"Even so," said he. "Now listen. If he's had a week's engagement he must
be finishing to-night. In order to catch the boat he must be working in
the neighbourhood. Savvy? The only possible place besides this is
Portsmouth. We'll run over to Portsmouth, only seventeen miles."

"All right," said I, with a wistful look back at my peaceful,
comfortable home, "let us go to Portsmouth. I'll resign myself to dine
at Portsmouth. But supposing he isn't there?" I asked, as the car drove
off.

"Then he went to Havre on Thursday."

"But suppose he's at Birmingham. He would then take to-morrow night's
boat."

"There isn't one on Sundays."

"Then Monday night's boat."

"Well, if he does, won't we be there on Tuesday morning to meet him on
the quay? Lord!" he laughed, and brought his huge grip down on my leg
above the knee, thereby causing me physical agony, "I should like to
take you on an expedition. It would do you a thundering lot of good."

We arrived at Portsmouth, where we conducted the same kind of enquiries
as at Southampton. Neither there nor at adjoining Southsea could we find
a sign of the Variety Star, Ras Fendihook, and still less of the obscure
Liosha. We dined at a Southsea hotel. We dined very well. On that I
insisted--without much expenditure of nervous force. Jaffery rails at me
for a Sybarite and what not, but I have never seen him refuse viands on
account of succulency or wine on account of flavour. We had a quart of
excellent champagne, a pint of decent port and a good cigar, and we felt
that the gods were good. That is how I like to feel. I felt it so
gratefully that when Jaffery suggested it was time to start back to
Southampton in order to waylay the London train at the docks, on the
off-chance of our fugitives having come down by it, and to catch the
Havre boat ourselves, I had not a weary word to say. I cheerfully
contemplated the prospect of a night's voyage to Havre. And as Jaffery
(also humanised by good cheer) had been entertaining me with juicy
stories of China and other mythical lands, I felt equal to any
dare-devil adventure.

We went back to Southampton and collected our luggage at the
South-Western Hotel--the hotel porter in charge thereof. Our uncertainty
as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed his dull brain.
Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to stick to his side and
obey him slavishly took the place of intellectual workings. It was
nearly midnight. We walked through the docks, a background of
darkness, a foreground of confusing lights amid which shone vivid
illuminated placards before the brightly lit steamers--"St.
Malo"--"Cherbourg"--"Jersey"--"Havre." At the quiet gangway of the
Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags on the quay and
stood patiently expectant like a dog who lays a stick at its master's
feet.

One London train came in. The carriage doors opened and a myriad ants
swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the fore, he the
aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women, vague human forms
encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of impedimenta. They all
seemed alike--just a herd of Britons, impelled by irrational instinct,
like the fate-driven lemmings of Norway, to cross the sea. And all
around, weird in the conflicting lights, hurried gnome-like figures
mountainously laden, and in the confusion of sounds could be heard the
slither and thud of trunks being conveyed to the hold. At last the tail
of the packed wedge disappeared on board and the gangway was clear. I
went to the aft gangway to Jaffery and the porter. Neither of us had
seen Fendihook or Liosha.

A second train produced results equally barren.

There was nothing to do but carry out the prearranged plan. We went
aboard followed by the porter with the luggage.

My method of travel has always been to arrange everything beforehand
with meticulous foresight. In the most crowded trains and boats I have
thus secured luxurious accommodation. To hear therefore that there were
no berths free and that we should have to pass the night either on the
windy deck or in the red-plush discomfort of the open saloon caused me
not unreasonable dismay. I had to choose and I chose the saloon.
Jaffery, of course, chose the raw winds of heaven. All night I did not
get a wink of sleep. There was a gross fellow in the next section of
red-plush whose snoring drowned the throb of the engines. Stewards long
after they had cleared away the remains of supper from the long central
table chinked money at the desk and discussed the racing stables of the
world with a loudly dressed, red-faced man who, judging from the popping
of corks, absorbed whiskies and sodas at the rate of three a minute. I
understood then how thoughts of murder arose in the human brain. I
devised exquisite means of removing him from a nauseated world. Then
there was a lamp which swung backwards and forwards and searched my
eyeballs relentlessly, no matter how I covered them.

What was I doing in this awful galley? Why had I left my wife and child
and tranquil home? The wind freshened as soon as we got out to sea.
There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and swift scurrying of
stewards. The ship rolled, which I particularly hate a ship to do. And I
was fully dressed and it seemed as if all the tender parts of my body
were tied up with twine. What was I doing in this galley?

When I awoke it was broad daylight, and Jaffery was grinning over me and
all was deathly still.

"Good God!" I cried, sitting up. "Why has the ship stopped? Is there a
fog?"

"Fog?" he boomed. "What are you talking of? We're alongside of Havre."

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Half-past six."

"A Christian gentleman's hour of rising is nine o'clock," said I, lying
down again.

He shook me rudely. "Get up," said he.

The sleepless, unshaven, unkempt, twine-bound, self-hating wreck of
Hilary Freeth rose to his feet with a groan.

"What a ghastly night!"

"Splendid," said Jaffery, ruddy and fresh. "I must have tramped over
twenty miles."

There was an onrush of blue-bloused porters, with metal plate numbers
on their arms. One took our baggage. We followed him up the companion
onto the deck, and joined the crowd that awaited the releasing gangway.
I stood resentful in the sardine pack of humans. The sky was overcast.
It was very cold. The universe had an uncared-for, unswept appearance,
like a house surprised at dawn, before the housemaids are up. The forced
appearance of a well-to-do philosopher at such an hour was nothing less
than an outrage. I glared at the immature day. The day glared at me, and
turned down its temperature about twenty degrees. From fool
thoughtlessness I had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in
charge of the blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I
glanced over my shoulder.

"This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly.

At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep from us
turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into each other's
eyes.

CHAPTER XVIII

Jaffery caught sight of her at the same time and gripped my arm. Her
eyes travelling from mine to his flashed indignant anger. Then she
turned haughtily. We tried to edge nearer her, but she was just beyond
the convergence of two side currents which pushed us even further away.
The gangway was fixed and the movement of the conglomerate mass began.
Presently Jaffery again seized my arm.

"There's the brute waiting for her."

And there on the quay, with a flower in his buttonhole and a smile on
his fat face, stood Mr. Ras Fendihook. He met her at the foot of the
gangway, and obviously told at once of our presence, sought us anxiously
with his gaze; then with an air of bravado waved his hat--a hard white
felt--and cried out: "Cheer O!" We did not respond. He grinned at us and
linking his arm through Liosha's joined the stream of passengers
hurrying across the stones to the custom-sheds.

"Stop," Jaffery roared.

They turned, as indeed did everybody within earshot. Fendihook would
have gone on, but Liosha very proudly drew him out of the stream into a
clear space and, prepared for battle, awaited us. When we had struggled
our slow way down and reached the quay she advanced a few steps looking
very terrible in her wrath.

"How dare you follow me?"

"Come further away from the crowd," said Jaffery, and with an imperious
gesture he swept the three of us along the quay to the stern of the
boat, where only a few idle sailor men were lounging, and a sergeant de
ville was pacing on his leisurely beat.

"I said you would make a fool of yourself one of these days if I didn't
play dragon," he said, at a sudden halt. "I've come to play dragon with
a vengeance." He marched on Fendihook. "Now you."

"How d'ye do, old cock? Didn't expect you here," he said jauntily.

"Don't be insolent," replied Jaffery in a remarkably quiet tone. "You
know very well why I'm here."

"Jaff Chayne--" Liosha began.

He waved her off. "Take her away, Hilary."

"Come," said I. "I'll tell you all about it."

"He has got to tell me, not you."

"I certainly don't know why the devil you're here," said Fendihook, with
sudden nastiness.

"I've come to save this lady from a dirty blackguard."

"How are you going to do it?"

Jaffery addressed Liosha. "You said in your letter--"

"You wrote to him, you crazy fool, after all my instructions?" snarled
Fendihook.

"You said in your letter you were going to marry this man."

"Sure," said Liosha.

"And are you going to marry this lady?"

"Certainly."

"Why didn't you marry her in England?"

"I told you in my letter," said Liosha. "See here--we don't want any of
your interference." And she planted herself by the side of her abductor,
glaring defiance at Jaffery.

Jaffery smiled. "You told her that because she was a widow and an
Albanian she would find considerable obstacles in her way and would
forfeit half her money to the Government. You lying little skunk!"

The vibration in Jaffery's voice arrested Liosha. She looked swiftly at
Fendihook.

"Wasn't it true what you told me?"

"Of course not," I interposed. "You were as free to marry in England as
Mrs. Considine."

She paid no attention to me.

"Wasn't it true?" she repeated.

Fendihook laughed in vulgar bluster. "You didn't take all that rot
seriously, you silly cuckoo?"

Liosha drew a step away from him and regarded him wonderingly. For the
first time doubt as to his straight-dealing rose in her candid mind.

"She did," said Jaffery. "She also took seriously your promise to marry
her in France."

"Well, ain't I going to marry her?"

"No," said Jaffery. "You can't."

"Who says I can't?"

"I do. You've got a wife already and three children."

"I've divorced her."

"You haven't. You've deserted her, which isn't the same thing. I've
found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous character."

Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her eyes
burning.

"He's married already--" she gasped.

"Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you."

Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been for
Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been round
Fendihook's throat.

"Steady on," growled Jaffery, controlling her with his iron strength.
Fendihook, who had started back with an oath, grew as white as a sheet.
I tapped him on the arm.

"You had better hook it," said I. "And keep out of her way if you don't
want a knife stuck into you. Yes," I added, meeting a scared look,
"you've been playing with the wrong kind of woman. You had better stick
to the sort you're accustomed to."

"Thank you for those kind words," said he. "I will."

"It would be wise also to keep out of the way of Jaffery Chayne. With my
own eyes I've seen him pick up a man he didn't like and"--I made an
expressive gesture--"throw him clean away."

"Right O!" said he.

He nodded, winked impudently and walked away. A thought struck me. I
overtook him.

"Where are you staying in Havre?"

He looked at me suspiciously. "What do you want to know for?"

"To save you from being murdered, as you would most certainly be if we
chanced upon the same hotel."

"I'm staying at the Phares--the swagger one on the beach near the
Casino."

"Excellent," said I. "Go on swaggering. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, old pal," said he.

He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away.

I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she stood
unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking sidewise down.
Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had mastered her fury, but
now we had to deal with her shame and humiliation.

"Let her go!" I whispered.

Jaffery freed her. She rubbed her wrists mechanically, without moving
her head. I wished Barbara had been there; she would have known exactly
what to do. As it was, we stood by her, somewhat helplessly.

"_Monsieur_," said a voice close by, and we saw our little blue-bloused
porter. He explained that he had been seeking us everywhere. If we did
not make haste we would lose the Paris train.

I replied that as we were not going to Paris, we were not pressed for
time; but this little outside happening broke the situation.

"Better give this fellow your luggage ticket, Liosha," said Jaffery.

She looked about her bewildered and then I noticed on the ground a
leather satchel which she had been carrying. I picked it up. She
extracted the ticket and we all went to the custom-house.

"What's the programme now?" I asked Jaffery.

"Hotel," said he. "This poor girl will want a rest. Besides, we'll have
to stay the night."

"Our friend is staying at the Hotel des Phares."

"Then we'll go to Tortoni's."

An ordinary woman would have drawn down the motor veil which she wore
cockled-up on her travelling hat; but Liosha, grandly unconcerned with
such vanities, showed her young shame-stricken face to all the world. I
felt intensely sorry for her. She realised now from what a blatant
scoundrel she had been saved; but she still bitterly resented our
intervention. "I felt as if I was stripped naked walking between
them"--that was her primitive account later of her state of mind.

"Barbara," said I, "sent you her very dear love."

She nodded, without looking at me.

"Barbara would have come too, if Susan had not been ill."

She gave a little start. I thought she was about to speak; but she
remained silent. We entered the customs-shed, when she attended
mechanically to her declarations.

On emerging free into the open air again, we found that the cheery sun
had pierced the morning clouds and gave promise of a glorious day. The
luggage was piled on the hotel omnibus. We took an open cab and rattled
through the narrow flag-paved streets of the harbour quarter of the
town. As we emerged into a more spacious thoroughfare, suddenly from a
gaudy column at the corner flared the name of Ras Fendihook. I caught
the heading of the _affiche_: "Music-Hall-Eldorado." Part of the mystery
was solved. Jaffery had been right in his deduction that he had left
London on a professional engagement; but we had not thought of an
engagement out of England. I had a correct answer now to my question:
"Why Havre of all places?" Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat
of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances. But Liosha had eyes
for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap. We passed another
column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where already at that early
hour, above its wide terrace, the striped awning of Tortoni's was flung.
We alighted at the hotel and ordered our three rooms; coffee and roll to
be taken up to madame; we men would eat our petit déjeuner downstairs.
Liosha left us without saying a word.

Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good _café au lait_, gladdened
by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our morning's work, quite a
different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on the terrace from the
sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours before. My urbane dismissal of
Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my memory. The glow of conscious heroism
warmed me, even like last night's dinner, to sympathy with my kind.
After despatching, by the chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and
sending up to Liosha's room a bunch of red roses we bought at a
florist's hard by, I surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the
matutinal Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his
pipe and uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.

I love provincial France. It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is regarding
of its _sous_, it is what you will. But it lives a spacious,
out-of-door, corporate life. On Sundays, it does not bury itself, like
provincial England, in a cellular house. It walks abroad. It indulges in
its modest pleasures. It is serious, it is intensely conscious of
family, but it can take deep breaths of freedom. It is not Sundayfied
into our vacuous boredom. It clings to the picturesque, in which it
finds its dignified delight. The little soldier clad in blue tunic and
red trousers struts along with his _fiancée_ or _maîtresse_ on his arm;
the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair plume; the
cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty wife, drinks
syrup at a neighbouring table in your café. The work-girls, even on
Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they were at home in the friendly
street. The curé in shovel hat and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday
happens not to be the _jour de repos hebdomadaire_ ordained by law, in
their blue _sarreau_; the peasants from outlying villages--the men in
queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in
dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent black,
with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with fat and
greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an exiguous
cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a quarter of an
inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair of gendarmes with
their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords; the white-aproned
waiters standing by café tables--all these types are distinct, picked
out pleasurably by the eye; they give a cheery sense of variety; the
stage is dressed.

So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do all day,
I replied:

"Sit here."

"Don't you want to see the place?"

"The place," said I, "is parading before us."

"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."

"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and she's not in
a mood for jaunts."

"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful for her.
Oh, that swine of a blighter!"

His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the dozenth
time we went over the story.

"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She can't go
back to the boarding-house."

"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to Barbara."

"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know, Hilary,
there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if one only knew
the right way to take her."

The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal it. I
assented to Jaffery's proposition.

"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a Spanish
gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of truth and
honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been a nasty knock
for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as she has pulled
herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a big way."

And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing towards us
past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself. Another woman
would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us would have had to
soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her to eat and cajole her
into revisiting the light of day. Not so Liosha. She arrayed herself in
fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt, fitting close to her splendid
figure, which she held erect, a smart hat with a feather, and new white
gloves, and came to us the incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the
morning, our roses pinned in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her
lips were not quite under control, but she made a valiant show.

We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our chairs.

"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."

We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she looked
steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.

"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."

"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been rather
indiscreet."

"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.

"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat your
breakfast?"

She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What would she
have now? I sent a waiter for café-au-lait and a brioche and lectured
her on the folly of going without proper sustenance. The ghost of a
smile crept into her eyes, in recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism
with which I am wrongly credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for
the roses. They were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the
little tray and the _verseur_ poured out the coffee and milk. We watched
her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.

"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.

"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the boat? We
watched the London trains carefully."

"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and went to
bed at once."

"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What were you
doing at Southsea?"

"Staying with Emma--Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I couldn't stick
that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote to Emma to ask her
to put me up."

"So that's why you went on Thursday?"

"That's why."

"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs.
Considine--I mean Mrs. Jupp--into your confidence?"

"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going to
Havre--to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that. But Jaff
Chayne was the only person that had to know the truth."

We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the intrigue
that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left London on Sunday
for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of Havre. As there was no
Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to travel to Havre via Paris.
Being a crafty villain, he would not run away with Liosha straight from
London. She was to join him a week later, after he had had time to spy
out the land and make his nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His
fortnight up, he was sailing away again to America. Liosha was to
accompany him. In all probability, for I delight in thinking the worst
of Mr. Ras Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of
his tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he
worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed voyage
back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in the railway
network of the United States. I have made it my business to enquire into
the ways of this entertaining but unholy villain. This is what I am sure
he would have done. One girl some half dozen years before he had left
penniless in San Francisco and the door over which burns the Red Lamp
swallowed her up forever.

For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a soul
must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As Jaffery had
guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of Westminster Abbey.
Although her open nature abhorred the deception, she obeyed his
instructions in minor details and thought she was acting in the spirit
of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters to Mrs. Jardine to be
posted in London. By risking discovery of her secret during her visit to
the admirable lady at Southsea and by ingenuously disclosing the plot to
Jaffery she showed herself to be a very sorry conspirator.

She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to touch upon
the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not stay in Havre all
day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who might swagger into the
town from his swagger hotel on the _plage_, we carried out Jaffery's
proposal, hired an automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight
from inland into the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of
fisher-folk and fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged
needle gates jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden
grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the
sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew a
deep breath.

"Oh, let us all come and live here."

We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats wherein the
fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach where a few
belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the curious steps to
the terrace and listened to the last number of the orchestra. Then lunch
at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet among the fishing boats; and
afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the little shady courtyard. Jaffery
was very gentle with Liosha, treating her tenderly like a bruised thing,
and talked of his adventures and cracked little jokes and attended
solicitously to her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy
gratitude, and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled
her to make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and
sipped _crême de menthe_ with frank gusto. To me she appeared like a
naughty child who instead of meeting with expected punishment finds
itself coddled in affectionate arms. All resentment had died away.
Unreservedly she had laid herself as a "damn fool" at our feet--or
rather at Jaffery's feet, for I did not count for much. Instead of
blundering over her and tugging her up and otherwise exacerbating her
wounds, he lifted her with tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the
first time, save when Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a
spiritual relation with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy--she was
dealing with a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her
immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At the
same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously throbbing
and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those few hours.

To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in Jaffery's
category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have threatened on many
restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a gigantic wheel for his
benefit similar to that in which Susan's white mice take futile
exercise. If there was such a wheel he must, I am sure, get in and whirl
it round; just as if there is a boat he must row it, or tree to be
felled he must fell it, or a hill to be climbed he must climb it. At
Etretat, as it happens, there are two hills. He stretched forth his hand
to one, of course the highest, crowned by the fishermen's chapel and
ordained an ascent. Liosha was in the chastened mood in which she would
have dived with him to the depths of the English Channel. I, with
grudging meekness and a prayer for another five minutes devoted to the
deglutition of another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.

It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze tempered the
fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and agreeable to the feet. The
smell of wild thyme mingling with the salt of the low-tide seaweed
conveyed stimulating fragrance. When we reached the top and Jaffery
suggested that we should lie down, I protested. Why not walk along the
edge of the inspiring cliffs?

"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night," said he
throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I need rest."

Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after the quick
ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played charmingly in the
wind which blew her skirts close around her in fine modelling. I thought
of the Winged Victory.

"I'm not a bit tired," she said.

But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his fists,
she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to go contrary
to his desires?" and settled down beside him.

So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the dancing sea
and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long plume from a
steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us and the tiny
golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and were in fact
giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when suddenly Liosha broke
the spell.

"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have killed
him."

Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.

"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.

"I did strike him once."

"Oh?" said I.

"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to hear the
details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous elements. But
she left them to my imagination. "After that," she continued, "he saw I
was an honest woman and talked about marriage."

Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my dear,"
said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."

She shrugged her shoulders--it was the full shrug of the un-English
child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away.
"He was so funny."

"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle
remonstrance.

"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he was
different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very much.
You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't behave
like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me out to
dinner."

Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go on."

"What can I say?"--she shrugged her shoulders again. "With him I hadn't
to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I liked. You all think
it dreadful because I know, like everybody else, how children come into
the world, and can make jokes about things like that. Emma used to say
it was not ladylike--but he--he did not say so. He laughed. His friends
used to laugh. With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off
my stays"--she threw out her hands largely--"ouf!"

"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.

"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a crowd
of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a big
difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in a low
voice.

I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to Barbara for
her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My attitude, as you can
understand, was solely one of kindly curiosity. Liosha, for some
moments, also said nothing. Rather feverishly she pulled off her new
white gloves and cast them away; and I noticed an all but imperceptible
something--something, for want of a better word, like a ripple--sweep
through her, faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her
neck and dying away in a flush on her cheek.

"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the grass-blades.

She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or two and
clutched his shoulder.

"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I thought you
understood. I would have married anybody who would have taken me out of
prison. He was going to take me out of prison to places where I could
breathe." She fell back onto her heels and beat her breast with both
hands. "I was dying for want of air. I was suffocating."

Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.

"What are you talking about?"

She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my knees.

"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my throat"--and
forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's discipline she mimed her
words startlingly--"I was sick--sick--sick to death. You forget, Jaff
Chayne, the mountains of Albania."

"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I
remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"

She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide
swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not
now. Not after--No. But mountains, freedom--anything unlike prison. Oh,
I've gone mad sometimes. I've wanted to take up a fender and smash
things."

"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.

"And what have you done?"

"I've broken out of prison and run away."

"That's what I did," said Liosha.

Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at
her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.

"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what it
comes to."

No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy good-humour
had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of
wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and
restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with
him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not
given him the tiniest little scrap of her heart.

"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.

"I tried to be good to please you--you and Barbara and Hilary, who've
been so kind to me."

"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I'm
as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear
beads."

"So do I," said Liosha.

I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees,
consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a moment
afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect agreement of
babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff road. I jumped to
my feet and pursued them.

"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe the
decencies of civilised life."

CHAPTER XIX

"_Arrêtez! 'Arrêtez!_" roared Jaffery all of a sudden.

We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from Etretat. The
chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door, leaped out and
disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice reverberating from side
to side of the Boulevard Maritime.

"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"

I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw Jaffery in
characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the shoulders and
laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad, powerful-looking
fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a point, and wearing a
curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a bowler-hat. I noticed that he
carried neither stick nor gloves. The ecstasies of encounter having
subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the car.

"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted, opening the
door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a drink at
Tortoni's."

Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling, took
off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave, self-possessed
manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes, the colour of a
stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering him my seat next
Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he quickly established
himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto occupied by Jaffery.
Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur and leaned over the
partition. The car started.

"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard him. "From
Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and Mediterranean ports
thrown in. In the depth of winter. Remember?"

"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head round.
"We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of December."

"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and back."

"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain Maturin.

"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.

"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.

"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.

"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile.
"He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."

"Remember that night off Vigo?"

"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and
go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the
time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was
responsible for the saving of his ship.

"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.

"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.

"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself
included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."

Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks,
holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to
side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a
hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing
from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come--No.
It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty--I
thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was
violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest
desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the
two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.

"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"

"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I
grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board
ship."

He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the
entertainment of a pretty woman.

"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.

"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man
doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying
that I love the sea."

With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel,
Restaurant and Café Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was
thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families
enjoying the Sunday afternoon _apéritif_.

"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the
crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But
Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our
table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first,
I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and
chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha
was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain
Maturin, with the steady English sailor's suspicion of any other drink
than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an
appetite for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.

"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with
yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"

"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue Cross
Line--Ellershaw & Co.--trading between Havre and Mozambique."

"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.

I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information. "Portuguese
East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to Madagascar."

"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.

"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of soda
into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to me,
exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped his
drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us--for he was not a
spontaneously communicative man--that he now had a very good command:
steamship _Vesta_, one thousand five hundred tons, somewhat old, but
sea-worthy, warranted to take more cargo than any vessel of her size he
had ever set eyes on.

"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.

"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up now."

Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered another.

"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"

"Yes, worse luck."

"Why worse luck?" I asked.

"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.

Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of Madagascar
before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and plot of garden
at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.

"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.

Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr.
Chayne?"

Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white teeth
showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And bringing down his
hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder--"Why not? You and I. Out of this
rotten civilisation?"

Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement. So did I.
I thought he was going mad.

"Would you like it?" he asked.

"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang into her
face.

Captain Maturin leaned forward.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and certainly
there's no accommodation for ladies."

Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady--in your silly old sailor
sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me. When you had me aboard,
did you think of having accommodation for a gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At
any rate," said he, at the end of the peal, "you've a sort of spare
cabin? There's always one."

"A kind of dog-hole--for you, Mr. Chayne."

Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He jumped to
his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two adjoining and
crowded tables, for which, dismayed and bareheaded--Jaffery could be a
very courtly gentleman when he chose--he apologized in fluent French,
and, turning, caught Captain Maturin beneath the arm.

"Let us have a private palaver about this."

They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the
Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till they
disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:

"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"

"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.

"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that
her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the
hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my immortal soul to go."

I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring
craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.

"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I, pretending to
believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a tramp--without
another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals
in Noah's Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that
Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful
food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to
sleep in--a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of
a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping
seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to
see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down--a floating--when she
does float--a floating inferno of misery--here it is--I can tell you all
about it--any child in a board school could tell you--an inferno of
misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and
always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the
wind--to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods
catching fire, and the wheezing mediæval boilers bursting and sending
you all to glory--"

I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and chin on
hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with absorbed
interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a shaky voice:

"I should love it! I should love it!"

"But it's lunatic," said I.

"So much the better."

"But the proprieties."

She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and flung out
her hands towards me.

"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What have Jaff
Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I travel from Scutari
to London?"

"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different now?"

It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from glow to
defensive sombreness admitted its significance.

"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the same."
She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath lowering brows.
"If you think just because he and I are good friends now there's any
difference, you're making a great mistake. And just you tell Barbara
that."

"I will do so--" said I.

"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha Prescott is not
going to let herself be made a fool of by a man who's crazy mad over
another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not me. And as for the
proprieties"--she snapped her fingers--"they be--they be anything'd!"

To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I drank
the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back on the
manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat
anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its discomfort.

"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear, will
always be in the way."

"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.

We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery sun now
about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables, followed by
the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.

"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en understands
the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem and Madagascar and
North and South Amerikee,' come."

"But this is midsummer madness," said I.

"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and fortuitously
caught a waiter by the arm. "_Même chose pour tout le monde_." He
flicked him away. "Now, this is business. Will you come and rough it?
The _Vesta_ isn't a Cunard Liner. Not even a passenger boat. No
luxuries. I hope you understand."

"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said Liosha.

"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but you
mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign on as
one of the crew?"

"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up to the
binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in irons."

"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her
incredulity.

"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and portmanteaux
aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.

"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.

"The _what_?" I asked.

"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha and me
have dunnage."

"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a
parrot in a cage."

Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light
mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to
become of the forty-odd _colis_ that we passed through the customs this
morning?"

"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over his
third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I brought him
along? I told him he'd come in useful."

"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a lone man,
give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all this baggage?
They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and I shall be
arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are agencies of
expedition. We can forward the luggage by _grande vitesse_ or _petite
vitesse_--how long are you likely to be away on this Theophile Gautier
voyage--'_Cueillir la fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka_'?"

"Four months," said Captain Maturin.

"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just in
time."

I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing
difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a
nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates
belonging to a woman who is not my wife.

There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the
others practical details, in which I had no share. A suit of oilskins
and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated
argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them
from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night. Liosha, aglow with
excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of
thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so
tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and
apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide. We drifted
mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Café-Restaurant,
where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not
one of the others took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a
schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth--it might
have been tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or
cared. His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and
clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such
plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table,
after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight--I whispered the
information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to
Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it
more piquantly crooked than ever. Captain Maturin went through the
performance with the grave face of another classical devotee to duty;
but his heart--poor fellow!--was not in his food. It was partly in
Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of
having as cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman
of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century
finery, who was sitting next to him.

Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do before
turning in--including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook's mate's
outfit--and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning. If his new
deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts,
he would see to their adequate reception.

"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said he,
with a grip like--like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and
clamping in a steamer's machinery--and athwart his green-grey eyes
filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of humour--"There's still
time."

"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact that all
my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet."

If I am not urbane, I am nothing.

He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The
rearrangement of her luggage--"dunnage," I corrected--would be a lengthy
process. She thanked me, in her best Considine manner, for all the
trouble I had taken on her account, sent her love to Barbara and to
Susan, whose sickness, she trusted, would be transitory, expressed the
hope that the care of her belongings would not be too great a strain
upon my household--and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very
middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities and
respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around my neck in
a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary, I do love you!"
and marched away magnificently through the staring tables to the inner
recesses of the hotel.

Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are credited in
France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with
traditions of _le flègme britannique_; but there was not much _flègme_
about Liosha's embrace, and so the good Havrais were mystified.

There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have run after
her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more instinctively
artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might suppose. Besides, there
was the bill to pay. We sat down again.

"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery. "He's one
of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a damnable way of
getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command of a great liner
instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred tons."

I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described it in
those terms to Liosha."

"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned
cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."

It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.

"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."

"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when I
contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment.
But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short
of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in the
morning."

"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."

"Give them to me now," said I.

He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind tidying up,
some day--I left my papers in a deuce of a mess."

"All right," said I.

"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything should
crop up."

He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the document,
which I put into my letter case.

"And what about letters?"

"Don't want any. Unless"--said he, after a little pause, frowning in the
plenitude of his content--"if you and Barbara can make things right
again with Doria--then one of you might drop me a line. I'll send you a
schedule of dates."

"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.

"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me there's only
one woman in the world."

"Let us have a final drink," said I.

We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.

When I awoke the next morning the _Vesta_ was already four hours on her
way to Madagascar.

CHAPTER XX

I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the County
of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely confess it.
I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men are--which, thank Heaven, I am
not--I might wear a pound or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my
person. This I decline to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot
keep a key. Of all the household stowaway places under my control (and
Barbara limits their number) only one is locked; and that drawer
containing I know not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so
forever and ever--for the key is lost. Such important documents as I
desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who are
trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My
other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any
rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying
on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a
freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case
wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on
my arrival at Northlands.

"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge of this
thing."

But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must accept
the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a luggage label to
the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend, "Key of Jaffery's
flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into the wall of my library.

"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I am not
going to have anything to do with this crack-brained adventure."

"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at considerable
length on the subject, "one would think that I could have prevented it.
If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to throw her cap over the
topmasts, why in the world shouldn't they?"

"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the description
you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child will be utterly
miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure and her skin."

I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the steamship
_Vesta_.

As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St. Quentin's
Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who, knowing me to be
a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need not have burdened
myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's chambers. I found the
small sitting-room in very much the same state of litter as when Jaffery
left it. He enjoyed litter and hated the devastating tidiness of
housemaids. Give a young horse with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an
hour's run in an ordinary bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal
appearance of Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his
books and pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos,
of old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs
and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender care
upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder, which
reposed--most useful piece of furniture--in the middle of the
hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric radiator that took the
place of a grate, I let these things be, and concentrated my attention
on his papers which lay loose on desk and table. This was obviously the
tidying up to which he had referred. I swept his correspondence into one
drawer. I gathered together the manuscript of his new novel and swept it
into another. On the top of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the
original manuscript of "The Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper
and threaded through with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer
of the desk, which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his
bedroom, where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and
looked around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed
two photographs on his dressing-table--one of his mother, whom I
remembered, and, one of Doria--these I laid face downwards so that the
light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered portmanteau from
beneath the lid of which protruded three or four corners of scribbling
paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the offending beer-barrel in a dark
alcove. The basin set below the tap, in order to catch the drip, was
nearly full. In four months' time the room would be flooded with sour
and horrible beer. Full of the thought, I deposited the letters in the
drawer with the rest of the correspondence, and, leaving the flat,
summoned the lift, and in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter
with the contents of a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow
that mantles from man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a
friend for life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the
labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery and
myself had, at least, one thing in common--videlicet, the keyless habit.
I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked some hidden
_trait-d'union_. Now I had found it.

And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how congenial
Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the _Vesta_. The
weather had changed from summer calm to storm. The gentleman from the
meteorological office who writes for the newspapers talked about
cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales in the channel and on the west
coasts of France. The same was likely to continue. The wind blew hard
enough in Berkshire, what must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a
matter of fact, as we learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a
short letter from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips
considerably later--for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to
the bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe--they had made
their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during which they
apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas washed the
deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food had not been
procurable. It seemed that every horror I had prophesied had come to
pass. I should have pitied them, but for the blatant joyousness of their
communications. "I was not seasick a minute, and I have never been so
happy in my life," wrote Liosha. "Hilary should have been with us,"
wrote Jaffery. "It would have made a man of him. Liosha in splendid
fettle. She goes about in men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her
hand to anything when she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just
imagine them having cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing
in wet and dirt. . . .

About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in my all
too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her first visit
since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to make friends with us
once more, and to prove it showed the pleasanter side of her character.
She professed not to have forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the
terrible episode in less vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that
she missed him more than she would confess, even to herself. In her
reconstituted existence he had stood for an essential element.
Unconsciously she had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his
constant service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now
that she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's
neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble uncomfortably.
After all, she had provoked the man (this with some reluctance she
admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up and shaken her. He
had had no intention of dashing out her brains or even of giving her a
beating. In her heart she repented. Otherwise why should she take so ill
Jaffery's flight with Liosha, which she characterised as abominable, and
Liosha's flight with Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?

"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday
morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a
disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat back
in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the woman. One
would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of stain."

"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."

"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot. "You, a
man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off with that
dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with Jaffery. What
respectable woman--well, what honest woman, according to the term of the
lower classes--would run away with two men within twenty-five hours?"

"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going to marry
her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because there's no question
of marriage or anything else between them."

"_Sancta simplicitas!_" She shook her head from side to side and looked
at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a fool. But she isn't. The
best one can say for her is that she has no moral sense. I know the
type."

"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.

She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied with her
ready sureness:

"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own among
literary people."

"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional chair."

"You're as bemused as Barbara."

"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've studied
an individual, which you haven't."

She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own way--Paul and
Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to me?"

"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it--what the dickens does it matter
to you?"

"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.

"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with malicious
intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again. You've banished
him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no concern of yours. If
he chose to elope with the fat woman in a freak museum, why shouldn't
he? What would it have to do with you?"

"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not sitting
on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the more
insulting."

"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.

"Precisely."

She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she had
swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to myself. She
was eaten up with jealousy.

"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the absent being
always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back and hear what
they've got to say for themselves."

She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little black and
ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What they may say is a
matter of perfect indifference to me."

I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what
Jaffery's--practically--last words to me were: 'There's only one woman
in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away with a laugh. "And to
prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh, Hilary"--with the tips of
her fingers she brushed my hair--"you really are a simple old dear!"

"All the same--" I began.

"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy conversation. I
didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you
have one."

She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down _Les Fleurs du
Mal_. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm, and went out.

Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good discipline.
It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever get Jaffery back
again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I was certain that not
only would she forgive past mishandling, but for the sake of keeping him
would put up with a little more. Whether she would marry him was another
story. I had every reason to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned
her bosom's lord. In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She
regarded a second marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough,
with her husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery
back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would
treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of course, were my
conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact
that she found herself lost without Jaffery and that she was furiously
jealous of Liosha.

It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived. Barbara
and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all my gods I
would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I arrived with a
mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid at a great hotel on
the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed in the Adriatic. We
revisited familiar churches and picture galleries in Venice. We mingled
with a cosmopolitan crowd and developed the complexions (not only in our
faces) of an Othello family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every
August, Mr. Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and
other feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her
marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about
nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.

Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the sea having
subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the
normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands,
coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch. Liosha, we were
given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and
swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship's boats with
paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux. She had
struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera,
had taken their photographs. They sent us one of the two standing side
by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could
not wish to see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and
Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's sake,
had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the
trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in
disgraceful fringes.

"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks
anything but utterly miserable."

"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she maintained.

"Well, it's her own skin."

"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.

What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had the last
word.

The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly afterwards
Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the Adrian-haunted
flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her
father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a
series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its
sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery. She still maintained her
unrelenting attitude, and spoke scornfully of him; but once or twice she
asked when this mad voyage would be over, thereby betraying curiosity
rather than indifference.

Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing. Wittekind's
list of new novels in its deep black framing border stared at you from
the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did
the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on
this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation
swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these
nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on
public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to
remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory
was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her.
Adrian's book had been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold
enormously. It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any
longer. Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do
his duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares.
"Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he wasn't a
tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of selling books, how
could Adrian's novels have attained their wide circulation? It was to
his interest to increase that circulation as much as possible. Why not
let him run his very successful business his own way? Doria loftily
assured me that she had no interest in his business, in the mere vulgar
number of copies sold. Adrian's glory was above such sordid things. Of
far higher importance was it that his name should be kept, like a
beacon, before the public. Not to do so was callous ingratitude and
tradesman's niggardliness on the part of Wittekind. Something ought to
be done. I confessed my inability to do anything.

"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the
executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking after
his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."

Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I might have
asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been kind, he would
have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued her from Fendihook,
and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet. But what would have been
the use? I was tired of these windy arguments with Doria, and worn out
with the awful irony of upholding our poor Adrian's genius.

"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he might
have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."

A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced an
_édition de luxe_ of the works of a brilliant novelist cut off like
Adrian in the flower of his age. It was printed on special paper and
illustrated by a famous artist, and limited to a certain number of
copies. This set Doria aflare. From Scotland, where she was paying one
of her restless visits, she sent me the newspaper cutting. If the
commercial organism, she said, that passed with Wittekind for a soul
would not permit him to advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn
list, why couldn't he do like Mackenzie & Co., and advertise an _édition
de luxe_ of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie & Co. thought it worth
while to bring out such an edition of an entirely second-rate author,
surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to treat Adrian equally
sumptuously. I advised her to write to Wittekind. She did. Accompanied
by a fury of ink, she sent me his most courteous and sensible answer.
Both books were doing splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden
aftermath of cheap editions. The time was not ripe for an _édition de
luxe_. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to, when other
sales showed signs of exhaustion.

"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when he
sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or waste'--there's a foolish
woman here who evidently has written a foolish book, and has shown me
her silly contract with a publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what
he's thinking of. It's intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to
but you. Do advise me."

I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of concocting
a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to impress the recipient.
It ran:

"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite him."

I was rather pleased at the humour--may I venture to qualify it as
mordant?--of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was
right. Let her fight it out herself with Wittekind.

But I have regretted that telegram ever since.

CHAPTER XXI

Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me from all
quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the voyage of the
_S.S. Vesta_, they were rare phenomena. Ordinarily, if I heard from him
thrice a year I had to consider that he was indulging in an orgy of
correspondence. But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with
Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which
preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the _Vesta_ covered a period of
abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor
found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the
journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque
hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a
University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand
hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances--that is to say in what, to
Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances--he performed these literary
gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the voyage of the _Vesta_
was an exceptional affair. Save incidentally--for he did send
descriptive articles to _The Daily Gazette_--he was not out on
professional business. The gymnastics were performed for my benefit--yet
with an ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to
satisfy a certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the deeper he
plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer did the poor ogre
come to heartache and to desire. He wrote spaciously, in the foolish
hope that I would reply narrowly, following a Doria scent laid down with
the naïveté of childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of
dates and addresses--I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for
certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North Pole or
horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather pathetic, for I
could give him but little comfort.

Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs taken
chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible to
reconstruct the _S.S. Vesta_ in all her dismalness. You have seen scores
of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the world. You have only to
picture an old, two-masted, well-decked tramp with smokestack and foul
clutter of bridge-house amidships, and fore and aft a miserable bit of a
deck broken by hatches and capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions
and chains and other unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual
promenader. From the photographs and letters I learned that the
dog-hole, intended by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha,
was away aft, beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch
of the propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy,
bunked in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and
relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their
life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence
for having been spared so dreadful an experience.

Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have
their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual
enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For instance, here is an extract
from one of his letters:

"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the time.
Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work till you
sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just see Liosha.
Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor like her, and that
was the daughter of a trader sailing among the Islands, who had lived
all her life since birth on his ship and had scarcely slept ashore.
She's as much born to it as any shell-back on board. She has the amazing
gift of looking part of the tub, like the stokers and the man at the
wheel. Unlike another woman, she's never in the way, and the more work
you can give her to do, the happier she is. She's in magnificent health
and as strong as a horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of
her; now she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep
her from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on as
cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and between the
cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and tell her about
their wives and their girls and what rotten food they've got--'Everybody
has got rotten food on board ship, you silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What
do you expect--sweetbreads and ices?'--and what soul-shattering
blighters they've shipped with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly
imaginary) they have performed in pursuit of their perilous calling.
They're all children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them,
these hell-tearing fellows--children afflicted with a perpetual thirst
and a craving to punch heads--and Liosha's a child, too; so there's a
kind of freemasonry between them.

"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other evening. The
first mate went to look into it and found Liosha standing enraptured at
the hatch looking down upon a free fight. There were knives about. The
mate, being a blasphemous and pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then
he came up to Liosha--you and Barbara should have seen her--it was
sultry, not a breath of air--and she just had on a thin bodice open at
her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged skirt and was
bareheaded.

"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'

"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except the
skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an ox-eyed
Juno; you know her way.

"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'

"'Enjoyment--!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his arms and came
over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail. 'There they was trying
to cut one another's throats, and she calls it enjoyment.'

"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A Dutchman--what you would
call a Swede--a hulking beggar, came up from the fo'c'sle very much the
worse for wear. Liosha says:

"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'

"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'

"'What was it all about?'

"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of that
mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had called him
a ----, he had retaliated, and the others had taken a hand, too."

It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But, believe
me, they were enough to annoy anybody.

"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on deck
for a minute.'

"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London, emerged.

"'What's the matter?'

"Why did you call Petersen a ----?' she asked pleasantly and
word-perfect.

"'Cos he is one.'

"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you. And you
both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to see the end of
it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see here, if you two don't
shake hands, right now, and make friends and promise not to fight again,
I'll not speak a word to either of you for the rest of the voyage.'

"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they would have
consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any other woman had
attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would have told her in
perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind her own business. In
either case they would have resented to the depths of their simple souls
the alien interference. But with Liosha it was different. Of course sex
told. Naturally. But she was a child like themselves. She had looked on,
placidly, and had caught the flash of knives without turning a hair.
They felt that if she were drawn into a mêlée she would use a knife with
the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems so deuced
interesting and I should like to know what you and Barbara think. Do you
remember Gulliver? For all the world it was like Glumdalclitch making
the peace between two little nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men
looked at each other sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at
the fo'c'sle hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At
last the lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman,
without looking at him.

"'All right, mate.'

"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried 'Bravo,
missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just a bit abaft
the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time, swung up the deck
towards me, as pleased as Punch."

Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.

Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed them in
full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of the African
continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round by the Cape of
Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish way, duplicated these
travel-pictures in articles to _The Daily Gazette_, which, supplemented
by memory, he has already published in book form for all the world to
read. Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape
Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other
apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing
copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter
entirely irrelevant to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty
_Vesta_ wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa,
disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken port, and
making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a European market.
If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all about it; but you see, I
remained in England. And if I subjected Jaffery's correspondence to
microscopic examination, and read up blue books on the exports and
imports of all the places on the South African coast line, and told you
exactly what was taken out of the _S.S. Vesta_ and what was put into
her, I cannot conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To
do so, would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The
transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a matter
of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled, in so-called
comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know all about it.
Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a mile of the shore. On
one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed lighters manned by
glistening and excited negroes. On board is a donkey-engine working a
derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast bales and packing cases are
lifted from the holds. A dingily white-suited officer stands by with
greasy invoice sheets, while another at the yawning abyss whence the
cargo emerges makes the tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations.
And the merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter,
by black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of
unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me; and I
cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or daughters of
men who are not intimately concerned in a particular trade. . . . You
must imagine, I say, the _S.S. Vesta_ repeating this monotonous
performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the little, black-bearded skipper,
all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained
scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English,
fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the _tour du propriétaire_,
among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of
the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom
Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger
children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to
which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant to the
story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to
relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you. I should have
chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as far as I can make
out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the
best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached
residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads
this. But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail. It was on the sea,
away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last
word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by
Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of
his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of
Liosha.

As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When Jaffery
put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and
letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy references to Doria
were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity. But Liosha was the
central figure in many a picture.

Here, I say, is another extract:

     "Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing that
     worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with her
     after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going round
     and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go with her.
     I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't see her
     settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I think
     I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling
     tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy has
     managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine. It
     shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting in
     another long stretch. . . .

     "She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares
     the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose
     wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out
     his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.
     I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty
     strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now
     and again, when it's my watch--I'm on the starboard watch, you
     know--I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She stands
     for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her lungs.
     And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her skirts,
     and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at her
     face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting
     deck--and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of a
     woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell of
     bacon and eggs--my son, if you don't know the conglomerate smell of
     fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the pure early
     morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary. She and the
     Portugee between them, he contributing the science and she the
     good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn your
     nose up at it--but you've never been hungry in your life! and there
     hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered her the
     permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to our
     comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to. She's
     a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play
     spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of
     cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.

     "Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any
     result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She
     considered the matter gravely.

     "'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much
     luck so far, have I?'

     "I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'

     "'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she said.
     'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used to
     meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras Fendihooks!'

     "She rose--we had been sitting on the cabin sky-light--and leaned
     over the taffrail and looked wistfully out to sea. I joined her.
     She was silent for a bit. Then she said:

     "'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to marry
     a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't beat
     me--and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm built.'

     "She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't
     talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man
     who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love
     would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it.
     Honest--I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean great
     Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he as
     decent a sort as you please."

It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's horizon
gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as an invalid's
interests become circumscribed by the walls of his sick-room. He tells
us of childish things, a catch of fish, a quarrel between the first and
second mate over Liosha, second having accused first of a disrespectful
attitude towards the lady, the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind
which Liosha had her morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's
toe and her temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and
Liosha's supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of
the impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay more--with
a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he himself had created
Liosha.

Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us both:

     "A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of Doria.
     If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've bought
     some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when I reach
     home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is rough
     only on the outside.

     "Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given her
     by the donkey-man. . . ."

There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a long
account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's company
including the captain took part, to the subversion of discipline and
navigation. But you see--he switches off at once to Liosha and the
trivial records of the humdrum day.

At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were in the
Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:

     "Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I can
     scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The
     dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub
     rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known
     ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was
     a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she
     shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the
     colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo
     straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great
     packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous
     mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands
     had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and
     straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the
     port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn
     turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the
     other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the
     inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I
     didn't like it; no one liked it.

     "When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway and
     began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying, staggering
     crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of forty-five
     degrees one way and thirty degrees another and constantly shifting
     both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed athwart the ship to
     catch hold of, your mind is pretty well concentrated on yourself. I
     know mine was. I slipped and wallowed on my belly hanging on to the
     rope like grim death till my turn came for the ladder. I got my
     feet on the rungs. I was all right, when looking up into the livid
     daylight whom do you think I saw calmly preparing to follow me?
     Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She had sea-boots and a jersey and
     looked just like a man. I roared:

     "'Clear out. This is no place for you.'

     "'I'm coming. Go along down.'

     "She put her foot on the rung just below my face. I gripped as much
     of her ankle as the stiff leather allowed.

     "'Clear out. Don't be a fool.'

     "Andrews, the first mate, poured out a flood of blasphemy. What the
     this, that and the other were we waiting for?

     "'Mr. Andrews,' I shouted, 'send this woman to her cabin.'

     "'Oh, go to hell! Tumble down every one of you, or I'll damn soon
     make you,' cried Andrews.

     "He was in a vile temper, being responsible for the snugness of the
     cargo, and the cargo lay about as snug as a dormitory of devils. He
     was sorry afterwards, poor chap, for his lack of courtesy, but at
     the moment he didn't care who went down into the hold, or who was
     killed, so long as this infernal cargo was righted and the crazy
     old tub didn't go down.

     "So I descended. It was ordained. Liosha followed. And once down we
     were carried away out of ourselves by a nightmare of toil and
     peril. Andrews and second were there yelling orders. We obeyed in
     some subconscious way. How we heard I don't know. For peace and
     quiet give me a battlefield. Twenty men in semi-darkness, scarce
     able to stand, fighting blind, mad forces of half a ton each. The
     huge crates of deal seemed so innocent and harmless on the
     quay-side, but charging about that swaying, rocking lower deck,
     they looked malignant, like grimy blocks of Hell's anger. I don't
     know what I did. All I can say is that I never before felt my
     muscles about to snap--queer feeling that--and I think I'm about as
     tough as they make 'em.

     "Liosha worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught sight
     of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't
     you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were
     running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got
     jammed on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were
     knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know
     what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of
     the ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He
     looked ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the
     iron ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along,
     barging into everything--it was blowing half a gale--and once I
     fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up
     and got him into the fo'c'sle and stuck him in a bunk. The Portugee
     cook, sick of fever--I think he's a blighted malingerer--was the
     only creature there. I routed him out, in the dim mephitic place
     reeking of sour bedding, and put Petersen in his charge. Then I
     went back through the drenching seas to the hatch. There was just
     enough room for a man's body to squeeze through down the ladder. I
     went down into the same hell-broth of sweat and confusion. The
     ground you stood upon might have been the back of a super-Titanic
     butterfly. Stability was a nonexistent term. It was a helpless
     scuttering surge of men and vast wooden cubes. Most of the men had
     torn off their upper garments and fought half naked, the sweat
     glistening on their skins in the feeble light. Soon the heat became
     unbearable and I too tore off jersey and shirt. Liosha joined me
     and we worked together without speaking. Her long thick hair had
     come down and she had hastily tied it in a knot, just as you might
     tie a knot in a towel, and she had thrown off things like everybody
     else and only a flimsy cotton, sleeveless bodice, or whatever it's
     called, drenched through and sticking to her, made a pretence of
     covering her from her waist.

     "You had to get like flies round these infernal things and wait
     your time--if you could--for the roll, and push and then scramble
     with ropes and make fast; awl at the same time dance out of the way
     of the slithering hulks that bore down on you with fantastic
     murderousness. And through it all thundered the roaring of the
     storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the propeller
     lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of every
     plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.

     "We had just, with exhausted muscles, made a whole stack fast, and
     were standing by, panting, haggard eyed, the sweat running down
     anyhow, twenty of us, Dagoes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, in the dim
     twilight--just a shaft of pale illumination coming slick down the
     ladder where the hatch was open,--hanging on to edges and corners
     of cargo, when suddenly the ship, caught on top of a wave, vibrated
     in a sickening shudder, plunged, and then with an impetus of
     cataclysm wallowed to starboard. Andrews shrieked, 'Stand clear!'
     Most of the men leaped and flung themselves away. But I stumbled
     and fell. Before I realized the danger of a vast sliding crate,
     two strong arms were curled round my waist and I was flung aside,
     to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was stopped by
     the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the men securing
     the crate and the other half grovelling around something on the
     deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless with blood
     streaming from her head.

     [Illustration: Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung
     aside.]

     "In a mortal funk I took her up the ladder with the help of another
     fellow, and carried her to her cabin. I never before realised the
     appalling length of this vessel. We got her into her bunk aft; I
     sent the other chap for brandy and first-aid appliances from the
     ship's stores, and did what I could to discover how far she was
     injured. . . .

     "Thank God, nothing worse had happened than a nasty scalp wound.
     But her escape had been miraculous. She had saved my life; for as I
     lay on the deck, the crate charging direct would have squashed my
     skull into jelly, and crushed my body against the side of the hold.
     A fraction of a second later and it would have been her skull and
     her body instead of mine; but she just managed to roll practically
     clear until she got caught by the swerving side of the crate. I
     hope you'll understand what a heroic thing she did. She faced what
     seemed to be certain death for me; and it is thanks to Liosha that
     I'm able to tell you that I'm alive. And she, God bless her, walks
     about with her head bandaged, among an adoring ship's company, and
     refuses to admit having done anything wonderful."

And, indeed, to confirm Jaffery's last statement, here is a bit of a
scrawl from Liosha--her complete account of the incident:

     "We've just had the most awful storm I ever did see. The cargo go
     loose in the hold and we had to fix it up. I got a cut on the head
     and had to stay in bed till the storm finished. I must say it gave
     me an awful headache, but there I guess I'm better now."

Well, that seems to be the most exciting thing that happened to them.
Afterwards, in the mind of each, it loomed as the great event in the
amazing voyage. A man does not forget having his life saved by a woman
at the risk of her own; and a woman, no matter how heroic in action and
how magnanimous in after modesty, does not forget it either. Although he
had been credited (to his ingenuous delight) by reviewers of "The
Greater Glory" with uncanny knowledge of the complexities of a woman's
nature, I have never met a more dunder-headed blunderer in his dealings
with women. He perceived the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on
Liosha's part, but seems to have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.

     "Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last _Vesta_ letters,
     "like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's splendid. I
     take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said about her.
     And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy, she has
     adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards me. In her great,
     spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression that she owns
     Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his good. Women's
     ways are wonderful but weird."

He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative
epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's
motherliness.

"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly ass!

CHAPTER XXII

It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her round of
country-house visits and returned to the flat in St. John's Wood. The
morning after her arrival in town she took my satirical counsel and
called at Wittekind's office, and, I am afraid, tried to bite that very
pleasant, well-intentioned gentleman. She went out to do battle,
arraying herself in subtle panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's
account of the matter. She informs me that when a woman goes to see her
solicitor, her banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man
who really understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different
kind of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery
at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered when
tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true. Costumes
also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with the hats. I
recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it explained many
puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations in my wee wife's
personal appearance. And yet, the other morning when I was going up to
town to see after some investments, and I asked her which was the more
psychological tie, a green or a violet, in which to visit my
stockbroker, she lost as much of her temper as she allows herself to
lose and bade me not he silly. . . . But this has nothing to do with
Doria.

Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on striking
terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in the outer
office and sent in her card. At the name of Mrs. Adrian Boldero, doors
flew open, and Doria marched straight away into Wittekind's comfortably
furnished private room. Wittekind himself, tall, loose-limbed,
courteous, the least tradesman-like person you can imagine, rose to
receive her. For some reason or the other, or more likely against
reason, she had pictured a rather soapy, smug little man hiding crafty
eyes behind spectacles; but here he was, obviously a man of good
breeding, who smiled at her most charmingly and gave her to understand
that she was the one person in the world whom he had been longing to
meet. And the office was not a sort of human _charcuterie_ hung round
with brains of authors for sale, but a quiet, restful place to which
valuable prints on the walls and a few bits of real Chippendale gave an
air of distinction. Doria admits to being disconcerted. She had come to
bite and she remained to smile. He seated her in a nice old armchair
with a beautiful back--she was sensitive to such things--and spoke of
Adrian as of his own blood brother. She had not anticipated such warmth
of genuine feeling, or so fine an appreciation of her Adrian's work.

"Believe me, my dear Mrs. Boldero," said he, "I am second only to you in
my admiration and grief, and there's nothing I wouldn't do to keep your
husband's memory green. But it is green, thank goodness. How do I know?
By two signs. One that people wherever the English language is spoken
are eagerly reading his books--I say reading, because you deprecate the
purely commercial side of things; but you must forgive me if I say that
the only proof of all their reading is the record of all their buying.
And when people buy and read an author to this prodigious extent, they
also discuss him. Adrian Boldero's name is a household word. You want
advertisement and an _édition de luxe_. But it is only the little man
that needs the big drum."

"But still, Mr. Wittekind," Doria urged, "an _édition de luxe_ would be
such a beautiful monument to him. I don't care a bit about the money,"
she went on with a splendid disregard of her rights that would have sent
a shiver down the incorporated back of the Incorporated Society of
Authors, "I'm only too willing to contribute towards the expense. Please
understand me. It's a tribute and a monument."

"You only put up monuments to those who are dead," said Wittekind.

"But my husband--"

"--isn't dead," said he.

"Oh!" said Doria. "Then--"

"The time for your _édition de luxe_ is not yet."

"Yet? But--you don't think Adrian's work is going to die?"

She looked at him tragically. He reassured her.

"Certainly not. Our future sumptuous edition will be a sign that he is
among the immortals. But an _édition de luxe_ now would be a wanton _Hic
jacet_."

All of this may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound business
from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through the medium of
Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her
account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul--or across
whatever part of oneself one smiles with when one's face is constrained
to immobility.

"I'm so glad I plucked up courage to come and see you, Mr. Wittekind,"
she said. "I feel much happier. I'm quite content to leave Adrian's
reputation in your hands. I wish, indeed, I had come to see you before."
"I wish you had," said he.

"Mr. Chayne has been most kind; but--"

"Jaffery Chayne isn't you," he laughed. "But all the same, he's a
splendid fellow and an admirable man of business."

"In what way?" she asked, rather coldly.

"Well--so prompt."

"That's the very last word I should apply to him. He took an
unconscionable time," said Doria.

"He had a very difficult and delicate work of revision to do. Your
husband's work was a first draft. The novel had to be pulled together.
He did it admirably. That sort of thing takes time, although it was a
labour of love."

"It merely meant writing in bits of scenes. Oh, Mr. Wittekind," she
cried, reverting to an old grievance, "I do wish I could see exactly
what he wrote and what Adrian wrote. I've been so worried! Why do your
printers destroy authors' manuscripts?"

"They don't," said Wittekind. "They don't get them nowadays. They print
from a typed copy."

"'The Greater Glory' was printed from my husband's original manuscript."

Wittekind smiled and shook his head. "No, my dear Mrs. Boldero. From two
typed copies--one in England and one in America."

"Mr. Chayne told me that in order to save time he sent you Adrian's
original manuscript with his revisions."

"I'm sure you must have misunderstood him," said Wittekind. "I read the
typescript myself. I've never seen a line of your husband's manuscript."

"But 'The Diamond Gate' was printed from Adrian's manuscript."

"No, no, no. That, too, I read in type."

Doria rose and the colour fled from her cheeks and her great dark eyes
grew bigger, and she brought down her little gloved hand on the writing
desk by which the publisher, cross-kneed, was sitting. He rose, too.

"Mr. Chayne has definitely told me that both Adrian's original
manuscripts went to the printers and were destroyed by the printers."

"It's impossible," said Wittekind, in much perplexity. "You're making
some extraordinary mistake."

"I'm not. Mr. Chayne would not tell me a lie."

Wittekind drew himself up. "Neither would I, Mrs. Boldero. Allow me."

He took up his "house" telephone. "Ask Mr. Forest to come to me at
once." He turned to Doria. "Let us get to the bottom of this. Mr. Forest
is my literary adviser--everything goes through his hands."

They waited in silence until Mr. Forest appeared. "You remember the
Boldero manuscripts?"

"Of course."

"What were they, manuscript or typescript?"

"Typescript."

"Have you even seen any of Mr. Boldero's original manuscript?"

"No."

"Do you think any of it has ever come into the office?"

"I'm sure it hasn't."

"Thank you, Mr. Forest."

The reader retired.

"You see," said Wittekind.

"Then where are the original manuscripts of 'The Diamond Gate' and 'The
Greater Glory'?"

"I'm very sorry, dear Mrs. Boldero, but I have no means of knowing."

"Mr. Chayne said they were sent here, and used by the printers and
destroyed by the printers."

"I'm sure," said Wittekind, "there's some muddling misunderstanding.
Jaffery Chayne, in his own line, is a distinguished man--and a man of
unblemished honour. A word or two will clear up everything."

"He's in Madagascar."

"Then wait till he comes back."

Doria insisted--and who in the world can blame her for insisting?

"You may think me a silly woman, Mr. Wittekind; but I'm not--not to the
extent of an hysterical invention. Mr. Chayne has told me definitely
that those two manuscripts came to your office, that the books were
printed from them and that they were destroyed by the printers."

"And I," said Wittekind, "give you my word of honour--and I have also
given you independent testimony--that no manuscript of your husband's
has ever entered this office."

"Suppose they had come in his handwriting, would they have been
destroyed?"

"Certainly not. Every sheet would have been returned with the proofs.
Typed copy may or may not be returned."

"But autograph copy is valuable?"

"Naturally."

"The manuscripts of Adrian's novels might be worth a lot of money?"

"Quite a lot of money."

"So you don't think Mr. Chayne destroyed them?"

"It's an act of folly of which a literary man like Mr. Chayne would be
incapable."

"And you've never seen any of it?"

"I've given you my word of honour."

"Then it's very extraordinary," said Doria.

"It is," said Wittekind, stiffly.

She thrust out her hand and flashed a generous glance.

"Forgive me for being bewildered. But it's so upsetting. You have
nothing whatever to do with it. It's all Jaffery Chayne." She looked up
at the loosely built, kindly man. "It's for him to give explanations. In
the meanwhile, I leave my dear, dear husband's memory in your hands--to
keep green, as you say"--tears came into her eyes--"and you will, won't
you?"

The pathos of her attitude dissolved all resentment. He bent over her,
still holding her hand.

"You may be quite sure of that," said he. "Even we publishers have our
ideals--and our purest is to distribute through the world the works of a
man of genius."

So Doria having telephoned for permission to come and see us on urgent
business, arrived at Northlands late in the afternoon, full of the
virtues of Wittekind and the vices of Jaffery. She gave us a full
account of her interview and appealed to me for explanations of
Jaffery's extraordinary conduct. I upbraided myself bitterly for having
counselled her to bite Wittekind. I ought, instead, to have thrown every
possible obstacle in the way of her meeting him. I ought to have
foreseen this question of the manuscripts, the one weak spot in our web
of deception. Now I may be a liar when driven by necessity from the
paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished liar. It is not my fault.
Mere providence has guided my life through such gentle pastures that I
have had no practice worth speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in
mendacity. Both of us were sorely put to it under Doria's indignant and
suspicious cross-examination.

"You saw the original manuscript of 'The Greater Glory'?"

"Yes," I lied.

"Did you see the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"

"No," I lied again.

"Was it among Adrian's papers?"

"Not to my knowledge. Probably if Adrian didn't send it to the printers,
he destroyed it."

"I don't believe he destroyed it. Jaffery has got it, and he has also
got the manuscript of 'The Greater Glory.' What does he want them for?"

"That's a leading question, my dear, which I can't answer, because I
don't know whether he has them or not. In fact, I know nothing whatever
about them."

"It sounds horrid and ungracious, Hilary, after all you've done for me,"
said Doria, "but I really think you ought to know something."

From her point of view, and from any outside person's point of view, she
was perfectly right. My bland ignorance was disgraceful. If she had
brought an action against us for recovery of these wretched manuscripts
and we managed to keep the essential secret, both counsel and judge
would have flayed me alive. . . . Put yourself in her place for a
minute--God knows I tried to do so hard enough--and you will see the
logic of her position, all through. She was not a woman of broad human
sympathies and generous outlook; she was intense and narrow. Her whole
being had been concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life;
it was concentrated now on his memory. To her, as to all the world, he
flamed a dazzling meteor. Her faults, which were many and hard to bear
with, all sprang from the bigotry of love. Nothing had happened to cloud
her faith. She had come up against many incomprehensible things: the
delay in publication of Adrian's book; the change of title; the burning
of Adrian's last written words on the blotting pad; the vivid pictures
that were obviously not Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo
of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the
literary side of the executorship. She had accepted them--not without
protest; but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of
things more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her
outrageously. I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.

But what on earth could I do? What on earth could my poor Barbara do? We
sat, both of us, racking our brains for some fantastic invention, while
Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen, walked about my library,
inveighing against Jaffery and crying for her manuscripts. And I dared
not know anything at all about them. She had every reason to reproach
me.

Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said: "You mustn't blame Hilary.
When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a special
department. Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary's management of
financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with the literary side
of things. It has worked very well. This silly muddle about the
manuscripts doesn't matter a little bit."

"But it does matter," cried Doria.

And it did. Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts written by
the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers, every fibre of
her passionate self craved their possession. We argued futilely, as
people must, who haven't the ghost of a case.

"But why has Jaffery lied?"

"The manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate,'" I declared, again perjuring
myself, "has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me. As I've told
you it was not among Adrian's papers which we went through together.
We're narrowed down to 'The Greater Glory.' Possibly," said I, with a
despairing flash, "Jaffery had to pull it about so much and deface it
with his own great scrawl, that he thought it might pain you to see it,
and so he told you that it had disappeared at the printer's. Now that I
remember, he did say something of the kind."

"Yes, he did," said Barbara.

Doria brushed away the hypothesis. "You poor things! You're merely
saying that to shield him. A blind imbecile could see through you"--I
have already apologised to you for our being the unconvincing liars that
we were--"you know nothing more about it than I do. You ought to, as
I've already said. But you don't. In fact, you know considerably less.
Shall I tell you where the manuscripts are at the present moment?"

"No, my dear," said Barbara, in the plaintive voice of one who has come
to the end of a profitless talk; for you cannot imagine how utterly
wearied we were with the whole of the miserable business. "Let us wait
till Jaffery comes home. It won't be so very long."

"Yes, Doria," said I, soothingly. "Barbara's right. You can't condemn a
man without a hearing?"

Doria laughed scornfully. "Can't I? I'm a woman, my dear friend. And
when a woman condemns a man unheard she's much more merciful than when
she condemns him after listening to his pleadings. Then she gets really
angry, and perhaps does the man injustice."

I gasped at the monstrous proposition; but Barbara did not seem to
detect anything particularly wrong about it.

"At any rate," said I, "whether you condemn him or not, we can't do
anything until he comes home. So we had better leave it at that."

"Very well," said Doria. "Let us leave it for the present. I don't want
to be more of a worry to you dear people than I can help. But that's
where Adrian's manuscripts are, both of them"--and she pointed to the
key of Jaffery's flat hanging with its staring label against my library
wall.

Of course it was rather mean to throw the entire onus on to Jaffery. But
again, what could we do? Doria put her pistol at our heads and demanded
Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every reason to believe in their
existence. Wittekind had never seen them. Vandal and Goth and every kind
of Barbarian that she considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable
that he had deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable
that he had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained
therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no
satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did we
confirm in her mind the suspicion of dark and nefarious dealings. If it
were only to gain time in order to think and consult, we had to refer
her to the absent Jaffery.

"My dear," said I to Barbara, when we were alone, "we're in a deuce of a
mess."

"I'm afraid we are."

"Henceforward," said I, "we're going to live like selfish pigs, with no
thought about anybody but ourselves and our own little pig and about
anything outside our nice comfortable sty."

"We'll do nothing of the kind," said Barbara.

"You'll see," said I. "I'm a lion of egotism when I'm roused."

We dined and had a pleasant evening. Doria did not raise the disastrous
topic, but talked of Marienbad and her visits, and discussed the modern
tendencies of the drama. She prided herself on being in the forefront of
progress, and found no dramatic salvation outside the most advanced
productions of the Incorporated Stage Society. I pleaded for beauty,
which she called wedding-cake. She pleaded for courage and truth in the
presentation of actual life, which I called dull and stupid photography
which any dismal fool could do. We had quite an exciting and entirely
profitless argument.

"I'm not going to listen any longer," she cried at last, "to your silly
old early Victorian platitudes!"

"And I," I retorted, "am not going to be browbeaten in my own home by
one-foot-nothing of crankiness and chiffon."

So, laughingly, we parted for the night, the best of friends. If only, I
thought, she could sweep her head clear of Adrian, what a fascinating
little person she might be. And I understood how it had come to pass
that our hulking old ogre had fallen in love with her so desperately.

The next morning I was in the garden, superintending the planting of
some roses in a new, bed, when Doria, in hat and furs, came through my
library window, and sang out a good-bye. I hurried to her.

"Surely not going already? I thought you were at least staying to
lunch."

No; she had to get back to town. The car, ordered by Barbara, was
waiting to take her to the station.

"I'll see you into the train," said I.

"Oh, please don't trouble."

"I will trouble," I laughed, and I accompanied her down the slope to the
front door where stood Barbara by the car and Franklin with the luggage.
Doria and I drove to the station. For the few minutes before the train
came in we walked up and down the platform. She was in high spirits,
full of jest and laughter. An unwonted flush in her cheeks and a
brightness in her deep eyes rendered her perfectly captivating.

"I haven't seen you looking so well and so pretty for ever such a long
time," I said.

The flush deepened. "You and Barbara have done me all the good in the
world. You always do. Northlands is a sort of Fontaine de Jouvence for
weary people."

That was as graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with me a
short while afterwards through the carriage window, she thanked me for
our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality than she had ever
before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling that, after all, we
had done something to help the poor little lady on her way. If I had
been a cat, I should have purred. After an hour or so, Barbara summoned
me from my contemplative occupation.

"Yes, dear?" said I, at the library window.

"Have you written to Rogers?"

Rogers was a plumber.

"He's a degraded wretch," said I, "and unworthy of receiving a letter
from a clean-minded man."

"Meanwhile," said Barbara, "the servants' bathroom continues to be
unusable."

"Good God!" said I, "does Rogers hold the cleanliness of this household
in his awful hands?"

"He does."

"Then I will sink my pride and write to him."

"Write now," said Barbara, leading me to my chair. "You ought to have
done it three days ago."

So with three days' bathlessness of my domestic staff upon my
conscience, and with Barbara at my elbow, I wrote my summons. I turned
in my chair, holding it up in my hand.

"Is this sufficiently dignified and imperious?"

I began to declaim it. "Sir, it has been brought to my notice that the
pipes--". I broke off short. "Hullo!" said I, my eyes on the wall, "what
has become of the key of Jaffery's flat?"

There was the brass-headed nail on which I had hung it, impertinently
and nakedly bright. The labelled key had vanished.

"You've got it in your pocket, as usual," said Barbara.

I may say that I have a habit of losing things and setting the household
from the butler to the lower myrmidons of the kitchen in frantic search,
and calling in gardeners and chauffeurs and nurses and wives and
children to help, only to discover that I have had the wretched object
in my pocket all the time. So accustomed is Barbara to this wolf-cry
that if I came up to her without my head and informed her that I had
lost it, she would be profoundly sceptical.

But this time I was blameless. "I haven't touched it," I declared, "and
I saw it this morning."

"I don't know about this morning," said Barbara. "But I grant you it was
there yesterday evening, because Doria drew our attention to it."

"Doria!" I cried, and I rose, with mouth agape, and our eyes met in a
sudden stare.

"Good Heavens! do you think she has taken it?"

"Who else?" said I. "She came out from here to say good-bye to me in the
garden. She had the opportunity. She was preternaturally animated and
demonstrative at the station--your sex's little guileful way ever since
the world began. She had the stolen key about her. She's going straight
to Jaffery's flat to hunt for those manuscripts."

"Well, let her," said Barbara. "We know she can't find them, because
they don't exist."

"But, my darling Barbara," I cried, "everything else does. And
everything else is there. And there's not a blessed thing locked up in
the place!"

"Do you mean--?" she cried aghast.

"Yes, I do. I must get up to town at once and stop her."

"I'll come with you," said Barbara.

So once more, on altruistic errand, I motored post-haste to London. We
alighted at St. Quentin's Mansions. My friend the porter came out to
receive us.

"Has a lady been here with a key of Mr. Chayne's flat?"

"No, sir, not to my knowledge."

We drew breaths of relief. Our journey had been something of a strain.

"Thank goodness!" said Barbara.

"Should a lady come, don't allow her to enter the flat," said I.

[Illustration: And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.]

"I shouldn't give a strange lady entrance in any case," said the porter.

"Good!" said I, and I was about to go. But Barbara, with her ready
common-sense, took me aside and whispered:

"Why not take all these compromising manuscripts home with us?"

In my letter case I had the half-forgotten power of attorney that
Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.

"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."

"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."

We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We entered
the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on the hearthrug,
lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.

CHAPTER XXIII

If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many sorrows,
it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the soul-stricken
little creature owe her life and her reason. For a fortnight she
scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours anywhere, and
snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a swallow. For a whole
fortnight she wrestled with the powers of darkness, which like Apollyon
straddled quite over all the breadth of the way, and by sheer valiancy
and beauty of heart, she made them spread forth their dragon's wings and
speed them away so that Doria for a season saw them no more. How she
fought and with what weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are
written down; but in a Book which no human eye can see.