quantity."
She laughed.
"Yes, we kept ourselves pretty busy bringing one another up," she
admitted.
They talked a while longer: of Abner and his kind, quaint ways; of
old friends. Ann had lost touch with most of them. She had studied
singing in Brussels, and afterwards her master had moved to London
and she had followed him. She had only just lately returned to New
York.
The small servant entered to clear away the tea things. She said
she thought that Ann had rung. Her tone implied that anyhow it was
time she had. Matthew rose and Ann held out her hand.
"I shall be at the concert," he said.
"It isn't till next week," Ann reminded him.
"Oh, I'm not in any particular hurry," said Matthew. "Are you
generally in of an afternoon?"
"Sometimes," said Ann.
He thought as he sat watching her from his stall that she was one of
the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Her voice was not great.
She had warned him not to expect too much.
"It will never set the Thames on fire," she had said. "I thought at
first that it would. But such as it is I thank God for it."
It was worth that. It was sweet and clear and had a tender quality.
Matthew waited for her at the end. She was feeling well disposed
towards all creatures and accepted his suggestion of supper with
gracious condescension.
He had called on her once or twice during the preceding days. It
was due to her after his long neglect of her, he told himself, and
had found improvement in her. But to-night she seemed to take a
freakish pleasure in letting him see that there was much of the old
Ann still left in her: the frank conceit of her; the amazing
self-opinionatedness of her; the waywardness, the wilfulness, the
unreasonableness of her; the general uppishness and dictatorialness
of her; the contradictoriness and flat impertinence of her; the
swift temper and exasperating tongue of her.
It was almost as if she were warning him. "You see, I am not
changed, except, as you say, in appearance. I am still Ann with all
the old faults and failings that once made life in the same house
with me a constant trial to you. Just now my very imperfections
appear charms. You have been looking at the sun--at the glory of my
face, at the wonder of my arms and hands. Your eyes are blinded.
But that will pass. And underneath I am still Ann. Just Ann."
They had quarrelled in the cab on the way home. He forgot what it
was about, but Ann had said some quite rude things, and her face not
being there in the darkness to excuse her, it had made him very
angry. She had laughed again on the steps, and they had shaken
hands. But walking home through the still streets Sylvia had
plucked at his elbow.
What fools we mortals be--especially men! Here was a noble woman--a
restful, understanding, tenderly loving woman; a woman as nearly
approaching perfection as it was safe for a woman to go! This
marvellous woman was waiting for him with outstretched arms (why
should he doubt it?)--and just because Nature had at last succeeded
in making a temporary success of Ann's skin and had fashioned a
rounded line above her shoulder-blade! It made him quite cross with
himself. Ten years ago she had been gawky and sallow-complexioned.
Ten years hence she might catch the yellow jaundice and lose it all.
Passages in Sylvia's letters returned to him. He remembered that
far-off evening in his Paris attic when she had knocked at his door
with her great gift of thanks. Recalled how her soft shadow hand
had stilled his pain. He spent the next two days with Sylvia. He
re-read all her letters, lived again the scenes and moods in which
he had replied to them.
Her personality still defied the efforts of his imagination, but he
ended by convincing himself that he would know her when he saw her.
But counting up the women on Fifth Avenue towards whom he had felt
instinctively drawn, and finding that the number had already reached
eleven, began to doubt his intuition. On the morning of the third
day he met Ann by chance in a bookseller's shop. Her back was
towards him. She was glancing through Aston Rowant's latest volume.
"What I," said the cheerful young lady who was attending to her,
"like about him is that he understands women so well."
"What I like about him," said Ann, "is that he doesn't pretend to."
"There's something in that," agreed the cheerful young lady. "They
say he's here in New York."
Ann looked up.
"So I've been told," said the cheerful young lady.
"I wonder what he's like?" said Ann.
"He wrote for a long time under another name," volunteered the
cheerful young lady. "He's quite an elderly man."
It irritated Matthew. He spoke without thinking.
"No, he isn't," he said. "He's quite young."
The ladies turned and looked at him.
"You know him?" queried Ann. She was most astonished, and appeared
disbelieving. That irritated him further.
"If you care about it," he said. "I will introduce you to him."
Ann made no answer. He bought a copy of the book for himself, and
they went out together. They turned towards the park.
Ann seemed thoughtful. "What is he doing here in New York?" she
wondered.
"Looking for a lady named Sylvia," answered Matthew.
He thought the time was come to break it to her that he was a great
and famous man. Then perhaps she would be sorry she had said what
she had said in the cab. Seeing he had made up his mind that his
relationship to her in the future would be that of an affectionate
brother, there would be no harm in also letting her know about
Sylvia. That also might be good for her.
They walked two blocks before Ann spoke. Matthew, anticipating a
pleasurable conversation, felt no desire to hasten matters.
"How intimate are you with him?" she demanded. "I don't think he
would have said that to a mere acquaintance."
"I'm not a mere acquaintance," said Matthew. "I've known him a long
time."
"You never told me," complained Ann.
"Didn't know it would interest you," replied Matthew.
He waited for further questions, but they did not come. At Thirty-
fourth Street he saved her from being run over and killed, and again
at Forty-second Street. Just inside the park she stopped abruptly
and held out her hand.
"Tell him," she replied, "that if he is really serious about finding
Sylvia, I may--I don't say I can--but I may be able to help him."
He did not take her hand, but stood stock still in the middle of the
path and stared at her.
"You!" he said. "You know her?"
She was prepared for his surprise. She was also prepared--not with
a lie, that implies evil intention. Her only object was to have a
talk with the gentleman and see what he was like before deciding on
her future proceedings--let us say, with a plausible story.
"We crossed on the same boat," she said. "We found there was a good
deal in common between us. She--she told me things." When you came
to think it out it was almost the truth.
"What is she like?" demanded Matthew.
"Oh, just--well, not exactly--" It was an awkward question. There
came to her relief the reflection that there was really no need for
her to answer it.
"What's it got to do with you?" she said.
"I am Aston Rowant," said Matthew.
The Central Park, together with the universe in general, fell away
and disappeared. Somewhere out of chaos was sounding a plaintive
voice: "What is she like? Can't you tell me? Is she young or
old?"
It seemed to have been going on for ages. She made one supreme
gigantic effort, causing the Central Park to reappear, dimly,
faintly, but it was there again. She was sitting on a seat.
Matthew--Aston Rowant, whatever it was--was seated beside her.
"You've seen her? What is she like?"
"I can't tell you."
He was evidently very cross with her. It seemed so unkind of him.
"Why can't you tell me--or, why won't you tell me? Do you mean
she's too awful for words?"
"No, certainly not--as a matter of fact--"
"Well, what?"
She felt she must get away or there would be hysterics somewhere.
She sprang up and began to walk rapidly towards the gate. He
followed her.
"I'll write you," said Ann.
"But why--?"
"I can't," said Ann. "I've got a rehearsal."
A car was passing. She made a dash for it and clambered on. Before
he could make up his mind it had gathered speed.
Ann let herself in with her key. She called downstairs to the small
servant that she wasn't to be disturbed for anything. She locked
the door.
So it was to Matthew that for six years she had been pouring out her
inmost thoughts and feelings! It was to Matthew that she had laid
bare her tenderest, most sacred dreams! It was at Matthew's feet
that for six years she had been sitting, gazing up with respectful
admiration, with reverential devotion! She recalled her letters,
almost passage for passage, till she had to hold her hands to her
face to cool it. Her indignation, one might almost say fury, lasted
till tea-time.
In the evening--it was in the evening time that she had always
written to him--a more reasonable frame of mind asserted itself.
After all, it was hardly his fault. He couldn't have known who she
was. He didn't know now. She had wanted to write. Without doubt
he had helped her, comforted her loneliness; had given her a
charming friendship, a delightful comradeship. Much of his work had
been written for her, to her. It was fine work. She had been proud
of her share in it. Even allowing there were faults--irritability,
shortness of temper, a tendency to bossiness!--underneath it all was
a man. The gallant struggle, the difficulties overcome, the long
suffering, the high courage--all that she, reading between the
lines, had divined of his life's battle! Yes, it was a man she had
worshipped. A woman need not be ashamed of that. As Matthew he had
seemed to her conceited, priggish. As Aston Rowant she wondered at
his modesty, his patience.
And all these years he had been dreaming of her; had followed her to
New York; had--
There came a sudden mood so ludicrous, so absurdly unreasonable that
Ann herself stopped to laugh at it. Yet it was real, and it hurt.
He had come to New York thinking of Sylvia, yearning for Sylvia. He
had come to New York with one desire: to find Sylvia. And the
first pretty woman that had come across his path had sent Sylvia
clean out of his head. There could be no question of that. When
Ann Kavanagh stretched out her hand to him in that very room a
fortnight ago he had stood before her dazzled, captured. From that
moment Sylvia had been tossed aside and forgotten. Ann Kavanagh
could have done what she liked with him. She had quarrelled with
him that evening of the concert. She had meant to quarrel with him.
And then for the first time he had remembered Sylvia. That was her
reward--Sylvia's: it was Sylvia she was thinking of--for six years'
devoted friendship; for the help, the inspiration she had given him.
As Sylvia, she suffered from a very genuine and explainable wave of
indignant jealousy. As Ann, she admitted he ought not to have done
it, but felt there was excuse for him. Between the two she feared
her mind would eventually give way. On the morning of the second
day she sent Matthew a note asking him to call in the afternoon.
Sylvia might be there, or she might not. She would mention it to
her.
She dressed herself in a quiet, dark-coloured frock. It seemed
uncommittal and suitable to the occasion. It also happened to be
the colour that best suited her. She would not have the lamps
lighted.
Matthew arrived in a dark serge suit and a blue necktie, so that the
general effect was quiet. Ann greeted him with kindliness and put
him with his face to what little light there was. She chose for
herself the window-seat. Sylvia had not arrived. She might be a
little late--that is, if she came at all.
They talked about the weather for a while. Matthew was of opinion
they were going to have some rain. Ann, who was in one of her
contradictory moods, thought there was frost in the air.
"What did you say to her?" he asked.
"Sylvia? Oh, what you told me," replied Ann. "That you had come to
New York to--to look for her."
"What did she say?" he asked.
"Said you'd taken your time about it," retorted Ann.
Matthew looked up with an injured expression.
"It was her own idea that we should never meet," he explained.
"Um!" Ann grunted.
"What do you think yourself she will be like?" she continued. "Have
you formed any notion?"
"It is curious," he replied. "I have never been able to conjure up
any picture of her until just now."
"Why 'just now'?" demanded Ann.
"I had an idea I should find her here when I opened the door," he
answered. "You were standing in the shadow. It seemed to be just
what I had expected."
"You would have been satisfied?" she asked.
"Yes," he said.
There was silence for a moment.
"Uncle Ab made a mistake," he continued. "He ought to have sent me
away. Let me come home now and then."
"You mean," said Ann, "that if you had seen less of me you might
have liked me better?"
"Quite right," he admitted. "We never see the things that are
always there."
"A thin, gawky girl with a bad complexion," she suggested. "Would
it have been of any use?"
"You must always have been wonderful with those eyes," he answered.
"And your hands were beautiful even then."
"I used to cry sometimes when I looked at myself in the glass as a
child," she confessed. "My hands were the only thing that consoled
me."
"I kissed them once," he told her. "You were asleep, curled up in
Uncle Ab's chair."
"I wasn't asleep," said Ann.
She was seated with one foot tucked underneath her. She didn't look
a bit grown up.
"You always thought me a fool," he said.
"It used to make me so angry with you," said Ann, "that you seemed
to have no go, no ambition in you. I wanted you to wake up--do
something. If I had known you were a budding genius--"
"I did hint it to you," said he.
"Oh, of course it was all my fault," said Ann.
He rose. "You think she means to come?" he asked. Ann also had
risen.
"Is she so very wonderful?" she asked.
"I may be exaggerating to myself," he answered. "But I am not sure
that I could go on with my work without her--not now."
"You forgot her," flashed Ann, "till we happened to quarrel in the
cab."
"I often do," he confessed. "Till something goes wrong. Then she
comes to me. As she did on that first evening, six years ago. You
see, I have been more or less living with her since then," he added
with a smile.
"In dreamland," Ann corrected.
"Yes, but in my case," he answered, "the best part of my life is
passed in dreamland."
"And when you are not in dreamland?" she demanded. "When you're
just irritable, short-tempered, cranky Matthew Pole. What's she
going to do about you then?"
"She'll put up with me," said Matthew.
"No she won't," said Ann. "She'll snap your head off. Most of the
'putting up with' you'll have to do."
He tried to get between her and the window, but she kept her face
close to the pane.
"You make me tired with Sylvia," she said. "It's about time you did
know what she's like. She's just the commonplace, short-tempered,
disagreeable-if-she-doesn't-get-her-own-way, unreasonable woman.
Only more so."
He drew her away from the window by brute force.
"So you're Sylvia," he said.
"I thought that would get it into your head," said Ann.
It was not at all the way she had meant to break it to him. She had
meant the conversation to be chiefly about Sylvia. She had a high
opinion of Sylvia, a much higher opinion than she had of Ann
Kavanagh. If he proved to be worthy of her--of Sylvia, that is,
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