CASE
=8=
tlje H>ame Sltttfjor
THE SACRED FOUNT.
$1.50.
THE WINGS OF THE
DOVE. 2 vols. $2.50.
THE BETTER SORT
THE BETTER SORT
BY
HENRY JAMES
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS
Published, February, 1903
-> *C II
48-
:63
CONTENTS
PAGE
BROKEN WINGS i
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN 24
THE Two FACES 50
THE TONE OF TIME 68
THE SPECIAL TYPE . 93
MRS. MEDWIN . 116
FLICKERBRIDGE ......... 143
THE STORY IN IT . . . . . . . .168
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE . ... 189
THE BIRTHPLACE 245
THE PAPERS 312
A rr
THE BETTER SORT
BROKEN WINGS
/CONSCIOUS as he was of what was between
V^ them, though perhaps less conscious than ever
of why there should at that time of day be anything,
he would yet scarce have supposed they could be so
long in a house together without some word or some
look. It had been since the Saturday afternoon, and
that made twenty-four hours. The party five-and-
thirty people, and some of them great was one in
which words and looks might more or less have gone
astray. The effect, none the less, he judged, would
have been, for her quite as for himself, that no sound
and no sign from the other had been picked up by
either. They had happened, both at dinner and at
luncheon, to be so placed as not to have to glare or
to grin across; and for the rest they could each, in
such a crowd, as freely help the general ease to keep
them apart as assist it to bring them together. One
chance there was, of course, that might be beyond their
control. He had been the night before half surprised
at not finding her his " fate " when the long procession
to the dining-room solemnly hooked itself together.
He would have said in advance recognising it as one
of the sharp " notes " of Mundham that, should the
THE BETTER SORT
gathering contain a literary lady, the literary lady
would, for congruity, be apportioned to the arm, when
there was a question of arms, of the gentleman present
who represented the nearest thing to literature. Poor
Straith represented " art/ and that, no doubt, would
have been near enough had not the party offered for
choice a slight excess of men. The representative of
art had been of the two or three who went in alone,
whereas Mrs. Harvey had gone in with one of the rep
resentatives of banking.
It was certain, however, that she would not again
be consigned to Lord Belgrove, and it was just possible
that he himself should not be again alone. She would
be, on the whole, the most probable remedy to that
state, on his part, of disgrace; and this precisely was
the great interest of their situation they were the only
persons present without some advantage over some
body else. They hadn t a single advantage; they
could be named for nothing but their cleverness; they
were at the bottom of the social ladder. The social
ladder, even at Mundham, had as they might properly
have been told, as indeed practically they were told
to end somewhere ; which is no more than to say that,
as he strolled about and thought of many things, Stuart
Straith had, after all, a good deal the sense of helping
to hold it up. Another of the things he thought of was
the special oddity for it was nothing else of his
being there at all, and being there in particular so out
of his order and his turn. He couldn t answer for Mrs.
Harvey s turn. It might well be that she was in hers ;
but these Saturday-to-Monday occasions had hitherto
mostly struck him as great gilded cages as to which
care was taken that the birds should be birds of a
feather.
There had been a wonderful walk in the afternoon,
within the limits of the place, to a far-away tea-house ;
and, in spite of the combinations and changes of this
2
BROKEN WINGS
episode, he had still escaped the necessity of putting
either his old friend or himself to the test. Also it had
been all, he flattered himself, without the pusillanimity
of his avoiding her. Life was, indeed, well understood
in these great conditions ; the conditions constituted in
their greatness a kind of fundamental facility, provided
a general exemption, bathed the hour, whatever it was,
in a universal blandness, that were all a happy solvent
for awkward relations. It was beautiful, for instance,
that if their failure to meet amid so much meeting had
been of Mrs. Harvey s own contrivance he couldn t be
in the least vulgarly sure of it. There were places in
which he would have had no doubt, places different
enough from Mundham. He felt all the same and
without anguish that these were much more his places
even if she didn t feel that they were much more hers.
The day had been warm and splendid, and this moment
of its wane with dinner in sight, but as across a field
of polished pink marble which seemed to say that
wherever in such a house there was space there was
also, benignantly, time formed, of the whole proces
sion of the hours, the one dearest to our friend, whQ
on such occasions interposed it, whenever he could,
between the set of impressions that ended and the set
that began with " dressing." The great terraces and
gardens were almost void; people had scattered,
though not altogether even yet to dress. The air of
the place, with the immense house all seated aloft in
strength, robed with summer and crowned with suc
cess, was such as to contribute something of its own
to the poetry of early evening. This visitor, at any
rate, saw and felt it all through one of those fine hazes
of August that remind you at least, they reminded
him of the artful gauze stretched across the stage of
a theatre when an effect of mystery or some particular
pantomimic ravishment is desired.
Should he, in fact, have to pair with Mrs. Harvey
3
THE BETTER SORT
for dinner it would be a shame to him not to have ad
dressed her sooner; and should she, on the contrary,
be put with someone else the loss of so much of the
time would have but the greater ugliness. Didn t he
meanwhile make out that were ladies in the lower gar
den, from which the sound of voices, faint, but, as al
ways in the upper air of Mundham, exceedingly sweet,
was just now borne to him? She might be among
them, and if he should find her he would let her know
he had sought her. He would treat it frankly as an
occasion for declaring that what had happened between
them or rather what had not happened was too ab
surd. What at present occurred, however, was that in
his quest of her he suddenly, at the turn of an alley,
perceived her, not far off, seated in a sort of bower with
the Ambassador. With this he pulled up, going an
other way and pretending not to see them. Three
times already that afternoon he had observed her in
different situations with the Ambassador. He was
the more struck accordingly when, upward of an hour
later, again alone and with his state unremedied, he
saw her placed for dinner next his Excellency. It was
not at all what would have been at Mundham her right
seat, so that it could only be explained by his Excel
lency s direct request. She was a success ! This time
Straith was well in her view and could see that in the
candle-light of the wonderful room, where the lustres
were, like the table, all crystal and silver, she was as
handsome as anyone, taking the women of her age, and
also as " smart " as the evening before, and as true as
any of the others to the law of a marked difference in
her smartness. If the beautiful way she held herself
for decidedly it was beautiful came in a great meas
ure from the good thing she professionally made of it
all, our observer could reflect that the poor thing he
professionally made of it probably affected his attitude
in just the opposite way; but they communicated
4
BROKEN WINGS
neither in the glare nor in the grin that he had dreaded.
Still, their eyes did now meet, and then it seemed to
him that her own were strange.
II
SHE, on her side, had her private consciousness, and
quite as full a one, doubtless, as he, but with the ad
vantage that, when the company separated for the
night, she was not, like her friend, reduced to a vigil
unalloyed. Lady Claude, at the top of the stairs, had
said, " May I look in in five minutes if you don t
mind? " and then had arrived in due course and in a
wonderful new beribboned gown, the thing just
launched for such occasions. Lady Claude was young
and earnest and delightfully bewildered and bewilder
ing, and however interesting she might, through cer
tain elements in her situation, have seemed to a literary
lady, her own admirations and curiosities were such as
from the first promised to rule the hour. She had al
ready expressed to Mrs. Harvey a really informed en
thusiasm. She not only delighted in her numerous
books, which was a tribute the author had not infre
quently met, but she even appeared to have read them
an appearance with which her interlocutress was much
less acquainted. The great thing was that she also
yearned to write, and that she had turned up in her
fresh furbelows not only to reveal this secret and to
ask for direction and comfort, but literally to make a
stranger confidence, for which the mystery of midnight
seemed propitious. Midnight was, indeed, as the sit
uation developed, well over before her confidence was
spent, for it had ended by gathering such a current as
floated forth, with everything in Lady Claude s own
life, many things more in that of her adviser. Mrs.
Harvey was, at all events, amused, touched, and effect
ually kept awake ; and at the end of half an hour they
5
THE BETTER SORT
had quite got what might have been called their second
wind of frankness and were using it for a discussion
of the people in the house. Their primary communion
had been simply on the question of the pecuniary profits
of literature as the producer of so many admired vol
umes was prepared to present them to an aspirant.
Lady Claude was in financial difficulties and desired
the literary issue. This was the breathless revelation
she had rustled over a mile of crimson velvet corridor
to make.
" Nothing ? " she had three minutes later incredu
lously gasped. " I can make nothing at all ? " But
the gasp was slight compared with the stupefaction
produced in her by a brief further parley, in the course
of which Mrs. Harvey had, after a hesitation, taken
her own plunge. " You make so little wonderful
you! " And then, as the producer of the admired vol
umes simply sat there in her dressing-gown, with the
saddest of slow head-shakes, looking suddenly too wan
even to care that it was at last all out : " What, in that
case, is the use of success and celebrity and genius?
You have no success ? " She had looked almost awe
struck at this further confession of her friend. They
were face to face in a poor human crudity, which trans
formed itself quickly into an effusive embrace.
" You ve had it and lost it ? Then when it has been
as great as yours one can lose it? "
" More easily than one can get it."
Lady Claude continued to marvel. " But you do
so much and it s so beautiful ! " On which Mrs. Har
vey simply smiled again in her handsome despair, and
after a moment found herself again in the arms of her
visitor. The younger woman had remained for a little
a good deal arrested and hushed, and had, at any rate,
sensitive and charming, immediately dropped, in the
presence of this almost august unveiling, the question
of her own thin troubles. But there are short cuts at
6
BROKEN WINGS
that hour of night that morning scarce knows, and it
took but little more of the breath of the real to suggest
to Lady Claude more questions in such a connection
than she could answer for herself. " How, then, if you
haven t private means, do you get on ? "
"Ah! I don t get on."
Lady Claude looked about. There were objects
scattered in the fine old French room. " You have
lovely things."
" Two."
"Two?"
" Two frocks. I couldn t stay another day."
" Ah, what is that? I couldn t either," said Lady
Claude soothingly. " And you have," she continued,
in the same spirit, " your nice maid :
" Who s indeed a charming woman, but my cook in
disguise ! " Mrs. Harvey dropped.
" Ah, you are clever ! " her friend cried, with a laugh
that was as a climax of reassurance.
" Extraordinarily. But don t think," Mrs. Harvey
hastened to add, " that I mean that that s why I m
here."
Her companion candidly thought. " Then why are
you?"
" I haven t the least idea. I ve been wondering all
the while, as I ve wondered so often before on such
occasions, and without arriving at any other reason
than that London is so wild."
Lady Claude wondered. " Wild ? "
" Wild ! " said her friend, with some impatience.
" That s the way London strikes."
" But do you call such an invitation a blow ? "
" Yes crushing. No one else, at all events, either,"
Mrs. Harvey added, " could tell you why I m here."
Lady Claude s power to receive and it was perhaps
her most attaching quality was greater still, when she
felt strongly, than her power to protest. " Why, how
7
THE BETTER SORT
can you say that when you ve only to see how every
one likes and admires you? Just look at the Ambas
sador," she had earnestly insisted. And this was what
had precisely, as I have mentioned, carried the stream
of their talk a good deal away from its source. It had
therefore not much further to go before setting in mo
tion the name of Stuart Straith, as to whom Lady
Claude confessed to an interest good-looking, dis
tinguished, " sympathetic," as he was that she could
really almost hate him for having done nothing what
ever to encourage. He had not spoken to her once.
" But, my dear, if he hasn t spoken to me! "
Lady Claude appeared to regret this not too much
for a hint that, after all, there might be a difference.
"Oh,but?ttWhe?"
" Without my having spoken to him first? " Mrs.
Harvey turned it over. " Perhaps not; but I couldn t
have done that." Then, to explain, and not only be
cause Lady Claude was naturally vague, but because
what was still visibly most vivid to her was her inde
pendent right to have been " made up " to : " And yet
not because we re not acquainted."
" You know him, then? "
"But too well."
" You mean you don t like him ? "
" On the contrary, I like him to distraction."
" Then what s the matter? " Lady Claude asked with
some impatience.
Her friend hesitated but a moment. " Well, he
wouldn t have me."
" Have you?"
" Ten years ago, after Mr. Harvey s death, when, if
he had lifted a finger, I would have married him."
"But he didn t lift it?"
" He was too grand. I was too small by his
measure. He wanted to keep himself; he saw his
future."
8
BROKEN WINGS
Lady Claude earnestly followed. " His present po
sition? "
" Yes everything that was to come to him ; his
steady rise in value."
" Has it been so great? "
" Surely his situation and name. Don t you know
his lovely work and what s thought of it ? "
" Oh yes, I know. That s why " But Lady
Claude stopped. After which : " But if he s still keep
ing himself ? "
" Oh, it s not for me," said Mrs. Harvey.
" And evidently not for me. Whom then," her
visitor asked, " does he think good enough ? "
" Oh, these great people! " Mrs. Harvey smiled.
" But we re great people you and I ! " And Lady
Claude kissed her good night.
" You mustn t, all the same," the elder woman said,
" betray the secret of my greatness, which I ve told
you, please remember, only in the deepest confidence."
Her tone had a quiet purity of bitterness that for a
moment longer held her friend, after which Lady
Claude had the happy inspiration of meeting it with
graceful gaiety. " It s quite for the best, I m sure, that
Mr. Straith wouldn t have you. You ve kept yourself
too ; you ll marry yet an ambassador ! " And with
another good night she reached the door. " You say
you don t get on, but you do."
" Ah ! " said Mrs. Harvey with vague attenuation.
" Oh yes, you do," Lady Claude insisted, while the
door emphasised it with a little clap that sounded
through the still house.
Ill
THE first night of The New Girl occurred, as everyone
remembers, three years ago, and the play is running
yet, a fact that may render strange the failure to be
9
THE BETTER SORT
widely conscious of which two persons in the audience
were guilty. It was not till afterward present either
to Mrs. Harvey or to Stuart Straith that The New Girl
was one of the greatest successes of modern times. In
deed if the question had been put to them on the spot
they might have appeared much at sea. But this, I
may as well immediately say, was the result of their
having found themselves side by side in the stalls and
thereby given most of their attention to their own pre
dicament. Straith showed that he felt the importance
of meeting it promptly, for he turned to his neighbour,
who was already in her place, as soon as her identity
had come distinct through his own arrival and sub
sidence. " I don t quite see how you can help speaking
to me now."
Her face could only show him how long she had been
aware of his approach. " The sound of your voice,
coming to me straight, makes it indeed as easy for me
as I could possibly desire. 7
He looked about at the serried rows, the loaded gal
leries and the stuffed boxes, with recognitions and
nods ; and this made between them another pause, dur
ing which, while the music seemed perfunctory and the
bustle that, in a London audience, represents concen
tration increased, they felt how effectually, in the thick,
preoccupied medium, how extraordinarily, they were
together.
" Well, that second afternoon at Mundham, just be
fore dinner, I was very near forcing your hand. But
something put me off. You re really too grand."
" Oh ! " she murmured.
" Ambassadors," said Stuart Straith.
" Oh ! " she again sounded. And before anything
more could pass the curtain was up. It came down in
due course and achieved, after various intervals, the
rest of its movements without interrupting, for our
friends, the sense of an evening of talk. They said
10
BROKEN WINGS
when it was down almost nothing about the play, and
when one of them toward the end put to the other,
vaguely, " Is a this thing going? " the question had
scarce the effect of being even relevant. What was
clearest to them was that the people about were some
how enough taken up to leave them at their ease but
what taken up with they but half made out. Mrs.
Harvey had, none the less, mentioned early that her
presence had a reason and that she ought to attend, and
her companion had asked her what she thought of a
certain picture made at a given moment by the stage,
in the reception of which he was so interested that it
was really what had brought him. These were glances,
however, that quickly strayed strayed, for instance
(as this could carry them far), in its coming to one
of them to say that, whatever the piece might be, the
real thing, as they had seen it at Mundham, was more
than a match for any piece. For it was Mundham that
was, theatrically, the real thing; better for scenery,
dresses, music, pretty women, bare shoulders, every
thing even coherent dialogue; a much bigger and
braver show, and got up, as it were, infinitely more
" regardless." By Mundham they were held long
enough to find themselves, though with an equal sur
prise, quite at one as to the special oddity of their hav
ing caught each other in such a plight. Straith said
that he supposed what his friend meant was that it was
odd he should have been there; to which she returned
that she had been imputing to him exactly that judg
ment of her own presence.
" But why shouldn t you be? " he asked. " Isn t that
just what you are? Aren t you, in your way like
those people a child of fortune and fashion ? "
He got no more answer to this for some time than
if he had fairly wounded her. He indeed that evening
got no answer at all that was direct. But in the next
interval she brought out with abruptness, taking no
ii
THE BETTER SORT
account of some other matter he had just touched,
" Don t you really know ? "
She had paused. " Know what ? "
Again she went on without heeding. " A place like
Mundham is, for me, a survival, though poor Mund-
ham in particular won t, for me, have survived that
visit for which it s to be pitied, isn t it ? It was a glit
tering ghost since laid ! of my old time."
Straith, at this almost gave a start. " Have you got
a new time? "
" Do you mean that you have? "
" Well," said Straith, " mine may now be called mid
dle-aged. It seems so long, I mean, since I set my
watch to it."
" Oh, I haven t even a watch ! " she returned with a
laugh. " I m beyond watches." After which she
added : " We might have met more or, I should say
perhaps, have got more out of it when we have met."
" Yes, it has been too little. But I ve always ex
plained it by our living in such different worlds."
Mrs. Harvey had an occasional incoherence. " Are
you unhappy ? "
He gave her a singular smile. " You said just now
that you re beyond watches. I m beyond unhappiness."
She turned from him and presently brought out:
" I ought absolutely to take away something of the
play."
" By all means. There s certainly something / shall
take."
" Ah, then you must help me give it me."
" With all my heart," said Straith, " if it can help
you. It s my feeling of our renewal."
She had one of the sad, slow head-shakes that at
Mundham had been impressive to Lady Claude. " That
won t help me."
" Then you must let me put to you now what I
should have tried to get near enough to you there to
12
BROKEN WINGS
put if I hadn t been so afraid of the Ambassador. What
has it been so long our impossibility ? "
Well, I can only answer for my own vision of it,
which is which always was that you were sorry for
me, but felt a sort of scruple of showing me that you
had nothing better than pity to give."
" May I come to see you? " Straith asked some min
utes after this.
Her words, for which he had also awhile to wait,
had, in truth, as little as his own the appearance of a
reply. " Are you unhappy really? Haven t you
everything ? "
" You re beautiful ! " he said for all answer.
"Mayn t I come?"
She hesitated.
" Where is your studio? "
" Oh, not too far to reach from it. Don t be anxious ;
I can walk, or even take the bus."
Mrs. Harvey once more delayed. Then she an
swered: " Mayn t I rather come there? "
" I shall be but too delighted."
It was said with promptness, even precipitation ; yet
the understanding, shortly after, appeared to have left
between them a certain awkwardness, and it was al
most as if to change the subject and relieve them
equally that she suddenly reminded him of something
he had spoken earlier. " You were to tell me why in
particular you had to be here."
" Oh yes. To see my dresses."
"Yours!" She wondered.
" The second act. I made them out for them drew
them."
Before she could check it her tone escaped. You ? "
" I." He looked straight before him. " For the fee.
And we didn t even notice them."
" / didn t," she confessed. But it offered the fact as
a sign of her kindness for him, and this kindness was
13
THE BETTER SORT
traceably what inspired something she said in the
draughty porch, after the performance, while the
footman of the friend, a fat, rich, immensely pleased
lady, who had given her a lift and then rejoined her
from a seat in the balcony, went off to make sure of
the brougham. " May I do something about your
things?"
" Do something ?"
" When I ve paid you my visit. Write something
about your pictures. I do a correspondence," said Mrs.
Harvey.
He wondered as she had done in the stalls. " For
a paper? "
" The Blackport Banner. A London Letter. The
new books, the new plays, the new twaddle of any sort
a little music, a little gossip, a little art. You ll
help me I need it awfully with the art. I do three
a month."
" You wonderful you ? " He spoke as Lady Claude
had done, and could no more help it again than Mrs.
Harvey had been able to help it in the stalls.
" Oh, as you say, for the fee ! " On which, as the
footman signalled, her old lady began to plunge
through the crowd.
IV
AT the studio, where she came to him within the week,
her first movement had been to exclaim on the splendid
abundance of his work. She had looked round charmed
so struck as to be, as she called it, crushed. " You ve
such a wonderful lot to show."
" Indeed, I have ! " said Stuart Straith.
" That s where you beat us."
" I think it may very well be," he went on, " where
I beat almost everyone."
BROKEN WINGS
" And is much of it new ? "
He looked about with her. " Some of it is pretty
old. But my things have a way, I admit, of growing
old extraordinarily fast. They seem to me in fact,
nowadays, quite born old/
She had the manner, after a little, of coming back
to something. " You are unhappy. You re not beyond
it. You re just nicely, just fairly and squarely, in the
middle of it."
" Well," said Straith, " if it surrounds me like a
desert, so that I m lost in it, that comes to the same
thing. But I want you to tell me about yourself."
She had continued at first to move about, and had
taken out a pocket-book, which she held up at him.
" This time I shall insist on notes. You made my mind
a blank about that play, which is the sort of thing we
can t afford. If it hadn t been for my fat old lady and
the next day s papers ! " She kept looking, going up
to things, saying, " How wonderful! " and " Oh, your
way! " and then stopping for a general impression,
something in the whole charm. The place, high, hand
some, neat, with two or three pale tapestries and sev
eral rare old pieces of furniture, showed a perfection of
order, an absence of loose objects, as if it had been
swept and squared for the occasion and made almost
too immaculate. It was polished and cold rather cold
for the season and the weather; and Stuart Straith
himself, buttoned and brushed, as fine and as clean as
his room, might at her arrival have reminded her of
the master of a neat, bare ship on his deck awaiting
a cargo. " May I see everything ? May I use every
thing?"
" Oh no ; you mayn t by any means use everything.
You mayn t use half. Did I spoil your London Let
ter ? " he continued after a moment.
" No one can spoil them as I spoil them myself. I
can t do them I don t know how, and don t want to.
15
THE BETTER SORT
I do them wrong, and the people want such trash. Of
course they ll sack me."
She was in the centre, and he had the effect of going
round her, restless and vague, in large, slow circles.
" Have you done them long? "
" Two or three months this lot. But I ve done
others, and I know what happens. Oh, my dear, I ve
done strange things ! "
"And is it a good job?"
She hesitated, then puffed, prettily enough, an indif
ferent sigh. " Three and ninepence. Is that good ? "
He had stopped before her, looking at her up and down.
" What do you get? " she went on, " for what you do
for a play ? "
" A little more, it would seem, than you. Four and
sixpence. But I ve only done, as yet, that one. Noth
ing else has offered."
" I see. But something will, eh ? "
Poor Straith took a turn again. " Did you like them
for colour ? " But again he pulled up. " Oh, I for
got ; we didn t notice them ! "
For a moment they could laugh about it. "I noticed
them, I assure you, in the Banner. The costumes in
the second act are of the most marvellous beauty.
That s what I said."
" Oh, that will fetch the managers ! " But before
her again he seemed to take her in from head to foot.
" You speak of using things. If you d only use
yourself for my enlightenment. Tell me all."
" You look at me," said Mrs. Harvey, " as with the
wonder of who designs my costumes. How I dress
on it, how I do even what I still do on it, is that what
you want to know ? "
" What has happened to you ? " Straith asked.
" How do I keep it up ? " she continued, as if she had
not heard him. " But I don t keep it up. You do,"
she declared, as she again looked round her.
16
BROKEN WINGS
Once more it set him off, but for a pause once more
almost as quick. " How long have you been ? "
" Been what ? " she asked as he faltered.
" Unhappy."
She smiled at him from a depth of indulgence. " As
long as you ve been ignorant that what I ve been
wanting is your pity. Ah, to have to know, as I be
lieved I did, that you supposed it would wound me,
and not to have been able to make you see that it was
the one thing left to me that would help me! Give me
your pity now. It s all I want. I don t care for any
thing else. But give me that."
He had, as it happened at the moment, to do a smaller
and a usual thing before he could do one so great and
so strange. The youth whom he kept for service ar
rived with a tea-tray, in arranging a place for which,
with the sequel of serving Mrs. Harvey, seating her
and seeing the youth again out of the room, some min
utes passed. " What pity could I dream of for you,"
he demanded as he at last dropped near her, " when I
was myself so miserably sore?"
" Sore? " she wondered. " But you were happy
then."
"Happy not to have struck you as good enough?
For I didn t, you know," he insisted. " You had your
success, which was so immense. You had your high
value, your future, your big possibilities; and I per
fectly understood that, given those things, and given
also my very much smaller situation, you should wish
to keep yourself."
" Oh, oh ! " She gasped as if hurt.
" I understand it; but how could it really make me
happy ? " he asked.
She turned at him as with her hand on the old scar
she could now carry. " You mean that all these years
you ve really not known ? "
" But not known what ? "
17
THE BETTER SORT
His voice was so blank that at the sound of it, and
at something that looked out from him, she only found
another " Oh, oh ! " which became the next instant a
burst of tears.
SHE had appeared at first unwilling to receive him at
home; but he understood it after she had left him,
turning over more and more everything their meeting
had shaken to the surface, and piecing together mem
ories that at last, however darkly, made a sense. He
was to call on her, it was finally agreed, but not till the
end of the week, when she should have finished " mov
ing " she had but just changed quarters ; and mean
while, as he came and went, mainly in the cold chamber
of his own past endeavour, which looked even to him
self as studios look when artists are dead and the
public, in the arranged place, are admitted to stare, he
had plenty to think about. What had come out he
could see it now was that each, ten years before, had
miserably misunderstood and then had turned for re
lief from pain to a perversity of pride. But it was
himself above all that he now sharply judged, since
women, he felt, have to get on as they can, and for the
mistake of this woman there were reasons he had, with
a sore heart, to acknowledge. She had really found in
the pomp of his early success, at the time they used to
meet, and to care to, exactly the ground for her sense
of failure with him that he had found in the vision
of her gross popularity for his conviction that she
judged him as comparatively small. Each had blun
dered, as sensitive souls of the " artistic temperament "
blunder, into a conception not only of the other s atti
tude, but of the other s material situation at the mo
ment, that had thrown them back on stupid secrecy,
where their estrangement had grown like an evil plant
18
BROKEN WINGS
in the shade. He had positively believed her to have
gone on all the while making the five thousand a year
that the first eight or ten of her so supremely happy
novels had brought her in, just as she, on her side, had
read into the felicity of his first new hits, his pictures
" of the year " at three or four Academies, the absurd-
est theory of the sort of career that, thanks to big
dealers and intelligent buyers, his gains would have
built up for him. It looked vulgar enough now, but
it had been grave enough then. His long, detached de
lusion about her " prices," at any rate, appeared to have
been more than matched by the strange stories occasion
ally floated to her and all to make her but draw more
closely in on the subject of his own.
It was with each equally that everything had changed
everything but the stiff consciousness in either of the
need to conceal changes from the other. If she had
cherished for long years the soreness of her not being
" good " enough, so this was what had counted most
in her sustained effort to appear at least as good as he.
London, meanwhile, was big; London was blind and
benighted; and nothing had ever occurred to under
mine for him the fiction of her prosperity. Before his
eyes there, while she sat with him, she had pulled off
one by one those vain coverings of her state that she
confessed she had hitherto done her best and so al
ways with an eye on himself deceptively to draw
about it. He had felt frozen, as he listened, at such
likenesses to things he knew. He recognised as she
talked, and he groaned as he understood. He under
stood oh, at last, whatever he had not done before!
And yet he could well have smiled, out of their common
abyss, at such odd identities and recurrences. Truly
the arts were sisters, as was so often said; for what
apparently could be more like the experience of one than
the experience of another ? And she spared him things
with it all. He felt that too, just as, even while show-
19
THE BETTER SORT
ing her how he followed, he had bethought himself of
closing his lips for the hour, none too soon, on his own
stale story. There had been a beautiful intelligence,
for that matter, in her having asked him nothing more.
She had overflowed because shaken by not finding him
happy, and her surrender had somehow offered itself
to him as her way the first that sprang up of con
sidering his trouble. She had left him, at all events,
in full possession of all the phases through which in
" literary circles " acclaimed states may pass on their
regular march to eclipse and extinction. One had but
one s hour, and if one had it soon it was really al
most a case of choice one didn t have it late. It might,
moreover, never even remotely have approached, at its
best, things ridiculously rumoured. Straith felt, on
the whole, how little he had known of literary circles
or of any mystery but his own, indeed ; on which, up
to actual impending collapse, he had mounted such
anxious guard.
It was when he went on the Friday to see her that he
took in the latest of the phases in question, which might
very well be almost the final one; there was at least
that comfort in it. She had just settled in a small flat,
where he recognised in the steady disposal, for the best,
of various objects she had not yet parted with, her
reason for having made him wait. Here they had to
gether these two worn and baffled workers a won
derful hour of gladness in their lost battle and of
freshness in their lost youth ; for it was not till Stuart
Straith had also raised the heavy mask and laid it be
side her own on the table, that they began really to
feel themselves recover something of that possibility of
each other they had so wearily wasted. Only she
couldn t get over it that he was like herself, and that
what she had shrunken to in her three or four sim
plified rooms had its perfect image in the hollow show
of his ordered studio and his accumulated work. He
20
BROKEN WINGS
told her everything now, kept as little back as she had
kept at their previous meeting, while she repeated over
and over, " You wonderful you ? " as if the knowl
edge made a deeper darkness of fate, as if the pain of
his having come down at all almost quenched the joy
of his having come so much nearer. When she learned
that he had not for three years sold a picture " You,
beautiful you ? " it seemed a new cold breath out of
the dusk of her own outlook. Disappointment and
despair were in such relations contagious, and there
was clearly as much less again left to her as the little
that was left to him. He showed her, laughing at the
long queerness of it, how awfully little, as they called
it, this was. He let it all come, but with more mirth
than misery, and with a final abandonment of pride
that was like changing at the end of a dreadful day
from tight boots to slippers. There were moments
when they might have resembled a couple united by
some misdeed and meeting to decide on some desperate
course; they gave themselves so to the great irony
the vision of the comic in contrasts that precedes sur
renders and extinctions.
They went over the whole thing, remounted the
dwindling stream, reconstructed, explained, under
stood recognised, in short, the particular example
they gave, and how, without mutual suspicion, they had
been giving it side by side. " We re simply the case,"
Straith familiarly put it, " of having been had enough
of. No case is perhaps more common, save that, for
you and for me, each in our line, it did look in the good
time didn t it? as if nobody could have enough."
With which they counted backward, gruesome as it
was, the symptoms of satiety up to the first dawn, and
lived again together the unforgettable hours distant
now out of which it had begun to glimmer that the
truth had to be faced and the right names given to the
wrong facts. They laughed at their original explana-
21
THE BETTER SORT
tions and the minor scale, even, of their early fears;
compared notes on the fallibility of remedies and
hopes, and, more and more united in the identity of
their lesson, made out perfectly that, though there ap
peared to be many kinds of success, there was only one
kind of failure. And yet what had been hardest
had not been to have to shrink, but the long game
of bluff, as Straith called it to have to keep up. It
fairly swept them away at present, however, the huge
ness .of the relief of no longer keeping up as against
each other. This gave them all the measure of the
motive their courage, on either side, in silence and
gloom, had forced into its service.
" Only what shall we do now for a motive? " Straith
went on.
She thought. " A motive for courage? "
< Yes to keep up."
" And go again, for instance, do you mean, to Mund-
ham? We shall, thank heaven, never go again to
Mundham. The Mundhams are over."
" Nous n irons plus au bois ;
Les lauriers sont coup6s,"
sang Straith. " It does cost."
" As everything costs that one does for the rich.
It s not our poor relations who make us pay."
" No ; one must have means to acknowledge the
others. We can t afford the opulent. But it isn t only
the money they take."
" It s the imagination," said Mrs. Harvey. " As
they have none themselves "
"It s an article we have to supply ? We have cer
tainly to use a lot to protect ourselves," Straith agreed.
" And the strange thing is that they like us."
She thought again. " That s what makes it easy to
cut them. They forgive."
22
BROKEN WINGS
" Yes," her companion laughed ; " once they really
don t know you enough ! "
" They treat you as old friends. But what do we
want now of courage ? " she went on.
He wondered. " Yes, after all, what? "
" To keep up, I mean. Why should we keep up ? "
It seemed to strike him. " I see. After all, why ?
The courage not to keep up "
"We have that, at least," she declared, "haven t
we ? " Standing there at her little high-perched win
dow, which overhung grey housetops, they let the con
sideration of this pass between them in a deep look,
as well as in a hush of which the intensity had some
thing commensurate. "If we re beaten!" she then
continued.
" Let us at least be beaten together ! " He took her
in his arms; she let herself go, and he held her long
and close for the compact. But when they had re
covered themselves enough to handle their agreement
more responsibly, the words in which they confirmed
it broke in sweetness as well as sadness from both to
gether : " And now to work ! "
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
MRS. MUNDEN had not yet been to my studio
on so good a pretext as when she first put it to
me that it would be quite open to me should I only
care, as she called it, to throw the handkerchief to
paint her beautiful sister-in-law. I needn t go here,
more than is essential, into the question of Mrs. Mun-
den, who would really, by-the-way, be a story in her
self. She has a manner of her own of putting things,
and some of those she has put to me ! Her im
plication was that Lady Beldonald had not only seen
and admired certain examples of my work, but had
literally been prepossessed in favour of the painter s
" personality." Had I been struck with this sketch I
might easily have imagined that Lady Beldonald was
throwing me the handkerchief. " She hasn t done,"
my visitor said, " what she ought."
" Do you mean she has done what she oughtn t? "
" Nothing horrid oh dear, no." And something in
Mrs. Munden s tone, with the way she appeared to
muse a moment, even suggested to me that what she
" oughtn t " was perhaps what Lady Beldonald had too
much neglected. " She hasn t got on."
" What s the matter with her? "
" Well, to begin with, she s American."
But I thought that was the way of ways to get
on."
24
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
" It s one of them. But it s one of the ways of being
awfully out of it too. There are so many ! "
" So many Americans? " I asked.
:< Yes, plenty of them Mrs. Munden sighed. " So
many ways, I mean, of being one."
" But if your sister-in-law s way is to be beauti
ful ?"
" Oh, there are different ways of that too."
" And she hasn t taken the right way ? "
" Well," my friend returned, as if it were rather dif
ficult to express, " she hasn t done with it "
" I see," I laughed; " what she oughtn t! "
Mrs. Munden in a manner corrected me, but it was
difficult to express. " My brother, at all events, was
certainly selfish. Till he died she was almost never in
London; they wintered, year after year, for what he
supposed to be his health which it didn t help, since
he was so much too soon to meet his end in the south
of France and in the dullest holes he could pick out,
and when they came back to England he always kept
her in the country. I must say for her that she always
behaved beautifully. Since his death she has been more
in London, but on a stupidly unsuccessful footing. I
don t think she quite understands. She hasn t what
/ should call a life. It may be, of course, that she
doesn t want one. That s just what I can t exactly
find out. I can t make out how much she knows."
" I can easily make out," I returned with hilarity,
" how much you do ! "
" Well, you re very horrid. Perhaps she s too old."
Too old for what? " I persisted.
" For anything. Of course she s no longer even a
little young; only preserved oh, but preserved, like
bottled fruit, in syrup ! I want to help her, if only be
cause she gets on my nerves, and I really think the
way of it would be just the right thing of yours at the
Academy and on the line."
25
THE BETTER SORT
" But suppose," I threw out, " she should give on my
nerves ? "
" Oh, she will. But isn t that all in the day s work,
and don t great beauties always ? "
" You don t," I interrupted ; but I at any rate saw
Lady Beldonald later on the day came when her kins
woman brought her, and then I understood that her
life had its centre in her own idea of her appearance.
Nothing else about her mattered one knew her all
when one knew that. She is indeed in one particular,
I think, sole of her kind a person whom vanity has
had the odd effect of keeping positively safe and sound.
This passion is supposed surely, for the most part, to
be a principle of perversion and injury, leading astray
those who listen to it and landing them, sooner or later,
in this or that complication ; but it has landed her lady
ship nowhere whatever it has kept her from the first
moment of full consciousness, one feels, exactly in the
same place. It has protected her from every danger,
has made her absolutely proper and prim. If she is
" preserved," as Mrs. Munden originally described her
to me, it is her vanity that has beautifully done it
putting her years ago in a plate-glass case and closing
up the receptacle against every breath of air. How
shouldn t she be preserved, when you might smash
your knuckles on this transparency before you could
crack it? And she is oh, amazingly! Preservation
is scarce the word for the rare condition of her sur
face. She looks naturally new, as if she took out every
night her large, lovely, varnished eyes and put them
in water. The thing was to paint her, I perceived, in
the glass case a most tempting, attaching feat; ren
der to the full the shining, interposing plate and the
general show-window effect.
It was agreed, though it was not quite arranged, that
she should sit to me. If it was not quite arranged, this
was because, as I was made to understand from an early
26
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
stage, the conditions for our start must be such as
should exclude all elements of disturbance, such, in a
word, as she herself should judge absolutely favour
able. And it seemed that these conditions were easily
imperilled. Suddenly, for instance, at a moment when
I was expecting her to meet an appointment the first
that I had proposed, I received a hurried visit from
Mrs. Munden, who came on her behalf to let me know
that the season happened just not to be propitious and
that our friend couldn t be quite sure, to the hour, when
it would again become so. Nothing, she felt, would
make it so but a total absence of worry.
" Oh, a total absence, " I said, " is a large order!
We live in a worrying world."
" Yes ; and she feels exactly that more than you d
think. It s in fact just why she mustn t have, as she
has now, a particular distress on at the very moment.
She wants to look, of course, her best, and such things
tell on her appearance."
I shook my head. " Nothing tells on her appearance.
Nothing reaches it in any way; nothing gets at it.
However, I can understand her anxiety. But what s
her particular distress ? "
" Why, the illness of Miss Dadd."
" And who in the world s Miss Dadd? "
" Her most intimate friend and constant companion
the lady who was with us here that first day."
" Oh, the little round, black woman who gurgled
with admiration? "
" None other. But she was taken ill last week, and
it may very well be that she ll gurgle no more. She
was very bad yesterday and is no better to-day, and
Nina is much upset. If anything happens to Miss
Dadd she ll have to get another, and, though she has
had two or three before, that won t be so easy."
"Two or three Miss Dadds? Is it possible? And
still wanting another ! " I recalled the poor lady com-
27
THE BETTER SORT
pletely now. " No ; I shouldn t indeed think it would
be easy to get another. But why is a succession of them
necessary to Lady Beldonald s existence ? "
" Can t you guess ? " Mrs. Munden looked deep,
yet impatient. " They help."
"Help what? Help whom?"
" Why, every one. You and me for instance. To
do what? Why, to think Nina beautiful. She has
them for that purpose; they serve as foils, as accents
serve on syllables, as terms of comparison. They make
her * stand out. It s an effect of contrast that must
be familiar to you artists; it s what a woman does
when she puts a band of black velvet under a pearl orna
ment that may require, as she thinks, a little showing
off."
I wondered. " Do you mean she always has them
black?"
" Dear no ; I ve seen them blue, green, yellow.
They may be what they like, so long as they re always
one other thing."
"Hideous?"
Mrs. Munden hesitated. " Hideous is too much to
say; she doesn t really require them as bad as that.
But consistently, cheerfully, loyally plain. It s really
a most happy relation. She loves them for it."
" And for what do they love her? "
" Why, just for the amiability that they produce in
her. Then, also, for their home. It s a career for
them."
" I see. But if that s the case," I asked, " why are
they so difficult to find? "
" Oh, they must be safe ; it s all in that : her being
able to depend on them to keep to the terms of the
bargain and never have moments of rising as even
the ugliest woman will now and then (say when she s
in love) superior to themselves."
I turned it over. " Then if they can t inspire
28
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
passions the poor things mayn t even at least feel
them?"
" She distinctly deprecates it. That s why such a
man as you may be, after all, a complication."
I continued to muse. " You re very sure Miss Dadd s
ailment isn t an affection that, being smothered, has
struck in?" My joke, however, was not well timed,
for I afterwards learned that the unfortunate lady s
state had been, even while I spoke, such as to forbid
all hope. The worst symptoms had appeared ; she was
not destined to recover ; and a week later I heard from
Mrs. Munden that she would in fact " gurgle " no
more.
II
ALL this, for Lady Beldonald, had been an agitation
so great that access to her apartment was denied for a
time even to her sister-in-law. It was much more out
of the question, of course, that she should unveil her
face to a person of my special business with it ; so that
the question of the portrait was, by common consent,
postponed to that of the installation of a successor to
her late companion. Such a successor, I gathered from
Mrs. Munden, widowed, childless, and lonely, as well
as inapt for the minor offices, she had absolutely to
have ; a more or less humble alter ego to deal with the
servants, keep the accounts, make the tea and arrange
the light. Nothing seemed more natural than that
she should marry again, and obviously that might
come; yet the predecessors of Miss Dadd had been
contemporaneous with a first husband, and others
formed in her image might be contemporaneous with
a second. I was much occupied in those months, at
any rate, so that these questions and their ramifications
lost themselves for a while to my view, and I was only
brought back to them by Mrs. Munden s coming to
29
THE BETTER SORT
me one day with the news that we were all right again
her sister-in-law was once more " suited." A cer
tain Mrs. Brash, an American relative whom she had
not seen for years, but with whom she had continued
to communicate, was to come out to her immediately;
and this person, it appeared, could be quite trusted to
meet the conditions. She was ugly ugly enough,
without abuse of it, and she was unlimitedly good.
The position offered her by Lady Beldonald was, more
over, exactly what she needed; widowed also, after
many troubles and reverses, with her fortune of the
smallest and her various children either buried or placed
about, she had never had time or means to come to
England, and would really be grateful in her declining
years for the new experience and the pleasant light
work involved in her cousin s hospitality. They had
been much together early in life, and Lady Beldonald
was immensely fond of her would have in fact tried
to get hold of her before had not Mrs. Brash been al
ways in bondage to family duties, to the variety of her
tribulations. I dare say I laughed at my friend s use
of the term " position " the position, one might call
it, of a candlestick or a sign-post, and I dare say I must
have asked if the special service the poor lady was to
render had been made clear to her. Mrs. Munden left
me, at all events, with the rather droll image of her
faring forth, across the sea, quite consciously and re
signedly to perform it.
The point of the communication had, however, been
that my sitter was again looking up and would doubt
less, on the arrival and due initiation of Mrs. Brash,
be in form really to wait on me. The situation must,
further, to my knowledge, have developed happily, for
I arranged with Mrs. Munden that our friend, now all
ready to begin, but wanting first just to see the things
I had most recently done, should come once more, as
a final preliminary, to my studio. A good foreign
30
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
friend of mine, a French painter, Paul Outreau, was
at the moment in London, and I had proposed, as he
was much interested in types, to get together for his
amusement a small afternoon party. Everyone came,
my big room was full, there was music and a modest
spread; and I have not forgotten the light of admira
tion in Outreau s expressive face as, at the end of
half an hour, he came up to me in his enthusiasm.
" Bonte divine, tnon cher que cette vieille est done
belle! "
I had tried to collect all the beauty I could, and
also all the youth, so that for a moment I was at a loss.
I had talked to many people and provided for the music,
and there were figures in the crowd that were still lost
to me. " What old woman do you mean ? "
" I don t know her name she was over by the door
a moment ago. I asked somebody and was told, I
think, that she s American."
I looked about and saw one of my guests attach a
pair of fine eyes to Outreau very much as if she knew he
must be talking of her. " Oh, Lady Beldonald ! Yes,
she s handsome; but the great point about her is that
she has been put up to keep, and that she wouldn t
be flattered if she knew you spoke of her as old. A
box of sardines is only old after it has been opened.
Lady Beldonald never has yet been but I m going to
do it." I joked, but I was somehow disappointed. It
was a type that, with his unerring sense for the banal,
I shouldn t have expected Outreau to pick out.
"You re going to paint her? But, my dear man,
she is painted and as neither you nor I can do it.
Ou est-elle done? " He had lost her, and I saw I had
made a mistake. " She s the greatest of all the great
Holbeins."
I was relieved. " Ah, then, not Lady Beldonald !
But do I possess a Holbein, of any price, unawares ? "
" There she is there she is ! Dear, dear, dear, what
THE BETTER SORT
a head ! " And I saw whom he meant and what : a
small old lady in a black dress and a black bonnet, both
relieved with a little white, who had evidently just
changed her place to reach a corner from which more
of the room and of the scene was presented to her.
She appeared unnoticed and unknown, and I imme
diately recognised that some other guest must have
brought her and, for want of opportunity, had as yet
to call my attention to her. But two things, simulta
neously with this and with each other, struck me with
force; one of them the truth of Outreau s description
of her, the other the fact that the person bringing her
could only have been Lady Beldonald. She was a
Holbein of the first water; yet she was also Mrs.
Brash, the imported " foil," the indispensable " accent,"
the successor to the dreary Miss Dadd! By the time
I had put these things together Outreau s " Ameri
can " having helped me I was in just such full pos
session of her face as I had found myself, on the other
first occasion, of that of her patroness. Only with so
different a consequence. I couldn t look at her enough,
and I stared and stared till I became aware she might
have fancied me challenging her as a person unpre-
sented. " All the same," Outreau went on, equally
held, " c est une tete a faire. If I were only staying long
enough for a crack at her ! But I tell you what " and
he seized my arm " bring her over ! "
"Over?"
" To Paris. She d have a succes fou"
" Ah, thanks, my dear fellow," I was now quite in
a position to say; " she s the handsomest thing in Lon
don, and " for what I might do with her was already
before me with intensity " I propose to keep her to
myself." It was before me with intensity, in the light
of Mrs. Brash s distant perfection of a little white old
face, in which every wrinkle was the touch of a master ;
but something else, I suddenly felt, was not less so,
32
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
for Lady Beldonald, in the other quarter, and though
she couldn t have made out the subject of our notice,
continued to fix us, and her eyes had the challenge of
those of the woman of consequence who has missed
something. A moment later I was close to her, apolo
gising first for not having been more on the spot at
her arrival, but saying in the next breath uncontrolla
bly, " Why, my dear lady, it s a Holbein ! "
"A Holbein? What?"
" Why, the wonderful sharp old face so extraor
dinarily, consummately drawn in the frame of black
velvet. That of Mrs. Brash, I mean isn t it her
name? your companion."
This was the beginning of a most odd matter the
essence of my anecdote ; and I think the very first note
of the oddity must have sounded for me in the tone
in which her ladyship spoke after giving me a silent
look. It seemed to come to me out of a distance im
measurably removed from Holbein. " Mrs. Brash is
not my * companion in the sense you appear to mean.
She s my rather near relation and a very dear old
friend. I love her and you must know her."
" Know her ? Rather ! Why, to see her is to want,
on the spot, is to * go for her. She also must sit for
me."
"She? Louisa Brash?" If Lady Beldonald had
the theory that her beauty directly showed it when
things were not well with her, this impression, which
the fixed sweetness of her serenity had hitherto struck
me by no means as justifying, gave me now my first
glimpse of its grounds. It was as if I had never before
seen her face invaded by anything I should have called
an expression. This expression, moreover, was of the
faintest was like the effect produced on a surface by
an agitation both deep within and as yet much con
fused. "Have you told her so?" she then quickly
asked, as if to soften the sound of her surprise.
33
THE BETTER SORT
" Dear no, I ve but just noticed her Outreau a mo
ment ago put me on her. But we re both so taken, and
he also wants "
"To paint her?" Lady Beldonald uncontrollably
murmured.
" Don t be afraid we shall fight for her," I returned
with a laugh for this tone. Mrs. Brash was still where
I could see her without appearing to stare, and she
mightn t have seen I was looking at her, though her
protectress, I am afraid, could scarce have failed of
this perception. " We must each take our turn, and
at any rate she s a wonderful thing, so that, if you ll
take her to Paris, Outreau promises her there "
" There? " my companion gasped.
" A career bigger still than among us, as he con
siders that we haven t half their eye. He guarantees
her a succes fou."
She couldn t get over it. " Louisa Brash. In
Paris?"
"They do see," I exclaimed, "more than we; and
they live extraordinarily, don t you know? in that.
But she ll do something here too."
"And what will she do?"
If, frankly, now, I couldn t help giving Mrs. Brash
a longer look, so after it I could as little resist sound
ing my interlocutress. " You ll see. Only give her
time.""
She said nothing during the moment in which she
met my eyes ; but then : " Time, it seems to me, is ex
actly what you and your friend want. If you haven t
talked with her "
" We haven t seen her ? Oh, we see bang off with
a click like a steel spring. It s our trade ; it s our life ;
and we should be donkeys if we made mistakes. That s
the way I saw you yourself, my lady, if I may say so;
that s the way, with a long pin straight through your
body, I ve got you. And just so I ve got her."
34
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
All this, for reasons, had brought my guest to tier
feet ; but her eyes, while we talked, had never once fol
lowed the direction of mine. " You call her a Hol
bein?"
" Outreau did, and I of course immediately recog
nised it. Don t you? She brings the old boy to life!
It s just as I should call you a Titian. You bring
him to life."
She couldn t be said to relax, because she couldn t
be said to have hardened; but something at any rate
on this took place in her something indeed quite
disconnected from what I would have called her.
" Don t you understand that she has always been sup
posed ? " It had the ring of impatience ; never
theless, on a scruple, it stopped short.
I knew what it was, however, well enough to say
it for her if she preferred. " To be nothing whatever
to look at? To be unfortunately plain or even if you
like repulsively ugly? Oh yes, I understand it per
fectly, just as I understand I have to as a part of my
trade many other forms of stupidity. It s nothing
new to one that ninety-nine people out of a hundred
have no eyes, no sense, no taste. There are whole com
munities impenetrably sealed. I don t say your friend
is a person to make the men turn round in Regent
Street. But it adds to the joy of the few who do
see that they have it so much to themselves. Where
in the world can she have lived? You must tell
me all about that or rather, if she ll be so good, she
must."
" You mean then to speak to her ? "
I wondered as she pulled up again. " Of her
beauty?"
" Her beauty ! " cried Lady Beldonald so loud that
two or three persons looked round.
" Ah, with every precaution of respect ! " I declared
in a much lower tone. But her back was by this time
35
THE BETTER SORT
turned to me, and in the movement, as it were, one of
the strangest little dramas I have ever known was well
launched.
Ill
IT was a drama of small, smothered intensely private
things, and I knew of but one other person in the secret ;
yet that person and I found it exquisitely susceptible
of notation, followed it with an interest the mutual
communication of which did much for our enjoyment,
and were present with emotion at its touching catas
trophe. The small case for so small a case had
made a great stride even before my little party sep
arated, and in fact within the next ten minutes.
In that space of time two things had happened ; one
of which was that I made the acquaintance of Mrs.
Brash, and the other that Mrs. Munden reached me,
cleaving the crowd, with one of her usual pieces of
news. What she had to impart was that, on her hav
ing just before asked Nina if the conditions of our
sitting had been arranged with me, Nina had replied,
with something like perversity, that she didn t propose
to arrange them, that the whole affair was " off "
again, and that she preferred not to be, for the present,
further pressed. The question for Mrs. Munden was
naturally what had happened and whether I under
stood. Oh, I understood perfectly, and what I at first
most understood was that even when I had brought
in the name of Mrs. Brash intelligence was not yet in
Mrs. Munden. She was quite as surprised as Lady
Beldonald had been on hearing of the esteem in which
I held Mrs. Brash s appearance. She was stupefied at
learning that I had just in my ardour proposed to the
possessor of it to sit to me. Only she came round
promptly which Lady Beldonald really never did.
Mrs. Munden was in fact wonderful ; for when I had
36
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
given her quickly " Why, she s a Holbein, you know,"
she took it up, after a first fine vacancy, with an imme
diate abysmal " Oh, is she ? " that, as a piece of social
gymnastics, did her the greatest honour ; and she was
in fact the first in London to spread the tidings. For
a face-about it was magnificent. But she was also the
first, I must add, to see what would really happen
though this she put before me only a week or two later.
" It will kill her, my dear that s what it will do ! "
She meant neither more nor less than that it would
kill Lady Beldonald if I were to paint Mrs. Brash;
for at this lurid light had we arrived in so short a
space of time. It was for me to decide whether my
aesthetic need of giving life to my idea was such as to
justify me in destroying it in a woman after all, in
most eyes, so beautiful. The situation was, after all,
sufficiently queer; for it remained to be seen what I
should positively gain by giving up Mrs. Brash. I
appeared to have in any case lost Lady Beldonald, now
too " upset " it was always Mrs. Munden s word
about her and, as I inferred, her own about herself
to meet me again on our previous footing. The only
thing, I of course soon saw, was to temporise to drop
the whole question for the present and yet so far as
possible keep each of the pair in view. I may as well
say at once that this plan and this process gave their
principal interest to the next several months. Mrs.
Brash had turned up, if I remember, early in the new
year, and her little wonderful career was in our par
ticular circle one of the features of the following sea
son. It was at all events for myself the most attach
ing ; it is not my fault if I am so put together as often
to find more life in situations obscure and subject to
interpretation than in the gross rattle of the fore
ground. And there were all sorts of things, things
touching, amusing, mystifying and above all such an
instance as I had never yet met in this funny little
37
THE BETTER SORT
fortune of the useful American cousin. Mrs. Munden
was promptly at one with me as to the rarity and, to
a near and human view, the beauty and interest of the
position. We had neither of us ever before seen that
degree, and that special sort of personal success come
to a woman for the first time so late in life. I found
it an example of poetic, of absolutely retributive, jus
tice; so that my desire grew great to work it, as we
say, on those lines. I had seen it all from the original
moment at my studio ; the poor lady had never known
an hour s appreciation which, moreover, in perfect
good faith, she had never missed. The very first thing
I did after producing so unintentionally the resentful
retreat of her protectress had been to go straight over
to her and say almost without preliminaries that I
should hold myself immeasurably obliged if she would
give me a few sittings. What I thus came face to face
with was, on the instant, her whole unenlightened past,
and the full, if foreshortened, revelation of what among
us all was now unfailingly in store for her. To turn
the handle and start that tune came to me on the spot
as a temptation. Here was a poor lady who had waited
for the approach of old age to find out what she was
worth. Here was a benighted being to whom it was
to be disclosed in her fifty-seventh year (I was to make
that out) that she had something that might pass for
a face. She looked much more than her age, and was
fairly frightened as if I had been trying on her some
possibly heartless London trick when she had taken
in my appeal. That showed me in what an air she
had lived and as I should have been tempted to put
it had I spoken out among what children of darkness.
Later on I did them more justice; saw more that her
wonderful points must have been points largely the
fruit of time, and even that possibly she might never
in all her life have looked so well as at this particular
moment. It might have been that if her hour had
38
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
struck I just happened to be present at the striking.
What had occurred, all the same, was at the worst a
sufficient comedy.
The famous " irony of fate " takes many forms, but
I had never yet seen it take quite this one. She had
been " had over " on an understanding, and she was
not playing fair. She had broken the law of her ugli
ness and had turned beautiful on the hands of her em
ployer. More interesting even perhaps than a view of
the conscious triumph that this might prepare for her,
and of which, had I doubted of my own judgment, I
could still take Outreau s fine start as the full guaran
tee more interesting was the question of the process
by which such a history could get itself enacted. The
curious thing was that, all the while, the reasons of
her having passed for plain the reasons for Lady Bel-
donald s fond calculation, which they quite justified
were written large in her face, so large that it was easy
to understand them as the only ones she herself had
ever read. What was it, then, that actually made the
old stale sentence mean something so different? into
what new combinations, what extraordinary language,
unknown but understood at a glance, had time and life
translated it ? The only thing to be said was that time
and life were artists who beat us all, working with
recipes and secrets that we could never find out. I
really ought to have, like a lecturer or a showman, a
chart or a blackboard to present properly the relation,
in the wonderful old tender, battered, blanched face,
between the original elements and the exquisite final
" style." I could do it with chalks, but I can scarcely
do it thus. However, the thing was, for any artist who
respected himself, to feel it which I abundantly did;
and then not to conceal from her that I felt it
which I neglected as little. But she was really, to do
her complete justice, the last to understand ; and I am
not sure that, to the end for there was an end she
39
THE BETTER SORT
quite made it all out or knew where she was. When
you have been brought up for fifty years on black, it
must be hard to adjust your organism, at a day s notice,
to gold-colour. Her whole nature had been pitched
in the key of her supposed plainness. She had known
how to be ugly it was the only thing she had learnt
save, if possible, how not to mind it. Being beautiful,
at any rate, took a new set of muscles. It w r as on the
prior theory, literally, that she had developed her ad
mirable dress, instinctively felicitous, always either
black or white, and a matter of rather severe squareness
and studied line. She was magnificently neat; every
thing she showed had a way of looking both old and
fresh ; and there was on every occasion the same pict
ure in her draped head draped in low-falling black
and the fine white plaits (of a painter s white, some
how) disposed on her chest. What had happened was
that these arrangements, determined by certain consid
erations, lent themselves in effect much better to cer
tain others. Adopted as a kind of refuge, they had
really only deepened her accent. It was singular, more
over, that, so constituted, there was nothing in her
aspect of the ascetic or the nun. She was a good, hard,
sixteenth-century figure, not withered with innocence,
bleached rather by life in the open. She was, in short,
just what we had made of her, a Holbein for a great
museum; and our position, Mrs. Munden s and mine,
rapidly became that of persons having such a treasure
to dispose of. The world I speak of course mainly
of the art-world flocked to see it.
IV
" BUT has she any idea herself, poor thing? " was the
way I had put it to Mrs. Munden on our next meet
ing after the incident at my studio; with the effect,
however, only of leaving my friend at first to take me
40
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
as alluding to Mrs. Brash s possible prevision of the
chatter she might create. I had my own sense of that
this prevision had been nil; the question was of
her consciousness of the office for which Lady Bel-
donald had counted on her and for which we were so
promptly proceeding to spoil her altogether.
" Oh, I think she arrived with a goodish notion,"
Mrs. Munden had replied when I had explained ; " for
she s clever too, you know, as well as good-looking, and
I don t see how, if she ever really knew Nina, she could
have supposed for a moment that she was not wanted
for whatever she might have left to give up. Hasn t
she moreover always been made to feel that she s ugly
enough for anything? " It was even at this point al
ready wonderful how my friend had mastered the case,
and what lights, alike for its past and its future, she
was prepared to throw on it. " If she has seen herself
as ugly enough for anything, she has seen herself and
that was the only way as ugly enough for Nina ; and
she has had her own manner of showing that she un
derstands without making Nina commit herself to any
thing vulgar. Women are never without ways for
doing such things both for communicating and re
ceiving knowledge that I can t explain to you, and
that you wouldn t understand if I could, as you must
be a woman even to do that. I dare say they ve ex
pressed it all to each other simply in the language of
kisses. But doesn t it, at any rate, make something
rather beautiful of the relation between them as affected
by our discovery ? "
I had a laugh for her plural possessive. " The point
is, of course, that if there was a conscious bargain, and
our action on Mrs. Brash is to deprive her of the sense
of keeping her side of it, various things may happen
that won t be good either for her or for ourselves. She
may conscientiously throw up the position/
" Yes," my companion mused " for she is conscien-
THE BETTER SORT
tious. Or Nina, without waiting for that, may cast her
forth."
I faced it all. " Then we should have to keep her."
" As a regular model ? " Mrs. Munden was ready
for anything. " Oh, that would be lovely ! "
But I further worked it out. " The difficulty is that
she s not a model, hang it that she s too good for one,
that she s the very thing herself. When Outreau and
I have each had our go, that will be all; there ll be
nothing left for anyone else. Therefore it behoves us
quite to understand that our attitude s a responsibility.
If we can t do for her positively more than Nina
does "
" We must let her alone? " My companion contin
ued to muse. " I see ! "
" Yet don t," I returned, " see too much. We can
do more."
" Than Nina ? " She was again on the spot. " It
wouldn t, after all, be difficult^ We only want the di
rectly opposite thing and which is the only one the
poor dear can give. Unless, indeed," she suggested,
" we simply retract we back out."
I turned it over. " It s too late for that. Whether
Mrs. Brash s peace is gone, I can t say. But Nina s is."
" Yes, and there s no way to bring it back that won t
sacrifice her friend. We can t turn round and say Mrs.
Brash is ugly, can we ? But fancy Nina s not having
seen! " Mrs. Munden exclaimed.
" She doesn t see now," I answered. " She can t,
I m certain, make out what we mean. The woman,
for her still, is just what she always was. But she has,
nevertheless, had her stroke, and her blindness, while
she wavers and gropes in the dark, only adds to her
discomfort. Her blow was to see the attention of the
world deviate."
" All the same, I don t think, you know," my inter
locutress said, " that Nina will have made her a scene,
42
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
or that, whatever we do, she ll ever make her one.
That isn t the way it will happen, for she s exactly as
conscientious as Mrs. Brash."
" Then what is the way? " I asked.
" It will just happen in silence."
" And what will it, as you call it, be? "
" Isn t that what we want really to see ? "
" Well," I replied after a turn or two about, " wheth
er we want it or not, it s exactly what we shall see;
which is a reason the more for fancying, between the
pair there in the quiet, exquisite house, and full of
superiorities and suppressions as they both are the
extraordinary situation. If I said just now that it s
too late to do anything but accept, it s because I ve
taken the full measure of what happened at my studio.
It took but a few moments but she tasted of the tree."
My companion wondered. " Nina ? "
" Mrs. Brash." And to have to put it so ministered,
while I took yet another turn, to a sort of agitation.
Our attitude was a responsibility.
But I had suggested something else to my friend,
who appeared for a moment detached. " Should you
say she ll hate her worse if she doesn t see? "
" Lady Beldonald ? Doesn t see what we see, you
mean, than if she does? Ah, I give that up!" I
laughed. " But what I can tell you is why I hold that,
as I said just now, we can do most. We can do this :
we can give to a harmless and sensitive creature hither
to practically disinherited and give with an unex
pectedness that will immensely add to its price the
pure joy of a deep draught of the very pride of life,
of an acclaimed personal triumph in our superior,
sophisticated world."
Mrs. Munden had a glow of response for my sud
den eloquence. " Oh, it will be beautiful! "
43
THE BETTER SORT
WELL, that is what, on the whole, and in spite of
everything, it really was. It has dropped into my
memory a rich little gallery of pictures, a regular pan
orama of those occasions that were the proof of the
privilege that had made me for a moment in the
words I have just recorded lyrical. I see Mrs. Brash
on each of these occasions practically enthroned and
surrounded and more or less mobbed ; see the hurrying
and the nudging and the pressing and the staring ; see
the people " making up " and introduced, and catch
the word when they have had their turn ; hear it above
all, the great one " Ah yes, the famous Holbein ! "
passed about with that perfection of promptitude that
makes the motions of the London mind so happy a
mixture of those of the parrot and the sheep. Noth
ing would be easier, of course, than to tell the whole
little tale with an eye only for that silly side of it.
Great was the silliness, but great also as to this case
of poor Mrs. Brash, I will say for it, the good nature.
Of course, furthermore, it took in particular " our set,"
with its positive child-terror of the banal, to be either
so foolish or so wise; though indeed I ve never quite
known where our set begins and ends, and have had
to content myself on this score with the indication once
given me by a lady next whom I was placed at dinner :
" Oh, it s bounded on the north by Ibsen and on the
south by Sargent ! " Mrs. Brash never sat to me ; she
absolutely declined ; and when she declared that it was
quite enough for her that I had with that fine precipi
tation invited her, I quite took this as she meant it, for
before we had gone very far our understanding, hers
and mine, was complete. Her attitude was as happy
as her success was prodigious. The sacrifice of the
portrait was a sacrifice to the true inwardness of Lady
44
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I divined, tow
ard muffling their domestic tension. All that was thus
in her power to say and I heard of a few cases of her
having said it was that she was sure I would have
painted her beautifully if she hadn t prevented me.
She couldn t even tell the truth, which was that I cer
tainly would have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn t;
and she never could mention the subject at all before
that personage. I can only describe the affair, natur
ally, from the outside, and heaven forbid indeed that
I should try too closely to reconstruct the possible
strange intercourse of these good friends at home.
My anecdote, however, would lose half such point
as it may possess were I to omit all mention of the
charming turn that her ladyship appeared gradually
to have found herself able to give to her deportment.
She had made it impossible I should myself bring up
our old, our original question, but there was real dis
tinction in her manner of now accepting certain other
possibilities. Let me do her that justice ; her effort at
magnanimity must have been immense. There couldn t
fail, of course, to be ways in which poor Mrs. Brash
paid for it. How much she had to pay we were, in
fact, soon enough to see ; and it is my intimate convic
tion that, as a climax, her life at last was the price.
But while she lived, at least and it was with an in
tensity, for those wondrous weeks, of which she had
never dreamed Lady Beldonald herself faced the
music. This is what I mean by the possibilities, by
the sharp actualities indeed, that she accepted. She
took our friend out, she showed her at home, never
attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick
whatever so long as the ordeal lasted. She drank deep,
on her side too, of the cup the cup that for her own
lips could only be bitterness. There was, I think, scarce
a special success of her companion s at which she was
not personally present. Mrs. Munden s theory of
45
THE BETTER SORT
the silence in which all this would be muffled for
them was, none the less, and in abundance, confirmed
by our observations. The whole thing was to be the
death of one or the other of them, but they never spoke
of it at tea. I remember even that Nina went so far
as to say to me once, looking me full in the eyes, quite
sublimely, "I ve made out what you mean she is a
picture." The beauty of this, moreover, was that, as
I am persuaded, she hadn t really made it out at all
the words were the mere hypocrisy of her reflective
endeavour for virtue. She couldn t possibly have made
it out ; her friend was as much as ever " dreadfully
plain " to her ; she must have wondered to the last what
on earth possessed us. Wouldn t it in fact have been,
after all, just this failure of vision, this supreme stu
pidity in short, that kept the catastrophe so long at
bay? There was a certain sense of greatness for her
in seeing so many of us so absurdly mistaken; and I
recall that on various occasions, and in particular when
she uttered the words just quoted, this high serenity,
as a sign of the relief of her soreness, if not of the
effort of her conscience, did something quite visible
to my eyes, and also quite unprecedented, for the beauty
of her face. She got a real lift from it such a mo
mentary discernible sublimity that I recollect coming
out on the spot with a queer, crude, amused " Do you
know I believe I could paint you now?
She was a fool not to have closed with me then and
there ; for what has happened since has altered every
thing what was to happen a little later was so much
more than I could swallow. This was the disappear
ance of the famous Holbein from one day to the other
producing a consternation among us all as great as
if the Venus of Milo had suddenly vanished from the
Louvre. " She has simply shipped her straight back "
the explanation was given in that form by Mrs.
Munden, who added that any cord pulled tight enough
46
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
would end at last by snapping. At the snap, in any
case, we mightily jumped, for the masterpiece we had
for three or four months been living with had made us
feel its presence as a luminous lesson and a daily need.
We recognised more than ever that it had been, for
high finish, the gem of our collection we found what
a blank it left on the wall. Lady Beldonald might fill
up the blank, but we couldn t. That she did soon fill
it up and, heaven help us, how? was put before me
after an interval of no great length, but during which
I had not seen her. I dined on the Christmas of last
year at Mrs. Munden s, and Nina, with a " scratch lot,"
as our hostess said, was there, and, the preliminary
wait being longish, approached me very sweetly. " I ll
come to you to-morrow if you like," she said; and the
effect of it, after a first stare at her, was to make me
look all round. I took in, in these two motions, two
things; one of which was that, though now again so
satisfied herself of her high state, she could give me
nothing comparable to what I should have got had
she taken me up at the moment of my meeting her on
her distinguished concession; the other that she was
" suited " afresh, and that Mrs. Brash s successor was
fully installed. Mrs. Brash s successor was at the other
side of the room, and I became conscious that Mrs.
Munden was waiting to see my eyes seek her. I guessed
the meaning of the wait; what was one, this time, to
say? Oh, first and foremost, assuredly, that it was
immensely droll, for this time, at least, there was no
mistake. The lady I looked upon, and as to whom
my friend, again quite at sea, appealed to me for a
formula, was as little a Holbein, or a specimen of any
other school, as she was, like Lady Beldonald herself,
a Titian. The formula was easy to give, for the
amusement was that her prettiness yes, literally, pro
digiously, her prettiness was distinct. Lady Beldon
ald had been magnificent had been almost intelligent.
47
THE BETTER SORT
Miss What s-her-name continues pretty, continues even
young, and doesn t matter a straw! She matters so
ideally little that Lady Beldonald is practically safer,
I judge, than she has ever been. There has not been
a symptom of chatter about this person, and I believe
her protectress is much surprised that we are not more
struck.
It was, at any rate, strictly impossible to me to make
an appointment for the day as to which I have just re
corded Nina s proposal; and the turn of events since
then has not quickened my eagerness. Mrs. Munden
remained in correspondence Xvith Mrs. Brash to the
extent, that is, of three letters, each of which she
showed me. They so told, to our imagination, her ter
rible little story that we were quite prepared or
thought we were for her going out like a snuffed
candle. She resisted, on her return to her original
conditions, less than a year; the taste of the tree, as
I had called it, had been fatal to her; what she had
contentedly enough lived without before for half a
century she couldn t now live without for a day. I
know nothing of her original conditions some minor
American city save that for her to have gone back
to them was clearly to have stepped out of her frame.
We performed, Mrs. Munden and I, a small funeral
service for her by talking it all over and making it
all out. It wasn t the minor American city-^-a mar
ket for Holbeins, and what had occurred was that the
poor old picture, banished from its museum and re
freshed by the rise of no new movement to hang it,
was capable of the miracle of a silent revolution, of
itself turning, in its dire dishonour, its face to the wall.
So it stood, without the intervention of the ghost of a
critic, till they happened to pull it round again and
find it mere dead paint. Well, it had had, if that is
anything, its season of fame, its name on a thousand
tongues and printed in capitals in the catalogue. We
48
THE BELDONALD HOLBEIN
had not been at fault. I haven t, all the same, the least
note of her not a scratch. And I did her so in inten
tion ! Mrs. Munden continues to remind me, however,
that this is not the sort of rendering with which, on the
other side, after all, Lady Beldonald proposes to con
tent herself. She has come back to the question of her
own portrait. Let me settle it then at last. Since she
will have the real thing well, hang it, she shall !
THE TWO FACES
THE servant, who, in spite of his sealed, stamped
look, appeared to have his reasons, stood there
for instruction, in a manner not quite usual, after an
nouncing the name. Mrs. Grantham, however, took
it up " Lord Gwyther? " with a quick surprise that
for an instant justified him even to the small scintilla
in the glance she gave her companion, which might
have had exactly the sense of the butler s hesitation.
This companion, a shortish, fairish, youngish man,
clean-shaven and keen-eyed, had, with a promptitude
that would have struck an observer which the butler
indeed was sprang to his feet and moved to the chim
ney-piece, though his hostess herself, meanwhile, man
aged not otherwise to stir. " Well ? " she said, as for
the visitor to advance ; which she immediately followed
with a sharper " He s not there ? "
" Shall I show him up, ma am ? "
" But of course ! " The point of his doubt made
her at last rise for impatience, and Bates, before leav
ing the room, might still have caught the achieved
irony of her appeal to the gentleman into whose com
munion with her he had broken. " Why in the world
not ? What a way ! " she exclaimed, as Sut-
ton felt beside his cheek the passage of her eyes to
the glass behind him.
" He wasn t sure you d see anyone."
" I don t see anyone, but I see individuals."
50
THE TWO FACES
That s just it ; and sometimes you don t see them."
" Do you mean ever because of you? " she asked as
she touched into place a tendril of hair. " That s just
his impertinence, as to which I shall speak to him."
" Don t," said Shirley Sutton. " Never notice any
thing."
That s nice advice from you," she laughed, " who
notice everything ! "
" Ah, but I speak of nothing."
She looked at him a moment. " You re still more
impertinent than Bates. You ll please not budge," she
went on.
"Really? I must sit him out?" he continued as,
after a minute, she had not again spoken only glanc
ing about, while she changed her place, partly for an
other look at the glass and partly to see if she could
improve her seat. What she felt was rather more than,
clever and charming though she was, she could hide.
" If you re wondering how you seem, I can tell you.
Awfully cool and easy."
She gave him another stare. She was beautiful and
conscious. " And if you re wondering how you
seem "
"Oh, I m not!" he laughed from before the fire;
" I always perfectly know."
" How you seem," she retorted, " is as if you
didn t!"
Once more for a little he watched her. " You re
looking lovely for him extraordinarily lovely, within
the marked limits of your range. But that s enough.
Don t be clever."
"Then who will be?"
" There you are! " he sighed with amusement.
" Do you know him ? " she asked as, through the
door left open by Bates, they heard steps on the land
ing.
Sutton had to think an instant, and produced a
THE BETTER SORT
" No " just as Lord Gwyther was again announced,
which gave an unexpectedness to the greeting offered
him a moment later by this personage a young man,
stout and smooth and fresh, but not at all shy, who,
after the happiest rapid passage with Mrs. Grantham,
put out a hand with a frank, pleasant " How d ye do ? "
" Mr. Shirley Sutton," Mrs. Grantham explained.
" Oh yes," said her second visitor, quite as if he
knew ; which, as he couldn t have known, had for her
first the interest of confirming a perception that his
lordship would be no, not at all, in general, em-
,barrassed, only was now exceptionally and especially
agitated. As it is, for that matter, with Button s total
impression that we are particularly and almost exclu
sively concerned, it may be further mentioned that he
was not less clear as to the really handsome way in
which the young man kept himself together and little
by little though with all proper aid indeed finally
found his feet. All sorts of things, for the twenty
minutes, occurred to Sutton, though one of them was
certainly not that it would, after all, be better he should
go. One of them was that their hostess was doing
it in perfection simply, easily, kindly, yet with some
thing the least bit queer in her wonderful eyes; an
other was that if he had been recognised without the
least ground it was through a tension of nerves on the
part of his fellow-guest that produced inconsequent
motions; still another was that, even had departure
been indicated, he would positively have felt dissuasion
in the rare promise of the scene. This was in especial
after Lord Gwyther not only had announced that he
was now married, but had mentioned that he wished
to bring his wife to Mrs. Grantham for the benefit so
certain to be derived. It was the passage immediately
produced by that speech that provoked in Sutton the
intensity, as it were, of his arrest. He already knew
of the marriage as well as Mrs. Grantham herself, and
52
THE TWO FACES
as well also as he knew of some other things ; and this
gave him, doubtless, the better measure of what took
place before him and the keener consciousness of the
quick look that, at a marked moment though it was
not absolutely meant for him any more than for his
companion Mrs. Grantham let him catch.
She smiled, but it had a gravity. " I think, you
know, you ought to have told me before."
" Do you mean when I first got engaged? Well, it
all took place so far away, and we really told, at home,
so few people."
Oh, there might have been reasons; but it had not
been quite right. " You were married at Stuttgart ?
That wasn t too far for my interest, at least, to reach."
" Awfully kind of you and of course one knew you
would be kind. But it wasn t at Stuttgart ; it was over
there, but quite in the country. We should have man
aged it in England but that her mother naturally
wished to be present, yet was not in health to come.
So it was really, you see, a sort of little hole-and-corner
German affair."
This didn t in the least check Mrs. Grantham s claim,
but it started a slight anxiety. " Will she be a, then,
German ? "
Sutton knew her to know perfectly what Lady,
Gwyther would " be," but he had by this time, while
their friend explained, his independent interest. " Oh
dear, no ! My father-in-law has never parted with the
proud birthright of a Briton. But his wife, you see,
holds an estate in Wurtemberg from her mother,
Countess Kremnitz, on which, with the awful condi
tion of his English property, you know, they ve found
it for years a tremendous saving to live. So that
though Valda was luckily born at home she has prac
tically spent her life over there."
" Oh, "I see." Then, after a slight pause, " Is Valda
her pretty name? " Mrs. Grantham asked.
53
THE BETTER SORT
" Well," said the young man, only wishing, in his
candour, it was clear, to be drawn out " well, she has,
in the manner of her mother s people, about thirteen;
but that s the one we generally use."
Mrs. Grantham hesitated but an instant. " Then may
/ generally use it? "
" It would be too charming of you ; and nothing
would give her as, I assure you, nothing would give
me, greater pleasure." Lord Gwyther quite glowed
with the thought.
" Then I think that instead of coming alone you
might have brought her to see me."
" It s exactly what," he instantly replied, " I came
to ask your leave to do." He explained that for the
moment Lady Gwyther was not in town, having as
soon as she arrived gone down to Torquay to put in
a few days with one of her aunts, also her godmother,
to whom she was an object of great interest. She had
seen no one yet, and no one not that that mattered
had seen her; she knew nothing whatever of Lon
don and was awfully frightened at facing it and at
what however little might be expected of her.
" She wants some one," he said, " some one who knows
the whole thing, don t you see ? and who s thoroughly
kind and clever, as you would be, if I may say so, to
take her by the hand." It was at this point and on
these words that the eyes of Lord Gwyther s two audi
tors inevitably and wonderfully met. But there was
nothing in the way he kept it up to show that he
caught the encounter. " She wants, if I may tell you
so, for the great labyrinth, a real friend; and asking
myself what I could do to make things ready for her,
and who would be absolutely the best woman in Lon
don "
" You thought, naturally, of me? " Mrs. Grantham
had listened with no sign but the faint flash just noted ;
now, however, she gave him the full light of her ex-
54
THE TWO FACES
pressive face which immediately brought Shirley Sut-
ton, looking at his watch, once more to his feet.
" She is the best woman in London ! " He addressed
himself with a laugh to the other visitor, but offered
his hand in farewell to their hostess.
You re going?"
" I must," he said without scruple.
" Then we do meet at dinner ? "
" I hope so." On which, to take leave, he returned
with interest to Lord Gwyther the friendly clutch he
had a short time before received.
II
THEY did meet at dinner, and if they were not, as it
happened, side by side, they made that up afterwards
in the happiest angle of a drawing-room that offered
both shine and shadow and that was positively much
appreciated, in the circle in which they moved, for the
favourable " corners " created by its shrewd mistress.
Her face, charged with something produced in it by
Lord Gwyther s visit, had been with him so constantly
for the previous hours that, when she instantly chal
lenged him on his " treatment " of her in the after
noon, he was on the point of naming it as his reason
for not having remained with her. Something new
had quickly come into her beauty; he couldn t as yet
have said what, nor whether on the whole to its ad
vantage or its loss. Till he could make up his mind
about that, at any rate, he would say nothing ; so that,
with sufficient presence of mind, he found a better ex
cuse. If in short he had in defiance of her particular
request left her alone with Lord Gwyther, it was sim
ply because the situation had suddenly turned so ex
citing that he had fairly feared the contagion of it
the temptation of its making him, most improperly,
put in his word.
55
THE BETTER SORT
They could now talk of these things at their ease.
Other couples, ensconced and scattered, enjoyed the
same privilege, and Sutton had more and more the
profit, such as it was, of feeling that his interest in
Mrs. Grantham had become what was the luxury of
so high a social code an acknowledged and protected
relation. He knew his London well enough to know
that he was on the way to be regarded as her main
source of consolation for the trick that, several months
before, Lord Gwyther had publicly played her. Many
persons had not held that, by the high social code in
question, his lordship could have " reserved the right "
to turn up in that way, from one day to another, en
gaged. For himself London took, with its short cuts
and its cheap psychology, an immense deal for granted.
To his own sense he was never could in the nature
of things never be any man s " successor." Just
what had constituted the predecessorship of other men
was apparently that they had been able to make up
their mind. He, worse luck, was at the mercy of her
face, and more than ever at the mercy of it now, which
meant, moreover, not that it made a slave of him, but
that it made, disconcertingly, a sceptic. It was the ab
solute perfection of the handsome; but things had a
way of coming into it. " I felt," he said, " that you
were there together at a point at which you had a
right to the ease that the absence of a listener would
give. I reflected that when you made me promise to
stay you hadn t guessed "
That he could possibly have come to me on such
an extraordinary errand? No, of course, I hadn t
guessed. Who would ? But didn t you see how little
I was upset by it ? "
Sutton demurred. Then with a smile, " I think he
saw how little."
" You yourself didn t, then? "
He again held back, but not, after all, to answer.
" He was wonderful, wasn t he? "
56
THE TWO FACES
" I think he was," she replied after a moment. To
which she added : " Why did he pretend that way he
knew you ? "
" He didn t pretend. He felt on the spot as if we
were friends." Sutton had found this afterwards, and
found truth in it. " It was an effusion of cheer and
hope. He was so glad to see me there, and to find you
happy."
"Happy?"
" Happy. Aren t you ? "
" Because of you? "
Well according to the impression he received as
he came in."
" That was sudden then," she asked, " and unex
pected?"
Her companion thought. " Prepared in some de
gree, but confirmed by the sight of us, there together,
so awfully jolly and sociable over your fire."
Mrs. Grantham turned this round. " If he kne\* 7 I
was happy then which, by the way, is none of his
business, nor of yours either why in the world did
he come? "
" Well, for good manners, and for his idea," said
Sutton.
She took it in, appearing to have no hardness of
rancour that could bar discussion. " Do you mean by
his idea his proposal that I should grandmother his
wife? And, if you do, is the proposal your reason for
calling him wonderful ? "
Sutton laughed. "Pray, what s yours?" As this
was a question, however, that she took her time to
answer or not to answer only appearing interested
for a moment in a combination that had formed itself
on the other side of the room he presently went on.
" What s his? that would seem to be the point. His,
I mean, for having decided on the extraordinary step
of throwing his little wife, bound hands and feet, into
57.
THE BETTER SORT
your arms. Intelligent as you are, and with these three
or four hours to have thought it over, I yet don t see
how that can fail still to mystify you."
She continued to watch their opposite neighbours.
" Little, you call her. Is she so very small? "
" Tiny, tiny she must be ; as different as possible
in every way of necessity from you. They always
are the opposite pole, you know," said Shirley Sutton.
She glanced at him now. " You strike me as of an
impudence ! "
" No, no. I only like to make it out with you."
She looked away again and, after a little, went on.
" I m sure she s charming, and only hope one isn t to
gather that he s already tired of her."
" Not a bit ! He s tremendously in love, and he ll
remain so."
" So much the better. And if it s a question," said
Mrs. Grantham, " of one s doing what one can for her,
he has only, as I told him when you had gone, to give
me the chance."
" Good ! So he is to commit her to you ? "
" You use extraordinary expressions, but it s settled
that he brings her."
"And you ll really and truly help her?"
" Really and truly ? " said Mrs. Grantham, with her
eyes again upon him. " Why not ? For what do you
take me?"
" Ah, isn t that just what I still have the discomfort,
j every day I live, of asking myself ? "
She had made, as she spoke, a movement to rise,
which, as if she was tired of his tone, his last words
J appeared to determine. But, also getting up, he held
her, when they were on their feet, long enough to hear
the rest of what he had to say. "If you do help her,
you know, you ll show him that you ve understood."
"Understood what?"
" Why, his idea the deep, acute train of reasoning
58
THE TWO FACES
that has led him to take, as one may say, the bull by
the horns ; to reflect that as you might, as you probably
would, in any case, get at her, he plays the wise game,
as well as the bold one, by assuming your generosity
and placing himself publicly under an obligation to
you/
Mi;s. Grantham showed not only that she had list
ened, but that she had for an instant considered.
" What is it you elegantly describe as my getting at
her?"
" He takes his risk, but puts you, you see, on your
honour."
She thought a moment more. " What profundities
indeed then over the simplest of matters ! And if your
idea is," she went on, " that if I do help her I shall
show him I ve understood them, so it will be that if I
don t-
" You ll show him " Sutton took her up " that
you haven t? Precisely. But in spite of not wanting
to appear to have understood too much
"I may still be depended on to do what I can?
Quite certainly. You ll see what I may still be depend
ed on to do." And she moved away.
Ill
IT was not, doubtless, that there had been anything in
their rather sharp separation at that moment to sustain
or prolong the interruption ; yet it definitely befell that,
circumstances aiding, they practically failed to meet
again before the great party at Burbeck. This occasion
wa& to gather in some thirty persons from a certain
Friday to the following Monday, and it was on the
Friday that Sutton went down. He had known in ad
vance that Mrs. Grantham was to be there, and this
perhaps, during the interval of hindrance, had helped
him a little to be patient. He had before him the cer-
59
THE BETTER SORT
titude of a real full cup two days brimming over with
the sight of her. He found, however, on his arrival
that she was not yet in the field, and presently learned
that her place would be in a small contingent that was
to join the party on the morrow. This knowledge he
extracted from Miss Banker, who was always the first
to present herself at any gathering that was to enjoy
her, and whom, moreover partly on that very account
the wary not less than the speculative w r ere apt to
hold themselves well-advised to engage with at as early
as possible a stage of the business. She was stout,
red, rich, mature, universal a massive, much-fingered
volume, alphabetical, wonderful, indexed, that opened
of itself at the right place. She opened for Sutton
instinctively at G , which happened to be remark
ably convenient. " What she s really waiting over for
is to bring down Lady Gwyther."
" Ah, the Gwythers are coming? "
" Yes ; caught, through Mrs. Grantham, just in time.
She ll be the feature everyone wants to see her."
Speculation and wariness met and combined at this
moment in Shirley Sutton. " Do you mean a Mrs.
Grantham ? "
" Dear no ! Poor little Lady Gwyther, who, but
just arrived in England, appears now literally for the
first time in her life in any society whatever, and whom
(don t you know the extraordinary story? you ought
to you!) she, of all people, has so wonderfully taken
up. It will be quite here as if she were i present
ing her."
Sutton, of course, took in more things than even
appeared. " I never know what I ought to know ; I
only know, inveterately, what I oughtn t. So what is
the extraordinary story ? "
" You really haven t heard ? "
" Really," he replied without winking.
" It happened, indeed, but the other day," said Miss
60
THE TWO FACES
Banker, " yet everyone is already wondering. Gwyther
has thrown his wife on her mercy but I won t believe
you if yu pretend to me you don t know why he
shouldn t."
Sutton asked himself then what he could pretend.
" Do you mean because she s merciless ? "
She hesitated. " If you don t know, perhaps I
oughtn t to tell you."
He liked Miss Banker, and found just the right tone
to plead. " Do tell me."
" Well," she sighed, " it will be your own fault !
They had been such friends that there could have been
but one name for the crudity of his /original precede.
When I was a girl we used to call it throwing over.
They call it in French to lacker. But I refer not so
much to the act itself as to the manner of it, though you
may say indeed, of course, that there is in such cases,
after all, only one manner. Least said, soonest
mended."
Sutton seemed to wonder. " Oh, he said too
much ? "
" He said nothing. That was it."
Sutton kept it up. " But was what?
" Why, what she must, like any woman in her shoes,
have felt to be his perfidy. He simply went and did it
took to himself this child, that is, without the pre
liminary of a scandal or a rupture before she could
turn round."
" I follow you. But it would appear from what you
say that she has turned round now."
" Well," Miss Banker laughed, " we shall see for
ourselves how far. It will be what everyone will try
to see."
" Oh, then we ve work cut out ! " And Sutton cer
tainly felt that he himself had an impression that lost
nothing from a further talk with Miss Banker in the
course of a short stroll in the grounds with her the
61
THE BETTER SORT
next day. He spoke as one who had now considered
many things.
" Did I understand from you yesterday that Lady
Gwyther s a child ? "
" Nobody knows. It s prodigious the way she has
managed."
" The way Lady Gwyther has ? "
" No ; the way May Grantham has kept her till this
hour in her pocket."
He was quick at his watch. " Do you mean by this
hour that they re due now ? "
" Not till tea. All the others arrive together in time
for that." Miss Banker had clearly, since the previous
day, filled in gaps and become, as it were, revised and
enlarged. " She ll have kept a cat from seeing her,
so as to produce her entirely herself."
" Well," Sutton mused, " that will have been a very
noble sort of return "
" For Gwyther s behaviour ? Very. Yet I feel
creepy."
"Creepy?"
" Because so much depends for the girl in the way
of the right start or the wrong start on the signs
and omens of this first appearance. It s a great house
and a great occasion, and we re assembled here, it
strikes me, very much as the Roman mob at the circus
used to be to see the next Christian maiden brought
out to the tigers."
"Oh, if she is a Christian maiden !" Sutton
murmured. But he stopped at what his imagination
called up.
It perhaps fed that faculty a little that Miss Banker
had the effect of making out that Mrs. Grantham might
individually be, in any case, something of a Roman
matron. " She has kept her in the dark so that we
may only take her from her hand. She will have
formed her for us."
62
THE TWO FACES
" In so few days ? "
" Well, she will have prepared her decked her for
the sacrifice with ribbons and flowers."
" Ah, if you only mean that she will have taken her
to her dressmaker ! " And it came to Sutton, at
once as a new light and as a check, almost, to anxiety,
that this was all poor Gwyther, mistrustful probably
of a taste formed by Stuttgart, might have desired of
their friend.
There were usually at Burbeck many things taking
place at once ; so that wherever else, on such occasions,
tea might be served, it went forward with matchless
pomp, weather permitting, on a shaded stretch of one
of the terraces and in presence of one of the prospects.
Shirley Sutton, moving, as the afternoon waned, more
restlessly about and mingling in dispersed groups only
to find they had nothing to keep him quiet, came upon
it as he turned a corner of the house saw it seated
there in all its state. It might be said that at Burbeck
it was, like everything else, made the most of. It con
stituted immediately, with multiplied tables and glit
tering plate, with rugs and cushions and ices and fruit
and wonderful porcelain and beautiful women, a scene
of splendour, almost an incident of grand opera. One
of the beautiful women might quite have been expected
to rise with a gold cup and a celebrated song.
One of them did rise, as it happened, while Sutton
drew near, and he found himself a moment later seeing
nothing and nobody but Mrs. Grantham. They met
on the terrace, just away from the others, and the
movement in which he had the effect of arresting her
might have been that of withdrawal. He quickly
saw, however, that if she had been about to pass into
the house it was only on some errand to get some
thing or to call someone that would immediately have
restored her to the public. It somehow struck him
on the spot and more than ever yet, though the im-
63
THE BETTER SORT
pression was not wholly new to him that she felt
herself a figure for the forefront of the stage and in
deed would have been recognised by anyone at a glance
as the prima donna assoluta. She caused, in fact, dur
ing the few minutes he stood talking to her, an extraor
dinary series of waves to roll extraordinarily fast over
his sense, not the least mark of the matter being that
the appearance with which it ended was again the one
with which it had begun. " The face the face," as
he kept dumbly repeating ; that was at last, as at first,
all he could clearly see. She had a perfection resplen
dent, but what in the world had it done, this perfection,
to her beauty? It was her beauty, doubtless, that
looked out at him, but it was into something else that,
as their eyes met, he strangely found himself looking.
It was as if something had happened in consequence
of which she had changed, and there was that in this
swift perception that made him glance eagerly about
for Lady Gwyther. But as he took in the recruited
group identities of the hour added to those of the
previous twenty-four he saw, among his recognitions,
one of which was the husband of the person missing,
that Lady Gwyther was not there. Nothing in the
whole business was more singular than his conscious
ness that, as he came back to his interlocutress after
the nods and smiles and handwaves he had launched,
she knew what had been his thought. She knew for
whom he had looked without success ; but why should
this knowledge visibly have hardened and sharpened
her, and precisely at a moment when she was unprece-
dentedly magnificent? The indefinable apprehension
that had somewhat sunk after his second talk with
Miss Banker and then had perversely risen again this
nameless anxiety now produced on him, with a sudden
sharper pinch, the effect of a great suspense. The
action of that, in turn, was to show him that he had
not yet fully known how much he had at stake on a
THE TWO FACES
final view. It was revealed to him for the first time
that he " really cared " whether Mrs. Grantham were
a safe nature. It was too ridiculous by what a thread
it hung, but something was certainly in the air that
would definitely tell him.
What was in the air descended the next moment to
earth. He turned round as he caught the expression
with which her eyes attached themselves to something
that approached. A little person, very young and very
much dressed, had come out of the house, and the ex
pression in Mrs. Grantham s eyes was that of the
artist confronted with her work and interested, even to
impatience, in the judgment of others. The little per
son drew nearer, and though Sutton s companion, with
out looking at him now, gave it a name and met it,,
he had jumped for himself at certitude. He saw many
things too many, and they appeared to be feathers,
frills, excrescences of silk and lace massed together
and conflicting, and after a moment also saw strug
gling out of them a small face that struck him as either
scared or sick. Then, with his eyes again returning
to Mrs. Grantham, he saw another.
He had no more talk with Miss Banker till late that
evening an evening during which he had felt himself
too noticeably silent; but something had passed be
tween this pair, across dinner-table and drawing-room,
without speech, and when they at last found words it
was in the needed ease of a quiet end of the long,
lighted gallery, where she opened again at the very par
agraph.
" You were right that was it. She did the only
thing that, at such short notice, she could do. She
took her to her dressmaker."
Sutton, with his back to the reach of the gallery, had,
as if to banish a vision, buried his eyes for a minute
in his hands. " And oh, the face the face! "
" Which? " Miss Banker asked.
65
THE BETTER SORT
" Whichever one looks at."
" But May Grantham s glorious. She has turned
herself out -"
" With a splendour of taste and a sense of effect, eh ?
" Yes." Sutton showed he saw far.
" She has the sense of effect. The sense of effect as
exhibited in Lady Gwyther s clothes ! " was some
thing Miss Banker failed of words to express. " Every
body s overwhelmed. Here, you know, that sort of
thing s grave. The poor creature s lost."
"Lost?"
" Since on the first impression, as we said, so much
depends. The first impression s made oh, made! I
defy her now ever to unmake it. Her husband, who s
proud, won t like her the better for it. And I don t
see," Miss Banker went on, " that her prettiness was
enough a mere little feverish, frightened freshness;
what did he see in her? to be so blasted. It has been
done with an atrocity of art "
That supposes the dressmaker then also a devil ? "
" Oh, your London women and their dressmakers ! "
Miss Banker laughed.
" But the face the face ! " Sutton woefully repeated.
"May s?"
" The little gin s. It s exquisite."
"Exquisite?"
" For unimaginable pathos."
" Oh ! " Miss Banker dropped.
" She has at last begun to see." Sutton showed
again how far he saw. " It glimmers upon her inno
cence, she makes it dimly out what has been done with
her. She s even worse this evening the way, my eye,
she looked at dinner ! than when she came. Yes "
he was confident " it has dawned (how couldn t it,
out of all of you?) and she knows."
" She ought to have known before ! " Miss Banker
intelligently sighed.
66
THE TWO FACES
" No ; she wouldn t in that case have been so beauti
ful."
" Beautiful? " cried Miss Banker; " overloaded like
a monkey in a show ! "
" The face, yes ; which goes to the heart. It s that
that makes it," said Shirley Sutton. " And it s that "
he thought it out " that makes the other."
" I see. Conscious? "
"Horrible!"
" You take it hard," said Miss Banker.
Lord Gwyther, just before she spoke, had come in
sight and now was near them. Sutton on this, appear
ing to wish to avoid him, reached, before answering his
companion s observation, a door that opened close at
hand. " So hard," he replied from that point, " that
I shall be off to-morrow morning."
" And not see the rest? " she called after him.
But he had already gone, and Lord Gwyther, arriv
ing, amiably took up her question. " The rest of
what?"
Miss Banker looked him well in the eyes. " Of Mrs.
Granthanrs clothes."
THE TONE OF TIME
I WAS too pleased with what it struck me that, as
an old, old friend, I had done for her, not to go
to her that very afternoon with the news. I knew she
worked late, as in general I also did; but I sacrificed
for her sake a good hour of the February daylight.
She was in her studio, as I had believed she would be,
where her card ("Mary J. Tredick " not Mary Jane,
but Mary Juliana) was manfully on the door; a little
tired, a little old and a good deal spotted, but with her
ugly spectacles taken off^as soon as I appeared, to greet
me. She kept on, while she scraped her palette and
wiped her brushes, the big stained apron that covered
her from head to foot and that I have often enough
before seen her retain in conditions giving the measure
of her renunciation of her desire to dazzle. Every fresh
reminder of this brought home to me that she had
given up everything but her work, and that there had
been in her history some reason. But I was as far
from the reason as ever. She had given up too much ;
this was just why one wanted to lend her a hand. I
told her, at any rate, that I had a lovely job for her.
" To copy something I do like? "
Her complaint, I knew, was that people only gave
orders, if they gave them at all, for things she did not
like. But this wasn t a case of copying not at all, at
least, in the common sense. " It s for a portrait
quite in the air."
68
THE TONE OF TIME
" Ah, you do portraits yourself ! "
" Yes, and you know how. My trick won t serve
for this. What s wanted is a pretty picture."
"Then of whom?"
"Of nobody. That is of anybody. Anybody you like."
She naturally wondered. " Do you mean I m my
self to choose my sitter? "
" Well, the oddity is that there is to be no sitter."
" Whom then is the picture to represent? "
" Why, a handsome, distinguished, agreeable man,
of not more than forty, clean-shaven, thoroughly well-
dressed, and a perfect gentleman."
She continued to stare. " And I m to find him my
self?"
I laughed at the term she used. Yes, as you find
the canvas, the colours and the frame." After which
I immediately explained. " I ve just had the rum-
mest visit, the effect of which was to make me think
of you. A lady, unknown to me and unintroduced,
turned up at my place at three o clock. She had come
straight, she let me know, without preliminaries, on
account of one s high reputation the usual thing and
of her having admired one s work. Of course I in
stantly saw I mean I saw it as soon as she named
her affair that she hadn t understood my work at
all. What am I good for in the world but just the
impression of the given, the presented case? I can
do but the face I see."
" And do you think I can do the face I don t? "
" No, but you see so many more. You see them in
fancy and memory, and they ve come out, for you, from
all the museums you ve haunted and all the great things
you ve studied. I know you ll be able to see the one
my visitor wants and to give it what s the crux of the
business the tone of time."
She turned the question over. " What does she want
it for?"
69
THE BETTER SORT
" Just for that for the tone of time. And, except
that it s to hang over her chimney, she didn t tell me.
I ve only my idea that it s to represent, to symbolise,
as it were, her husband, who s not alive and who per
haps never was. This is exactly what will give you a
free hand."
" With nothing to go by no photographs or other
portraits ? "
" Nothing."
" She only proposes to describe him ? "
" Not even ; she wants the picture itself to do that.
Her only condition is that he be a tres-bel homme"
She had begun at last, a little thoughtfully, to remove
her apron. " Is she French ? "
" I don t know. I give it up. She calls herself Mrs.
Bridgenorth."
Mary wondered. " Connais pas! I never heard of
her."
" You wouldn t."
" You mean it s not her real name ? "
I hesitated. " I mean that she s a very downright
fact, full of the implication that she ll pay a down
right price. It s clear to me that you can ask what
you like; and it s therefore a chance that I can t con
sent to your missing." My friend gave no sign either
way, and I told my story. " She s a woman of fifty,
perhaps of more, who has been pretty, and who still
presents herself, with her grey hair a good deal pow
dered, as I judge, to carry it off, extraordinarily well.
She was a little frightened and a little free; the latter
because of the former. But she did uncommonly well,
I thought, considering the oddity of her wish. This
oddity she quite admits ; she began indeed by insisting
on it so in advance that I found myself expecting I
didn t know what. She broke at moments into French,
which was perfect, but no better than her English,
which isn t vulgar; not more at least than that of
70
THE TONE OF TIME
everybody else. The things people do say, and the
way they say them, to artists ! She wanted immensely,
I could see, not to fail of her errand, not to be treated
as absurd; and she was extremely grateful to me for
meeting her so far as I did. She was beautifully
dressed and she came in a brougham."
My listener took it in ; then, very quietly, " Is she
respectable? " she inquired.
"Ah, there you are!" I laughed; "and how you
always pick the point right out, even when one has
endeavoured to diffuse a specious glamour ! She s ex
traordinary," I pursued after an instant; "and just
what she wants of the picture, I think, is to make her
a little less so."
" Who is she, then ? What is she ? " my companion
simply went on.
It threw me straightway back on one of my hobbies.
" Ah, my dear, what is so interesting as life ? What
is, above all, so stupendous as London ? There s every
thing in it, everything in the world, and nothing too
amazing not some day to pop out at you. What is a
woman, faded, preserved, pretty, powdered, vague,
odd, dropping on one without credentials, but with a
carriage and very good lace? What is such a person
but a person who may have had adventures, and have
made them, in one way or another, pay? They re,
however, none of one s business; it s scarcely on the
cards that one should ask her. I should like, with Mrs.
Bridgenorth, to see a fellow ask! She goes in for
propriety, the real thing. If I suspect her of being the
creation of her own talents, she has clearly, on the
other hand, seen a lot of life. Will you meet her? " I
next demanded.
My hostess waited. " No."
"Then you won t try?"
"Need I meet her to try?" And the question
made me guess that, so far as she had understood, she
71
THE BETTER SORT
began to feel herself a little taken. " It seems strange,"
she none the less mused, " to attempt to please her on
such a basis. To attempt," she presently added, " to
please her at all. It s your idea that she s not mar
ried?" she, with this, a trifle inconsequently asked.
" Well," I replied, " I ve only had an hour to think
of it, but I somehow already see the scene. Not im
mediately, not the day after, or even perhaps the year
after the thing she desires is set up there, but in due
process of time and on convenient opportunity, the
transfiguration will occur. Who is that awfully hand
some man ? l That ? Oh, that s an old sketch of my
dear dead husband. Because I told her insidiously
sounding her that she would want it to look old, and
that the tone of time is exactly what you re full of."
" I believe I am," Mary sighed at last.
" Then put on your hat." I had proposed to her on
my arrival to come out to tea with me, and it was
when left alone in the studio while she went to her
room that I began to feel sure of the success of my
errand. The vision that had an hour before deter
mined me grew deeper and brighter for her while I
moved about and looked at her things. There were
more of them there on her hands than one liked to see ;
but at least they sharpened my confidence, which was
pleasant for me in view of that of my visitor, who had
accepted without reserve my plea for Miss Tredick.
Four or five of her copies of famous portraits orna
ments of great public and private collections were on
the walls, and to see them again together was to feel
at ease about my guarantee. The mellow manner of
them was what I had had in my mind in saying, to
excuse myself to Mrs. Bridgenorth, " Oh, my things,
you know, look as if they had been painted to-mor
row ! " It made no difference that Mary s Vandykes
and Gainsboroughs were reproductions and replicas,
for I had known her more than once to amuse herself
72
THE TONE OF TIME
with doing the thing quite, as she called it, off her
own bat. She had copied so bravely so many brave
things that she had at the end of her brush an extraor
dinary bag of tricks. She had always replied to me
that such things were mere clever humbug, but mere
clever humbug was what our client happened to want.
The thing was to let her have it one could trust her
for the rest. And at the same time that I mused in
this way I observed to myself that there was already
something more than, as the phrase is, met the eye In
such response as I felt my friend had made. I had
touched, without intention, more than one spring; I
had set in motion more than one impulse. I found
myself indeed quite certain of this after she had come
back in her hat and her jacket. She was different
her idea had flowered ; and she smiled at me from un
der her tense veil, while she drew over her firm, narrow
hands a pair of fresh gloves, with a light distinctly
new. " Please tell your friend that I m greatly obliged
to both of you and that I take the order."
" Good. And to give him all his good looks? "
" It s just to do that that I accept. I shall make him
supremely beautiful and supremely base."
" Base? " I just demurred.
" The finest gentleman you ll ever have seen, and the
worst friend."
I wondered, as I was startled; but after an instant
I laughed for joy. " Ah well, so long as he s not mine !
I see we shall have him," I said as we went, for truly
I had touched a spring. In fact I had touched the
spring.
It rang, more or less, I was presently to find, all over
the place. I went, as I had promised, to report to Mrs.
Bridgenorth on my mission, and though she declared
herself much gratified at the success of it I could see
she a little resented the apparent absence of any
desire on Miss Tredick s part for a preliminary con-
73
THE BETTER SORT
ference. " I only thought she might have liked just
to see me, and have imagined I might like to see her."
But I was full of comfort. " You ll see her when
it s finished. You ll see her in time to thank her."
" And to pay her, I suppose," my hostess laughed,
with an asperity that was, after all, not excessive.
" Will she take very long? "
I thought. " She s so full of it that my impression
would be that she ll do it off at a heat."
" She is full of it then ? " she asked ; and on hearing
to what tune, though I told her but half, she broke out
with admiration. " You artists are the most extraor
dinary people ! " It was almost with a bad conscience
that I confessed we indeed were, and while she said
that what she meant was that we seemed to understand
everything, and I rejoined that this was also what 7
meant, she took me into another room to see the place
for the picture a proceeding of which the effect was
singularly to confirm the truth in question. The place
for the picture in her own room, as she called it, a
boudoir at the back, overlooking the general garden of
the approved modern row and, as she said, only just
wanting that touch proved exactly the place (the
space of a large panel in the white woodwork over the
mantel) that I had spoken of to my friend. She put
it quite candidly, "Don t you see what it will do?"
and looked at me, wonderfully, as for a sign that I
could sympathetically take from her what she didn t
literally say. She said it, poor woman, so very nearly
that I had no difficulty whatever. The portrait, taste
fully enshrined there, of the finest gentleman one should
ever have seen, would do even more for herself than
it would do for the room.
I may as well mention at once that my observation
of Mrs. Bridgenorth was not in the least of a nature
to unseat me from the hobby I have already named.
In the light of the impression she made on me life
74
THE TONE OF TIME
seemed quite as prodigious and London quite as amaz
ing as I had ever contended, and nothing could have
been more in the key of that experience than the manner
in which everything was vivid between us and nothing
expressed. We remained on the surface with the ten
acity of shipwrecked persons clinging to a plank. Our
plank was our concentrated gaze at Mrs. Bridgenorth s
mere present. We allowed her past to exist for us only
in the form of the prettiness that she had gallantly res
cued from it and to which a few scraps of its identity
still adhered. She was amiable, gentle, consistently
proper. She gave me more than anything else the
sense, simply, of waiting. She was like a house so
freshly and successfully " done up " that you were sur
prised it wasn t occupied. She was waiting for some
thing to happen for somebody to come. She was
waiting, above all, for Mary Tredick s work. She
clearly counted that it would help her.
I had foreseen the fact the picture was produced
at a heat; rapidly, directly, at all events, for the sort
of thing it proved to be. I left my friend alone at first,
left the ferment to work, troubling her with no ques
tions and asking her for no news ; two or three weeks
passed, and I never went near her. Then at last, one
afternoon as the light was failing, I looked in. She
immediately knew what I wanted. " Oh yes, I m
doing him."
" Well," I said, " I ve respected your intensity, but
I have felt curious."
I may not perhaps say that she was never so sad as
when she laughed, but it s certain that she always
laughed when she was sad. When, however, poor
dear, for that matter, was she, secretly, not? Her
little gasps of mirth were the mark of her worst mo
ments. But why should she have one of these just
now ? " Oh, I know your curiosity ! " she replied to
me ; and the small chill of her amusement scarcely met
n
THE BETTER SORT
it. " He s coming out, but I can t show him to you yet.
I must muddle it through in my own way. It has in
sisted on being, after all, a * likeness, " she added.
But nobody will ever know."
"Nobody?"
" Nobody she sees."
" Ah, she doesn t, poor thing," I returned, " seem to
see anybody ! "
" So much the better. I ll risk it." On which I felt
I should have to wait, though I had suddenly grown
impatient. But I still hung about, and while I did so
she explained. " If what I ve done is really a portrait,
the condition itself prescribed it. If I was to do the
most beautiful man in the world I could do but one."
We looked at each other ; then I laughed. " It can
scarcely be me! But you re getting," I asked, " the
great thing? "
" The infamy? Oh yes, please God."
It took away my breath a little, and I even for the
moment scarce felt at liberty to press. But one could
always be cheerful. " What I meant is the tone of
time."
" Getting it, my dear man ? Didn t I get it long
ago? Don t I show it the tone of time?" she sud
denly, strangely sighed at me, with something in her
face I had never yet seen. " I can t give it to him
more than for all these years he was to have given
it to me."
I scarce knew what smothered passion, what remem
bered wrong, what mixture of joy and pain my words
had accidentally quickened. Such an effect of them
could only become, for me, an instant pity, which, how
ever, I brought out but indirectly. " It s the tone," I
smiled, " in which you re speaking now."
This served, unfortunately, as something of a check.
" I didn t mean to speak now." Then with her eyes
on the picture, " I ve said everything there. Come
back," she added, " in three days. He ll be all right."
76
THE TONE OF TIME
He was indeed when at last I saw him. She had
produced an extraordinary thing a thing wonderful,
ideal, for the part it was to play. My only reserve,
from the first, was that it was too fine for its part, that
something much less " sincere " would equally have
served Mrs. Bridgenorth s purpose, and that relega
tion to that lady s " own room " whatever charm it
was to work there might only mean for it cruel ob
scurity. The picture is before me now, so that I could
describe it if description availed. It represents a man
of about five-and-thirty, seen only as to the head and
shoulders, but dressed, the observer gathers, in a fash
ion now almost antique and which was far from con
temporaneous with the date of the work. His high,
slightly narrow face, which would be perhaps too
aquiline but for the beauty of the forehead and the
sweetness of the mouth, has a charm that even, after
all these years, still stirs my imagination. His type has
altogether a distinction that you feel to have been firmly
caught and yet not vulgarly emphasised. The eyes are
just too near together, but they are, in a wondrous
way, both careless and intense, while lip, cheek, and
chin, smooth and clear, are admirably drawn. Youth
is still, you see, in all his presence, the joy and pride
of life, the perfection of a high spirit and the expecta
tion of a great fortune, which he takes for granted
with unconscious insolence. Nothing has ever hap
pened to humiliate or disappoint him, and if my fancy
doesn t run away with me the whole presentation of
him is a guarantee that he will die without having
suffered. He is so handsome, in short, that you can
scarcely say what he means, and so happy that you can
scarcely guess what he feels.
It is of course, I hasten to add, an appreciably fem
inine rendering, light, delicate, vague, imperfectly syn
thetic insistent and evasive, above all, in the wrong
places ; but the composition, none the less, is beautiful
77
THE BETTER SORT
and the suggestion infinite. The grandest air of the
thing struck me in fact, when first I saw it, as coming
from the high artistic impertinence with which it of
fered itself as painted about 1850. It would have been
a rare flower of refinement for that dark day. The
" tone " that of such a past as it pretended to was
there almost to excess, a brown bloom into which the
image seemed mysteriously to retreat. The subject of
it looks at me now across more years and more knowl
edge, but what I felt at the moment was that he man
aged to be at once a triumphant trick and a plaus
ible evocation. He hushed me, I remember, with
so many kinds of awe that I shouldn t have dreamt of
asking who he was. All I said, after my first incoher
ences of wonder at my friend s practised skill, was:
" And you ve arrived at this truth without docu
ments ? "
" It depends on what you call documents."
" Without notes, sketches, studies? "
" I destroyed them years ago."
" Then you once had them? "
She just hung fire. " I once had everything."
It told me both more and less than I had asked;
enough at all events to make my next question, as I
uttered it, sound even to myself a little foolish. " So
that it s all memory? "
From where she stood she looked once more at her
work ; after which she jerked away and, taking several
steps, came back to me with something new whatever
it was I had already seen in her air and answer.
" It s all hate! " she threw at me, and then went out of
the room. It was not till she had gone that I quite
understood why. Extremely affected by the impression
visibly made on me, she had burst into tears but had
wished me not to see them. She left me alone for
some time with her wonderful subject, and I again, in
her absence, made things out. He was dead he had
78
THE TONE OF TIME
been dead for years; the sole humiliation, as I have
called it, that he was to know had come to him in
that form. The canvas held and cherished him, in any
case, as it only holds the dead. She had suffered from
him, it came to me, the worst that a woman can suffer,
and the wound he had dealt her, though hidden, had
never effectually healed. It had bled again while she
worked. Yet when she at last reappeared there was
but one thing to say. " The beauty, heaven knows,
I see. But I don t see w r hat you call the infamy."
She gave him a last look again she turned away.
" Oh, he was like that."
" Well, whatever he was like," I remember replying,
" I wonder you can bear to part with him. Isn t it
better to let her see the picture first here? "
As to this she doubted. " I don t think I want her
to come."
I wondered. " You continue to object so to meet
her?"
" What good will it do ? It s quite impossible I
should alter him for her."
" Oh, she won t want that! " I laughed. " She ll
adore him as he is."
" Are you quite sure of your idea ? "
" That he s to figure as Mr. Bridgenorth? Well, if
I hadn t been from the first, my dear lady, I should be
now. Fancy, with the chance, her not jumping at him !
Yes, he ll figure as Mr. Bridgenorth."
" Mr. Bridgenorth ! " she echoed, making the sound,
with her small, cold laugh, grotesquely poor for him.
He might really have been a prince, and I wondered if
he hadn t been. She had, at all events, a new notion.
" Do you mind my having it taken to your place and
letting her come to see it there?" Which as I im
mediately embraced her proposal, deferring to her rea
sons, whatever they were was what was speedily ar
ranged.
79
THE BETTER SORT
II
THE next day therefore I had the picture in charge,
and on the following Mrs. Bridgenorth, whom I had
notified, arrived. I had placed it, framed and on an
easel, well in evidence, and I have never forgotten the
look and the cry that, as she became aware of it, leaped
into her face and from her lips. It was an extraor
dinary moment, all the more that it found me quite
unprepared so extraordinary that I scarce knew at
first what had happened. By the time I really per
ceived, moreover, more things had happened than one,
so that when I pulled myself together it was to face
the situation as a whole. She had recognised on the
instant the subject; that came first and was irrepres-
sibly vivid in her. Her recognition had, for the length
of a flash, lighted for her the possibility that the stroke
had been directed. That came second, and she flushed
with it as with a blow in the face. What came third
and it was what was really most wondrous was the
quick instinct of getting both her strange recognition
and her blind suspicion well in hand. She couldn t
control, however, poor woman, the strong colour in her
face and the quick tears in her eyes. She could only
glare at the canvas, gasping, grimacing, and try to gain
time. Whether in surprise or in resentment she in
tensely reflected, feeling more than anything else how
little she might prudently show; and I was conscious
even at the moment that nothing of its kind could have
been finer than her effort to swallow her shock in ten
seconds.
How many seconds she took I didn t measure;
enough, assuredly, for me also to profit. I gained
more time than she, and the greatest oddity doubtless
was my own private manoeuvre the quickest calcula
tion that, acting from a mere confused instinct, I had
80
THE TONE OF TIME
ever made. If she had known the great gentleman
represented there and yet had determined on the spot
to carry herself as ignorant, all my loyalty to Mary
Tredick came to the surface in a prompt counter-move.
What gave me opportunity was the red in her cheek.
" Why, you ve known him ! "
I saw her ask herself for an instant if she mightn t
successfully make her startled state pass as the mere
glow of pleasure her natural greeting to her acquisi
tion. She was pathetically, yet at the same time almost
comically, divided. Her line was so to cover her tracks
that every avowal of a past connection was a danger;
but it also concerned her safety to learn, in the light of
our astounding coincidence, how far she already stood
exposed. She meanwhile begged the question. She
smiled through her tears. " He s too magnificent ! "
But I gave her, as I say, all too little time. " Who
is he? Who wo? he?"
It must have been my look still more than my words
that determined her. She wavered but an instant
longer, panted, laughed, cried again, and then, drop
ping into the nearest seat, gave herself up so com
pletely that I was almost ashamed. " Do you think
I d tell you his name? " The burden of the backward
years all the effaced and ignored lived again, al
most like an accent unlearned but freshly breaking out
at a touch, in the very sound of the words. These per
ceptions she, however, the next thing showed me, were
a game at which two could play. She had to look at
me but an instant. " Why, you really don t know it ! "
I judged best to be frank. " I don t know it."
" Then how does she? "
" How do you ? " I laughed. " I m a different mat
ter."
She sat a minute turning things round, staring at
the picture. " The likeness, the likeness ! " It was
almost too much.
81
THE BETTER SORT
"It s so true?"
" Beyond everything."
I considered. " But a resemblance to a known in
dividual that wasn t what you wanted."
She sprang up at this in eager protest. " Ah, no
one else would see it."
I showed again, I fear, my amusement. " No one
but you and she ? "
" It s her doing him! " She was held by her wonder.
" Doesn t she, on your honour, know ? "
That his is the very head you would have liked if
you had dared? Not a bit. How should she? She
knows nothing on my honour."
Mrs. Bridgenorth continued to marvel. " She just
painted him for the kind of face ? "
That corresponds with my description of what you
wished ? Precisely."
" But hozv after so long? From memory? As a
friend?"
" As a reminiscence yes. Visual memory, you see,
in our uncanny race, is wonderful. As the ideal thing,
simply, for your purpose. You are then suited ? " I,
after an instant added.
She had again been gazing, and at this turned her
eyes on me; but I saw she couldn t speak, couldn t do
more at least than sound, unutterably, " Suited ! " so
that I was positively not surprised when suddenly
just as Mary had done, the power to produce this effect
seeming a property of the model she burst into tears.
I feel no harsher in relating it, however I may appear,
than I did at the moment, but it is a fact that while
she just wept I literally had a fresh inspiration on be
half of Miss Tredick s interests. I knew exactly, more
over, before my companion had recovered herself, what
she w r ould next ask me ; and I consciously brought this
appeal on in order to have it over. I explained that
I had not the least idea of the identity of our artist s
82
THE TONE OF TIME
sitter, to which she had given me no clue. I had noth
ing but my impression that she had known him known
him well; and, from whatever material she had
worked, the fact of his having also been known to Mrs.
Bridgenorth was a coincidence pure and simple. It
partook of the nature of prodigy, but such prodigies did
occur. My visitor listened with avidity and credulity.
She was so far reassured. Then I saw her question
come. " Well, if she doesn t dream he was ever any
thing to me or what he will be now I m going to
ask you, as a very particular favour, never to tell her.
She will want to know of course exactly how I ve
been struck. You ll naturally say that I m delighted,
but may I exact from you that you say nothing else? "
There was supplication in her face, but I had to
think. " There are conditions I must put to you first,
and one of them is also a question, only more frank
than yours. Was this mysterious personage frustrat
ed by death to have married you ? "
She met it bravely. " Certainly, if he had lived."
I was only amused at an artlessness in her " certain
ly." " Very good. But why do you wish the coin
cidence
" Kept from her? " She knew exactly why. " Be
cause if she suspects it she won t let me have the picture.
Therefore," she added with decision, " you must let
me pay for it on the spot."
" What do you mean by on the spot ? "
" I ll send you a cheque as soon as I get home."
" Oh," I laughed, " let us understand. Why do you
consider she won t let you have the picture ? "
She made me wait a little for this, but when it came
it was perfectly lucid. " Because she ll then see how
much more I must want it."
" How much less wouldn t it be rather, since tHe
bargain was, as the more convenient thing, not for a
likeness?"
83
THE BETTER SORT
" Oh," said Mrs. Bridgenorth with impatience, " the
likeness will take care of itself. She ll put this and that
together." Then she brought out her real apprehen
sion. " She ll be jealous."
".Oh ! " I laughed. But I was startled.
"She ll hate me!"
I wondered. " But I don t think she liked him."
" Don t think? " She stared at me, with her echo,
over all that might be in it, then seemed to find little
enough. " I say I "
It was almost comically the old Mrs. Bridgenorth.
" But I gather from her that he was bad."
" Then what was she? "
I barely hesitated. " What were you? "
" That s my own business." And she turned again
to the picture. " He was good enough for her to dc
that of him."
I took it in once more. " Artistically speaking, for
the way it s done, it s one of the most curious things
I ve ever seen."
" It s a grand treat ! " said poor Mrs. Bridgenorth
more simply.
It was, it is really ; which is exactly what made the
case so interesting. " Yet I feel somehow that, as I
say, it wasn t done with love."
It was wonderful how she understood. " It was
done with rage."
" Then what have you to fear? "
She knew again perfectly. " What happened when
he made me jealous. So much," she declared, " that
if you ll give me your word for silence "
" Well ? "
" Why, I ll double the money."
" Oh," I replied, taking a turn about in the excite
ment of our concurrence, " that s exactly what to do
a still better stroke for her it had just come to me
to propose ! "
84
THE TONE OF TIME
" It s understood then, on your oath, as a gentle
man? " She was so eager that practically this settled
it, though I moved to and fro a little while she watched
me in suspense. It vibrated all round us that she had
gone out to the thing in a stifled flare, that a whole
close relation had in the few minutes revived. We
know it of the truly amiable person that he will strain
a point for another that he wouldn t strain for himself.
The stroke to put in for Mary was positively pre
scribed. The work represented really much more than
had been covenanted, and if the purchaser chose so to
value it this was her own affair. I decided. " If it s
understood also on your word."
We were so at one that we shook hands on it. " And
when may I send ? "
" Well, I shall see her this evening. Say early to
morrow."
" Early to-morrow." And I went with her to her
brougham, into which, I remember, as she took leave,
she expressed regret that she mightn t then and there
have introduced the canvas for removal. I consoled
her with remarking that she couldn t have got it in
which was not quite true.
I saw Mary Tredick before dinner, and though I
was not quite ideally sure of my present ground with
her I instantly brought out my news. " She s so de
lighted that I felt I must in conscience do something
still better for you. She s not to have it on the original
terms. I ve put up the price."
Mary wondered. " But to what? "
" Well, to four hundred. If you say so, I ll try even
for five."
" Oh, she ll never give that."
" I beg your pardon."
"After the agreement?" She looked grave. "I
don t like such leaps and bounds."
" But, my dear child, they re yours. You contracted
85
THE BETTER SORT
for a decorative trifle, and you ve produced a breathing
masterpiece."
She thought. " Is that what she calls it? " Then,
as having to think too, I hesitated, " What does she
know ? " she pursued.
" She knows she wants it."
" So much as that ? "
At this I had to brace myself a little. " So much that
she ll send me the cheque this afternoon, and that you ll
have mine by the first post in the morning."
" Before she has even received the picture ? "
" Oh, she ll send for it to-morrow." And as I was
dining out and had still to dress, my time was up.
Mary came with me to the door, where I repeated my
assurance. " You shall receive my cheque by the first
post." To which I added : " If it s little enough for
a lady so much in need to pay for any husband, it isn t
worth mentioning as the price of such a one as you ve
given her ! "
I was in a hurry, but she held me. " Then you ve
felt your idea confirmed ? "
"My idea?"
" That that s what I have given her ? "
I suddenly fancied I had perhaps gone too far; but
I had kept my cab and was already in it. " Well, put
it," I called with excess of humour over the front,
" that you ve, at any rate, given him a wife ! "
When on my return from dinner that night I let
myself in, my first care, in my dusty studio, was to
make light for another look at Mary s subject. I felt
the impulse to bid him good night, but, to my aston
ishment, he was no longer there. His place was a
void he had already disappeared. I saw, however,
after my first surprise, what had happened saw it
moreover, frankly, with some relief. As my servants
were in bed I could ask no questions, but it was clear
that Mrs. Bridgenorth, whose note, containing its
86
THE TONE OF TIME
cheque, lay on my table, had been after all unable to
wait. The note, I found, mentioned nothing but the
enclosure; but it had come by hand, and it was her
silence that told the tale. Her messenger had been in
structed to " act " ; he had come with a vehicle, he
had transferred to it canvas and frame. The prize
was now therefore landed and the incident closed. I
didn t altogether, the next morning, know why, but I
had slept the better for the sense of these things, and
as soon as my attendant came in I asked for details.
It was on this that his answer surprised me. " No,
sir, there was no man ; she came herself. She had only
a four-wheeler, but I helped her, and we got it in. It
was a squeeze, sir, but she would take it."
I wondered. " She had a four-wheeler? and not
her servant? "
" No, no, sir. She came, as you may say, single-
handed."
" And not even in her brougham, which would have
been larger."
My man, with his habit, weighed it. " But have she
a brougham, sir ? "
" Why, the one she was here in yesterday."
Then light broke. " Oh, that lady! It wasn t her,
sir. It was Miss Tredick."
Light broke, but darkness a little followed it a
darkness that, after breakfast, guided my steps back
to my friend. There, in its own first place, 1 met her
creation ; but I saw it would be a different thing meet
ing her. She immediately put down on a table, as if
she had expected me, the cheque I had sent her over
night. " Yes, I ve brought it away. And I can t take
the money."
I found myself in despair. You want to keep
him?"
" I don t understand what has happened."
"You just back out?"
87
THE BETTER SORT
" I don t understand," she repeated, " what has hap
pened." But what I had already perceived was, on
the contrary, that she very nearly, that she in fact quite
remarkably, did understand. It was as if in my zeal
I had given away my case, and I felt that my test
was coming. She had been thinking all night with
intensity, and Mrs. Bridgenorth s generosity, coupled
with Mrs. Bridgenorth s promptitude, had kept her
awake. Thence, for a woman nervous and critical,
imaginations, visions, questions. " Why, in writing
me last night, did you take for granted it was she who
had swooped down? Why," asked Mary Tredick,
" should she swoop? "
Well, if I could drive a bargain for Mary, I felt I
could a fortiori lie for her. " Because it s her way.
She does swoop. She s impatient and uncontrolled.
And it s affectation for you to pretend," I said with
diplomacy, " that you see no reason for her falling in
love "
" Falling in love? " She took me straight up.
" With that gentleman. Certainly. What woman
wouldn t? What woman didn t? I really don t see,
you know, your right to back out."
" I won t back out," she presently returned, "if
you ll answer me a question. Does she know the man
represented ? " Then as I hung fire : " It has come to
me that she must. It would account for so much. For
the strange way I feel," she went on, " and for the
extraordinary sum you ve been able to extract from
her."
It was a pity, and I flushed with it, besides wincing
at the word she used. But Mrs. Bridgenorth and I,
between us, had clearly made the figure too high.
" You think that, if she had guessed, I would naturally
work it to extract more ? "
She turned away from me on this and, looking blank
in her trouble, moved vaguely about. Then she
88
THE TONE OF TIME
stopped. " I see him set up there. I hear her say it.
What you said she would make him pass for."
I believe I foolishly tried though only for an in
stant to look as if I didn t remember what I had said.
"Her husband?"
" He wasn t."
The next minute I had risked it. " Was he yours ? "
I don t know what I had expected, but I found my
self surprised at her mere pacific head-shake. " No."
" Then why mayn t he have been ? "
" Another woman s ? Because he died, to my abso
lute knowledge, unmarried." She spoke as quietly.
" He had known many women, and there was one in
particular with whom he became and too long re
mained ruinously intimate. She tried to make him
marry her, and he was very near it. Death, however,
saved him. But she was the reason "
" Yes? " I feared again from her a wave of pain,
and I went on while she kept it back. " Did you know
her?"
" She was one I wouldn t." Then she brought it
out. " She was the reason he failed me." Her suc
cessful detachment somehow said all, reduced me to a
flat, kind " Oh! " that marked my sense of her telling
me, against my expectation, more than I knew what
to do with. But it was just while I wondered how to
turn her confidence that she repeated, in a changed
voice, her challenge of a moment before. " Does she
know the man represented ? "
" I haven t the least idea." And having so acquitted
myself I added, with what strikes me now as futility :
" She certainly yesterday didn t name him."
" Only recognised him? "
" If she did she brilliantly concealed it."
" So that you got nothing from her ? "
It was a question that offered me a certain advantage.
" I thought you accused me of getting too much."
89
THE BETTER SORT
She gave me a long look, and I now saw everything
in her face. " It s very nice what you re doing for
me, and you do it handsomely. It s beautiful beauti
ful, and I thank you with all my heart. But I know."
" And what do you know ? "
She went about now preparing her usual work.
" What he must have been to her."
" You mean she was the person? "
" Well," she said, putting on her old spectacles,
" she was one of them."
" And you accept so easily the astounding coinci
dence ?"
" Of my finding myself, after years, in so extraor
dinary a relation with her? What do you call easily?
I ve passed a night of torment."
" But what put it into your head ? "
" That I had so blindly and strangely given him
back to her ? You put it yesterday."
"And how?"
" I can t tell you. You didn t in the least mean to
on the contrary. But you dropped the seed. The
plant, after you had gone," she said with a business
like pull at her easel, " the plant began to grow. I
saw them there in your studio face to face."
" You were jealous ? " I laughed.
She gave me through her glasses another look, and
they seemed, from this moment, in their queerness, to
have placed her quite on the other side of the gulf of
time. She was firm there ; she was settled ; I couldn t
get at her now. "I see she told you I would be." I
doubtless kept down too little my start at it, and she
immediately pursued. " You say I accept the coinci
dence, which is of course prodigious. But such things
happen. Why shouldn t I accept it if you do ? "
"Do I? "I smiled.
She began her work in silence, but she presently ex
claimed : " I m glad I didn t meet her! "
90
THE TONE OF TIME
" I don t yet see why you wouldn t."
" Neither do I. It was an instinct."
" Your instincts " I tried to be ironic " are mi
raculous."
" They have to be, to meet such accidents. I must
ask you kindly to tell her, when you return her gift,
that now I have done the picture I find I must after
all keep it for myself."
" Giving no reason ? "
She painted away. " She ll know the reason."
Well, by this time I knew it too; I knew so many
things that I fear my resistance was weak. If our
wonderful client hadn t been his wife in fact, she was
not to be helped to become his wife in fiction. I knew
almost more than I can say, more at any rate than
I could then betray. He had been bound in common
mercy to stand by my friend, and he had basely for
saken her. This indeed brought up the obscure, into
which I shyly gazed. ;< Why, even granting your
theory, should you grudge her the portrait? It was
painted in bitterness."
Yes. Without that ! "
" It wouldn t have come ? Precisely. Is it in bitter
ness, then, you ll keep it ? "
She looked up from her canvas. " In what would
you keep it? "
It made me jump. " Do you mean I may? Then
I had my idea. " I d give you her price for it ! "
Her smile through her glasses was beautiful. " And
afterwards make it over to her? You shall have it
when I die." With which she came away from her
easel, and I saw that I was staying her work and
should properly go. So I put out my hand to her. " It
took whatever you will ! to paint it," she said, " but
I shall keep it in joy." I could answer nothing now
had to cease to pretend ; the thing was in her hands.
For a moment we stood there, and I had again the
91
THE BETTER SORT
sense, melancholy and final, of her being, as it were,
remotely glazed and fixed into what she had done.
" He s taken from me, and for all those years he s kept.
Then she herself, by a prodigy ! " She lost her
self again in the wonder of it.
" Unwittingly gives him back? "
She fairly, for an instant over the marvel, closed her
eyes. " Gives him back."
Then it was I saw how he would be kept! But it
was the end of my vision. I could only write, rueful
ly enough, to Mrs. Bridgenorth, whom I never met
again, but of whose death preceding by a couple of
years Mary Tredick s I happened to hear. This is
an old man s tale. I have inherited the picture, in the
deep beauty of which, however, darkness still lurks.
No one, strange to say, has ever recognised the model,
but everyone asks his name. I don t even know it.
THE SPECIAL TYPE
I NOTE it as a wonderful case of its kind the finest
of all perhaps, in fact, that I have ever chanced to
encounter. The kind, moreover, is the greatest kind,
the roll recruited, for our high esteem and emulation,
from history and fiction, legend and song. In the way
of service and sacrifice for love I ve really known noth
ing go beyond it. However, you can judge. My own
sense of it happens just now to be remarkably rounded
off by the sequel more or less looked for on her part
of the legal step taken by Mrs. Brivet. I hear from
America that, a decent interval being held to have
elapsed since her gain of her divorce, she is about to
marry again an event that will, it would seem, put
an end to any question of the disclosure of the real
story. It s this that s the real story, or will be, with
nothing wanting, as soon as I shall have heard that her
husband (who, on his side, has only been waiting for
her to move first) has sanctified his union with Mrs.
Cavenham.
SHE was, of course, often in and out, Mrs. Cavenham,
three years ago, when I was painting her portrait ; and
the more so that I found her, I remember, one of those
comparatively rare sitters who present themselves at
odd hours, turn up without an appointment. The thing
is to get most women to keep those they do make;
but she used to pop in, as she called it, on the chance,
93
THE BETTER SORT
letting me know that if I had a moment free she was
quite at my service. When I hadn t the moment free
she liked to stay to chatter, and she more than once
expressed to me, I recollect, her theory that an artist
really, for the time, could never see too much of his
model. I must have shown her rather frankly that I
understood her as meaning that a model could never
see too much of her artist. I understood in fact every
thing, and especially that she was, in Brivet s absence,
so unoccupied and restless that she didn t know what
to do with herself. I was conscious in short that it
was he who would pay for the picture, and that gives,
I think, the measure of my enlightenment. If I took
such pains and bore so with her folly, it was funda
mentally for Brivet.
I was often at that time, as I had often been before,
occupied for various " subjects " with Mrs. Dun-
dene, in connection with which a certain occasion comes
back to me as the first slide in the lantern. If I had
invented my story I couldn t have made it begin better
than with Mrs. Cavenham s irruption during the pres
ence one morning of that lady. My door, by some
chance, had been unguarded, and she was upon us with
out a warning. This was the sort of thing my model
hated the one, I mean, who, after all, sat mainly
to oblige ; but I remember how well she behaved. She
was not dressed for company, though indeed a dress
was never strictly necessary to her best effect. I re
call that I had a moment of uncertainty, but I must
have dropped the name of each for the other, as it was
Mrs. Cavenham s line always, later on, that I had made
them acquainted; and inevitably, though I wished her
not to stay and got rid of her as soon as possible, the
two women, of such different places in the scale, but
of such almost equal beauty, were face to face for some
minutes, of which I was not even at the moment un
aware that they made an extraordinary use for mutual
94
THE SPECIAL TYPE
inspection. It was sufficient; they from that instant
knew each other.
" Isn t she lovely? " I remember asking and quite
without the spirit of mischief when I came back from
restoring my visitor to her cab.
" Yes, awfully pretty. But I hate her."
" Oh," I laughed, " she s not so bad as that."
" Not so handsome as I, you mean ? " And my
sitter protested. " It isn t fair of you to speak as if I
were one of those who can t bear even at the worst
or the best another woman s looks. I should hate
her even if she were ugly."
" But what have you to do with her? "
She hesitated; then with characteristic looseness:
" What have I to do with anyone? "
" Well, there s no one else I know of that you do
hate."
" That shows," she replied, " how good a reason
there must be, even if I don t know it yet."
She knew it in the course of time, but I have never
seen a reason, I must say, operate so little for relief.
As a history of the hatred of Alice Dundene my anec
dote becomes wondrous indeed. Meanwhile, at any
rate, I had Mrs. Cavenham again with me for her reg
ular sitting, and quite as curious as I had expected her
to be- about the person of the previous time.
" Do you mean she isn t, so to speak, a lady? " she
asked after I had, for reasons of my own, fenced a
little. " Then if she s not professional either, what
is she?"
" Well," I returned as I got at work, " she escapes,
to my mind, any classification save as one of the most
beautiful and good-natured of women."
" I see her beauty," Mrs. Cavenham said. " It s
immense. Do you mean that her good-nature s as
great?"
I had to think a little. " On the whole, yes."
95
THE BETTER SORT
" Then I understand. That represents a greater
quantity than /, I think, should ever have occasion
for."
" Oh, the great thing s to be sure to have enough,"
I growled.
But she laughed it off. " Enough, certainly, is as
good as a feast! "
It was I forget how long, some months after this
that Frank Brivet, whom I had not seen for two years,
knocked again at my door. I didn t at all object to
him at my other work as I did to Mrs. Cavenham, but
it \vas not till he had been in and out several times
that Alice which is what most people still really call
her chanced to see him and received in such an ex
traordinary way the impression that was to be of such
advantage to him. She had been obliged to leave me
that day before he went though he stayed but a few
minutes later; and it was not till the next time we
were alone together that I was struck with her sudden
interest, which became frankly pressing. I had met
her, to begin with, expansively enough.
" An American ? But what sort don t you know ?
There are so many."
I didn t mean it as an offence, but in the matter of
men, and though her acquaintance with them is so
large, I always simplify with her. " The sort. He s
rich."
"And how rich?"
" Why, as an American. Disgustingly."
I told her on this occasion more about him, but it
was on that fact, I remember, that, after a short silence,
she brought out with a sigh : " Well, I m sorry. I
should have liked to love him for himself."
THE SPECIAL TYPE
II
QUITE apart from having been at school with him, I m
conscious though at times he so puts me out that
I ve a taste for Frank Brivet. I m quite aware, by the
same token and even if when a man s so rich it s dif
ficult to tell that he s not everyone s affinity. I was
struck, at all events, from the first of the affair, with
the way he clung to me and seemed inclined to haunt
my studio. He s fond of art, though he has some
awful pictures, and more or less understands mine;
but it wasn t this that brought him. Accustomed as
I was to notice what his wealth everywhere does for
him, I was rather struck with his being so much thrown
upon me and not giving London the big fish that
rises so to the hook baited with gold more of a chance
to perform to him. I very soon, however, understood.
He had his reasons for wishing not to be seen much
with Mrs. Cavenham, and, as he was in love with her,
felt the want of some machinery for keeping tempo
rarily away from her. I was his machinery, and, when
once I perceived this, was willing enough to turn his
wheel. His situation, moreover, became interesting
from the moment I fairly grasped it, which he soon en
abled me to do. His old reserve on the subject of
Mrs. Brivet went to the winds, and it s not my fault
if I let him see how little I was shocked by his confi
dence. His marriage had originally seemed to me to
require much more explanation than anyone could
give, and indeed in the matter of women in general,
I confess, I ve never seized his point of view. His in
clinations are strange, and strange, too, perhaps, his
indifferences. Still, I can enter into some of his aver
sions, and I agreed with him that his wife was
odious.
" She has hitherto, since we began practically to live
97
THE BETTER SORT
apart," he said, " mortally hated the idea of doing any
thing so pleasant for me as to divorce me. But I ve
reason to believe she has now changed her mind.
She d like to get clear."
I waited a moment. " For a man ? "
" Oh, such a jolly good one ! Remson Sturch."
I wondered. " Do you call him good? "
" Good for her. If she only can be got to be
which it oughtn t to be difficult to make her fool
enough to marry him, he ll give her the real size of
his foot, and I shall be avenged in a manner positively
ideal."
Then will she institute proceedings ? "
" She can t, as things stand. She has nothing to
go upon. I ve been," said poor Brivet, " I positively
have, so blameless." I thought of Mrs. Cavenham,
and, though I said nothing, he went on after an instant
as if he knew it. l They can t put a finger. I ve been
so d d particular."
I hesitated. " And your idea is now not to be par
ticular any more? "
" Oh, about her" he eagerly replied, " always ! "
On which I laughed out and he coloured. " But my
idea is nevertheless, at present," he went on, " to pave
the way ; that is, I mean, if I can keep the person you re
thinking of so totally out of it that not a breath in
the whole business can possibly touch her."
" I see," I reflected. " She isn t willing? "
He stared. " To be compromised ? Why the devil
should she be? "
" Why shouldn t she for you? Doesn t she love
you?"
Yes, and it s because she does, dearly, that I don t
feel the right way to repay her is by spattering her
over."
" Yet if she stands," I argued, " straight in the
splash ! "
98
THE SPECIAL TYPE
" She doesn t ! " he interrupted me, with some curt-
ness. " She stands a thousand miles out of it; she
stands on a pinnacle ; she stands as she stands in your
charming portrait lovely, lonely, untouched. And so
she must remain."
" It s beautiful, it s doubtless inevitable," I returned
after a little, " that you should feel so. Only, if your
wife doesn t divorce you for a woman you love, I don t
quite see how she can do it for the woman you don t."
"Nothing is more simple," he declared; on which
I saw he had figured it out rather more than I thought.
" It will be quite enough if she believes I love her."
" If the lady in question does or Mrs. Brivet? "
" Mrs. Brivet confound her ! If she believes I love
somebody else. I must have the appearance, and the
appearance must of course be complete. All I ve got
to do is to take up "
" To take up ? " I asked, as he paused.
" Well, publicly, with someone or other ; someone
who could easily be squared. One would undertake,
after all, to produce the impression."
" On your wife naturally, you mean? "
" On my wife, and on the person concerned."
I turned it over and did justice to his ingenuity.
" But what impression would you undertake to pro
duce on ?"
" Well? " he inquired as I just faltered.
" On the person not- concerned. How would the
lady you just accused me of having in mind be affected
toward such a proceeding? "
He had to think a little, but he thought with success.
" Oh, I d answer for her."
" To the other lady ? " I laughed.
He remained quite grave. " To myself. She d
leave us alone. As it would be for her good, she d un
derstand."
I was sorry for him, but he struck me as artless.
99
THE BETTER SORT
" Understand, in that interest, the spattering of an
other person? "
He coloured again, but he was sturdy. " It must
of course be exactly the right person a special type.
Someone who, in the first place," he explained,
" wouldn t mind, and of whom, in the second, she
wouldn t be jealous."
I followed perfectly, but it struck me as important
all round that we should be clear. " But wouldn t the
danger be great that any woman who shouldn t have
that effect the effect of jealousy upon her wouldn t
have it either on your wife? "
" Ah," he acutely returned, " my wife wouldn t be
warned. She wouldn t be in the know.
" I see." I quite caught up. " The two other ladies
distinctly would."
But he seemed for an instant at a loss. " Wouldn t
it be indispensable only as regards one ? "
Then the other would be simply sacrificed ? "
" She would be," Brivet splendidly put it, " remu
nerated. I was pleased even with the sense of financial
power betrayed by the way he said it, and I at any rate
so took the measure of his intention of generosity and
his characteristically big view of the matter that this
quickly suggested to me what at least might be his ex
posure. " But suppose that, in spite of remunera
tion/ this secondary personage should perversely like
you? She would have to be indeed, as you say, a
special type, but even special types may have general
feelings. Suppose she should like you too much."
It had pulled him up a little. " What do you mean
by too much ?"
" Well, more than enough to leave the case quite as
simple as you d require it."
" Oh, money always simplifies. Besides, I should
make a point of being a brute." And on my laughing
at this : " I should pay her enough lo keep her down,
100
THE SPECIAL TYPE
to make her easy. But the thing," he went on with
a drop back to the less mitigated real " the thing,
hang it ! is first to find her."
"Surely," I concurred; "for she should have to
lack, you see, no requirement whatever for plausibility.
She must be, for instance, not only squareable, but
before anything else even awfully handsome."
" Oh, awfully ! " He could make light of that,
which was what Mrs. Cavenham was.
" It wouldn t do for her, at all events," I maintained,
" to be a bit less attractive than
"Well, than who?" he broke in, not only with a
comic effect of disputing my point, but also as if he
knew whom I was thinking of.
Before I could answer him, however, the door
opened, and we were interrupted by a visitor a visitor
who, on the spot, in a flash, primed me with a reply.
But I had of course for the moment to keep it to my
self. " Than Mrs. Dundene! "
III
I HAD nothing more than that to do with it, but before
I could turn round it was done ; by which I mean that
Brivet, whose previous impression of her had, for some
sufficient reason, failed of sharpness, now jumped
straight to the perception that here to his hand for the
solution of his problem was the missing quantity and
the appointed aid. They were in presence on this oc
casion, for the first time, half an hour, during which
he sufficiently showed me that he felt himself to have
found the special type. He was certainly to that ex
tent right that nobody could in those days in par
ticular without a rapid sense that she was indeed
" special," spend any such time in the company of our
extraordinary friend. I couldn t quarrel with his
recognising so quickly what I had myself instantly rec-
101
THE BETTER SORT
ognised, yet if it did in truth appear almost at a glance
that she would, through the particular facts of situa
tion, history, aspect, tone, temper, beautifully " do,"
I felt from the first so affected by the business that I
desired to wash my hands of it. There was something
I wished to say to him before it went further, but
after that I cared only to be out of it. I may as well
say at once, however, that I never was out of it; for
a man habitually ridden by the twin demons of im
agination and observation is never enough for his
peace out of anything. But I wanted to be able to
apply to either, should anything happen, " Thou canst
not say 7 did it ! What might in particular happen
was represented by what I said to Brivet the first time
he gave me a chance. It was what I had wished before
the affair went further, but it had then already gone
so far that he had been twice as he immediately let
me know to see her at home. He clearly desired me
to keep up with him, which I was eager to declare im
possible ; but he came again to see me only after he
had called. Then I instantly made my point, which
was that she was really, hang it ! too good for his fell
purpose.
" But, my dear man, my purpose is a sacred one.
And if, moreover, she herself doesn t think she s too
good "
" Ah," said I, " she s in love with you, and so it
isn t fair."
He wondered. " Fair to me?"
" Oh, I don t care a button for you ! What I m
thinking of is her risk."
" And what do you mean by her risk? "
" Why, her finding, of course, before you ve done
with her, that she can t do without you."
He met me as if he had quite thought of that. " Isn t
it much more my risk ? "
" Ah, but you take it deliberately, walk into it with
1 02
THE SPECIAL TYPE
your eyes open. What I want to be sure of, liking
her as I do, is that she fully understands."
He had been moving about my place with his hands
in his pockets, and at this he stopped short. " How
much do you like her ? "
" Oh, ten times more than she likes me ; so that
needn t trouble you. Does she understand that it can
be only to help somebody else ? "
" Why, my dear chap, she s as sharp as a steam-
whistle."
" So that she also already knows who the other per
son is ? "
He took a turn again, then brought out, " There s
no other person for her but me. Of course, as yet,
there are things one doesn t say ; I haven t set straight
to work to dot all my i s, and the beauty of her, as
she s really charming and would be charming in any
relation is just exactly that I don t expect to have
to. We ll work it out all right, I think, so that what
I most wanted just to make sure of from you was what
you ve been good enough to tell me. I mean that you
don t object for yourself."
I could with philosophic mirth allay that scruple,
but what I couldn t do was to let him see what really
most worried me. It stuck, as they say, in my crop
that a woman like yes, when all was said and done
Alice Dundene should simply minister to the con
venience of a woman like Rose Cavenham. " But
there s one thing more." This was as far as I could
go. " I may take from you then that she not only
knows it s for your divorce and remarriage, but can
fit the shoe on the very person? "
He waited a moment. " Well, you may take from
me that I find her no more of a fool than, as I seem
to see, many other fellows have found her."
I too was silent a little, but with a superior sense of
being able to think it all out further than he. " She s
magnificent! "
103
THE BETTER SORT
" Well, so am I ! " said Brivet. And for months
afterward there was much in fact everything in the
whole picture to justify his claim. I remember how it
struck me as a lively sign of this that Mrs. Cavenham,
at an early day, gave up her pretty house in Wilton
Street and withdrew for a time to America. That was
palpable design and diplomacy, but I m afraid that I
quite as much, and doubtless very vulgarly, read into
it that she had had money from Brivet to go. I even
promised myself, I confess, the entertainment of finally
making out that, whether or no the marriage should
come off, she would not have been the person to find
the episode least lucrative.
She left the others, at all events, completely together,
and so, as the plot, with this, might be said definitely
to thicken, it came to me in all sorts of ways that the
curtain had gone up on the drama. It came to me, I
hasten to add, much less from the two actors themselves
than from other quarters the usual sources, which
never fail, of chatter; for after my friends direction
was fairly taken they had the good taste on either
side to handle it, in talk, with gloves, not to expose
it to what I should have called the danger of definition.
I even seemed to divine that, allowing for needful pre
liminaries, they dealt even with each other on this
same unformulated plane, and that it well might be
that no relation in London at that moment, between
a remarkable man and a beautiful woman, had more
of the general air of good manners. I saw for a long
time, directly, but little of them, for they were naturally
much taken up, and Mrs. Dundene in particular inter
mitted, as she had never yet done in any complication
of her chequered career, her calls at my studio. As
the months went by I couldn t but feel partly, per
haps, for this very reason that their undertaking an
nounced itself as likely not to fall short of its aim. I
gathered from the voices of the air that nothing what-
104
THE SPECIAL TYPE
ever was neglected that could make it a success, and
just this vision it was that made me privately project
wonders into it, caused anxiety and curiosity often
again to revisit me, and led me in fine to say to myself
that so rich an effect could be arrived at on either side
only by a great deal of heroism. As the omens marked
ly developed I supposed the heroism had likewise done
so, and that the march of the matter was logical I in
ferred from the fact that even though the ordeal, all
round, was more protracted than might have been
feared, Mrs. Cavenham made no fresh appearance.
This I took as a sign that she knew she was safe took
indeed as the feature not the least striking of the sit
uation constituted in her interest. I held my tongue,
naturally, about her interest, but I watched it from a
distance with an attention that, had I been caught in the
act, might have led to a mistake about the direction
of my sympathy. I had to make it my proper secret
that, while I lost as little as possible of what was being
done for her, I felt more and more that I myself could
never have begun to do it.
IV
SHE came back at last, however, and one of the first
things she did on her arrival was to knock at my door
and let me know immediately, to smooth the way, that
she was there on particular business. I was not to
be surprised though even if I were she shouldn t
mind to hear that she wished to bespeak from me,
on the smallest possible delay, a portrait, full-length
for preference, of our delightful friend Mr. Brivet.
She brought this out with a light perfection of assur
ance of which the first effect I couldn t help it was
to make me show myself almost too much amused for
good manners. She first stared at my laughter, then
wonderfully joined in it, looking meanwhile extraor-
105
THE BETTER SORT
dinarily pretty and elegant more completely hand
some in fact, as well as more completely happy, than
I had ever yet seen her. She was distinctly the better,
I quickly saw, for what was being done for her, and
it was an odd spectacle indeed that while, out of her
sight and to the exclusion of her very name, the good
work went on, it put roses in her cheeks and rings on
her fingers and the sense of success in her heart. What
had made me laugh, at all events, was the number of
other ideas suddenly evoked by her request, two of
which, the next moment, had disengaged themselves
with particular brightness. She wanted, for all her
confidence, to omit no precaution, to close up every
issue, and she had acutely conceived that the posses
sion of Brivet s picture full-length, above all!
would constitute for her the strongest possible appear
ance of holding his supreme pledge. If that had been
her foremost thought her second then had been that
if I should paint him he would have to sit, and that in
order to sit he would have to return. He had been at
this time, as I knew, for many weeks in foreign cities
which helped moreover to explain to me that Mrs.
Cavenham had thought it compatible with her safety
to reopen her London house. Everything accordingly
seemed to make for a victory, but there was such a
thing, her proceeding implied, as one s at least as
her susceptibility and her nerves. This question of
his return I of course immediately put to her; on
which she immediately answered that it was expressed
in her very proposal, inasmuch as this proposal was
nothing but the offer that Brivet had himself made her.
The thing was to be his gift; she had only, he had
assured her, to choose her artist and arrange the time ;
and she had amiably chosen me chosen me for the
dates, as she called them, immediately before us. I
doubtless but I don t care give the measure of my
native cynicism in confessing that I didn t the least
1 06
THE SPECIAL TYPE
avoid showing her that I saw through her game.
Well, I ll do him," I said, " if he ll come himself and
ask me."
She wanted to know, at this, of course, if I impugned
her veracity. " You don t believe what I tell you ?
You re afraid for your money? "
I took it in high good-humour. " For my money
not a bit."
"For what then?"
I had to think first how much I could say, which
seemed to me, naturally, as yet but little. " I know
perfectly that whatever happens Brivet always pays.
But let him come; then we ll talk."
" Ah, well," she returned, " you ll see if he doesn t
come." And come he did in fact though without
a word from myself directly at the end of ten days ;
on which we immediately got to work, an idea highly
favourable to it having meanwhile shaped itself in
my own breast. Meanwhile too, however, before his
arrival, Mrs. Cavenham had been again to see me,
and this it was precisely, I think, that determined my
idea. My present explanation of what afresh passed
between us is that she really felt the need to build up
her security a little higher by borrowing from my own
vision of what had been happening. I had not, she
saw, been very near to that, but I had been at least,
during her time in America, nearer than she. And
I had doubtless somehow "aggravated" her by appear
ing to disbelieve in the guarantee she had come in such
pride to parade to me. It had in any case befallen
that, on the occasion of her second visit, what I least
expected or desired her avowal of being " in the
know " suddenly went too far to stop. When she
did speak she spoke with elation. " Mrs. Brivet has
filed her petition."
" For getting rid of him? "
" Yes, in order to marry again ; which is exactly
107
THE BETTER SORT
what he wants her to do. It s wonderful and, in a
manner, I think, quite splendid the way he has made
it easy for her. He has met her wishes handsomely
obliged her in every particular."
As she preferred, subtly enough, to put it all as if
it were for the sole benefit of his wife, I was quite
ready for this tone; but I privately defied her to keep
it up. Well, then, he hasn t laboured in vain."
" Oh, it couldn t have been in vain. What has hap
pened has been the sort of thing that she couldn t pos
sibly fail to act upon."
" Too great a scandal, eh ? "
She but just paused at it. " Nothing neglected, cer
tainly, or omitted. He was not the man to undertake
" And not put it through ? No, I should say he
wasn t the man. In any case he apparently hasn t been.
But he must have found the job
" Rather a bore? " she asked as I had hesitated.
:< Well, not so much a bore as a delicate matter."
She seemed to demur. " Delicate? "
" Why, your sex likes him so."
" But isn t just that what has made it easy? "
" Easy for him yes," I after a moment admitted.
But it wasn t what she meant. " And not difficult,
also, for them."
This was the nearest approach I was to have heard
her make, since the day of the meeting of the two
women at my studio, to naming Mrs. Dundene. She
never, to the end of the affair, came any closer to her
in speech than by the collective and promiscuous plural
pronoun. There might have been a dozen of them,
and she took cognizance, in respect to them, only of
quantity. It was as if it had been a way of showing
how little of anything else she imputed. Quality, as
distinguished from quantity, was what she had. " Oh,
I think," I said, " that we can scarcely speak for them."
108
THE SPECIAL TYPE
" Why not? They must certainly have had the most
beautiful time. Operas, theatres, suppers, dinners,
diamonds, carriages, journeys hither and yon with him,
poor dear, telegrams sent by each from everywhere
to everywhere and always lying about, elaborate ar
rivals and departures at stations for everyone to see,
and, in fact, quite a crowd usually collected as many
witnesses as you like. " Then," she wound up, " his
brougham standing always half the day and half the
night at their doors. He has had to keep a brougham,
and the proper sort of man, just for that alone. In
other words unlimited publicity."
" I see. What more can they have wanted? Yes,"
I pondered, " they like, for the most part, we suppose,
a studied, outrageous affichage, and they must have
thoroughly enjoyed it."
" Ah, but it was only that."
I wondered. " Only what ? "
" Only affiche. Only outrageous. Only the form of
well, of what would definitely serve. He never saw
them alone."
I wondered or at least appeared to still more.
"Never?"
" Never. Never once." She had a wonderful air of
answering for it. " I know."
I saw that, after all, she really believed she knew,
and I had indeed, for that matter, to recognise that I
myself believed her knowledge to be sound. Only there
went with it a complacency, an enjoyment of having
really made me see what could be done for her, so little
to my taste that for a minute or two I could scarce
trust myself to speak : she looked somehow, as she sat
there, so lovely, and yet, in spite of her loveliness or
perhaps even just because of it sc smugly selfish;
she put it to me with so small a consciousness of any
thing but her personal triumph that, while she had kept
her skirts clear, her name unuttered and her reputation
109
THE BETTER SORT
untouched, " they " had been in it even more than her
success required. It was their skirts, their name and
their reputation that, in the proceedings at hand, would
bear the brunt. It w r as only after waiting a w r hile that
I could at last say : " You re perfectly sure then of
Mrs. Brivet s intention ? "
" Oh, we ve had formal notice."
" And he s himself satisfied of the sufficiency ? "
" Of the sufficiency ?"
" Of what he has done."
She rectified. " Of what he has appeared to do."
That is then enough?"
" Enough," she laughed, " to send him to the gal
lows ! " To which I could only reply that all was well
that ended well.
ALL for me, however, as it proved, had not ended yet.
Brivet, as I have mentioned, duly reappeared to sit for
me, and Mrs. Cavenham, on his arrival, as consistently
went abroad. He confirmed to me that lady s news
of how he had " fetched," as he called it, his wife
let me know, as decently owing to me after what had
passed, on the subject, between us, that the forces set
in motion had logically operated ; but he made no other
allusion to his late accomplice for I now took for
granted the close of the connection than was conveyed
in this intimation. He spoke and the effect was almost
droll as if he had had, since our previous meeting,
a busy and responsible year and wound up an affair
(as he was accustomed to wind up affairs) involving
a mass of detail ; he even dropped into occasional rem
iniscence of what he had seen and enjoyed and disliked
during a recent period of rather far-reaching advent
ure; but he stopped just as short as Mrs. Cavenham
had done and. indeed, much shorter than she of in-
no
THE SPECIAL TYPE
troducing Mrs. Dundene by name into our talk. And
what was singular in this, I soon saw, was apart from
a general discretion that he abstained not at all be
cause his mind was troubled, but just because, on the
contrary, it was so much at ease. It was perhaps even
more singular still, meanwhile, that, though I had
scarce been able to bear Mrs. Cavenham s manner in
this particular, I found I could put up perfectly with
that of her friend. She had annoyed me, but he didn t
I give the inconsistency for what it is worth. The
obvious state of his conscience had always been a strong
point in him and one that exactly irritated some people
as much as it charmed others; so that if, in general,
it was positively, and in fact quite aggressively ap
proving, this monitor, it had never held its head so
high as at the juncture of which I speak. I took all
this in with eagerness, for I saw how it would play
into my work. Seeking as I always do, instinctively,
to represent sitters in the light of the thing, whatever
it may be, that facially, least wittingly or responsibly,
gives the pitch of their aspect, I felt immediately that
I should have the clue for making a capital thing of
Brivet were I to succeed in showing him in just this
freshness of his cheer. His cheer was that of his being
able to say to himself that he had got all he wanted
precisely as he wanted : without having harmed a fly.
He had arrived so neatly where most men arrive be
smirched, and what he seemed to cry out as he stood
before my canvas wishing everyone well all round
was : " See how clever and pleasant and practicable,
how jolly and lucky and rich I ve been ! " I de
termined, at all events, that I would make some such
characteristic words as these cross, at any cost, the
footlights, as it were, of my frame.
Well, I can t but feel to this hour that I really hit
my nail that the man is fairly painted in the light
and that the work remains as yet my high-water mark.
in
THE BETTER SORT
He himself was delighted with it and all the more, I
think, that before it was finished he received from
America the news of his liberation. He had not de
fended the suit as to which judgment, therefore, had
been expeditiously rendered; and he was accordingly
free as air and with the added sweetness of every aug
mented appearance that his wife was herself blindly
preparing to seek chastisement at the hands of destiny.
There being at last no obstacle to his open association
with Mrs. Cavenham, he called her directly back to
London to admire my achievement, over which, from
the very first glance, she as amiably let herself go. It
was the very view of him she had desired to possess;
it was the dear man in his intimate essence for those
who knew him; and for any one who should ever be
deprived of him it would be the next best thing to the
sound of his voice. We of course by no means lin
gered, however, on the contingency of privation, which
was promptly swept away in the rush of Mrs. Caven-
ham s vision of how straight also, above and beyond,
I had, as she called it, attacked. I couldn t quite my
self, I fear, tell how straight, but Mrs. Cavenham per
fectly could, and did, for everybody: she had at her
fingers ends all the reasons why the thing would be
a treasure even for those who had never seen " Frank."
I had finished the picture, but was, according to my
practice, keeping it near me a little, for afterthoughts,
when I received from Mrs. Dundene the first visit she
had paid me for many a month. " I ve come," she im
mediately said, " to ask you a favour " ; and she turned
her eyes, for a minute, as if contentedly full of her
thought, round the large workroom she already knew
so well and in which her beauty had really rendered
more services than could ever be repaid. There were
studies of her yet on the walls; there were others
thrust away in corners; others still had gone forth
from where she stood and carried to far-away places
112
THE SPECIAL TYPE
the reach of her lingering look. I had greatly, almost
inconveniently missed her, and I don t know why it
was that she struck me now as more beautiful than
ever. She had always, for that matter, had a way of
seeming; each time a little different and a little better.
Dressed very simply in black materials, feathers and
lace, that gave the impression of being light and fine,
she had indeed the air of a special type, but quite as
some great lady might have had it. She looked like
a princess in Court mourning. Oh, she had been a
case for the petitioner was everything the other side
wanted ! " Mr. Brivet," she went on to say, " has
kindly offered me a present. I m to ask of him what
ever in the world I most desire."
I knew in an instant, on this, what was coming, but
I was at first wholly taken up with the simplicity of
her allusion to her late connection. Had I supposed
that, like Brivet, she wouldn t allude to it at all? or
had I stupidly assumed that if she did it would be
with ribaldry and rancour? I hardly know; I only
know that I suddenly found myself charmed to receive
from her thus the key of my own freedom. There was
something I wanted to say to her, and she had thus
given me leave. But for the moment I only re
peated as with amused interest : " Whatever in the
world ?"
" Whatever in all the world."
" But that s immense, and in what way can poor /
help ?"
" By painting him for me. I want a portrait of him."
I looked at her a moment in silence. She was lovely.
" That s what in all the world you ve chosen? "
" Yes thinking it over: full-length. I want it for
remembrance, and I want it as you will do it. It s the
only thing I do want."
"Nothing else?"
" Oh, it s enough." I turned about she was won-
THE BETTER SORT
derful. I had whisked out of sight for a month the
picture I had produced for Mrs. Cavenham, and it was
now completely covered with a large piece of stuff. I
stood there a little, thinking of it, and she went on as
if she feared I might be unwilling. " Can t you do
it?"
It showed me that she had not heard from him of
my having painted him, and this, further, was an in
dication that, his purpose effected, he had ceased to see
her. " I suppose you know," I presently said, " what
you ve done for him ? "
" Oh yes; it was what I wanted."
" It was what he wanted ! " I laughed.
" Well, I want what he wants."
" Even to his marrying Mrs. Cavenham ? "
She hesitated. " As well her as anyone, from the
moment he couldn t marry me."
" It was beautiful of you to be so sure of that," I
returned.
" How could I be anything else but sure ? He doesn t
so much as know me ! " said Alice Dundene.
" No," I declared, " I verily believe he doesn t.
There s your picture," I added, unveiling my work.
She was amazed and delighted. " I may have that?
" So far as I m concerned absolutely."
" Then he had himself the beautiful thought of sit
ting for me? "
I faltered but an instant. " Yes."
Her pleasure in what I had done was a joy to me.
" Why, it s of a truth ! It s perfection."
" I think it is."
" It s the whole story. It s life."
"That s what I tried for," I said; and I added to
myself: " Why the deuce do we? "
" It will be him for me," she meanwhile went on.
" I shall live with it, keep it all to myself, and do you
know what it will do? it will seem to make up."
114
THE SPECIAL TYPE
"To make up?"
" I never saw him alone," said Mrs. Dundene.
I am still keeping the thing to send to her, punctual
ly, on the day he s married ; but I had of course, on my
understanding with her, a tremendous bout with Mrs.
Cavenham, who protested with indignation against my
" base treachery " and made to Brivet an appeal for
redress which, enlightened, face to face with the mag
nificent humility of his other friend s selection, he
couldn t, for shame, entertain. All he was able to do
was to suggest to me that I might for one or other of
the ladies, at my choice, do him again; but I had no
difficulty in replying that my best was my best and that
what was done was done. He assented with the awk
wardness of a man in dispute between women, and
Mrs. Cavenham remained furious. " Can t * they
of all possible things, think ! take something else ? "
" Oh, they want him! "
" Him ? " It was monstrous.
1 To live with," I explained" to make up."
To make up for what ? "
" Why, you know, they never saw him alone."
MRS. MEDWIN
" \\7 ELL, we are a pair ! " the poor lady s visitor
VV broke out to her, at the end of her explana
tion, in a manner disconcerting enough. The poor
lady was Miss Cutter, who lived in South Audley
Street, where she had an " upper half " so concise that
it had to pass, boldly, for convenient; and her visitor
was her half-brother, whom she had not seen for three
years. She was remarkable for a maturity of which
every symptom might have been observed to be admir
ably controlled, had not a tendency to stoutness just
affirmed its independence. Her present, no doubt, in
sisted too much on her past, but with the excuse, suf
ficiently valid, that she must certainly once have been
prettier. She was clearly not contented with once
she wished to be prettier again. She neglected nothing
that could produce that illusion, and, being both fair
and fat, dressed almost wholly in black. When she
added a little colour it was not, at any rate, to her
drapery. Her small rooms had the peculiarity that
everything they contained appeared to testify with
vividness to her position in society, quite as if they
had been furnished by the bounty of admiring friends.
They were adorned indeed almost exclusively with ob
jects that nobody buys, as had more than once been
remarked by spectators of her own sex, for herself, and
would have been luxurious if luxury consisted main
ly in photographic portraits slashed across with sig-
116
MRS. MEDWIN
natures, in baskets of flowers beribboned with the cards
of passing compatriots, and in a neat collection of red
volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical volumes, aids to
London lucidity, of every sort, devoted to addresses
and engagements. To be in Miss Cutter s tiny draw
ing-room, in short, even with Miss Cutter alone
should you by any chance have found her so was
somehow to be in the world and in a crowd. It was
like an agency it bristled with particulars.
This was what the tall, lean, loose gentleman loung
ing there before her might have appeared to read in the
suggestive scene over which, while she talked to him,
his eyes moved without haste and without rest. " Oh,
come, Mamie ! " he occasionally threw off ; and the
words were evidently connected with the impression
thus absorbed. His comparative youth spoke of waste
even as her positive her too positive spoke of econ
omy. There was only one thing, that is, to make up
in him for everything he had lost, though it was dis
tinct enough indeed that this thing might sometimes
serve. It consisted in the perfection of an indifference,
an indifference at the present moment directed to the
plea a plea of inability, of pure destitution with
which his sister had met him. Yet it had even now a
wider embrace, took in quite sufficiently all conse
quences of queerness, confessed in advance to the false
note that, in such a setting, he almost excruciatingly
constituted. He cared as little that he looked at mo
ments all his impudence as that he looked all his sha b-
biness, all his cleverness, all his history. These differ
ent things were written in him in his premature bald
ness, his seamed, strained face, the lapse from bravery
of his long tawny moustache; above all, in his easy,
friendly, universally acquainted eye, so much too so
ciable for mere conversation. What possible relation
with him could be natural enough to meet it? He
wore a scant, rough Inverness cape and a pair of black
117
THE BETTER SORT
trousers, wanting in substance and marked with the
sheen of time, that had presumably once served for
evening use. He spoke with the slowness helplessly
permitted to Americans as something too slow to be
stopped and he repeated that he found himself asso
ciated with Miss Cutter in a harmony worthy of won
der. She had been telling him not only that she
couldn t possibly give him ten pounds, but that his un
expected arrival, should he insist on being much in
view, might seriously interfere with arrangements nec
essary to her own maintenance ; on which he had begun
by replying that he of course knew she had long ago
spent her money, but that he looked to her now exactly
because she had, without the aid of that convenience,
mastered the art of life.
" I d really go away with a fiver, my dear, if you d
only tell me how you do it. It s no use saying only, as
you ve always said, that people are very kind to you.
What the devil are they kind to you for? "
" Well, one reason is precisely that no particular in
convenience has hitherto been supposed to attach to
me. I m just what I am," said Mamie Cutter ; " noth
ing less and nothing more. It s awkward to have to
explain to you, which, moreover, I really needn t in
the least. I m clever and amusing and charming."
She was uneasy and even frightened, but she kept her
temper and met him with a grace of her own. " I
don t think you ought to ask me more questions than
I ask you."
" Ah, my dear," said the odd young man, " I ve no
mysteries. Why in the world, since it was what you
came out for and have devoted so much of your time
to, haven t you pulled it off? Why haven t you mar
ried?"
" Why haven t you? " she retorted. " Do you think
that if I had it would have been better for you?
that my husband would for a moment have put up with
118
MRS. MEDWIN
you ? Do you mind my asking you if you ll kindly go
now? " she went on after a glance at the clock. " I m
expecting a friend, whom I must see alone, on a matter
of great importance
" And my being seen with you may compromise
your respectability or undermine your nerve ? " He
sprawled imperturbably in his place, crossing again, in
another sense, his long black legs and showing, above
his low shoes, an absurd reach of parti-coloured sock.
" I take your point well enough, but mayn t you be
after all quite wrong? If you can t do anything for
me couldn t you at least do something with me ? If it
comes to that, I m clever and amusing and charming
too! I ve been such an ass that you don t appreciate
me. But people like me I assure you they do. They
usually don t know what an ass I ve been; they only
see the surface, which " and he stretched himself
afresh as she looked him up and down " you can im
agine them, can t you, rather taken with ? I m what
I am too ; nothing less and nothing more. That s
true of us as a family, you see. We are a crew ! " He
delivered himself serenely. His voice was soft and
flat, his pleasant eyes, his simple tones tending to the
solemn, achieved at moments that effect of quaintness
which is, in certain connections, socially so known and
enjoyed. " English people have quite a weakness for
me more than any others. I get on with them beau
tifully. I ve always been with them abroad. They
think me," the young man explained, " diabolically
American."
* You ! " Such stupidity drew from her a sigh of
compassion.
Her companion apparently quite understood it.
" Are you homesick, Mamie ? " he asked, with wonder
ing irrelevance.
The manner of the question made her for some rea
son, in spite of her preoccupations, break into a laugh,
119
THE BETTER SORT
A shade of indulgence, a sense of other things, came
back to her. " You are funny, Scott ! "
" Well," remarked Scott, " that s just what I claim.
But are you so homesick? " he spaciously inquired, not
as if to a practical end, but from an easy play of intel
ligence.
" I m just dying of it ! " said Mamie Cutter.
" Why, so am I ! " Her visitor had a sweetness of
concurrence.
" We re the only decent people," Miss Cutter de
clared. " And I know. You don t you can t ; and I
can t explain. Come in," she continued with a return
of her impatience and an increase of her decision, " at
seven sharp."
She had quitted her seat some time before, and now,
to get him into motion, hovered before him while, still
motionless, he looked up at her. Something intimate,
in the silence, appeared to pass between them a com
munity of fatigue and failure and, after all, of intelli
gence. There was a final, cynical humour in it. It
determined him, at any rate, at last, and he slowly
rose, taking in again as he stood there the testimony
of the room. He might have been counting the photo
graphs, but he looked at the flowers with detachment.
"Who s coming?"
" Mrs. Medwin."
"American?"
"Dear no!"
" Then what are you doing for her? "
" I work for everyone," she promptly returned.
" For everyone who pays ? So I suppose. Yet isn t
it only we who do pay? "
There was a drollery, not lost on her, in the way
his queer presence lent itself to his emphasised plural.
" Do you consider that you do? "
At this, with his deliberation, he came back to his
charming idea. " Only try me, and see if I can t be
120
MRS. MEDWIN
made to. Work me in." On her sharply presenting
her back he stared a little at the clock. " If I come at
seven may I stay to dinner? "
It brought her round again. " Impossible. I m
dining out."
"With whom?"
She had to think. " With Lord Considine."
" Oh, my eye! " Scott exclaimed.
She looked at him gloomily. " Is that sort of tone
what makes you pay? I think you might understand,"
she went on, " that if you re to sponge on me success
fully you mustn t ruin me. I must have some remote
resemblance to a lady."
" Yes ? But why must If " Her exasperated silence
was full of answers, of which, however, his inimitable
manner took no account. " You don t understand my
real strength; I doubt if you even understand your
own. You re clever, Mamie, but you re not so clever
as I supposed. However," he pursued, " it s out of
Mrs. Medwin that you ll get it."
"Get what?"
" Why, the cheque that will enable you to assist
me."
On this, for a moment, she met his eyes. " If you ll
come back at seven sharp not a minute before, and
not a minute after, I ll give you two five-pound notes."
He thought it over. " Whom are you expecting a
minute after? "
It sent her to the window with a groan almost of
anguish, and she answered nothing till she had looked
at the street. " If you injure me, you know, Scott",
you ll be sorry."
" I wouldn t injure you for the world. What I
want to do in fact is really to help you, and I promise
you that I won t leave you by which I mean won t
leave London till I ve effected something really pleas
ant for you. I like you, Mamie, because I like pluck ;
121
THE BETTER SORT
I like you much more than you like me. I like you
very, very much." He had at last with this reached
the door and opened it, but he remained with his hand
on the latch. " What does Mrs. Medwin want of
you? " he thus brought out.
She had come round to see him disappear, and in the
relief of this prospect she again just indulged him.
" The impossible."
He waited another minute. " And you re going to
doit?"
" I m going to do it," said Mamie Cutter.
" Well, then, that ought to be a haul. Call it three
fivers ! " he laughed. " At seven sharp." And at last
he left her alone.
II
Miss CUTTER waited till she heard the house-door
close; after which, in a sightless, mechanical way, she
moved about the room, readjusting various objects that
he had not touched. It was as if his mere voice and
accent had spoiled her form. But she was not left too
long to reckon with these things, for Mrs. Medwin
was promptly announced. This lady was not, more
than her hostess, in the first flush of her youth; her
appearance the scattered remains of beauty manip
ulated by taste resembled one of the light repasts
in which the fragments of yesterday s dinner figure
with a conscious ease that makes up for the want of
presence. She was perhaps of an effect still too im
mediate to be called interesting, but she was candid,
gentle and surprised not fatiguingly surprised, only
just in the right degree ; and her white face it was
too white with the fixed eyes, the somewhat touzled
hair and the Louis Seize hat, might at the end of the
very long neck have suggested the head of a princess
carried, in a revolution, on a pike, A She immediately
122
MRS. MEDWIN
took up the business that had brought her, with the
air, however, of drawing from the omens then discern
ible less confidence than she had hoped. The complica
tion lay in the fact that if it was Mamie s part to pre
sent the omens, that lady yet had so to colour them
as to make her own service large. She perhaps over-
coloured, for her friend gave way to momentary
despair.
" What you mean is then that it s simply impossi
ble?"
"Oh no," said Mamie, with a qualified emphasis.
" It s possible:
11 But disgustingly difficult? "
" As difficult as you like."
" Then what can I do that I haven t done? "
" You can only wait a little longer."
" But that s just what I have done. I ve done noth
ing else. I m always waiting a little longer ! "
Miss Cutter retained, in spite of this pathos, her
grasp of the subject. " The thing, as I ve told you,
is for you first to be seen."
" But if people won t look at me? "
" They will."
" They will? Mrs. Medwin was eager.
" They shall," her hostess went on. " It s their only
having heard without having seen."
" But if they stare straight the other way? " Mrs.
Medwin continued to object. " You can t simply go
up to them and twist their heads about."
" It s just what I can," said Mamie Cutter.
But her charming visitor, heedless for the moment
of this attenuation, had found the way to put it. " It s
the old story. You can t go into the water till you
swim, and you can t swim till you go into the water.
I can t be spoken to till I m seen, but I can t be seen
till I m spoken to."
She met this lucidity, Miss Cutter, with but an in-
123
THE BETTER SORT
stant s lapse. "You say I can t twist their heads about.
But I have twisted them."
It had been quietly produced, but it gave her com
panion a jerk. " They say Yes ? "
She summed it up. " All but one. She says No.
Mrs. Medwin thought ; then jumped. " Lady
Wantridge?"
Miss Cutter, as more delicate, only bowed admission.
" I shall see her either this afternoon or late to-morrow.
But she has written."
Her visitor wondered again. " May I see her let
ter?"
" No." She spoke with decision. " But I shall
square her."
"Then how?"
" Well " and Miss Cutter, as if looking upward
for inspiration, fixed her eyes awhile on the ceiling
" well, it will come to me."
Mrs. Medwin watched her it was impressive.
"And will they come to you the others?" This
question drew out the fact that they would so far,
at least, as they consisted of Lady Edward, Lady Bell-
house and Mrs. Pouncer, who had engaged to muster,
at the signal of tea, on the I4th prepared, as it were,
for the worst. There was of course always the chance
that Lady Wantridge might take the field in such force
as to paralyse them, though that danger, at the same
time, seemed inconsistent with her being squared. It
didn t perhaps all quite ideally hang together; but
what it sufficiently came to was that if she was the
one who could do most for a person in Mrs. Medw r in s
position she was also the one who could do most
against. It would therefore be distinctly what our
friend familiarly spoke of as " collar-work." The ef
fect of these mixed considerations was at any rate
that Mamie eventually acquiesced in the idea, hand
somely thrown out by her client, that she should have
124
MRS, MEDWIN
an " advance " to go on with. Miss Cutter confessed
that it seemed at times as if one scarce could go on;
but the advance was, in spite of this delicacy, still more
delicately made made in the form of a banknote, sev
eral sovereigns, some loose silver and two coppers, the
whole contents of her purse, neatly disposed by Mrs.
Medwin on one of the tiny tables. It seemed to clear
the air for deeper intimacies, the fruit of which was
that Mamie, lonely, after all, in her crowd, and always
more helpful than helped, eventually brought out that
the way Scott had been going on was what seemed
momentarily to overshadow her own power to do so.
" I ve had a descent from him." But she had to
explain. " My half-brother Scott Homer. A
wretch."
; What kind of a wretch?"
" Every kind. I lose sight of him at times he dis
appears abroad. But he always turns up again, worse
than ever."
"Violent?"
" No."
"Maudlin?"
" No."
"Only unpleasant?"
" No. Rather pleasant. Awfully clever awfully
travelled and easy."
" Then what s the matter with him ? "
Mamie mused, hesitated seemed to see a wide past.
" I don t know."
" Something in the background ? " Then as her
friend was silent, "Something queer about cards?"
Mrs. Medwin threw off.
" I don t know and I don t want to ! "
" Ah well, I m sure / don t," Mrs. Medwin returned
with spirit. The note of sharpness was perhaps also
a little in the observation she made as she gathered
herself to go. " Do you mind my saying something? "
125
THE BETTER SORT
Mamie took her eyes quickly from the money on the
little stand. " You may say what you like."
" I only mean that anything awkward you may have
to keep out of the way does seem to make more won
derful, doesn t it, that you should have got just where
you are? I allude, you know, to your position."
" I see." Miss Cutter somewhat coldly smiled. " To
my power."
" So awfully remarkable in an American."
" Ah, you like us so."
Mrs. Medwin candidly considered. "But we don t,
dearest."
Her companion s smile brightened. " Then why do
you come to me? "
" Oh, I like you! " Mrs. Medwin made out.
" Then that s it. There are no Americans. It s al
ways you.
" Me ? " Mrs. Medwin looked lovely, but a little
muddled.
" Me!" Mamie Cutter laughed. "But if you like
me, you dear thing, you can judge if I like you." She
gave her a kiss to dismiss her. " I ll see you again
when I ve seen her."
"Lady Wantridge? I hope so, indeed. I ll turn
up late to-morrow, if you don t catch me first. Has
it come to you yet? " the visitor, now at the door, went
on.
" No; but it will. There s time."
" Oh, a little less every day ! "
Miss Cutter had approached the table and glanced
again at the gold and silver and the note, not indeed
absolutely overlooked the two coppers. " The bal
ance," she put it, " the day after ? "
" That very night, if you like."
" Then count on me."
" Oh, if I didn t ! " But the door closed on the
dark idea. Yearningly then, and only when it had
done so, Miss Cutter took up the money.
126
MRS. MEDWIN
She went out with it ten minutes later, and, the calls
on her time being many, remained out so long that at
half -past six she had not come back. At that hour,
on the other hand, Scott Homer knocked at her door,
where her maid, who opened it with a weak pretence
of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him, as a les
son well learnt, that he had not been expected till seven.
No lesson, none the less, could prevail against his
native art. He pleaded fatigue, her, the maid s, dread
ful depressing London, and the need to curl up some
where. If she would just leave him quiet half an hour
that old sofa upstairs would do for it, of which he took
quickly such effectual possession that when, five min
utes later, she peeped, nervous for her broken vow,
into the drawing-room, the faithless young woman
found him extended at his length and peacefully asleep.
Ill
THE situation before Miss Cutter s return developed
in other directions still, and when that event took place,
at a few minutes past seven, these circumstances were,
by the foot of the stair, between mistress and maid,
the subject of some interrogative gasps and scared ad
missions. Lady Wantridge had arrived shortly after
the interloper, and wishing, as she said, to wait, had
gone straight up in spite of being told he was lying
down.
" She distinctly understood he was there? "
" Oh yes, ma am; I thought it right to mention."
" And what did you call him ? "
" Well, ma am, I thought it unfair to you to call
him anything but a gentleman."
Mamie took it all in, though there might well be
more of it than one could quickly embrace. " But if
she has had time," she flashed, " to find out he isn t
one?"
127
THE BETTER SORT
" Oh, ma am, she had a quarter of an hour."
Then she isn t with him still? "
" No, ma am ; she came down again at last. She
rang, and I saw her here, and she said she wouldn t
wait longer."
Miss Cutter darkly mused. " Yet had already
waited ?"
" Quite a quarter."
" Mercy on us ! " She began to mount. Before
reaching the top, however, she had reflected that quite
a quarter was long if Lady Wantridge had only been
shocked. On the other hand, it was short if she had
only been pleased. But how could she have been
pleased? The very essence of their actual crisis was
just that there was no pleasing her. Mamie had but
to open the drawing-room door indeed to perceive that
this was not true at least of Scott Homer, who was
horribly cheerful.
Miss Cutter expressed to her brother without reserve
her sense of the constitutional, the brutal selfishness
that had determined his mistimed return. It had taken
place, in violation of their agreement, exactly at the
moment when it was most cruel to her that he should
be there, and if she must now completely wash her
hands of him he had only himself to thank. She had
come in flushed with resentment and for a moment
had been voluble ; but it would have been striking that,
though the way he received her might have seemed
but to aggravate, it presently justified him by causing
their relation really to take a stride. He had the art
of confounding those who would quarrel with him by
reducing them to the humiliation of an irritated cu
riosity.
" What could she have made of you ? " Mamie de
manded.
" My dear girl, she s not a woman who s eager to
make too much of anything anything, I mean, that
128
MRS. MEDWIN
will prevent her from doing as she likes, what she
takes into her head. Of course," he continued to ex
plain, " if it s something she doesn t want to do, she ll
make as much as Moses."
Mamie wondered if that was the way he talked to
her visitor, but felt obliged to own to his acuteness.
It was an exact description of Lady Wantridge, and
she was conscious of tucking it away for future use in
a corner of her miscellaneous little mind. She with
held, however, all present acknowledgment, only ad
dressing him another question. " Did you really get
on with her ? "
" Have you still to learn, darling I can t help again
putting it to you that I get on with everybody?
That s just what I don t seem able to drive into you.
Only see how I get on with you."
She almost stood corrected. " What I mean is, of
course, whether "
" Whether she made love to me ? Shyly, yet or
because shamefully? She would certainly have liked
awfully to stay."
;< Then why didn t she?"
" Because, on account of some other matter and I
could see it was true she hadn t time. Twenty min
utes she was here less were all she came to give you.
So don t be afraid I ve frightened her away. She ll
come back."
Mamie thought it over. " Yet you didn t go with
her to the door ? "
" She wouldn t let me, and I know when to do what
I m told quite as much as what I m not told. She
wanted to find out about me. I mean from your little
creature; a pearl of fidelity, by the way."
" But what on earth did she come up for? " Mamie
again found herself appealing, and, just by that fact,
showing her need of help.
" Because she always goes up." Then, as, in the
129
THE BETTER SORT
presence of this rapid generalisation, to say nothing
of that of such a relative altogether, Miss Cutter could
only show as comparatively blank : " I mean she knows
when to go up and when to come down. She has in
stincts; she didn t know whom you might have up
here. It s a kind of compliment to you anyway. Why,
Mamie," Scott pursued, " you don t know the curios
ity we any of us inspire. You wouldn t believe what
I ve seen. The bigger bugs they are the more they re
on the look-out."
Mamie still followed, but at a distance. " The look
out for what ? "
" Why, for anything that will help them to live.
You ve been here all this time without making out then,
about them, what I ve had to pick out as I can ? They re
dead, don t you see? And we re alive."
" You ? Oh ! " Mamie almost laughed about it.
" Well, they re a worn-out old lot, anyhow ; they ve
used up their resources. They do look out; and I ll
do them the justice to say they re not afraid not even
of me ! " he continued as his sister again showed some
thing of the same irony. " Lady Wantridge, at any
rate, wasn t; that s what I mean by her having made
love to me. She does what she likes. Mind it, you
know." He was by this time fairly teaching her to
know one of her best friends, and when, after it, he
had come back to the great point of his lesson that
of her failure, through feminine inferiority, practically
to grasp the truth that their being just as they were,
he and she, was the real card for them to play when
he had renewed that reminder he left her absolutely
in a state of dependence. Her impulse to press him
on the subject of Lady Wantridge dropped ; it was as
if she had felt that, whatever had taken place, some
thing would somehow come of it. She was to be, in
a manner, disappointed, but the impression helped to
keep her over to the next morning, when, as Scott had
130
MRS. MEDWIN
foretold, his new acquaintance did reappear, explain
ing to Miss Cutter that she had acted the day before
to gain time and that she even now sought to gain it
by not waiting longer. What, she promptly intimated
she had asked herself, could that friend be thinking
of ? She must show where she stood before things had
gone too far. If she had brought her answer without
more delay she wished to make it sharp. Mrs. Med-
win? Never! "No, my dear not I. There I stop."
Mamie had known it would be " collar-work," but
somehow now, at the beginning, she felt her heart sink.
It was not that she had expected to carry the position
with a rush, but that, as alw r ays after an interval, her
visitor s defences really loomed and quite, as it were,
to the material vision too large. She was always
planted with them, voluminous, in the very centre of
the passage; was like a person accommodated with
a chair in some unlawful place at the theatre. She
wouldn t move and you couldn t get round. Mamie s
calculation indeed had not been on getting round ; she
was obliged to recognise that, too foolishly and fondly,
she had dreamed of producing a surrender. Her dream
had been the fruit of her need ; but, conscious that she
was even yet unequipped for pressure, she felt, almost
for the first time in her life, superficial and crude. She
was to be paid but with what was she, to that end,
to pay? She had engaged to find an answer to this
question, but the answer had not, according to her
promise, " come." And Lady Wantridge meanwhile
massed herself, and there was no view of her that didn t
show her as verily, by some process too obscure to be
traced, the hard depository of the social law. She was
no younger, no fresher, no stronger, really, than any
of them; she was only, with a kind of haggard fine
ness, a sharpened taste for life, and, with all sorts of
things behind and beneath her, more abysmal and more
immoral, more secure and more impertinent. The
THE BETTER SORT
points she made were two in number. One was that
she absolutely declined; the other was that she quite
doubted if Mamie herself had measured the job. The
thing couldn t be done. But say it could be; was
Mamie quite the person to do it ? To this Miss Cutter,
with a sweet smile, replied that she quite understood
how little she might seem so. " I m only one of the
persons to whom it has appeared that you are."
" Then who are the others ? "
" Well, to begin with, Lady Edward, Lady Bell-
house and Mrs. Pouncer."
" Do you mean that they ll come to meet her? "
" I ve seen them, and they ve promised."
"To come, of course," Lady Wantridge said, "if /
come."
Her hostess hesitated. " Oh, of course, you could
prevent them. But I should take it as awfully kind of
you not to. Won J t you do this for me?" Mamie
pleaded.
Her friend looked about the room very much as
Scott had done. " Do they really understand what it s
for? "
" Perfectly. So that she may call."
" And what good will that do her ? "
Miss Cutter faltered, but she presently brought it
out. " Of course what one hopes is that you ll ask
her."
"Ask her to call?"
" Ask her to dine. Ask her, if you d be so truly
sweet, for a Sunday, or something of that sort,
and even if only in one of your most mixed parties, to
Catchmore."
Miss Cutter felt the less hopeful after this effort in
that her companion only showed a strange good nature.
And it was not the amiability of irony; yet it was
amusement. "Take Mrs. Medwin into my family?"
" Some day, when you re taking forty others."
132
MRS. MEDWIN
" Ah, but what I don t see is what it does for you.
You re already so welcome among us that you can
scarcely improve your position even by forming for us
the most delightful relation."
" Well, I know how dear you are," Mamie Cutter
replied ; " but one has, after all, more than one side,
and more than one sympathy. I like her, you know."
And even at this Lady Wantridge was not shocked;
she showed that ease and blandness which were her
way, unfortunately, of being most impossible. She re
marked that she might listen to such things, because
she was clever enough for them not to matter; only
Mamie should take care how she went about saying
them at large. When she became definite, however,
in a minute, on the subject of the public facts, Miss
Cutter soon found herself ready to make her own con
cession. Of course, she didn t dispute them: there they
were ; they were unfortunately on record, and nothing
was to be done about them but to Mamie found it,
in truth, at this point, a little difficult.
" Well, what ? Pretend already to have forgotten
them?"
" Why not, when you ve done it in so many other
cases?"
" There are no other cases so bad. One meets them,
at any rate, as they come. Some you can manage,
others you can t. It s no use, you must give them up.
They re past patching ; there s nothing to be done with
them. There s nothing, accordingly, to be done with
Mrs. Medwin but to put her off." And Lady Want-
ridge rose to her height.
" Well, you know, I do do things," Mamie quavered
with a smile so strained that it partook of exaltation.
You help people? Oh yes, I ve known you to do
wonders. But stick," said Lady Wantridge with
strong and cheerful emphasis, " to your Americans ! "
Miss Cutter, gazing, got up. " You don t do justice,
133
THE BETTER SORT
Lady Wantridge, to your own compatriots. Some of
them are really charming. Besides," said Mamie,
" working for mine often strikes me, so far as the in
terest the inspiration and excitement, don t you
know? go, as rather too easy. You all, as I con
stantly have occasion to say, like us so ! "
Her companion frankly weighed it. " Yes ; it takes
that to account for your position. I ve always thought
of you, nevertheless, as keeping, for their benefit, a
regular working agency. They come to you, and you
place them. There remains, I confess," her ladyship
went on in the same free spirit, " the great won
der "
" Of how I first placed my poor little self? Yes,"
Mamie bravely conceded, " when / began there was no
agency. I just worked my passage. I didn t even
come to you, did I? You never noticed me till, as
Mrs. Short Stokes says, I was way, way up ! Mrs.
Medwin," she threw in, " can t get over it." Then, as
her friend looked vague : " Over my social situation."
" Well, it s no great flattery to you to say," Lady
Wantridge good-humouredly returned, " that she cer
tainly can t hope for one resembling it." Yet it really
seemed to spread there before them. " You simply
made Mrs. Short Stokes."
" In spite of her name ! " Mamie smiled.
" Oh, your names ! In spite of everything."
" Ah, I m something of an artist." With which,
and a relapse marked by her wistful eyes into the grav
ity of the matter, she supremely fixed her friend. She
felt how little she minded betraying at last the extrem
ity of her need, and it was out of this extremity that
her appeal proceeded. " Have I really had your last
word ? It means so much to me."
Lady Wantridge came straight to the point. " You
mean you depend on it? "
"Awfully!"
134
MRS. MEDWIN
"Is it all you have?"
"All. Now."
" But Mrs. Short Stokes and the others rolling/
aren t they ? Don t they pay up ? "
" Ah," sighed Mamie, " if it wasn t for them ! "
Lady Wantridge perceived. " You ve had so
much?"
" I couldn t have gone on."
" Then what do you do with it all ? "
" Oh, most of it goes back to them. There are all
sorts, and it s all help. Some of them have nothing."
" Oh, if you feed the hungry," Lady Wantridge
laughed, " you re indeed in a great way of business.
Is Mrs. Medwin " her transition was immediate
"really rich?"
" Really. He left her everything."
" So that if I do say yes "
" It will quite set me up."
" I see and how much more responsible it makes
one ! But I d rather myself give you the money."
" Oh ! " Mamie coldly murmured.
" You mean I mayn t suspect your prices ? Well,
I daresay I don t ! But I d rather give you ten pounds."
" Oh ! " Mamie repeated in a tone that sufficiently
covered her prices. The question was in every way
larger. "Do you never forgive?" she reproachfully
inquired. The door opened, however, at the moment
she spoke, and Scott Homer presented himself.
IV
SCOTT HOMER wore exactly, to his sister s eyes, the
aspect he had worn the day before, and it also formed,
to her sense, the great feature of his impartial greet
ing.
" How d ye do, Mamie? How d ye do, Lady Want
ridge?
135
THE BETTER SORT
" How d ye do again ? " Lady Wantridge replied
with an equanimity striking to her hostess. It was as
if Scott s own had been contagious; it was almost in
deed as if she had seen him before. Had she ever so
seen him before the previous day? While Miss Cut
ter put to herself this question her visitor, at all events,
met the one she had previously uttered.
" Ever l forgive ? " this personage echoed in a tone
that made as little account as possible of the interrup
tion. " Dear, yes ! The people I have forgiven ! "
She laughed perhaps a little nervously ; and she was
now looking at Scott. The way she looked at him
was precisely what had already had its effect for his
sister. " The people I can ! "
" Can you forgive me? " asked Scott Homer.
She took it so easily. " But what? "
Mamie interposed ; she turned directly to her broth
er. " Don t try her. Leave it so." She had had an
inspiration ; it was the most extraordinary thing in the
world. " Don t try him " she had turned to their
companion. She looked grave, sad, strange. " Leave
it so." Yes, it was a distinct inspiration, which she
couldn t have explained, but which had come, prompted
by something she had caught the extent of the recog
nition expressed in Lady Wantridge s face. It had
come absolutely of a sudden, straight out of the oppo
sition of the two figures before her quite as if a con
cussion had struck a light. The light was helped by
her quickened sense that her friend s silence on the
incident of the day before showed some sort of con
sciousness. She looked surprised. " Do you know my
brother?"
" Do I know you? " Lady Wantridge asked of him.
" No, Lady Wantridge," Scott pleasantly confessed,
"not one little mite! "
" Well, then, if you must go ! " and Mamie of
fered her a hand. " But I ll go down with you. Not
136
MRS. MEDWIN
you! " she launched at her brother, who immediately
effaced himself. His way of doing so and he had al
ready done so, as for Lady Wantridge, in respect to
their previous encounter struck her even at the mo
ment as an instinctive, if slightly blind, tribute to her
possession of an idea ; and as such, in its celerity, made
her so admire him, and their common wit, that, on the
spot, she more than forgave him his queerness. He
was right. He could be as queer as he liked! The
queerer the better! It was at the foot of the stairs,
when she had got her guest down, that what she had
assured Mrs. Medwin would come did indeed come.
" Did you meet him here yesterday? "
" Dear, yes. Isn t he too funny ? "
" Yes," said Mamie gloomily. " He is funny. But
had you ever met him before? "
"Dear, no!"
" Oh ! " and Mamie s tone might have meant many
things.
Lady Wantridge, however, after all, easily over
looked it. " I only knew he was one of your odd
Americans. That s why, when I heard yesterday, here,
that he was up there awaiting your return, I didn t let
that prevent me. I thought he might be. He cer
tainly," her ladyship laughed, " is."
" Yes, he s very American," Mamie went on in the
same way.
" As you say, we are fond of you ! Good-bye," said
Lady Wantridge.
But Mamie had not half done with her. She felt
more and more or she hoped at least that she looked
strange. She was, no doubt, if it came to that, strange.
" Lady Wantridge," she almost convulsively broke out,
" I don t know whether youll understand me, but I
seem to feel that I must act with you I don t know
what to call it ! responsibly. He is my brother."
" Surely and why not? " Lady Wantridge stared.
" He s the image of you ! "
137
THE BETTER SORT
" Thank you ! " and Mamie was stranger than ever.
" Oh, he s good-looking. He s handsome, my dear.
Oddly but distinctly ! " Her ladyship was for treat
ing it much as a joke.
But Mamie, all sombre, would have none of this.
She boldly gave him up. " I think he s awful."
" He is indeed delightfully. And where do you
get your ways of saying things? It isn t anything
and the things aren t anything. But it s so droll."
" Don t let yourself, all the same," Mamie consist
ently pursued, " be carried away by it. The thing
can t be done simply."
Lady Wantridge wondered. " Done simply ?"
" Done at all."
"But what can t be?"
" Why, what you might think from his pleasant
ness. What he spoke of your doing for him."
Lady Wantridge recalled. " Forgiving him? "
" He asked you if you couldn t. But you can t. It s
too dreadful for me, as so near a relation, to have,
loyally loyally to you to say it. But he s impos
sible."
It was so portentously produced that her ladyship
had somehow to meet it. " What s the matter with
him?"
" I don t know."
" Then what s the matter with you? " Lady Want
ridge inquired.
" It s because I won t know," Mamie not without
dignity explained.
Then/ won t either!"
" Precisely. Don t. It s something," Mamie pur
sued, with some inconsequence, " that somewhere or
other, at some time or other he appears to have done ;
something that has made a difference in his life."
" Something ? " Lady Wantridge echoed again.
"What kind of thing?"
138
MRS. MEDWIN
Mamie looked up at the light above the door, through
which the London sky was doubly dim. " I haven t
the least idea."
" Then what kind of difference? "
Mamie s gaze was still at the light. " The difference
you see."
Lady Wantridge, rather obligingly, seemed to ask
herself what she saw. " But I don t see any ! It seems,
at least," she added, " such an amusing one! And he
has such nice eyes."
" Oh, dear eyes ! " Mamie conceded ; but with too
much sadness, for the moment, about the connections
of the subject, to say more.
It almost forced her companion, after an instant, to
proceed. " Do you mean he can t go home? "
She weighed her responsibility. " I only make out
more s the pity! that he doesn t."
"Is it then something too terrible ?"
She thought again. " I don t know what for men
is too terrible."
" Well then, as you don t know what is for women
either good-bye ! " her visitor laughed.
It practically wound up the interview; which, how
ever, terminating thus on a considerable stir of the air,
was to give Miss Cutter, the next few days, the sense
of being much blown about. The degree to which, to
begin with, she had been drawn or perhaps rather
pushed closer to Scott was marked in the brief col
loquy that, on her friend s departure, she had with
him. He had immediately said it. " You ll see if she
doesn t ask me down ! "
"So soon?"
" Oh, I ve known them at places at Cannes, at Pau,
at Shanghai to do it sooner still. I always know
when they will. You can t make out they don t love
me!" He spoke almost plaintively, as if he wished
she could.
139
THE BETTER SORT
" Then I don t see why it hasn t done you more
good."
" Why, Mamie," he patiently reasoned, " what more
good could it? As I tell you," he explained, " it has
just been my life."
" Then why do you come to me for money? "
" Oh, they don t give me that! " Scott returned.
" So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the
best, must keep you up ? "
He fixed on her the nice eyes that Lady Wantridge
admired. " Do you mean to tell me that already at
this very moment I am not distinctly keeping you? "
She gave him back his look. " AVait till she has
asked you, and then," Mamie added, " decline."
Scott, not too grossly, wondered. " As acting for
you? "
Mamie s next injunction was answer enough. " But
before yes call."
He took it in. " Call but decline. Good."
" The rest," she said, " I leave to you." And she
left it, in fact, with such confidence that for a couple
of days she was not only conscious of no need to give
Mrs. Medwin another turn of the screw, but positively
evaded, in her fortitude, the reappearance of that lady.
It was not till the third day that she waited upon her,
finding her, as she had expected, tense.
" Lady Wantridge will ? "
" Yes, though she says she won t."
" She says she won t ? O oh ! " Mrs. Medwin
moaned.
" Sit tight all the same. I have her! "
"But how?"
" Through Scott whom she wants."
"Your bad brother!" Mrs. Medwin stared.
" What does she want of him? "
" To amuse them at Catchmore. Anything for that.
And he would. But he sha n t!" Mamie declared.
140
MRS. MEDWIN
"" He sha n t go unless she comes. She must meet you
first you re my condition."
" O o oh ! " Mrs. Medwin s tone was a wonder
of hope and fear. " But doesn t he want to go? "
" He wants what / want. She draws the line at-
you. I draw the line at him."
" But she doesn t she mind that he s bad ? "
It was so artless that Mamie laughed. " No ; it
doesn t touch her. Besides, perhaps he isn t. It isn t
as for you people seem not to know. He has settled
everything, at all events, by going to see her. It s
before her that he s the thing she will have to have."
"Have to?"
" For Sundays in the country. A feature the
feature."
" So she has asked him? "
Yes; and he has declined."
" For me? " Mrs. Medwin panted.
" For me," said Mamie, on the doorstep. " But I
don t leave him for long." Her hansom had waited.
" She ll come."
Lady Wantridge did come. She met in South Aud-
ley Street, on the fourteenth, at tea, the ladies whom
Mamie had named to her, together with three or four
others, and it was rather a masterstroke for Miss Cut
ter that, if Mrs. Medwin was modestly present, Scott
Homer was as markedly not. This occasion, however,
is a medal that would take rare casting, as would also,
for that matter, even the minor light and shade, the
lower relief, of the pecuniary transaction that Mrs.
Medwin s flushed gratitude scarce awaited the dispersal
of the company munificently to complete. A new un
derstanding indeed, on the spot rebounded from it,
the conception of which, in Mamie s mind, had prompt
ly bloomed. " He sha n t go now unless he takes you."
Then, as her fancy always moved quicker for her
client than her client s own " Down with him to
141
THE BETTER SORT
Catchmore! When he goes to amuse them, you" she
comfortably declared, " shall amuse them too." Mrs.
Medwin s response was again rather oddly divided,
but she was sufficiently intelligible when it came to
meeting the intimation that this latter would be an
opportunity involving a separate fee. " Say," Mamie
had suggested, " the same."
" Very well; the same."
The knowledge that it was to be the same had per
haps something to do, also, with the obliging spirit in
which Scott eventually went. It was all, at the last,
rather hurried a party rapidly got together for the
Grand Duke, who was in England but for the hour,
who had good-naturedly proposed himself, and who
liked his parties small, intimate and funny. This one
was of the smallest, and it was finally judged to con
form neither too little nor too much to the other con
ditions after a brief whirlwind of wires and counter-
wires, and an iterated waiting of hansons at various
doors to include Mrs. Medwin. It was from Catch-
more itself that, snatching a moment on the wondrous
Sunday afternoon, this lady had the harmonious
thought of sending the new cheque. She was in bliss
enough, but her scribble none the less intimated that it
was Scott who amused them most. He was the
feature.
FLICKERBRIDGE
FRANK GRANGER had arrived from Paris to
paint a portrait an order given him, as a young
compatriot with a future, whose early work would
some day have a price, by a lady from New York, a
friend of his own people and also, as it happened, of
Addie s, the young woman to whom it was publicly
both affirmed and denied that he was engaged. Other
young women in Paris fellow-members there of the
little tight transpontine world of art-study professed
to know that the pair had been " several limes " over
so closely contracted. This, however, was their own
affair; the last phase of the relation, the last time of
the times, had passed into vagueness; there was per
haps even an impression that if they were inscrutable to
their friends they were not wholly crystalline to each
other and themselves. What had occurred for Granger,
at all events, in connection with the portrait was that
Mrs. Bracken, his intending model, whose return to
America was at hand, had suddenly been called to Lon
don by her husband, occupied there with pressing busi
ness, but had yet desired that her displacement should
not interrupt her sittings. The young man, at her re
quest, had followed her to England and profited by
all she could give him, making shift with a small studio
lent him by a London painter whom he had known
and liked, a few years before, in the French atelier
that then cradled, and that continued to cradle, so
many of their kind.
143
THE BETTER SORT
The British capital was a strange, grey world to
him, where people walked, in more ways than one, by
a dim light; but he was happily of such a turn that
the impression, just as it came, could nowhere ever fail
him, and even the worst of these things was almost
as much an occupation putting it only at that as
the best. Mrs. Bracken, moreover, passed him on,
and while the darkness ebbed a little in the April days
he found himself consolingly committed to a couple
of fresh subjects. This cut him out work for more than
another month, but meanwhile, as he said, he saw a lot
a lot that, with frequency and with much expression,
he wrote about to Addie. She also wrote to her absent
friend, but in briefer snatches, a meagreness to her
reasons for which he had long since assented. She
had other play for her pen, as well as, fortunately,
other remuneration; a regular correspondence for a
" prominent Boston paper," fitful connections with
public sheets perhaps also, in cases, fitful, and a mind,
above all, engrossed at times, to the exclusion of every
thing else, with the study of the short story. This
last was what she had mainly come out to go into, two
or three years after he had found himself engulfed in
the mystery of Carolus. She was indeed, on her own
deep sea, more engulfed than he had ever been, and he
had grown to accept the sense that, for progress too,
she sailed under more canvas. It had not been par
ticularly present to him till now that he had in the least
got on, but the way in which Addie had and evident
ly, still more, would was the theme, as it were, of
every tongue. She had thirty short stories out and
nine descriptive articles. His three or four portraits
of fat American ladies they were all fat, all ladies
and all American were a poor show compared with
these triumphs; especially as Addie had begun to
throw out that it was about time they should go home.
It kept perpetually coming up in Paris, in the trans-
144
FLICKERBRIDGE
pontine world, that, as the phrase was, America had
grown more interesting since they left. Addie was at
tentive to the rumour, and, as full of conscience as she
was of taste, of patriotism as of curiosity, had often
put it to him frankly, with what he, who was of New
York, recognised as her New England emphasis : " I m
not sure, you know, that we do real justice to our
country." Granger felt he would do it on the day
if the day ever came he should irrevocably marry her.
No other country could possibly have produced her.
II
BUT meanwhile it befell, in London, that he was strick
en with influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The
attack was short but sharp had it lasted Addie would
certainly have come to his aid ; most of a blight, really,
in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters
the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond ear
rings, with the chins tending to the massive left for
him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love,
so that with their assistance he pulled through; but
his convalescence was slow and his weakness out of
proportion to the muffled shock. He came out, but
he went about lame; it tired him to paint he felt as
if he had been ill for a month. He strolled in Kensing
ton Gardens when he should have been at work ; he sat
long on penny chairs and helplessly mused and mooned.
Addie desired him to return to Paris, but there were
chances under his hand that he felt he had just wit
enough left not to relinquish. He would have gone for
a week to the sea he would have gone to Brighton;
but Mrs. Bracken had to be finished Mrs. Bracken
was so soon to sail. He just managed to finish her
in time the day before the date fixed for his breaking
ground on a greater business still, the circumvallation
of Mrs. Dunn. Mrs. Dunn duly waited on him, and
145
THE BETTER SORT
he sat down before her, feeling, however, ere he rose,
that he must take a long breath before the attack.
While asking himself that night, therefore, where he
should best replenish his lungs, he received from Addie,
who had had from Mrs. Bracken a poor report of him,
a communication which, besides being of sudden and
startling interest, applied directly to his case.
His friend wrote to him under the lively emotion
of having from one day to another become aware of
a new relative, an ancient cousin, a sequestered gentle
woman, the sole survival of " the English branch of
the family," still resident, at Flickerbridge, in the
" old family home," and with whom, that he might
immediately betake himself to so auspicious a quarter
for change of air, she had already done what was
proper to place him, as she said, in touch. What came
of it all, to be brief, was that Granger found himself
so placed almost as he read : he was in touch with Miss
Wenham of Flickerbridge, to the extent of being in
correspondence with her, before twenty-four hours had
sped. And on the second day he was in the train, set
tled for a five-hours run to the door of this amiable
woman, who had so abruptly and kindly taken him on
trust and of whom but yesterday he had never so much
as heard. This was an oddity the whole incident was
of which, in the corner of his compartment, as he
proceeded, he had time to take the size. But the sur
prise, the incongruity, as he felt, could but deepen as he
went. It was a sufficiently queer note, in the light,
or the absence of it, of his late experience, that so com
plex a product as Addie should have any simple insular
tie ; but it was a queerer note still that she should have
had one so long only to remain unprofitably uncon
scious of it. Not to have done something with it, used
it, worked it, talked about it at least, and perhaps even
written these things, at the rate she moved, repre
sented a loss of opportunity under which, as he saw
146
FLICKERBRIDGE
her, she was peculiarly formed to wince. She was at
any rate, it was clear, doing something with it now;
using it, working it, certainly, already talking and,
yes, quite possibly writing about it. She was, in
short, smartly making up what she had missed, and
he could take such comfort from his own action as
he had been helped to by the rest of the facts, succinctly
reported from Paris on the very morning of his start.
It was the singular story of a sharp split in a good
English house that dated now from years back. A
worthy Briton, of the best middling stock, had, early
in the forties, as a very young man, in Dresden, whither
he had been despatched to qualify in German for a
stool in an uncle s counting-house, met, admired, wooed
and won an American girl, of due attractions, domi
ciled at that period with her parents and a sister, who
was also attractive, in the Saxon capital. He had mar
ried her, taken her to England, and there, after some
years of harmony and happiness, lost her. The sister
in question had, after her death, come to him, and to
his young child, on a visit, the effect of which, between
the pair, eventually defined itself as a sentiment that
was not to be resisted. The bereaved husband, yield
ing to a new attachment and a new response, and find
ing a new union thus prescribed, had yet been forced
to reckon with the unaccommodating law of the land.
Encompassed with frowns in his own country, how
ever, marriages of this particular type were wreathed
in smiles in his sister s-in-law, so that his remedy was
not forbidden. Choosing between two allegiances he
had let the one go that seemed the least close, and
had, in brief, transplanted his possibilities to an easier
air. The knot was tied for the couple in New York,
where, to protect the legitimacy of such other children
as might come to them, they settled and prospered.
Children came, and one of the daughters, growing up
and marrying in her turn, was, if Frank rightly fol-
147
THE BETTER SORT
lowed, the mother of his own Addie, who had been
deprived of the knowledge of her indeed, in childhood,
by death, and been brought up, though without undue
tension, by a stepmother a character thus, in the con
nection, repeated.
The breach produced in England by the invidious
action, as it was there held, of the girl s grandfather,
had not failed to widen all the more that nothing had
been done on the American side to close it. Frigidity
had settled, and hostility had only been arrested by in
difference. Darkness, therefore, had fortunately su
pervened, and a cousinship completely divided. On
either side of the impassable gulf, of the impenetrable
curtain, each branch had put forth its leaves a foliage
wanting, in the American quarter, it was distinct
enough to Granger, in no sign or symptom of climate
and environment. The graft in New York had taken,
and Addie was a vivid, an unmistakable flower. At
Flickerbridge, or wherever, on the other hand, strange
to say, the parent stem had had a fortune comparatively
meagre. Fortune, it was true, in the vulgarest sense,
had attended neither party. Addie s immediate belong
ings were as poor as they were numerous, and he gath
ered that Miss Wenham s pretensions to wealth were
not so marked as to expose the claim of kinship to the
imputation of motive. To this lady s single identity,
at all events, the original stock had dwindled, and our
young man was properly warned that he should find
her shy and solitary. What was singular was that, in
these conditions, she should desire, she should endure,
to receive him. But that was all another story, lucid
enough when mastered. He kept Addie s letters, ex
ceptionally copious, in his lap; he conned them at in
tervals; he held the threads.
He looked out between whiles at the pleasant Eng
lish land, an April aquarelle washed in with wondrous
breadth. He knew the French thing, he knew the
148
FLICKERBRIDGE
American, but he had known nothing of this. He saw
it already as the remarkable Miss Wenham s setting.
The doctor s daughter at Flickerbridge, with nippers
on her nose, a palette on her thumb and innocence in
her heart, had been the miraculous link. She had be
come aware, even there, in our world of wonders, that
the current fashion for young women so equipped was
to enter the Parisian lists. Addie had accordingly
chanced upon her, on the slopes of Montparnasse, as
one of the English girls in one of the thorough-going
sets. They had met in some easy collocation and had
fallen upon common ground; after which the young
woman, restored to Flickerbridge for an interlude and
retailing there her adventures and impressions, had
mentioned to Miss Wenham, who had known and pro
tected her from babyhood, that that lady s own name
of Adelaide was, as well as the surname conjoined
with it, borne, to her knowledge, in Paris, by an ex
traordinary American specimen. She had then re-
crossed the Channel with a wonderful message, a
courteous challenge, to her friend s duplicate, who had
in turn granted through her every satisfaction. The
duplicate had, in other words, bravely let Miss Wen-
ham know exactly who she was. Miss Wenham, in
whose personal tradition the flame of resentment ap
peared to have been reduced by time to the palest ashes
for whom, indeed, the story of the great schism was
now but a legend only needing a little less dimness to
make it romantic Miss Wenham had promptly re
sponded by a letter fragrant with the hope that old
threads might be taken up. It was a relationship that
they must puzzle out together, and she had earnestly
sounded the other party to it on the subject of a possi
ble visit. Addie had met her with a definite promise;
she would come soon, she would come when free, she
would come in July; but meanwhile she sent her dep
uty. Frank asked himself by what name she had
149
THE BETTER SORT
described, by what character introduced him to Flicker-
bridge. He felt mainly, on the whole, as if he were
going there to find out if he were engaged to her. He
was at sea, really, now, as to which of the various
views Addie herself took of it. To Miss Wenham she
must definitely have taken one, and perhaps Miss Wen-
ham would reveal it. This expectation was really his
excuse for a possible indiscretion.
Ill
HE was indeed to learn on arrival to what he had been
committed; but that was for a while so much a part
of his first general impression that the fact took time
to detach itself, the first general impression demanding
verily all his faculties of response. He almost felt, for
a day or two, the victim of a practical joke, a gross
abuse of confidence. He had presented himself with
the moderate amount of flutter involved in a sense of
due preparation; but he had then found that, how
ever primed with prefaces and prompted with hints,
he had not been prepared at all. How could he be, he
asked himself, for anything so foreign to his experience,
so alien to his proper world, so little to be preconceived
in the sharp north light of the newest impressionism,
and yet so recognised, after all, really, in the event, so
noted and tasted and assimilated? It was a case he
would scarce have known how to describe could
doubtless have described best with a full, clean brush,
supplemented by a play of gesture; for it was always
his habit to see an occasion, of whatever kind, primarily
as a picture, so that he might get it, as he was wont
to say, so that he might keep it, well together. He
had been treated of a sudden, in this adventure, to one
of the sweetest, fairest, coolest impressions of his life
one, moreover, visibly, from the start, complete and
homogeneous. Oh, it was there, if that was all one
150
FLICKERBRIDGE
wanted of a thing! It was so " there " that, as had
befallen him in Italy, in Spain, confronted at last, in
dusky side-chapel or rich museum, with great things
dreamed of or with greater ones unexpectedly present
ed, he had held his breath for fear of breaking the spell ;
had almost, from the quick impulse to respect, to pro
long, lowered his voice and moved on tiptoe. Supreme
beauty suddenly revealed is apt to strike us as a pos
sible illusion, playing with our desire instant freedom
with it to strike us as a possible rashness.
This fortunately, however and the more so as his
freedom for the time quite left him didn t prevent his
hostess, the evening of his advent and while the vision
was new, from being exactly as queer and rare and
impayable, as improbable, as impossible, as delightful
at dinner at eight ( she appeared to keep these immense
hours) as she had overwhelmingly been at tea at five.
She was in the most natural way in the world one of
the oddest apparitions, but that the particular means
to such an end could be natural was an inference diffi
cult to make. He failed in fact to make it for a couple
of days ; but then though then only he made it with
confidence. By this time indeed he was sure of every
thing, including, luckily, himself. If we compare his
impression, with slight extravagance, to some of the
greatest he had ever received, this is simply because
the image before him was so rounded and stamped.
It expressed with pure perfection, it exhausted its
character. It was so absolutely and so unconsciously
what it was. He had been floated by the strangest of
chances out of the rushing stream into a clear, still
backwater a deep and quiet pool in which objects
were sharply mirrored. He had hitherto in life known
nothing that was old except a few statues and pictures ;
but here everything was old, was immemorial, and
nothing so much so as the very freshness itself. Vague
ly to have supposed there were such nooks in the world
THE BETTER SORT
had done little enough, he now saw, to temper the glare
of their opposites. It was the fine touches that counted,
and these had to be seen to be believed.
Miss Wenham, fifty-five years of age, and unap-
peasably timid, unaccountably strange, had, on her re
duced scale, an almost Gothic grotesqueness ; but the
final effect of one s sense of it was an amenity that ac
companied one s steps like wafted gratitude. More
flurried, more spasmodic, more apologetic, more com
pletely at a loss at one moment and more precipitately
abounding at another, he had never before in all his
days seen any maiden lady ; yet for no maiden lady he
had ever seen had he so promptly conceived a private
enthusiasm. Her eyes protruded, her chin receded and
her nose carried on in conversation a queer little in
dependent motion. She wore on the top of her head
an upright circular cap that made her resemble a
caryatid disburdened, and on other parts of her person
strange combinations of colours, stuffs, shapes, of
metal, mineral and plant. The tones of her voice rose
and fell, her facial convulsions, whether tending one
could scarce make out to expression or repression,
succeeded each other by a law of their own ; she was
embarrassed at nothing and at everything, frightened
at everything and at nothing, and she approached ob
jects, subjects, the simplest questions and answers and
the whole material of intercourse, either with the in
directness of terror or with the violence of despair.
These things, none the less, her refinements of oddity
and intensities of custom, her suggestion at once of
conventions and simplicities, of ease and of agony, her
roundabout, retarded suggestions and perceptions, still
permitted her to strike her guest as irresistibly charm
ing. He didn t know what to call it; she was a fruit
of time. She had a queer distinction. She had been
expensively produced, and there would be a good deal
more of her to come.
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FLICKERBRIDGE
The result of the whole quality of her welcome, at
any rate, was that the first evening, in his room, before
going to bed, he relieved his mind in a letter to Addie,
which, if space allowed us to embody it in our text,
would usefully perform the office of a " plate." It
would enable us to present ourselves as profusely illus
trated. But the process of reproduction, as we say,
costs. He wished his friend to know how grandly
their affair turned out. She had put him in the way
of something absolutely special an old house un
touched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner such
as one didn t believe existed, and the holy calm of
which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint,
the slang of critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris,
come back as so many signs of a huge monkey-cage.
He moved about, restless, while he wrote; he lighted
cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, put
them out again; the night was mild and one of the
windows of his large high room, which stood over the
garden, was up. He lost himself in the things about
him, in the type of the room, the last century with not
a chair moved, not a point stretched. He hung over
the objects and ornaments, blissfully few and adorably
good, perfect pieces all, and never one, for a change,
French. The scene was as rare as some fine old print
with the best bits down in the corners. Old books and
old pictures, allusions remembered and aspects con
jectured, reappeared to him ; he knew now what anx
ious islanders had been trying for in their backward
hunt for the homely. But the homely at Flickerbridge
was all style, even as style at the same time was mere
honesty. The larger, the smaller past he scarce knew
which to call it was at all events so hushed to sleep
round him as he wrote that he had almost a bad con
science about having come. How one might love it,
but how one might spoil it! To look at it too hard
was positively to make it conscious, and to make it
153
THE BETTER SORT
conscious was positively to wake it up. Its only safety,
of a truth, was to be left still to sleep to sleep in its
large, fair chambers, and under its high, clean can
opies.
He added thus restlessly a line to his letter, maun
dered round the room again, noted and fingered some
thing else, and then, dropping on the old flowered sofa,
sustained by the tight cubes of its cushions, yielded
afresh to the cigarette, hesitated, stared, wrote a few
words more. He wanted Addie to know, that was
what he most felt, unless he perhaps felt more how
much she herself would want to. Yes, what he su
premely saw was all that Addie would make of it. Up
to his neck in it there he fairly turned cold at the sense
of suppressed opportunity, of the outrage of privation,
that his correspondent would retrospectively and, as
he even divined with a vague shudder, almost vin
dictively nurse. Well, what had happened was that
the acquaintance had been kept for her, like a packet
enveloped and sealed for delivery, till her attention was
free. He saw her there, heard her and felt her felt
how she would feel and how she would, as she usually
said, " rave." Some of her young compatriots called
it " yell," and in the reference itself, alas ! illustrated
their meaning. She would understand the place, at
any rate, down to the ground ; there wasn t the slight
est doubt of that. Her sense of it would be exactly
like his own, and he could see, in anticipation, just
the terms of recognition and rapture in which she
would abound. He knew just what she would call
quaint, just what she would call bland, just what she
would call weird, just what she would call wild. She
would take it all in with an intelligence much more
fitted than his own, in fact, to deal with what he sup
posed he must regard as its literary relations. She
would have read the obsolete, long-winded memoirs
and novels that both the figures and the setting ought
154
FLICKERBRIDGE
clearly to remind one of; she would know about the
past generations the lumbering county magnates and
their turbaned wives and round-eyed daughters, who,
in other days, had treated the ruddy, sturdy, tradeless
town, the solid square houses and wide, walled gardens,
the streets to-day all grass and gossip, as the scene of
a local " season." She would have warrant for the
assemblies, dinners, deep potations; for the smoked
sconces in the dusky parlours; for the long, muddy
century of family coaches, " holsters," highwaymen.
She would put a finger, in short, just as he had done,
on the vital spot the rich humility of the whole thing,
the fact that neither Flickerbridge in general nor Miss
Wenham in particular, nor anything nor anyone con
cerned, had a suspicion of their character and their
merit. Addie and he would have to come to let in
light.
He let it in then, little by little, before going to bed,
through the eight or ten pages he addressed to her;
assured her that it was the happiest case in the world,
a little picture yet full of " style " too absolutely
composed and transmitted, with tradition, and tradition
only, in every stroke, tradition still noiselessly breath
ing and visibly flushing, marking strange hours in the
tall mahogany clocks that were never wound up and
that yet audibly ticked on. All the elements, he was sure
he should see, would hang together with a charm, pre
senting his hostess a strange iridescent fish for the
glazed exposure of an aquarium as floating in her
native medium. He left his letter open on the table, but,
looking it over next morning, felt of a sudden indis
posed to send it. He would keep it to add more, for
there would be more to know; yet when three days
had elapsed he had still not sent it. He sent instead,
after delay, a much briefer report, which he was moved
to make different and, for some reason, less vivid.
Meanwhile he learned from Miss Wenham how Addie
155
THE BETTER SORT
had introduced him. It took time to arrive with her
at that point, but after the Rubicon was crossed they
went far afield.
IV
" OH yes, she said you were engaged. That was why
since I had broken out so she thought I would like
to see you ; as I assure you I ve been so delighted to.
But aren t you ? " the good lady asked as if she saw
in his face some ground for doubt.
" Assuredly if she says so. It may seem very odd
to you, but I haven t known, and yet I ve felt that,
being nothing whatever to you directly, I need some
warrant for consenting thus to be thrust on you. We
were," the young man explained, " engaged a year
ago; but since then (if you don t mind my telling you
such things ; I feel now as if I could tell you anything !)
I haven t quite known how I stand. It hasn t seemed
that we were in a position to marry. Things are
better now, but I haven t quite known how she
would see them. They were so bad six months ago
that I understood her, I thought, as breaking off. I
haven t broken; I ve only accepted, for the time be
cause men must be easy with women being treated
as the best of friends. Well, I try to be. I wouldn t
have come here if I hadn t been. I thought it would
be charming for her to know you when I heard from
her the extraordinary way you had dawned upon her,
and charming therefore if I could help her to it. And
if I m helping you to know her" he went on, " isn t
that charming too ? "
" Oh, I so want to ! " Miss Wenham murmured, in
her unpractical, impersonal way. " You re so differ
ent !" she wistfully declared.
" It s you, if I may respectfully, ecstatically say so,
who are different. That s the point of it all. I m
156
FLICKERBRIDGE
not sure that anything so terrible really ought to hap
pen to you as to know us."
" Well," said Miss Wenhani, " I do know you a
little, by this time, don t I ? And I don t find it terri
ble. It s a delightful change for me."
"Oh, I m not sure you ought to have a delightful
change!"
"Why not if you do?"
" Ah, I can bear it. I m not sure that you can. I m
too bad to spoil I am spoiled. I m nobody, in short;
I m nothing. I ve no type. You re all type. It has
taken long, delicious years of security and monotony
to produce you. You fit your frame with a perfection
only equalled by the perfection with which your frame
fits you. So this admirable old house, all time-softened
white within and time-faded red without, so every
thing that surrounds you here and that has, by some
extraordinary mercy, escaped the inevitable fate of ex
ploitation : so it all, I say, is the sort of thing that, if
it were the least bit to fall to pieces, could never, ah,
never more, be put together again. I have, dear Miss
Wenham," Granger went on, happy himself in his ex
travagance, which was yet all sincere, and happier still
in her deep, but altogether pleased, mystification
" I ve found, do you know, just the thing one has ever
heard of that you most resemble. You re the Sleeping
Beauty in the wood."
He still had no compunction when he heard her be-
wilderedly sigh : " Oh, you re too delightfully droll ! "
" No, I only put things just as they are, and as I ve
also learned a little, thank heaven, to see them which
isn t, I quite agree with you, at all what anyone does.
You re in the deep doze of the spell that has held you
for long years, and it would be a shame, a crime, to
wake you up. Indeed I already feel, with a thousand
scruples, that I m giving you the fatal shake. I say
it even though it makes me sound a little as if I thought
myself the fairy prince."
157
THE BETTER SORT
She gazed at him with her queerest, kindest look,
which he was getting used to, in spite of a faint fear,
at the back of his head, of the strange things that some
times occurred when lonely ladies, however mature,
began to look at interesting young men from over the
seas as if the young men desired to flirt. " It s so won
derful," she said, " that you should be so very odd and
yet so very good-natured." Well, it all came to the
same thing it was so wonderful that she should be
so simple and yet so little of a bore. He accepted with
gratitude the theory of his languor which moreover
was real enough and partly perhaps why he was so
sensitive; he let himself go as a convalescent, let her
insist on the weakness that always remained after
fever. It helped him to gain time, to preserve the
spell even while he talked of breaking it; saw him
through slow strolls and soft sessions, long gossips,
fitful, hopeless questions there was so much more to
tell than, by any contortion, she could and explana
tions addressed gallantly and patiently to her under
standing, but not, by good fortune, really reaching it.
They were perfectly at cross-purposes, and it was all
the better, and they wandered together in the silver
haze with all communication blurred.
When they sat in the sun in her formal garden he
was quite aware that the tenderest consideration failed
to disguise his treating her as the most exquisite of
curiosities. The term of comparison most present to
him was that of some obsolete musical instrument.
The old-time order of her mind and her air had the
stillness of a painted spinnet that was duly dusted,
gently rubbed, but never tuned nor played on. Her
opinions were like dried roseleaves; her attitudes like
British sculpture; her voice was what he imagined of
the possible tone of the old gilded, silver-stringed harp
in one of the corners of the drawing-room. The lonely
little decencies and modest dignities of her life, the
158
FLICKERBRIDGE
fine grain of its conservatism, the innocence of its ig
norance, all its monotony of stupidity and salubrity,
its cold dulness and dim brightness, were there before
him. Meanwhile, within him, strange things took
place. It was literally true that his impression began
again, after a lull, to make him nervous and anxious,
and for reasons peculiarly confused, almost grotesquely
mingled, or at least comically sharp. He was distinct
ly an agitation and a new taste that he could see;
and he saw quite as much therefore the excitement she
already drew from the vision of Addie, an image in
tensified by the sense of closer kinship and presented
to her, clearly, with various erratic enhancements, by
her friend the doctor s daughter. At the end of a few
days he said to her : " Do you know she wants to come
without waiting any longer ? She wants to come while
I m here. I received this morning her letter proposing
it, but I ve been thinking it over and have waited to
speak to you. The thing is, you see, that if she writes
to you proposing it "
" Oh, I shall be so particularly glad ! "
THEY were, as usual, in the garden, and it had not yet
been so present to him that if he were only a happy
cad there would be a good way to protect her. As she
wouldn t hear of his being yet beyond precautions she
had gone into the house for a particular shawl that
was just the thing for his knees, and, blinking in the
watery sunshine, had come back with it across the fine
little lawn. He was neither fatuous nor asinine, but
he had almost to put it to himself as a small task to
resist the sense of his absurd advantage with her. It
filled him with horror and awkwardness, made him
think of he didn t know what, recalled something of
Maupassant s the smitten " Miss Harriet " and her
159
THE BETTER SORT
tragic fate. There was a preposterous possibility yes,
he held the strings quite in his hands of keeping the
treasure for himself. That was the art of life what
the real artist would consistently do. He would close
the door on his impression, treat it as a private museum.
He would see that he could lounge and linger there,
live with wonderful things there, lie up there to rest
and refit. For himself he was sure that after a little
he should be able to paint there do things in a key
he had never thought of before. When she brought
him the rug he took it from her and made her sit down
on the bench and resume her knitting; then, passing
behind her with a laugh, he placed it over her own
shoulders; after which he moved to and fro before
her, his hands in his pockets and his cigarette in his
teeth. He was ashamed of the cigarette a villainous
false note; but she allowed, liked, begged him to
smoke, and what he said to her on it, in one of the
pleasantries she benevolently missed, was that he did
so for fear of doing worse. That only showed that
the end was really in sight. " I dare say it will strike
you as quite awful, what I m going to say to you, but
I can t help it. I speak out of the depths of my respect
for you. It will seem to you horrid disloyalty to poor
Addie. Yes there we are; there 7 am, at least, in
my naked monstrosity." He stopped and looked at
her till she might have been almost frightened. " Don t
let her come. Tell her not to. I ve tried to prevent it,
but she suspects."
The poor woman wondered. " Suspects ? "
" Well, I drew it, in writing to her, on reflection, as
mild as I could having been visited, in the watches
of the night, by the instinct of what might happen.
Something told me to keep back my first letter in
which, under the first impression, I myself rashly
raved ; and I concocted instead of it an insincere
and guarded report. But guarded as I was I clearly
160
FLICKERBRIDGE
didn t keep you down, as we say, enough. The won
der of your colour daub you over with grey as I
might must have come through and told the tale.
She scents battle from afar by which I mean she
scents quaintness. But keep her off. It s hideous,
what I m saying but I owe it to you. I owe it to
the world. She ll kill you."
" You mean I sha n t get on with her ? "
" Oh, fatally ! See how / have. She s intelligent,
remarkably pretty, remarkably good. And she ll adore
you."
"Well then?"
" Why, that will be just how she ll do for you."
" Oh, I can hold my own ! " said Miss Wenham with
the head-shake of a horse making his sleigh-bells rattle
in frosty air.
" Ah, but you can t hold hers ! She ll rave about you.
She ll write about you. You re Niagara before the
first white traveller and you know, or rather you can t
know, what Niagara became after that gentleman.
Addie will have discovered Niagara. She will under
stand you in perfection ; she will feel you down to the
ground ; not a delicate shade of you will she lose or let
anyone else lose. You ll be too weird for words, but the
words will nevertheless come. You ll be too exactly the
real thing and to be left too utterly just as you are, and
all Addie s friends and all Addie s editors and contrib
utors and readers will cross the Atlantic and flock to
Flickerbridge, so, unanimously, universally, vocifer
ously, to leave you. You ll be in the magazines with
illustrations; you ll be in the papers with headings;
you ll be everywhere with everything. You don t un
derstand you think you do, but you don t. Heaven
forbid you should understand ! That s just your beauty
your * sleeping beauty. But you needn t. You can
take me on trust. Don t have her. Say, as a pretext,
as a reason, anything in the world you like. Lie to
161
THE BETTER SORT
her scare her away. I ll go away and give you up
I ll sacrifice everything myself." Granger pursued his
exhortation, convincing himself more and more. " If
I saw my way out, my way completely through, /
would pile up some fabric of fiction for her I should
only want to be sure of its not tumbling down. One
would have, you see, to keep the thing up. But I
would throw dust in her eyes. I would tell her that
you don t do at all that you re not, in fact, a desirable
acquaintance. I d tell her you re vulgar, improper,
scandalous; I d tell her you re mercenary, designing,
dangerous; I d tell her the only safe course is im
mediately to let you drop. I would thus surround you
with an impenetrable legend of conscientious misrepre
sentation, a circle of pious fraud, and all the while
privately keep you for myself."
She had listened to him as if he were a band of music
and she a small shy garden-party. " I shouldn t like
you to go away. I shouldn t in the least like you not
to come again."
" Ah, there it is ! " he replied. " How can I come
again if Addie ruins you ? "
" But how will she ruin me even if she does what
you say? I know I m too old to change and really
much too queer to please in any of the extraordinary
ways you speak of. If it s a question of quizzing me
I don t think my cousin, or anyone else, will have quite
the hand for it that you seem to have. So that if you
haven t ruined me ! "
" But I have that s just the point ! " Granger in
sisted. " I ve undermined you at least. I ve left, after
all, terribly little for Addie to do."
She laughed in queer tones. " Well, then, we ll ad
mit that you ve done everything but frighten me."
He looked at her with surpassing gloom. " No
that again is one of the most dreadful features. You ll
positively like it what s to come. You ll be caught
162
FLICKERBRIDGE
up in a chariot of fire like the prophet wasn t there,
was there, one? of old. That s exactly why if one
could but have done it you would have been to be
kept ignorant and helpless. There s something or
other in Latin that says that it s the finest things that
change the most easily for the worse. You already
enjoy your dishonour and revel in your shame. It s
too late you re lost! "
VI
ALL this was as pleasant a manner of passing the time
as any other, for it didn t prevent his old-world corner
from closing round him more entirely, nor stand in the
way of his making out, from day to day, some new
source, as well as some new effect, of its virtue. He
was really scared at moments at some of the liberties
he took in talk at finding himself so familiar ; for the
great note of the place was just that a certain modern
ease had never crossed its threshold, that quick in
timacies and quick oblivions were a stranger to its air.
It had known, in all its days, no rude, no loud in
vasion. Serenely unconscious of most contempo
rary things, it had been so of nothing so much as of
the diffused social practice of running in and out.
Granger held his breath, on occasions, to think how
Addie would run. There were moments when, for
some reason, more than at others, he heard her step on
the stair-case and her cry in the hall. If he played
freely, none the less, with the idea with which we have
shown him as occupied, it was not that in every meas
urable way he didn t sacrifice, to the utmost, to still
ness. He only hovered, ever so lightly, to take up
again his thread. She wouldn t hear of his leaving her,
of his being in the least fit again, as she said, to travel.
She spoke of the journey to London which was in
fact a matter of many hours as an experiment fraught
163
THE BETTER SORT
with lurking complications. He added then day to day,
yet only hereby, as he reminded her, giving other com
plications a larger chance to multiply. He kept it be
fore her, when there was nothing else to do, that she
must consider; after which he had his times of fear
that she perhaps really would make for him this sacri
fice.
He knew that she had written again to Paris, and
knew that he must himself again write a situation
abounding for each in the elements of a quandary. If
he stayed so long, why then he wasn t better, and if he
wasn t better Addie might take it into her head !
They must make it clear that he was better, so that,
suspicious, alarmed at what was kept from her, she
shouldn t suddenly present herself to nurse him. If
he was better, however, why did he stay so long? If
he stayed only for the attraction the sense of the attrac
tion might be contagious. This was what finally grew
clearest for him, so that he had for his mild disciple
hours of still sharper prophecy. It consorted with his
fancy to represent to her that their young friend had
been by this time unsparingly warned; but nothing
could be plainer than that this was ineffectual so long
as he himself resisted the ordeal. To plead that he re
mained because he was too weak to move was only to
throw themselves back on the other horn of their di
lemma. If he was too weak to move Addie would
bring him her strength of which, when she got there,
she would give them specimens enough. One morn
ing he broke out at breakfast with an intimate convic
tion. They would see that she was actually starting
they would receive a wire by noon. They didn t
receive it, but by his theory the portent was only the
stronger. It had, moreover, its grave as well as its
gay side, for Granger s paradox and pleasantry were
only the most convenient way for him of saying what
he felt. He literally heard the knell sound, and in
164
FLICKERBRIDGE
expressing this to Miss Wenham with the conversa
tional freedom that seemed best to pay his way he the
more vividly faced the contingency. He could never
return, and though he announced it with a despair
that did what might be to make it pass as a joke,
he saw that, whether or no she at last understood,
she quite at last believed him. On this, to his knowl
edge, she wrote again to Addie, and the contents of her
letter excited his curiosity. But that sentiment, though
not assuaged, quite dropped when, the day after, in
the evening, she let him know that she had had, an
hour before, a telegram.
" She comes Thursday."
He showed not the least surprise. It was the deep
calm of the fatalist. It had to be. " I must leave you
then to-morrow."
She looked, on this, as he had never seen her; it
would have been hard to say whether what was in
her face was the last failure to follow or the first effort
to meet. " And really not to come back ? "
" Never, never, dear lady. Why should I come
back? You can never be again what you have been.
I shall have seen the last of you."
" Oh ! " she touchingly urged.
Yes, for I should next find you simply brought to
self-consciousness. You ll be exactly what you are, I
charitably admit nothing more or less, nothing dif
ferent. But you ll be it all in a different way. We
live in an age of prodigious machinery, all organised
to a single end. That end is publicity a publicity as
ferocious as the appetite of a cannibal. The thing there
fore is not to have any illusions fondly to flatter your
self, in a muddled moment, that the cannibal will spare
you. He spares nobody. He spares nothing. It will
be all right. You ll have a lovely time. You ll be only
just a public character blown about the world for all
you are and proclaimed for all you are on the housetops.
165
THE BETTER SORT
It will be for that, mind, I quite recognise because
Addie is superior as well as for all you aren t. So
good-bye."
He remained, however, till the next day, and noted
at intervals the different stages of their friend s jour
ney ; the hour, this time, she would really have started,
the hour she would reach Dover, the hour she would
get to town, where she would alight at Mrs. Dunn s.
Perhaps she would bring Mrs. Dunn, for Mrs. Dunn
would swell the chorus. At the last, on the morrow,
as if in anticipation of this, stillness settled between
them; he became as silent as his hostess. But before
he went she brought out, shyly and anxiously, as an
appeal, the question that, for hours, had clearly been
giving her thought. " Do you meet her then to-night
in London ? "
" Dear, no. In what position am I, alas ! to do
that? When can I ever meet her again?" He had
turned it all over. " If I could meet Addie after this,
you know, I could meet you. And if I do meet Addie,"
he lucidly pursued, " what will happen, by the same
stroke, is that I shall meet you. And that s just what
I ve explained to you that I dread."
" You mean that she and I will be inseparable ? "
He hesitated. " I mean that she ll tell me all about
you. I can hear her, and her ravings, now."
She gave again and it was infinitely sad her little
whinnying laugh. " Oh, but if what you say is true,
you ll know."
" Ah, but Addie won t ! Won t, I mean, know that
I know or at least won t believe it. Won t believe
that anyone knows. Such," he added, with a strange,
smothered sigh, " is Addie. Do you know," he wound
up, " that what, after all, has most definitely happened
is that you ve made me see her as I ve never done
before?"
She blinked and gasped, she wondered and despaired.
166
FLICKERBRIDGE
" Oh, no, it will be you. I ve had nothing to do with
it. Everything s all you ! "
But for all it mattered now! " You ll see," he said,
" that she s charming. I shall go, for to-night, to Ox
ford. I shall almost cross her on the way."
" Then, if she s charming, what am I to tell her
from you in explanation of such strange behaviour as
your flying away just as she arrives ? "
" Ah, you needn t mind about that you needn t tell
her anything."
She fixed him as if as never again. " It s none of my
business, of course I feel ; but isn t it a little cruel if
you re engaged ? "
Granger gave a laugh almost as odd as one of her
own. " Oh, you ve cost me that ! " and he put out his
hand to her.
She wondered while she took it. " Cost you ? "
" We re not engaged. Good-bye."
THE STORY IN IT
THE weather had turned so much worse that the
rest of the day was certainly lost. The wind had
risen and the storm gathered force; they gave from
time to time a thump at the firm windows and dashed
even against those protected by the verandah their
vicious splotches of rain. Beyond the lawn, beyond
the cliff, the great wet brush of the sky dipped deep
into the sea. But the lawn, already vivid with the
touch of May, showed a violence of watered green;
the budding shrubs and trees repeated the note as they
tossed their thick masses, and the cold, troubled light,
filling the pretty drawing-room, marked the spring
afternoon as sufficiently young. The two ladies seated
there in silence could pursue without difficulty as
well as, clearly, without interruption their respective
tasks; a confidence expressed, when the noise of the
wind allowed it to be heard, by the sharp scratch of
Mrs. Dyott s pen at the table where she was busy with
letters.
Her visitor, settled on a small sofa that, with a palm-
tree, a screen, a stool, a stand, a bowl of flowers and
three photographs in silver frames, had been arranged
near the light wood-fire as a choice " corner " Maud
Blessingbourne, her guest, turned audibly, though at
intervals neither brief nor regular, the leaves of a book,
covered in lemon-coloured paper and not yet despoiled
168
THE STORY IN IT
of a certain fresh crispness. This effect of the volume,
for the eye, would have made it, as presumably the
newest French novel and evidently, from the attitude
of the reader, " good " consort happily with the
special tone of the room, a consistent air of selection
and suppression, one of the finer aesthetic evolutions.
If Mrs. Dyott was fond of ancient French furniture,
and distinctly difficult about it, her inmates could be
fond with whatever critical cocks of charming dark-
braided heads over slender sloping shoulders of mod
ern French authors. Nothing had passed for half an
hour nothing, at least, to be exact, but that each of
the companions occasionally and covertly intermitted
her pursuit in such a manner as to ascertain the degree
of absorption of the other without turning round.
What their silence was charged with, therefore, was
not only a sense of the weather, but a sense, so to speak,
of its own nature. Maud Blessingbourne, when she
lowered her book into her lap, closed her eyes with a
conscious patience that seemed to say she waited; but
it was nevertheless she who at last made the movement
representing a snap of their tension. She got up and
stood by the fire, into which she looked a minute ; then
came round and approached the window as if to see
what was really going on. At this Mrs. Dyott wrote
with refreshed intensity. Her little pile of letters had
grown, and if a look of determination was compatible
with her fair and slightly faded beauty, the habit of
attending to her business could always keep pace with
any excursion of her thought. Yet she was the first
who spoke.
" I trust your book has been interesting."
" Well enough; a little mild."
A louder throb of the tempest had blurred the sound
of the words. " A little wild? "
" Dear, no timid and tame ; unless I ve quite lost
my sense."
169
THE BETTER SORT
" Perhaps you have," Mrs. Dyott placidly suggested
" reading so many."
Her companion made a motion of feigned despair.
" Ah, you take away my courage for going to my room,
as I was just meaning to, for another."
" Another French one? "
" I m afraid."
" Do you carry them by the dozen "
" Into innocent British homes? " Maud tried to re
member. " I believe I brought three seeing them in
a shop window as I passed through town. It never
rains but it pours ! But I ve already read two."
" And are they the only ones you do read? "
" French ones ? " Maud considered. " Oh, no.
D Annunzio."
"And what s that?" Mrs. Dyott asked as she af
fixed a stamp.
"Oh, you dear thing!" Her friend was amused,
yet almost showed pity. " I know you don t read,"
Maud went on ; " but why should you ? You live ! "
" Yes wretchedly enough," Mrs. Dyott returned,
getting her letters together. She left her place, hold
ing them as a neat, achieved handful, and came over
to the fire, while Mrs. Blessingbourne turned once more
to the window, where she was met by another flurry.
Maud spoke then as if moved only by the elements.
" Do you expect him through all this? "
Mrs. Dyott just waited, and it had the effect, in
describably, of making everything that had gone before
seem to have led up to the question. This effect was
even deepened by the way she then said, " Whom do
you mean ? "
" Why, I thought you mentioned at luncheon that
Colonel Voyt was to walk over. Surely he can t."
" Do you care very much ? " Mrs. Dyott asked.
Her friend now hesitated. " It depends on what
you call much. If you mean should I like to see him
then certainly."
170
THE STORY IN IT
" Well, my dear, I think he understands you re
here."
" So that as he evidently isn t coming," Maud
laughed, " it s particularly flattering! Or rather," she
added, giving up the prospect again, " it would be, I
think, quite extraordinarily flattering if he did. Ex
cept that, of course," she subjoined, " he might come
partly for you."
" Partly is charming. Thank you for partly.
If you are going upstairs, will you kindly," Mrs. Dyott
pursued, " put these into the box as you pass? "
The younger woman, taking the little pile of letters,
considered them with envy. " Nine ! You are good.
You re always a living reproach ! "
Mrs. Dyott gave a sigh. " I don t do it on purpose.
The only thing, this afternoon," she went on, reverting
to the other question, " would be their not having come
down."
" And as to that you don t know."
" No I don t know." But she caught even as she
spoke a rat-tat-tat of the knocker, which struck her as
a sign. "Ah, there!"
" Then I go." And Maud whisked out.
Mrs. Dyott, left alone, moved with an air of selection
to the window, and it was as so stationed, gazing out
at the wild weather, that the visitor, whose delay to
appear spoke of the wiping of boots and the disposal
of drenched mackintosh and cap, finally found her.
He was tall, lean, fine, with little in him, on the whole,
to confirm the titular in the " Colonel Voyt " by which
he was announced. But he had left the army, and his
reputation for gallantry mainly depended now on his
fighting Liberalism in the House of Commons. Even
these facts, however, his aspect scantly matched;
partly, no doubt, because he looked, as was usually said,
un-English. His black hair, cropped close, was lightly
powdered with silver, and his dense glossy beard,
171
THE BETTER SORT
that of an emir or a caliph, and grown for civil reasons,
repeated its handsome colour and its somewhat foreign
effect. His nose had a strong and shapely arch, and
the dark grey of his eyes was tinted with blue. It had
been said of him in relation to these signs that he
would have struck you as a Jew had he not, in spite
of his nose, struck you so much as an Irishman.
Neither responsibility could in fact have been fixed
upon him, and just now, at all events, he was only a
pleasant, weather-washed, wind-battered Briton, who
brought in from a struggle with the elements that he
appeared quite to have enjoyed a certain amount of un-
removed mud and an unusual quantity of easy expres
sion. It was exactly the silence ensuing on the retreat
of the servant and the closed door that marked between
him and his hostess the degree of this ease. They met,
as it were, twice : the first time while the servant was
there and the second as soon as he was not. The dif
ference \vas great between the two encounters, though
we must add in justice to the second that its marks
were at first mainly negative. This communion con
sisted only in their having drawn each other for a
minute as close as possible as possible, that is, with
no help but the full clasp of hands. Thus they were
mutually held, and the closeness was at any rate such
that, for a little, though it took account of dangers,
it did without words. When words presently came the
pair were talking by the fire, and she had rung for tea.
He had by this time asked if the note he had despatched
to her after breakfast had been safely delivered.
" Yes, before luncheon. But I m always in a state
when except for some extraordinary reason you
send such things by hand. I knew, without it, that
you had come. It never fails. I m sure when you re
there I m sure when you re not."
He wiped, before the glass, his wet moustache. " I
see. But this morning I had an impulse."
172
THE STORY IN IT
" It was beautiful. But they make me as uneasy,
sometimes, your impulses, as if they were calculations ;
make me wonder what you have in reserve."
" Because w r hen small children are too awfully good
they die ? Well, I am a small child compared to you
but I m not dead yet. I cling to life."
He had covered her with his smile, but she con
tinued grave. " I m not half so much afraid when
you re nasty."
" Thank you ! What then did you do," he asked,
"with my note?"
" You deserve that I should have spread it out on
my dressing-table or left it, better still, in Maud
Blessingbourne s room."
He wondered while he laughed. " Oh, but what
does she deserve ? "
It was her gravity that continued to answer. " Yes
it would probably kill her."
" She believes so in you? "
" She believes so in yon. So don t be too nice to
her."
He was still looking, in the chimney-glass, at the
state of his beard brushing from it, with his hand
kerchief, the traces of wind and wet. " If she also
then prefers me when I m nasty, it seems to me I ought
to satisfy her. Shall I now, at any rate, see her ? "
" She s so like a pea on a pan over the possibility of
it that she s pulling herself together in her room."
" Oh then, we must try and keep her together. But
why, graceful, tender, pretty too quite, or almost
as she is, doesn t she remarry? "
Mrs. Dyott appeared and as if the first time to
look for the reason. " Because she likes too many
men."
It kept up his spirits. " And how many may a lady
like ?"
" In order not to like any of them too much ? Ah,
173
THE BETTER SORT
that, you know, I never found out and it s too late
now. When," she presently pursued, " did you last
see her?"
He really had to think. " Would it have been since
last November or so? somewhere or other where we
spent three days."
" Oh, at Surredge ? I know all about that. I
thought you also met afterwards."
He had again to recall. " So we did ! Wouldn t it
have been somewhere at Christmas? But it wasn t by
arrangement ! " he laughed, giving with his forefinger
a little pleasant nick to his hostess s chin. Then as if
something in the way she received this attention put
him back to his question of a moment before. " Have
you kept my note ? "
She held him with her pretty eyes. " Do you want
it back?"
" Ah, don t speak as if I did take things ! "
She dropped her gaze to the fire. " No, you don t ;
not even the hard things a really generous nature often
would." She quitted, however, as if to forget that,
the chimney-place. " I put it there! "
"You ve burnt it? Good!" It made him easier,
but he noticed the next moment on a table the lemon-
coloured volume left there by Mrs. Blessingbourne,
and, taking it up for a look, immediately put it down.
" You might, while you were about it, have burnt that
too."
"You ve read it?"
"Dear, yes. And you?"
" No," said Mrs. Dyott ; " it wasn t for me Maud
brought it."
It pulled her visitor up. " Mrs. Blessingbourne
brought it?"
" For such a day as this." But she wondered.
" How you look ! Is it so awful ? "
" Oh, like his others." Something had occurred
174
THE STORY IN IT
to him; his thought was already far. "Does she
know?"
"Know what?"
" Why, anything."
But the door opened too soon for Mrs. Dyott, who
could only murmur quickly
"Take care!"
II
IT was in fact Mrs. Blessingbourne, who had under
her arm the book she had gone up for a pair of
covers that this time showed a pretty, a candid blue.
She was followed next minute by the servant, who
brought in tea, the consumption of which, with the
passage of greetings, inquiries and other light civilities
between the two visitors, occupied a quarter of an hour.
Mrs. Dyott meanwhile, as a contribution to so much
amenity, mentioned to Maud that her fellow-guest
wished to scold her for the books she read a state
ment met by this friend with the remark that he must
first be sure about them. But as soon as he had picked
up the new volume he broke out into a frank " Dear,
dear!"
"Have you read that too?" Mrs. Dyott inquired.
" How much you ll have to talk over together ! The
other one," she explained to him, " Maud speaks of as
terribly tame."
" Ah, I must have that out with her ! You don t
feel the extraordinary force of the fellow ? " Voyt went
on to Mrs. Blessingbourne.
And so, round the hearth, they talked talked soon,
while they warmed their toes, with zest enough to
make it seem as happy a chance as any of the quieter
opportunities their imprisonment might have involved.
Mrs. Blessingbourne did feel, it then appeared, the
force of the fellow, but she had her reserves and re-
T75
THE BETTER SORT
actions, in which Voyt was much interested. Mrs.
Dyott rather detached herself, mainly gazing, as she
leaned back, at the fire; she intervened, however,
enough to relieve Maud of the sense of being listened
to. That sense, with Maud, was too apt to convey that
one was listened to for a fool. " Yes, when I read a
novel I mostly read a French one," she had said to
Voyt in answer to a question about her usual practice ;
" for I seem with it to get hold more of the real thing
to get more life for my money. Only I m not so in
fatuated with them but that sometimes for months and
months on end I don t read any fiction at all."
The two books were now together beside them.
" Then when you begin again you read a mass ? "
" Dear, no. I only keep up with three or four
authors."
He laughed at this over the cigarette he had been
allowed to light. " I like your keeping up, and keep
ing up in particular with * authors.
" One must keep up with somebody," Mrs. Dyott
threw off.
" I dare say I m ridiculous," Mrs. Blessingbourne
conceded without heeding it ; " but that s the way we
express ourselves in my part of the country."
" I only alluded," said Voyt, " to the tremendous
conscience of your sex. It s more than mine can keep
up with. You take everything too hard. But if you
can t read the novel of British and American manu
facture, heaven knows I m at one with you. It seems
really to show our sense of life as the sense of puppies
and kittens."
" Well," Maud more patiently returned, " I m told
all sorts of people are now doing wonderful things;
but somehow I remain outside."
" Ah, it s they, it s our poor twangers and twaddlers
who remain outside. They pick up a living in the
street. And who indeed would want them in ? "
176
THE STORY IN IT
Mrs. Blessingbourne seemed unable to say, and yet
at the same time to have her idea. The subject, in truth,
she evidently found, was not so easy to handle. " Peo
ple lend me things, and I try; but at the end of fifty
pages "
There you are ! Yes heaven help us !
" But what I mean," she went on, " isn t that I don t
get wofully weary of the eternal French thing. What s
their sense of life? "
" Ah, voila! " Mrs. Dyott softly sounded.
" Oh, but it is one ; you can make it out," Voyt
promptly declared. " They do what they feel, and they
feel more things than we. They strike so many more
notes, and with so different a hand. When it comes
to any account of a relation, say, between a man and
a woman I mean an intimate or a curious or a sug
gestive one where are we compared to them? They
don t exhaust the subject, no doubt," he admitted;
" but we don t touch it, don t even skim it. It s as if
we denied its existence, its possibility. You ll doubt
less tell me, however," he went on, " that as all such
relations arc for us, at the most, much simpler, we can
only have all round less to say about them."
She met this imputation with the quickest amuse
ment. " I beg your pardon. I don t think I shall tell
you anything of the sort. I don t know that I even
agree with your premise."
" About such relations? " He looked agreeably sur
prised. " You think we make them larger ? or subt
ler?"
Mrs. Blessingbourne leaned back, not looking, like
Mrs. Dyott, at the fire, but at the ceiling. " I don t
know what I think."
" It s not that she doesn t know," Mrs. Dyott re
marked. " It s only that she doesn t say."
But Voyt had this time no eye for their hostess.
For a moment he watched Maud. " It sticks out of
177
THE BETTER SORT
you, you know, that you ve yourself written something.
Haven t you and published? I ve a notion I could
read you"
11 When I do publish," she said without moving,
" you ll be the last one I shall tell. I have" she went
on, " a lovely subject, but it would take an amount of
treatment !"
" Tell us then at least what it is."
At this she again met his eyes. " Oh, to tell it would
be to express it, and that s just what I can t do. What
I meant to say just now," she added, " was that the
French, to my sense, give us only again and again, for
ever and ever, the same couple. There they are once
more, as one has had them to satiety, in that yellow
thing, and there I shall certainly again find them in
the blue."
" Then why do you keep reading about them ? " Mrs.
Dyott demanded.
Maud hesitated. " I don t! " she sighed. " At all
events, I sha n t any more. I give it up."
" You ve been looking for something, I judge," said
Colonel Voyt, " that you re not likely to find. It
doesn t exist."
" What is it? " Mrs. Dyott inquired.
" I never look," Maud remarked, " for anything but
an interest."
" Naturally. But your interest," Voyt replied, " is
in something different from life."
" Ah, not a bit ! I love life in art, though I hate
it anywhere else. It s the poverty of the life those
people show, and the awful bounders, of both sexes,
that they represent."
" Oh, now we have you ! " her interlocutor laughed.
" To me, when all s said and done, they seem to be
as near as art can come in the truth of the truth.
It can only take what life gives it, though it certainly
may be a pity that that isn t better. Your complaint
178
THE STORY IN IT
of their monotony is a complaint of their conditions.
When you say we get always the same couple what do
you mean but that we get always the same passion?
Of course we do ! " Voyt declared. " If what you re
looking for is another, that s what you won t anywhere
find."
Maud for a while said nothing, and Mrs. Dyott
seemed to wait. " Well, I suppose I m looking, more
than anything else, for a decent woman."
" Oh then, you mustn t look for her in pictures of
passion. That s not her element nor her whereabouts."
Mrs. Blessingbourne weighed the objection.
" Doesn t it depend on what you mean by passion ? "
" I think one can mean only one thing : the enemy
to behaviour."
" Oh, I can imagine passions that are, on the con
trary, friends to it."
Her interlocutor thought. " Doesn t it depend per
haps on what you mean by behaviour ? "
" Dear, no. Behaviour is just behaviour the most
definite thing in the world."
Then what do you mean by the * interest you
just now spoke of? The picture of that definite
thing?"
Yes call it that. Women aren t always vicious,
even when they re "
" When they re what? " Voyt asked.
" When they re unhappy. They can be unhappy and
good."
" That one doesn t for a moment deny. But can
they be good and interesting? "
" That must be Maud s subject ! " Mrs. Dyott ex
plained. To show a woman who is. I m afraid, my
dear," she continued, " you could only show yourself."
;< You d show then the most beautiful specimen con
ceivable " and Voyt addressed himself to Maud.
" But doesn t it prove that life is, against your conten-
179
THE BETTER SORT
tion, more interesting than art? Life you embellish
and elevate; but art would find itself able to do noth
ing with you, and, on such impossible terms, would
ruin you."
The colour in her faint consciousness gave beauty
to her stare. " Ruin me? "
" He means," Mrs. Dyott again indicated, "that you
would ruin art.
" Without, on the other hand " Voyt seemed to
assent " its giving at all a coherent impression of
you."
" She wants her romance cheap ! " said Mrs. Dyott.
" Oh, no I should be willing to pay for it. I don t
see why the romance since you give it that name
should be all, as the French inveterately make it, for
the women who are bad."
" Oh, they pay for it ! " said Mrs. Dyott.
"Do they?"
" So, at least " Mrs. Dyott a little corrected herself
"one has gathered (for I don t read your books,
you know!) that they re usually shown as doing."
Maud wondered, but looking at Voyt. " They re
shown often, no doubt, as paying for their badness.
But are they shown as paying for their romance ? "
" My dear lady," said Voyt, " their romance is their
badness. There isn t any other. It s a hard law, if
you will, and a strange, but goodness has to go with
out that luxury. Isn t to be good just exactly, all
round, to go without?" He put it before her kindly
and clearly regretfully too, as if he were sorry the
truth should be so sad. He and she, his pleasant eyes
seemed to say, would, had they had the making of it,
have made it better. " One has heard it before at
least / have; one has heard your question put. But
always, when put to a mind not merely muddled, for
an inevitable answer. Why don t you, cher monsieur,
give us the drama of virtue ? ( Because, chere
180
THE STORY IN IT
madame, the high privilege of virtue is precisely to
avoid drama. The adventures of the honest lady?
The honest lady hasn t can t possibly have advent
ures."
Mrs. Blessingbourne only met his eyes at first, smil
ing with a certain intensity. " Doesn t it depend a
little on what you call adventures? "
" My poor Maud," said Mrs. Dyott, as if in compas
sion for sophistry so simple, " adventures are just ad
ventures. That s all you can make of them ! "
But her friend went on, for their companion, as if
without hearing. " Doesn t it depend a good deal on
what you call drama? " Maud spoke as one who had
already thought it out. " Doesn t it depend on what
you call romance? "
Her listener gave these arguments his very best at
tention. " Of course you may call things anything
you like speak of them as one thing and mean quite
another. But why should it depend on anything ? Be
hind these words we use the adventure, the novel,
the drama, the romance, the situation, in short, as we
most comprehensively say behind them all stands the
same sharp fact that they all, in their different ways,
represent."
" Precisely ! " Mrs. Dyott was full of approval.
Maud, however, was full of vagueness. " What
great fact? "
" The fact of a relation. The adventure s a relation ;
the relation s an adventure. The romance, the novel,
the drama are the picture of one. The subject the
novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the develop
ment, the climax, and for the most part the decline, of
one. And what is the honest lady doing on that side
of the town? "
Mrs. Dyott was more pointed. " She doesn t so
much as form a relation."
But Maud bore up. " Doesn t it depend, again, on
what you call a relation ? "
181
THE BETTER SORT
" Oh," said Mrs. Dyott, " if a gentleman picks up
her pocket-handkerchief "
" Ah, even that s one," their friend laughed, " if
she has thrown it to him. We can only deal with one
that is one."
" Surely," Maud replied. " But if it s an innocent
one ?"
" Doesn t it depend a good deal," Mrs. Dyott asked,
" on what you call innocent? "
1 You mean that the adventures of innocence have
so often been the material of fiction? Yes," Voyt re
plied ; " that s exactly what the bored reader complains
of. He has asked for bread and been given a stone.
What is it but, with absolute directness, a question of
interest, or, as people say, of the story? What s a
situation undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation
stops, where s the story ? If it doesn t stop, where s the
innocence ? It seems to me you must choose. It would
be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that s how we
flounder. Art is our flounderings shown."
Mrs. Blessingbourne and with an air of deference
scarce supported perhaps by its sketchiness kept her
deep eyes on this definition. " But sometimes we
flounder out."
It immediately touched in Colonel Voyt the spring
of a genial derision. " That s just where I expected
you would! One always sees it come."
" He has, you notice," Mrs. Dyott parenthesised to
Maud, " seen it come so often ; and he has always
waited for it and met it."
" Met it, dear lady, simply enough ! It s the old
story, Mrs. Blessingbourne. The relation is innocent
that the heroine gets out of. The book is innocent
that s the story of her getting out. But what the devil
in the name of innocence was she doing in? "
Mrs. Dyott promptly echoed the question. " You
have to be in, you know, to get out. So there you are
182
THE STORY IN IT
already with your relation. It s the end of your good
ness."*
" And the beginning," said Voyt, " of your play ! "
" Aren t they all, for that matter, even the worst,"
Mrs. Dyott pursued, " supposed some time or other to
get out? But if, meanwhile, they ve been in, however
briefly, long enough to adorn a tale "
" They ve been in long enough to point a moral.
That is to point ours ! " With which, and as if a sud
den flush of warmer light had moved him, Colonel Voyt
got up. The veil of the storm had parted over a great
red sunset.
Mrs. Dyott also was on her feet, and they stood be
fore his charming antagonist, who, with eyes lowered
and a somewhat fixed smile, had not moved. " We ve
spoiled her subject! " the elder lady sighed.
" Well," said Voyt, " it s better to spoil an artist s
subject than to spoil his reputation. I mean," he ex
plained to Maud with his indulgent manner, " his ap
pearance of knowing what he has got hold of, for
that, in the last resort, is his happiness."
She slowly rose at this, facing him with an aspect
as handsomely mild as his own. " You can t spoil my
happiness."
He held her hand an instant as he took leave. " I
wish I could add to it ! "
III
WHEN he had quitted them and Mrs. Dyott had can
didly asked if her friend had found him rude or crude,
Maud replied though not immediately that she had
feared showing only too much that she found him
charming. But if Mrs. Dyott took this, it was to weigh
the sense. " How could you show it too much ? "
" Because I always feel that that s my only way of
showing anything. It s absurd, if you like," Mrs.
183
THE BETTER SORT
Blessingbourne pursued, " but I never know, in such
intense discussions, what strange impression I may
give."
Her companion looked amused. Was it intense? "
" / was," Maud frankly confessed.
" Then it s a pity you were so wrong. Colonel Voyt,
you know, is right." Mrs. Blessingbourne at this gave
one of the slow, soft, silent headshakes to which she
often resorted and which, mostly accompanied by the
light of cheer, had somehow, in spite of the small ob
stinacy that smiled in them, a special grace. With this
grace, for a moment, her friend, looking her up and
down, appeared impressed, yet not too much so to
take, the next minute, a decision. " Oh, my dear, I m
sorry to differ from anyone so lovely for you re aw
fully beautiful to-night, and your frock s the very
nicest I ve ever seen you wear. But he s as right as
he can be."
Maud repeated her motion. " Not so right, at all
events, as he thinks he is. Or perhaps I can say," she
went on, after an instant, " that I m not so wrong. I
do know a little what I m talking about."
Mrs. Dyott continued to study her. " You are vexed.
You naturally don t like it such destruction."
"Destruction?"
" Of your illusion."
" I have no illusion. If I had, moreover, it wouldn t
be destroyed. I have, on the whole, I think, my little
decency."
Mrs. Dyott stared. " Let us grant it for argument.
What then?"
" Well, I ve also my little drama."
"An attachment?"
" An attachment."
" That you shouldn t have? "
" That I shouldn t have."
" A passion? "
184
THE STORY IN IT
" A passion."
"Shared?"
" Ah, thank goodness, no ! "
Mrs. Dyott continued to gaze. " The object s un
aware ? "
" Utterly."
Mrs. Dyott turned it over. " Are you sure ? "
" Sure."
" That s what you call your decency ? But isn t it,"
Mrs. Dyott asked, " rather his? "
" Dear, no. It s only his good fortune."
Mrs. Dyott laughed. " But yours, darling your
good fortune: where does that come in? "
:< Why, in my sense of the romance of it."
:< The romance of what? Of his not knowing? "
" Of my not wanting him to. If I did " Maud had
touchingly worked it out " where would be my hon
esty?"
The inquiry, for an instant, held her friend; yet
only, it seemed, for a stupefaction that was almost
amusement. " Can you want or not want as you like?
Where in the world, if you don t want, is your ro
mance ? "
Mrs. Blessingbourne still wore her smile, and she
now, with a light gesture that matched it, just touched
the region of her heart. " There ! "
Her companion admiringly marvelled. " A lovely
place for it, no doubt ! but not quite a place, that I can
see, to make the sentiment a relation."
" Why not ? What more is required for a relation
for me? "
" Oh, all sorts of things, I should say ! And many
more, added to those, to make it one for the person you
mention."
" Ah, that I don t pretend it either should be or can
be. I only speak for myself."
It was said in a manner that made Mrs. Dyott, with
185
THE BETTER SORT
a visible mixture of impressions, suddenly turn away.
She indulged in a vague movement or two, as if to
look for something; then again found herself near her
friend, on whom with the same abruptness, in fact with
a strange sharpness, she conferred a kiss that might
have represented either her tribute to exalted consist
ency or her idea of a graceful close of the discussion.
" You deserve that one should speak for you ! "
Her companion looked cheerful and secure. " How
can you, without knowing ? "
" Oh, by guessing! It s not ? "
But that was as far as Mrs. Dyott could get. " It s
not," said Maud, " anyone you ve ever seen."
" Ah then, I give you up ! "
And Mrs. Dyott conformed, for the rest of Maud s
stay, to the spirit of this speech. It was made on a
Saturday night, and Mrs. Blessingbourne remained till
the Wednesday following, an interval during which, as
the return of fine weather was confirmed by the Sunday,
the two ladies found a wider range of action. There
were drives to be taken, calls made, objects of interest
seen, at a distance; with the effect of much easy talk
and still more easy silence. There had been a question
of Colonel Voyt s probable return on the Sunday, but
the whole time passed without a sign from him, and it
was merely mentioned by Mrs. Dyott, in explanation,
that he must have been suddenly called, as he was so
liable to be, to town. That this in fact was what had
happened he made clear to her on Thursday afternoon,
when, walking over again late, he found her alone.
The consequence of his Sunday letters had been his
taking, that day, the 4.15. Mrs. Voyt had gone back
on Thursday, and he now, to settle on the spot the
question of a piece of work begun at his place, had
rushed dow r n for a few hours in anticipation of the
usual collective move for the week s end. He was
to go up again by the late train, and had to count a
186
THE STORY IN IT
little a fact accepted by his hostess with the hard
pliancy of practice his present happy moments. Too
few as these were, however, he found time to make
of her an inquiry or two not directly bearing on their
situation. The first was a recall of the question for
which Mrs. Blessingbourne s entrance on the previous
Saturday had arrested her answer. Did that lady
know of anything between them ?
" No. I m sure. There s one thing she does know,"
Mrs. Dyott went on ; " but it s quite different and not
so very wonderful."
"What, then, is it?"
" Well, that she s herself in love."
Voyt showed his interest. " You mean she told
you?"
" I got it out of her."
He showed his amusement. " Poor thing ! And
with whom? "
" With you."
His surprise, if the distinction might be made, was
less than his wonder. * You got that out of her too? "
" No it remains in. Which is much the best way
for it. For you to know it would be to end it."
He looked rather cheerfully at sea. " Is that then
why you tell me? "
" I mean for her to know you know it. Therefore
it s in your interest not to let her."
" I see," Voyt after a moment returned. " Your
real calculation is that my interest will be sacrificed to
my vanity so that, if your other idea is just, the flame
will in fact, and thanks to her morbid conscience, ex
pire by her taking fright at seeing me so pleased. But
I promise you," he declared, " that she sha n t see it.
So there you are ! " She kept her eyes on him and had
evidently to admit, after a little, that there she was.
Distinct as he had made the case, however, he was not
yet quite satisfied. " Why are you so sure that I m the
man?"
187
THE BETTER SORT
" From the way she denies you."
"You put it to her?"
" Straight. If you hadn t been she would, of course,
have confessed to you to keep me in the dark about
the real one."
Poor Voyt laughed out again. " Oh, you dear
souls!"
" Besides," his companion pursued, " I was not in
want of that evidence."
" Then what other had you? "
" Her state before you came which was what made
me ask you how much you had seen her. And her
state after it," Mrs. Dyott added. " And her state,"
she wound up, " while you were here."
" But her state while I was here was charming."
" Charming. That s just what I say."
She said it in a tone that placed the matter in its
right light a light in which they appeared kindly,
quite tenderly, to watch Maud wander away into space
with her lovely head bent under a theory rather too
big for it. Voyt s last word, however, was that there
was just enough in it in the theory for them to allo\v
that she had not shown herself, on the occasion of their
talk, wholly bereft of sense. Her consciousness, if they
let it alone as they of course after this, mercifully
must was, in the last analysis, a kind of shy romance.
Not a romance like their own, a thing to make the
fortune of any author up to the mark one who should
have the invention or w r ho could have the courage ; but
a small, scared, starved, subjective satisfaction that
would do her no harm and nobody else any good. Who
but a duffer he stuck to his contention would see
the shadow of a " story " in it?
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
WHAT determined the speech that startled him
in the course of their encounter scarcely mat
ters, being probably but some words spoken by himself
quite without intention spoken as they lingered and
slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaint
ance. He had been conveyed by friends, an hour or
two before, to the house at which she was staying ; the
party of visitors at the other house, of whom he was
one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always,,
that he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to
luncheon. There had been after luncheon much dis
persal, all in the interest of the original motive, a view
of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic feat
ures, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that
made the place almost famous; and the great rooms
were so numerous that guests could wander at their
will, hang back from the principal group, and, in
cases where they took such matters with the last seri
ousness, give themselves up to mysterious apprecia
tions and measurements. There were persons to be
observed, singly or in couples, bending toward objects
in out-of-the-way corners with their hands on their
knees and their heads nodding quite as with the empha
sis of an excited sense of smell. When they were two
they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted
into silences of even deeper import, so that there were
aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much
189
THE BETTER SORT
the air of the " look round," previous to a sale highly
advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be, the
dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition at
Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed, and
John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions,
disconcerted almost equally by the presence of those
who knew too much and by that of those who knew
nothing. The great rooms caused so much poetry and
history to press upon him that he needed to wander
apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though
his doing so was not, as happened, like the gloating
of some of his companions, to be compared to the move
ments of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue
promptly enough in a direction that was not to have
been calculated.
It led, in short, in the course of the October after
noon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose
face, a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance, as they
sat, much separated, at a very long table, had begun
merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It affected
him as the sequel of something of which he had lost
the beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite
welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn t know what
it continued, which was an interest, or an amusement,
the greater as he was also somehow aware yet with
out a direct sign from her that the young woman her
self had not lost the thread. She had not lost it, but
she wouldn t give it back to him, he saw, without some
putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw
that, but saw several things more, things odd enough
in the light of the fact that at the moment some acci
dent of grouping brought them face to face he was
still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact
between them in the past would have had no impor
tance. If it had had no importance he scarcely knew
why his actual impression of her should so seem to
have so much ; the answer to which, however, was that
190
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
in such a life as theyall appeared^tgj^e leaflinp^Foj__thg
ff\^^^^n^r^r^^T ^\<:p tTMngsas thev__came. He
was satisfied, without "nTIhe" least bemg^Lbie^to say
why, that this young lady might roughly have ranked
in the house as a poor relation ; satisfied also that she
was not there on a brief visit, but was more or less a
part of the establishment almost a working, a remun
erated part. Didn t she enjoy at periods a protection
that she paid for by helping, among other services, to
show the place and explain it, deal with the tiresome
people, answer questions about the dates of the build
ings, the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the
pictures, the favourite haunts of the ghost? It wasn t
that she looked as if you could have given her shillings
it was impossible to look less so. Yet when she finally
drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever
so much older older than when he had seen her be
fore it might have been as an effect of her guessing
that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more
imagination to her than to all the others put together,
and had thereby penetrated to a kind of truth that the
others were too stupid for. She was there on harder
terms than anyone ; she was there as a consequence of
things suffered, in one way and another, in the inter
val of years; and she remembered him very much as
she was remembered only a good deal better.
By the time they at last thus came to speech they were
alone in one of the rooms remarkable for a fine por
trait over the chimney-place out of which their friends
had passed, and the charm of it was that even before
they had spoken they had practically arranged with
each other to stay behind for talk. The charm, happily,
was in other things too; it was partly in there being
scarce a spot at Weatherend without something to stay
behind for. It was in the way the autumn day looked
into the high windows as it waned ; in the way the red
light, breaking at the close from under a low, sombre
191
I
THE BETTER SORT
sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old
wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was
most of all perhaps in the way she came to him as if,
since she had been turned on to deal with the simpler
sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole
thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of
her general business. As soon as he heard her voice,
however, the gap was filled up and the missing link
supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude
lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it to get
there before her. " I met you years and years ago in
Rome. I remember all about it." She confessed to
disappointment she had been so sure he didn t; and
to prove how well he did he began to pour forth the
particular recollections that popped up as he called
for them. Her face and her voice, all at his service
now, worked the miracle the impression operating
like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame,
one by one, a long row of gas jets. Marcher flattered
himself that the illumination was brilliant, yet he was
really still more pleased on her showing him, with
amusement, that in his haste to make everything right
he had got most things rather wrong. It hadn t been
at Rome it had been at Naples; and it hadn t been
seven years before it had been more nearly ten. She
hadn t been either with her uncle and aunt, but with
her mother and her brother; in addition to which it
was not with the Pembles that he had been, but with
the Boyers, coming down in their company from Rome
a point on which she insisted, a little to his confusion,
and as to which she had her evidence in hand. The
Boyers she had known, but she didn t know the Pem
bles, though she had heard of them, and it was the
people he was with who had made them acquainted.
The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round
them with such violence as to drive them for refuge
into an excavation this incident had not occurred at
192
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occa
sion when they had been present there at an important
find.
He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her cor
rections, though the moral of them was, she pointed
out, that he really didn t remember the least thing
aboutTier ; and he^only felt it as a drawback that when
all was made conformable to the truth there didn t
appear much of anything left. They lingered together
still, she neglecting her office for from the moment
he was so clever she had no proper right to him
and both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see
if a memory or two more wouldn t again breathe upon
them. It had not taken them many minutes, after all,
to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those
that constituted their respective hands; only what
came out was that the pack was unfortunately not
perfect that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged,
could give them, naturally, no more than it had. It
had made them meet her at twenty, him at twenty-
five; but nothing was so strange, they seemed to say
to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn t done
a little more for them. They looked at each other as
with the feeling of an occasion missed ; the present one
would have been so much better if the other, in the far
distance, in the foreign land, hadn t been so stupidly
meagre. There weren t, apparently, all counted, more
than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in
coming to pass between them ; trivialities of youth, sim
plicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small
possible germs, but too deeply buried too deeply
(didn t it seem?) to sprout after so many years.
Marcher said to himself that he ought to have rendered
her some service saved her from a capsized boat in
the Bay, or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched
from her cab, in the streets of Naples, by a lazzarone
with a stiletto. Or it would have been nice if he could
T93
THE BETTER SORT
have been taken with fever, alone, at his hotel, and she
could have come to look after him, to write to his
people, to drive him out in convalescence. Then they
would be in possession of the sorp^thin^ ftr other that-
their actual show seemed to lack^ It yet somehow
presented itself, this show, as too good to be spoiled;
so that they were reduced for a few minutes more to
wondering a little helplessly why since they seemed
to know a certain number of the same people their
reunion had been so long averted. They didn t use
that name for it, but their delay from minute to min
ute to join the others was a kind of confession that
they didn t quite want it to be a failure. Their at
tempted supposition of reasons for their not having
met but showed how little they knew of each other.
There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a
positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an old
friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spite
of which it was as an old friend that he saw she would
have suited him. He had new ones enough was sur
rounded with them, for instance, at that hour at the
other house ; as a new one he probably wouldn t have
so much as noticed her. He would have liked to invent
something, get her to make-believe with him that some
passage of a romantic or critical kind had originally
occurred. He was really almost reaching out in im
agination as against time for something that would
do, and saying to himself that if it didn t come this
new incident would simply and rather awkwardly close.
They would separate, and now for no second or for no
third chance. They would have tried and not suc
ceeded. Then it was, just at the turn, as he afterwards
made it out to himself, that, everything else failing,
she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were,
save the situation. He felt as soon as she spoke that
she had been consciously keeping back what she said
and hoping to get on without it ; a scruple in her that
194
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
immensely touched him when, by the end of three or
four minutes more, he was able to measure it. What
she brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air ancj
supplied the link the link it was such a mystery he
should frivolously have managed to lose.
" You know you told me something that I ve never *
forgotten and that again and again has made me think
of you since; it was that tremendously hot day when
we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze.
What I allude to was what you said to me, on the way
back, as we sat, under the awning of the boat, enjoy
ing the cool. Have you forgotten ? "
He had forgotten, and he was even more surprised
than ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw it
was no vulgar reminder of any " sweet " speech. The
vanity of women had long memories, but she was mak
ing no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake.
With another woman, a totally different one, he might
have feared the recall possibly even some imbecile
" offer." So, in having to say that he had indeed for
gotten, he was conscious rather of a loss than of a
gain ; he already saw an interest in the matter of her
reference. " I try to think but I give it up. Yet I
remember the Sorrento day."
" I m not very sure you do," May Bartram after a
moment said ; " and I m not very sure I ought to want
you to. It s dreadful to bring a person back, at any
time, to what he was ten years before. If you ve lived
away from it," she smiled, " so much the better."
" Ah, if you haven t why should I ? " he asked.
" Lived away, you mean, from what I myself was ? "
" From what / was. I was of course an ass," March
er went on ; " but I would rather know from you just
the sort of ass I was than from the moment you have
something in your mind not know anything."
Still, however, she hesitated. " But if you ve com
pletely ceased to be that sort ? "
195
THE BETTER SORT
" Why, I can then just so all the more bear to know.
Besides, perhaps I haven t."
"Perhaps. Yet if you haven t," she added, "I
should suppose you would remember. Not indeed that
/ in the least connect with my impression the invidious
name you use. If I had only thought you foolish," she
explained, " the thing I speak of wouldn t so have re
mained with me. It was about yourself." She waited,
as if it might come to him; but as, only meeting her
eyes in wonder, he gave no sign, she burnt her ships.
" Has it ever happened ? "
Then it was that, while he continued to stare, a
light broke for him and the blood slowly came to his
face, which began to burn with recognition. " Do
you mean I told you ?" But he faltered, lest
what came to him shouldn t be right, lest he should
only give himself away.
" It was something about yourself that it was nat
ural one shouldn t forget that is if one remembered
you at all. That s why I ask you," she smiled, " if the
thing you then spoke of has ever come to pass ? "
Oh, then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and
found himself embarrassed. This, he also saw, made
her sorry for him, as if her allusion had been a mis
take. It took him but a moment, however, to feel that
it had not been, much as it had been a surprise. After
the first little shock of it her knowledge on the con
trary began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet
to him. She was the only other person in the world
then who would have it, and she had had it all these
years, while the fact of his having so breathed his
secret had unaccountably faded from him. No won
der they couldn t have met as if nothing had happened.
" I judge," he finally said, " that I know what you
mean. Only I had strangely enough lost the con
sciousness of having taken you so far into my confi
dence."
196
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
" Is it because you ve taken so many others as well ? "
" I ve taken nobody. Not a creature since then."
" So that I m the only person who knows? "
" The only person in the world."
" Well," she quickly replied, " I myself have never
spoken. I ve never, never repeated of you what you
told me." She looked at him so that he perfectly be
lieved her. Their eyes met over it in such a way that
he was without a doubt. " And I never will."
She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost ex
cessive, put him at ease about her possible derision.
Somehow the whole question was a new luxury to
him that is, from the moment she was in possession.
If she didn t take the ironic view she clearly took the
sympathetic, and that was what he had had, in all the
long time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt
was that he couldn t at present have begun to tell her
and yet could profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident
of having done so of old. " Please don t then. We re
just right as it is."
" Oh, I am," she laughed, " if you are ! " To which
she added : " Then you do still feel in the same way? "
It was impossible to him not to take to himself that
she was really interested, and it all kept coming as a
sort of revelation. He hacjjjapught of himself so Ipng
as abominably alone^ and, lo, he wasn t alone a b 1 1 "- He
hadn t beenT it appeared, for an hour since those mo
ments on the Sorrento boat. It was she who had been,
he seemed to see as he looked at her she who had been
made so by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity.
To tell her what he had told her what had it been
but to ask something of her? something that she had
given, in her charity, without his having, by a remem
brance, by a return of the spirit, failing another en
counter, so much as thanked her. What he had asked
of her had been simply at first not to laugh at him.
She had beautifully not done so for ten years, and she
197
THE BETTER SORT
was not doing so now. So he had endless gratitude
to make up. Only for that he must see just how he
had figured to her. " What, exactly, was the account
I gave ?"
" Of the way you did feel ? Well, it was very sim
ple. You said you had had from your earliest time, as
the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept
for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious
and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you,
that you had in your bones the foreboding and the con
viction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you."
" Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher
asked.
She thought a moment. " It was perhaps because
I seemed, as you spoke r to nnrlrntnnd it
" You do understand it ? " he eagerly asked.
Again she kept her kind eyes on him. " You still
have the belief?"
" Oh ! " he exclaimed helplessly. There was too
much to say.
" Whatever it is to be," she clearly made out, " it
hasn t yet come."
He shook his head in complete surrender now. " It
hasn t yet come. Only, you know, it isn t anything
I m to do, to achieve in the world, to be distinguished
or admired for. I m not such an ass as that. It would
be much better, no doubt, if I were."
" It s to be something you re merely to suffer? "
" Well, say to wait for to have to meet, to face,
to see suddenly break out in my life ; possibly destroy
ing all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me ;
possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything,
striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to
the consequences, however they shape themselves."
She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued
for him not to be that of mockery. " Isn t what you
describe perhaps but the expectation or, at any rate,
198
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
the sense of danger, familiar to so many people of
** falling in love? "
John Marcher thought. " Did you ask me that be
fore?"
" No I wasn t so free-and-easy then. But it s
what strikes me now."
" Of course," he said after a moment, " it strikes
you. Of course it strikes me. Of course what s in store
for me may be no more than that. The only thing is,"
he went on, " that I think that if it had been that, I
should by this time know."
" Do you mean because you ve been in love ? " And
then as he but looked at her in silence : " You ve been
in love, and it hasn t meant such a cataclysm, hasn t
proved the great affair ? "
" Here I am, you see. It hasn t been overwhelm-
ing."
* Then it hasn t been love," said May Bartram.
" Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that
I ve taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was de
lightful, it was miserable," he explained. " But it
wasn t strange. It wasn t what my affair s to be."
" You want something all to yourself something
that nobody else knows or has known ? "
" It isn t a question of what I want God knows
I don t want anything. It s only a question of the ap
prehension that haunts me that I live with day by
day."
He said this so lucidly and consistently that, visibly,
it further imposed itself. If she had not been interested
before she would have been interested now. " Is it a
sense of coming violence? "
&. Evidently now too, again, he liked to talk of it
" I don t think of it as when it does come necessar
ily violent. I only think of it as natural and as of
course, above all, unmistakable. I think of it simply
as "the thing. The thing will of itself appear natural."
199
THE BETTER SORT
r>( Then how will it appear strange?"
Marcher bethought himself. " It won t to me."
"To whom then?"
" Well," he replied, smiling at last, " say to you."
" Oh then, I m to be present? "
l( Why, you are present since you know."
" I see." She turned it over. " But I mean at the
catastrophe."
At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to
their gravity ; it was as if the long look they exchanged
held them together. " It will only depend on yourself
if you ll watch with me."
" Are you afraid? " she asked.
" Don t leave me now he went on.
" Are you afraid? " she repeated.
" Do you think me simply out of my mind? " he pur
sued instead of answering. " Do I merely strike you
as a harmless lunatic ? "
=-y " No," said May Bartram. " I understand you. I
believe you."
* You mean you feel how my obsession poor old
thing! may correspond to some possible reality? "
To some possible reality."
" Then you will watch with me ? "
She hesitated, then for the third time put her ques
tion. " Are you afraid ? "
" Did I tell you I was at Naples? "
" No, you said nothing about it."
" Then I don t know. And I should like to know,"
said John Marcher. " You ll tell me yourself whether
you think so. If you ll watch with me you ll see."
" Very good then." They had been moving by this
time across the room, and at the door, before passing
out, they paused as if for the full wind-up of their un
derstanding. "I ll watch with you," said May Bar-
tram.
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
II
THE fact that she " knew " knew and yet neither }
chaffed him nor betrayed him had in a short time<
begun to constitute between them a sensible bond^x
which became more marked when, within the year that
followed their afternoon at Weatherend, the oppor
tunities for meeting multiplied. The event that thus
promoted these occasions was fh^ c|eath of the ancient
lady. Jher_great-aunt. under whose wing, since losing
her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter,
and who, though but the widowed mother of the new
successor to the property, had succeeded thanks to
a high tone and a high temper in not forfeiting the
supreme position at the great house. The deposition
of this personage arrived but with her death, which,
followed by many changes, made in particular a differ
ence for the young woman in whom Marcher s expert
attention had recognised from the first a dependent with
a pride that might ache though it didn t bristle. Noth
ing for a long time had made him easier than the
thought that the aching must have been much soothed
by Miss Bartram s now finding herself able to set up
a small home in London. She had acquired property,
to an amount that made that luxury just possible, under
her aunt s extremely complicated will, and when the
whole matter began to be straightened out, which in
deed took time, she let him know that the happy issue
was at last in view. He had seen her again before that
day, both because she had more than once accompanied
the ancient lady to town and because he had paid an
other visit to the friends who so conveniently made of
Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality.
These friends had taken him back there; he had
achieved there again with Miss Bartram some quiet
detachment; and he had in London succeeded in per-
20 1
THE BETTER SORT
suading her to more than one brief absence from her
aunt. They went together, on these latter occasions,
to the National Gallery and the South Kensington
Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked
of Italy at large not now attempting to recover, as at
first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance. That
recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its
purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that
they were, to Marcher s sense, no longer hovering
about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt
their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.
They were literally afloat together; for our gentle
man this ^wasmarked, quite as marked as that the fort
unate cause oTTTwaS just the buried treasure_of heF
knowledge] He had with his own hands" dug upThTs
little hoard, brought to light that is to within reach of
the dim day constituted by their discretions and priva
cies the object of value the hiding-place of which he
had, after putting it into the ground himself, so
strangely, so long forgotten. The exquisite luck of
having again just stumbled on the spot made him in
different to any other question; he would doubtless
have devoted more time to the odd accident of his
lapse of memory if he had not been moved to devote
so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for
the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep
fresh. It had never entered into his plan that anyone
should " know," and mainly for the reason that it was
not in him to tell anyone. That would have been im
possible, since nothing but the amusement of a cold
world would have waited on it. Since, however, a
mysterious fate had opened his mouth in youth, in spite
of him, he would count that a compensation and profit
by it to the utmost. That the right person should
know tempered the asperity of his secret more even
than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and
May Bartram was clearly right, because well, be-
202
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
cause there she was. Her knowledge simply settled it ;
he would have been sure enough by this time had she
been wrong. There was that in his situation, no doubt,
that disposed him too much to see her as a mere con
fidant, taking all her light for him from the fact the
fact only of her interest in his predicament, from her
mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard
him as the funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that
her price for him was just in her giving him this con
stant sense of his being admirably spared, he was
careful to remember that she had, after all, also a life
of her own, with things that might happen to her,
things that in friendship one should likewise take ac
count of. Something fairly remarkable came to pass
with him, for that matter, in this connection some
thing represented by a certain passage of his conscious
ness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the
other.
He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew,
the most disinterested person in the world, carrying
his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so
\ quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others
" no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking
of them no allowance and only making on his side all
those that were asked. He had disturbed nobody with
the queerness of having to know a haunted man,
though he had had moments of rather special tempta
tion on hearing people say that they were " unsettled."
If they were as unsettled as he was he who had never
been settled for an hour in his life they would know
what it meant. Yet it wasn t, all trie same, for him to
make them, and he listened to them civilly enough.
This was why he had such good though possibly such
father colourless manners ; this was why, .above all,
hejruvki rp.garjhirnsHf, in a greedy_world t as decently
as, in factTperhaps even a littlel^ihljmely unselfish.
that he valued this character
203
THE BETTER SORT
quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of let
ting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be
much on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less,
to be selfish just a little, since, surely, no more charm
ing occasion for it had come to him. " Just a little,"
in a word, was just as much as Miss Bartram, taking
one day with another, would let him. He never would
be in the least coercive, and he would keep well before
him the lines on which consideration for her the very
highest ought to proceed. He would thoroughly es
tablish the heads under which her affairs, her require^
ments, her peculiarities he went so far as to give them
the latitude of that name would come into their inter
course. All this naturally was a sign of how much he
took the intercourse itself for granted. There was
nothing more to be done about that. It simply existed ;
had sprung into being with her first penetrating ques
tion to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend.
The real form it should have taken on the basis that
stood out large was the form of their marrying. But
the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marry
ing out of the question. (His conviction, his apprehen
sion, his obsession, in short, was not a condition he
could invite a woman to share/ and that consequence
of it was precisely what was the matter with hirnT}
Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the
twists and the turns of the months and the years, like
a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little
whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him
or to be slain. CThe definite point was the inevitable
spring of the creature ; and the definite lesson from that
was that a man of feeling didn t cause himself to be ac
companied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the
image under which he had ended by figuring his lifeTJ
They had at first, none the less, in the scattered
hours spent together, made no allusion to that view
of it; which was a sign he was handsomely ready to
204
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
give that he didn t expect, that he in fact didn t care
always to be talking about it. Such a feature in one s
outlook was really like a hump on one s back. The
difference it made every minute of the day existed
quite independently of discussion. One discussed, of
course, like a hunchback, for there was always, if noth
ing else, the hunchback face. That remained, and she
was watching him ; but people watched best, as a gen
eral thing, in silence, so that such would be predom
inantly the manner of their vigil. Yet he didn t want,
at the same time, to be solemn; solemn was what he
imagined he too much tended to be with other people.
The thing to be, with the one person who knew, was
easy and natural to make the reference rather than
be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seem
ing to make it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar,
facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous.
Some such consideration as the latter was doubtless
in his mind, for instance, when he wrote pleasantly to
Miss Bar tram that perhaps the great thing he had so
long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than
this circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her
acquiring a house in London, it was the first allusion
they had yet again made, needing any other hitherto
so little ; but when she replied, after having given him
the news, that (she was by no means satisfied with such
a Jrifle, as thejcljmaxtoso^speciar a suspense,jshe_af-
most set him woricIerTng it she hadnTeven a larger con
ception "bt singularity tor him than he had for himself.
He was at all events destined to become aware little by
little, as time went by, that she was all the while look
ing at his life, judging it, measuring it, in the light of
the thing she knew, which grew to be at last, with the
consecration of the years, never mentioned between
them save as " the real truth " about him. That had
always been his ow r n form of reference to it, but she
adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the
205
THE* BETTER SORT
end of a period, he knew there was no moment at which
it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got
inside his condition, or exchanged the attitude of beau
tifully indulging for that of still more beautifully be
lieving him.
It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing
him but as the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in
the long run since it covered so much ground was
his easiest description of their friendship. He had a
screw loose for her, but she liked him in spite of it, and
was practically, against the rest of the world, his kind,
wise keeper, unremunerated, but fairly amused and,
in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably oc
cupied. The rest of the world of course thought him
queer, but she, she only, knew how, and above all why,
queer ; which was precisely what enabled her to dispose
the concealing veil in the right folds. She took his
gaiety from him since it had to pass with them for
gaiety as she took everything else; but she certainly
so far justified by her unerring touch his finer sense
of the degree to which he had ended by convincing her.
She at least never spoke of the secret of his life ex
cept as " the real truth abouLyou," and she hadin fact
a wonderful way ot making it seem, as such, the secret
of her own life too. That was in fine how he so con
stantly felt her as allowing for him ; he couldn t on the
whole call it anything else. He allowed for himself,
but she, exactly, allowed still more; partly because,
better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced his
unhappy perversion through portions of its course into
which he could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt,
but, besides knowing that, she knew how he looked
as well ; he knew each of the things of importance he
was insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up
the amount they made, understand how much, with
a lighter w r eight on his spirit, he might have done, and
thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short.
206
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
Above all she was in the secret of the difference between
the forms he went through those of his little office
under Government, those of caring for his modest pat
rimony, for his library, for his garden in the country,
for the people in London whose invitations he accepted
and repaid and the detachment that reigned beneath
them and that made of all behaviour, all that could
in the least be called behaviour, a long act of dissimula
tion. What it had come to was that he wore a mask
painted with the social simper, out of the eye-holes of
which there looked eyes of an expression not in the
least matching the other features. This the stupid
world, even after years, had never more than half
discovered. It was only May Bartram who had, and
she achieved, by an art indescribable, the feat of at
once or perhaps it was only alternately meeting the
eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as
from over his shoulder, with their peep through the
apertures.
A So, while they grew older together, she did watch
with him, and so she let this association give shape and
colour to her own existence. Jjeneathfoy ^ forms as well
detachment had learned to sit, and jbeT^viouTTiacPbe-
come for herT^^e^^aTTenseTa false account of her
self. Theje was "But *one"acC5 ufit of "lief that would
have been true all the while, and that she could give.
directly, to nobody, least of all_tojohn Marcher, Her
wfiole attituHe~was a "virtual statement, but the percep
tion of that only seemed destined to take its place for
him as one of the many things necessarily crowded out
of his consciousness. If she had, moreover, like him
self, to make sacrifices to their real truth, it was to be
granted that her compensation might have affected her
as more prompt and more natural. They had long
periods, in this London time, during which, when they
were together, a stranger might have listened to them
without in the least pricking up his ears ; on the other
207
THE BETTER SORT
hand, the real truth was equally liable at any moment
to rise to the surface, and the auditor would then have
wondered indeed what they were talking about. They
had from an early time made up their mind that society
was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin that this
gave them had fairly become one of their common
places. Yet there were still moments when the situa
tion turned almost fresh usually under the effect of
some expression drawn from herself. Her expressions
doubtless repeated themselves, but her intervals were
generous. " What saves us , you know^J^jthat we
answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that
of the man and woman whose friendship has become
such a daily habit, or almost, as to be at last indispen
sable." That, for instance, was a remark she had fre
quently enough had occasion to make, though she had
given it at different times different developments.
What we are especially concerned with is the turn it
happened to take from her one afternoon when he had
come to see her in honour of her birthday. This an
niversary had fallen on a Sunday, at a season of thick
fog and general outward gloom; but he had brought
her his customary offering, having known her now
long enough to have established a hundred little cus
toms. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present
he made her on her birthday, that he had not sunk into
real selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a
small trinket, but it was always fine of its kind, and
he was regularly careful to pay for it more than he
thought he could afford. " Our habit saves you, at
least, don t you see? because it makes you, after all,
for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men.
What s the most inveterate mark of men in general?
Why, the capacity to spend endless time with dull
women to spend it, I won t say without being bored,
but without minding that they are, without being
driven off at a tangent by it ; which comes to the same
208
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
thing. I m your dull woman, a part of the daily bread
for which you pray at church. That covers your tracks
more than anything."
" And what covers yours ? " asked Marcher, whom
his dull woman could mostly to this extent amuse. " I
see of course what you mean by your saving me, in
one way and another, so far as other people are con
cerned I ve seen it all along. Only, what is it that
saves you? I often think, you know, of that."
She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too,
but in rather a different way. " Where other people,
you mean, are concerned? "
- " Well, you re really so in with me, you know as
a sort of result of my being so in with yourself. I
mean of my having such an immense regard for you,
being so tremendously grateful for all you ve done for
me. I sometimes ask myself if it s quite fair. Fair
I mean to have so involved and since one may say
it interested you. I almost feel as if you hadn t
really had time to do anything else."
" Anything else but be interested? " she asked. " Ah,
what else does one ever want to be? If I ve been
watching with you, as we long ago agreed that I
was to do, watching is always in itself an absorption."
" Oh, certainly," John Marcher said, " if you hadn t
had your curiosity ! Only, doesn t it sometimes
come to you, as time goes on, that your curiosity is not
being particularly repaid ? "
May Bartram had a pause. " Do you ask that, by
any chance, because you feel at all that yours isn t ? I
mean because you have to wait so long."
Oh, he understood what she meant. " For the thing
to happen that never does happen? For the beast to
jump out? No, I m just where I was about it. It
isn t a matter as to which I can choose, I can decide
for a change. It isn t one as to which there can be a
change. It s in the lap of the gods. One s in the
209
THE BETTER SORT
hands of one s law there one is. As to the form the
law will take, the way it will operate, that s its own
affair."
" Yes," Miss Bartram replied ; " of course one s fate
is coming, of course it has come, in its own form and
its own way, all the while. Only, you know, the form
and the way in your case w^ere to have been well,
something so exceptional and, as one may say, so par
ticularly your own."
Something in this made him look at her with suspi
cion. " You say were to have been, as if in your
heart you had begun to doubt."
" Oh ! " she vaguely protested.
" As if you believed," he went on, " that nothing
will now take place."
She shook her head slowly, but rather inscrutably.
" You re far from my thought."
He continued to look at her. " What then is the
matter with you ? "
*"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter
with me is simply that I m more sure than ever my
curiosity, as you call it, will be but too well re
paid. " A
They were frankly grave now ; he had got up from
his seat, had turned once more about the little draw
ing-room to which, year after year, he brought his
inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might have
said, tasted their intimate community with every sauce,
where every object was as familiar to him as the things
of his own house and the very carpets were worn with
his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-
houses are worn by the elbows of generations of clerks.
The generations of his nervous moods had been at
work there, and the place was the written history of
jhis whole middle life. Under the impression of what
this friend had just said he knew himself, for some
Reason, more aware of these things, which made him,
210
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
after a moment, stop again before her. " Is it, possibly,
that you ve grown afraid ? "
l " Afraid? " He thought, as she repeated the word,
that his question had made her, a little, change colour ;
so that, lest he should have touched on a truth, he ex
plained very kindly. " You remember that that was
what you asked me long ago that first day at Weath-
erend."
" Oh yes, and you told me you didn t know that
I was to see for myself. We ve said little about it
since, even in so long a time."
" Precisely/ Marcher interposed " quite as if it
rwere too delicate a matter for us to make free with.
Quite as if we might find, on pressure, that I am afraid.
For then," he said, "we shouldn t, should we? quite
^ know what to do."
She had for the time no answer to this question.
There have been days when I thought you were.
Only, of course," she added, " there have been days
when we have thought almost anything."
" Everything. Oh ! " Marcher softly groaned as
with a gasp, half spent, at the face, more uncovered
just then than it had been for a long while, of the im
agination always with them. It had always had its
incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the
very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to
them, they could still draw from him the tribute of
a sigh that rose from the depths of his being. All
that they had thought, first and last, rolled over him;
the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren
speculation. This in fact was what the place had just
struck him as so full of the simplification of every
thing but the state of suspense. That remained only
by seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even
his original fear, if fear it had been, had lost itself in
the desert. " I judge, however," he continued, " that
you see I m not afraid now."
211
THE BETTER SORT
" What I see is, as I make it out, that you ve achieved
something almost unprecedented in the way of getting
used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely,
you ve lost your sense of it; you know it s there, but
you re indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to
have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the
danger is," May Bartram wound up, " I m bound to
say that I don t think your attitude could well be sur
passed."
John Marcher faintly smiled. " It s heroic? "
" Certainly call it that."
He considered. " I am, then, a man of courage? "
" That s what you were to show me."
He still, however, wondered. " But doesn t the man
of courage know what he s afraid of or not afraid
of? I don t know that, you see. I don t focus it. I
can t name it. I only know I m exposed."
" Yes, but exposed how shall I say ? so directly.
So intimately. That s surely enough."
" Enough to make you feel, then as what we may
call the end of our watch that I m not afraid ? "
" You re not afraid. But it isn t," she said, " the
end of our watch. That is it isn t the end of yours.
You ve everything still to see."
" Then why haven t you? " he asked. He had had,
all along, to-day, the sense of her keeping something
back, and he still had it. As this was his first impres
sion of that, it made a kind of date. The case was the
more marked as she didn t at first answer; which in
turn made him go on. " You know something I don t."
Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled
a little. " You know what s to happen." Her silence,
with the face she showed, was almost a confession
it made him sure. " You know, and you re afraid to
tell me. It s so bad that you re afraid I ll find out."
All this might be true, for she did look as if, unex
pectedly to her, he had crossed some mystic line that
212
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
she had secretly drawn round her. Yet she might,
after all, not have worried ; and the real upshot was
that he himself, at all events, needn t. " You ll never
find out."
Ill
IT was all to have made, none the less, as I have said,
a date; as came out in the fact that again and again,
even after long intervals, other things that passed be
tween them wore, in relation to this hour, but the
character of recalls and results. Its immediate effect
had been indeed rather to lighten insistence almost
to provoke a reaction; as if their topic had dropped
by its own weight and as if moreover, for that matter,
Marcher had been visited by one of his occasional
warnings against egotism. He had kept up, he felt,
and very decently on the whole, his consciousness of
the importance of not being selfish, and it was true
that he had never sinned in that direction without
promptly enough trying to press the scales the other
way. He often repaired his fault, the season permit
ting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to the
opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to
show he didn t wish her to have but one sort of food
for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there
with him a dozen nights in the month. It even hap
pened that, seeing her home at such times, he occa
sionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the
evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down
to the frugal but always careful little supper that await
ed his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by
his not eternally insisting with her on himself; made
for instance, at such hours, when it befell that, her
piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they
went over passages of the opera together. It
chanced to be on one of these occasions, however, that
213
THE BETTER SORT
he reminded her of her not having answered a certain
question he had put to her during the talk that had
taken place between them on her last birthday. " What
is it that saves you? " saved her, he meant, from that
appearance of variation from the usual human type.
If he had practically escaped remark, as she pretended,
by doing, in the most important particular, what most
men do find the answer to life in patching up an
alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himself
how had she escaped it, and how could the alliance,
such as it was, since they must suppose it had been
more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather
positively talked about?
/. I never said," May Bartram replied, " that it hadn t
made me talked about."
jt" Ah well then, you re not saved.
" It has not been a question for me._ If you ve had
your woman, I ve had," she said, " my man."-
" And you mean that makes you all right? "
She hesitated. " I don t know why it shouldn t
make me humanly, which is what we re speaking of
as right as it makes you."
" I see," Marcher returned. " Humanly, no doubt,
as showing that you re living for something. Not,
that is, just for me and my secret."
May Bartram smiled. " I don t pretend it exactly
shows that I m not living for you. It s my intimacy
with you that s in question."
He laughed as he saw what she meant. " Yes, but
since, as you say, I m only, so far as people make
out, ordinary, you re aren t you? no more than or
dinary either. You help me to pass for a man like
another. So if I am, as I understand you, you re not
compromised. Is that it? "
She had another hesitation, but she spoke clearly
enough. " That s it. It s all that concerns me to
help you to pass for a man like another."
214
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
He was careful to acknowledge the remark hand
somely. " How kind, how beautiful, you are to me!
How shall I ever repay you? "
She had her last grave pause, as if there might be
a choice of ways. But she chose. " By going on as
you are."
It was into this going on as he was that they re
lapsed, and really for so long a time that the day in
evitably came for a further sounding of their depths.
It was as if these depths, constantly bridged over by
a structure that was firm enough in spite of its
lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the some
what vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the in
terest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and
a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been
made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had,
all the while, not appeared to feel the need of rebutting
his charge of an idea within her that she didn t dare
to express, uttered just before one of the fullest of
their later discussions ended. It had come up for him
then that she " knew " something and that what she
knew was bad too bad to tell him. When he had
spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he
might find it out, her reply had left the matter too
equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher s special
sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He
circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed
and widened and that yet was not much affected by
the consciousness in him that there was nothing she
could " know," after all, any better than he did. She
had no source of knowledge that he hadn t equally
gxcept of course that she might have finernerves.
That was what Worherfftad \vlieie" they wei ^Interested;
they made out things, where people were concerned,
that the people often couldn t have made out for them
selves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagina
tion, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of
215
THE BETTER SORT
May Bartram was in particular that she had given
herself so to his case. He felt in these days what, oddly
enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread
of losing her by some catastrophe some catastrophe
that yet wouldn t at all be the catastrophe : partly be
cause she had, almost of a sudden, begun to strike him
as useful to him as never yet, and partly by reason of
an appearance of uncertainty in her health, coincident
and equally new. It was characteristic of the inner
detachment he had hitherto so successfully cultivated
and to which our whole account of him is a reference,
it was characteristic that his complications, such as
they were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to
thicken about him, even to the point of making him ask
himself if he were, by any chance, of a truth, within
sight or sound, within touch or reach, within the im
mediate jurisdiction of the thing that waited.
When the day came, as come it had to, that his
friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder
in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a change
and the chill of a shock. He immediately began to
imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to
think of her peril as the direct menace for himself of
personal privation. This indeed gave him one of those
partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable
to him it showed him that what was still first in his
mind was the loss she herself might suffer. " What if
she should have to die before knowing, before see
ing - ? " Tj; wnnlrl h^ve been brutal, in the e.arly
stages pf hpr trnnhlp, fr> put that question +
it had immediately sn^r^H for him fn hi* own
rprn ; and {tig possibility was what most m?,rJ frim
sorry fnr )ipr If she did " know," moreover, in the
sense of her having had some what should he think ?
mystical, irresistible light, this would make the mat
ter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original
adoption of his own curiosity had quite become the
216
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
basis of her life. She had been living to see what
would be to be seen, and it would be cruel to her
to have to give up before the accomplishment of the
vision. These reflections, as I say, refreshed his gen
erosity; yet, make them as he might, he saw himself,
with the lapse of the period, more and more discon
certed. It lapsed for him with a strange, steady sweep,
and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independ
ently of the threat of much inconvenience, almost the
only positive surprise his career, if career it could
be called, had yet offered him. She kept the house as
she had never done; he had to go to her to see her
she could meet him nowhere now, though there was
scarce a corner of their loved old London in which
she had not in the past, at one time or another, done
so; and he found her always seated by her fire in the
deep, old-fashioned chair she was less and less able
to leave. He had been struck one day, after an absence
exceeding his usual measure, with her suddenly look
ing much older to him than he had ever thought of
her being ; then he recognised that the suddenness was
all on his side he had just been suddenly struck. She
looked older because inevitably, after so many years,
she was old, or almost; which was of course true in
still greater measure of her companion. If she was
old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it
was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that
brought the truth home to him. His surprises began
here ; when once they had begun they multiplied ; they
came rather with a rush : it was as if, in the oddest
way in the world, they had all been kept back, sown
in a thick cluster, for the late afternoon of life, the
time at which, for people in general, the unexpected
has died out.
/ - One of them was that he should have caught him
self for he had so done really wondering if the great
accident would take form now as nothing more than
217
THE BETTER SORT
his being condemned to see this charming woman, this
admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never
so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in
thought with such a possibility ; in spite of which there
was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long
riddle the mere efTacement of even so fine a feature of
his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would
represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop
of dignity under the shadow of which his existence
could only become the most grotesque of failures. He
had been far from holding it a failure long as he had
waited for the appearance that was to make it a suc
cess. He had waited for a quite other thing, not for
such a one as that. The breath of his good faith came
short, however, as he recognised how long he had
waited, or how long, at least, his companion had. That
she, at all events, might be recorded as having waited
in vain this affected him sharply, and all the more
because of his at first having done little more than
amuse himself with the idea. It grew more grave as
the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of
mind it produced in him, which he ended by watching,
himself, as if it had been some definite disfigurement
of his outer person, may pass for another of his sur
prises. This conjoined itself still with another, the
really stupefying consciousness of a question that he
would have allowed to shape itself had he dared. What
did everything mean what, that is, did she mean, she
and her vain waiting and her probable death and the
soundless admonition of it all unless that, at this
time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too
late? He had never, at any stage of his queer con
sciousness, admitted the whisper of such a correction ;
he had never, till within these last few months, been so
false to his conviction as not to hold that what was to
come to him had time, whether he struck himself as
having it or not. That at last, at last, he certainly
218
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
hadn t it, to speak of, or had it but in the scantiest meas
ure such, soon enough, as things went with him, be
came the inference with which his old obsession had
to reckon: and this it was not helped to do by the
more and more confirmed appearance that the great
vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had
lived had, to attest itself, almost no margin left. Since
it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it
was in Time that his fate was to have acted ; and as he
waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which
was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in
turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to an
other matter beside. It all hung together; they were
subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and
indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had,
accordingly, turned stale, when the secret of the gods
had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated,
that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn t have been
failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged ;
it was failure not to be anything. And so, in the dark
valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for
twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He didn t
care what awful crash might overtake him, with what
ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet be asso
ciated since he wasn t, after all, too utterly old to
suffer if it would only be decently proportionate to
the posture he had kept, all his life, in the promised
presence of it. He had but one desire left that he
shouldn t have been " sold."
IV
THEN it was that one afternoon, while the spring of the
year was young and new, she met, all in her own way,
his frankest betrayal of these alarms. He had gone
in late to see her, but evening had not settled, and she
was presented to him in that long, fresh light of wan-
219
THE BETTER SORT
ing April days which affects us often with a sadness
sharper than the greyest hours of autumn. The week
had been warm, the spring was supposed to have begun
early, and May Bartram sat, for the first time in the
year, without a fire, a fact that, to Marcher s sense, gave
the scene of which she formed part a smooth and ul
timate look, an air of knowing, in its immaculate order
and its cold, meaningless cheer, that it would never
see a fire again. Her own aspect he could scarce
have said why intensified this note. Almost as white
as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as nu
merous and as fine as if they had been etched by a
needle, with soft white draperies relieved by a faded
green scarf, the delicate tone of which had been con
secrated by the years, she was the picture of a serene,
exquisite, but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or in
deed all whose person, might have been powdered with
silver. She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals
and green fronds she might have been a lily too only
an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly
kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt from
a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under
some clear glass bell. The perfection of household
care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her
rooms, but they especially looked to Marcher at present
as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put
away, so that she might sit with folded hands and with
nothing more to do. She was " out of it," to his
vision; her work was over; she communicated with
him as across some gulf, or from some island of rest
that she had already reached, and it made him feel
strangely abandoned. Was it or, rather, wasn t it
that if for so long she had been watching with him
the answer to their question had swum into her ken
and taken on its name, so that her occupation was
verily gone? He had as much as charged her with
this in saying to her, many months before, that she
220
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
even then knew something she was keeping from him.
It was a point he had never since ventured to press,
vaguely fearing, as he did, that it might become a dif
ference, perhaps a disagreement, between them. He
had in short, in this later time, turned nervous, which
was what, in all the other years, he had never been;
and the oddity was that his nervousness should have
waited till he had begun to doubt, should have held
off so long as he was sure. There was something, it
seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down
on his head, something that would so at least put an
end to his suspense. But he wanted not to speak the
wrong word; that would make everything ugly. He
wanted the knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if
drop it could, by its own august weight. If she was
to forsake him it was surely for her to take leave.
This was why he didn t ask her again, directly, what
she knew ; but it was also why, approaching the matter
from another side, he said to her in the course of his
visit : " What do you regard as the very worst that,
at this time of day, can happen to me? "
He had asked her that in the past often enough;
they had, with the odd, irregular rhythm of their inten
sities and avoidances, exchanged ideas about it and
then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals,
washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever
been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions
in it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come
out again, sounding for the hour as new. She could thus
at present meet his inquiry quite freshly and patiently.
" Oh yes, I ve repeatedly thought, only it always
seemed to me of old that I couldn t quite make up my
mind. I thought of dreadful things, between which it
was difficult to choose; and so must you have done."
" Rather ! I feel now as if I had scarce done any
thing else. I appear to myself to have spent my life
in thinking of nothing but dreadful things. A great
221
THE BETTER SORT
many of them I ve at different times named to you,
but there were others I couldn t name."
" They were too, too dreadful ? "
" Too, too dreadful some of them."
She looked at him a minute, and there came to him
as he met it an inconsequent sense that her eyes, when
one got their full clearness, were still as beautiful as
they had been in youth, only beautiful with a strange,
cold light a light that somehow was a part of the
effect, if it wasn t rather a part of the cause, of the
pale, hard sweetness of the season and the hour. " And
yet," she said at last, " there are horrors we have men
tioned."
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a
figure in such a picture, talk of " horrors," but she was
to do, in a few minutes, something stranger yet
though even of this he was to take the full meas
ure but afterwards and the note of it was already in
the air. It was, for the matter of that, one of the
signs that her eyes were having again such a high
flicker of their prime. He had to admit, however, what
she said. " Oh yes, there were times when we did
go far." He caught himself in the act, speaking as if it
all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the con
summation depended, for him, clearly, more and more
on his companion.
But she had now a soft smile. " Oh, far ! "
It was oddly ironic. " Do you mean you re prepared
to go further? "
She was frail and ancient and charming as she con
tinued to look at him, yet it was rather as if she had
lost the thread. " Do you consider that we went so
far?"
" Why, I thought it the point you were just making
that we had looked most things in the face."
" Including each other? " She still smiled. " But
you re quite right. We ve had together great imagina-
222
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
tions, often great fears; but some of them have been
unspoken."
" Then the worst we haven t faced that. I could
face it, I believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel,"
he explained, " as if I had lost my power to conceive
such things." And he wondered if he looked as blank
,as he sounded. " It s spent."
" Then why do you assume," she asked, " that mine
isn t?"
" Because you ve given me signs to the contrary.
It isn t a question for you of conceiving, imagining,
comparing. It isn t a question now of choosing." At
last he came out with it. " You know something that
I don t. You ve showed me that before."
These last words affected her, he could see in a mo
ment, remarkably, and she spoke with firmness. " I ve
shown you, my dear, nothing."
He shook his head. " You can t hide it."
" Oh, oh ! " May Bartram murmured over what
she couldn t hide. It was almost a smothered groan.
" You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it
to you as of something you were afraid I would find
out. Your answer was that I couldn t, that I wouldn t,
and I don t pretend I have. But you had something
therefore in mind, and I see now that it must have been,
that it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities,
has settled itself for you as the worst. This," he went
on, " is why I appeal to you. I m only afraid of ig
norance now I m not afraid of knowledge." And
then as for a while she said nothing : " What makes
me sure is that I see in your face and feel here, in this
air and amid these appearances, that you re out of it.
You ve done. You ve had your experience. You leave
me to my fate."
Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair,
as if she had in fact a decision to make, so that her
whole manner was a virtual confession, though still
223
THE BETTER SORT
with a small, fine, inner stiffness, an imperfect sur
render. " It would be the worst," she finally let herself
say. " I mean the thing that I ve never said."
It hushed him a moment. " More monstrous than all
the monstrosities we ve named? "
"More monstrous. Isn t that what you sufficiently
express," she asked, " in calling it the worst? "
Marcher thought. " Assuredly if you mean, as I
do, something that includes all the loss and all the
shame that are thinkable."
" It would if it should happen," said May Bartram.
;< What we re speaking of, remember, is only my idea."
" It s your belief," Marcher returned. " That s
enough for me. I feel your beliefs are right. There
fore if, having this one, you give me no more light
on it, you abandon me."
" No, no!" she repeated. "I m with you don t
you see? still. And as if to make it more vivid to
him she rose from her chair a movement she seldom
made in these days and showed herself, all draped
and all soft, in her fairness and slimness. " I haven t
forsaken you."
It was really, in its effort against weakness, a gener
ous assurance, and had the success of the impulse not,
happily, been great, it would have touched him to pain
more than to pleasure. But the cold charm in her eyes
had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest
of her person, so that it was, for the minute, almost
like a recovery of youth. He couldn t pity her for that ;
he could only take her as she showed as capable still
of helping him.. It was as if, at the same time, her
light might at any instant go out ; wherefore he must
make the most of it. There passed before him with in-
tensity the three or four things he wanted most to
know; but the question that came of itself to his lips
really covered the others. " Then tell me if I shall
consciously suffer."
224
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
She promptly shook her head. " Never ! "
It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and
it produced on him an extraordinary effect. " Well,
what s better than that? Do you call that the worst? "
You think nothing is better? " she asked.
She seemed to mean something so special that he
again sharply wondered, though still with the dawn
of a prospect of relief. " Why not, if one doesn t
know? After which, as their eyes, over his question,
met in a silence, the dawn deepened and something to his
purpose came, prodigiously, out of her very face. His
own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead,
and he gasped with the force of a perception to which,
on the instant, everything fitted. The sound of his
gasp filled the air ; then he became articulate. " I see
-if I don t suffer!"
In her own look, however, was doubt. " You see
what?"
" Why, what you mean what you ve always
meant."
She again shook her head. " What I mean isn t
what I ve always meant. It s different."
" It s something new ? "
She hesitated. " Something new. It s not what you
think. I see what you think."
His divination drew breath then; only her correc
tion might be wrong. " It isn t that I am a donkey? "
he asked between faintness and grimness. " It isn t
that it s all a mistake?"
ELA. mistake ? " she pityingly echoed. That possibil
ity, for her, he saw T would be monstrous:, and if she*
guaranteed him theimmunity from pain it would ac-
cordingly not be what she had in mind. " Oh, no," she
declared ; " it s nothing of that sort. You ve been
right."
Yet he couldn t help asking himself if she weren t,
thus pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to
225
THE BETTER SORT
him he should be most lost if his history should prove
all a platitude. " Are you telling me the truth, so
that I sha n t have been a bigger idiot than I can bear
to know? I haven t lived with a vain imagination,
in the most besotted illusion? I haven t waited but to
see the door shut in my face? "
She shook her head again. " However the case
stands that isn t the truth. Whatever the reality, it is
a reality. The door isn t shut. The door s open/ said
May Bartram.
"Then something s to come?"
She waited once again, always with her cold, sweet
eyes on him. " It s never too late." She had, with
her gliding step, diminished the distance between them,
and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute,
as if still full of the unspoken. Her movement might
have been for some finer emphasis of what she was
at once hesitating and deciding to say. He had been
standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely
adorned, a small, perfect old French clock and two
morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture;
and her hand grasped the shelf while she kept him
waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encourage
ment. She only kept him waiting, however; that is
he only waited. It had become suddenly, from her
movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him
that she had something more to give him ; her wasted
face delicately shone with it, and it glittered, almost as
with the white lustre of silver, in her expression. She
was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her face
was the truth, and strangely, without consequence,
while their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air,
she appeared to present it as inordinately soft. This,
prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more
gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued
for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her
contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind,
226
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
but all expectant. The end, none the less, was that
what he had expected failed to sound. Something
else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first
in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the
same instant to a slow, fine shudder, and though he
remained staring though he stared, in fact, but the
harder she turned off and regained her chair. It was
the end of what she had been intending, but it left him
thinking only of that.
" Well, you don t say ? "
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chim
ney and had sunk back, strangely pale, " I m afraid
I m too ill."
" Too ill to tell me? " It sprang up sharp to him,
and almost to his lips, the fear that she would die
without giving him light. He checked himself in time
from so expressing his question, but she answered as
if she had heard the words.
*| Don t you know nowjj"
Now - ^-f" She had spoken as if something
that had made a difference had come up within the
moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell,
was already with them. " I know nothing." And he
was afterwards to say to himself that he must have
spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as
to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his
hands of the whole question.
" Oh ! " said May Bartram.
" Are you in pain? " he asked, as the woman went
to her.
" No," said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to
take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appeal-
ingly contradicted her ; in spite of which, however, he
showed once more his mystification. " What then has
happened? "
She was once more, with her companion s help, on
227
THE BETTER SORT
her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he
had found, blankly, his hat and gloves and had reached
the door. Yet he waited for her answer. " What was
to," she said.
HE came back the next day, but she was then unable
to see him, and as it was literally the first time this had
occurred in the long stretch of their acquaintance he
turned away, defeated and sore, almost angry or feel
ing at least that such a break in their custom was really
the beginning of the end and wandered alone with
his thoughts, especially with one of them that he was
unable to keep down. She was dying, and he would
lose her; she was dying, and his life would end. He
stopped in the park, into which he had passed, and
stared before him at his recurrent doubt. Away from
her the doubt pressed again; in her presence he had
believed her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw
himself into the explanation that, nearest at hand, had
most of a miserable warmth for him and least of a cold
torment. She had deceived him to save him to put
him off with something in which he should be able to
rest. What could the thing that was to happen to him
be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to
happen ? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude
ihat was what he had figured as the beast in the
jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods.
HeTiad had her word for it as he left her; for what
else, on earth, could she have meant ? It wasn t a thing
of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distin
guished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed
and immortalised ; it had only the stamp of the common
doom. But poor Marcher, at this hour, judged the
common doom sufficient. It would serve his turn, and
even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would
228
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
bend his pride to accept it. He sat down on a bench
in the twilight. He hadn t been a fool. Something^
had been, as she had said, to come. Before he rose in
deed it had quite struck him that the final fact really /
matched with the long avenue through which he had
had to reach it. As sharing- his sngp^nftf , and as giving
herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, .she
had Come WJth>im every step nf flip A*ray Hf hpfl IJvH
by her ?H, anH tn IP^IVP li^r hahinH wnnlH hr rmpTly,
damnably to miss her. ^Qiat^could be more_over-
\vhplmincr than tha?
Well, he was to know within the week, for though
she kept him a while at bay, left him restless and
wretched during a series of days on each of which he
asked about her only again to have to turn away, she
ended his trial by receiving him where she had always
received him. Yet she had been brought out at some
hazard into the presence of so many of the things that
were, consciously, vainly, half their past, and there
was scant service left in the gentleness of her mere
desire, all too visible, to check his obsession and wind
up his long trouble. That was clearly what she want
ed; the one thing more, for her own peace, while she
could still put out her hand. He was so affected by her
state that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to
let everything go; it was she herself therefore who
brought him back, took up again, before she dismissed
him, her last word of the other time. She showed
how she wished to leave their affair in order. " I m
not sure you understood. You ve nothing to wait for
more. It has come."
Oh, how he looked at her! " Really? "
" Really."
The thing that, as you said, zvas to ? "
" The thing that we began in our youth to watch
for."
Face to face with her once more he believed her;
229
THE BETTER SORT
it was a claim to which he had so abjectly little to op
pose. " You mean that it has come as a positive, def
inite occurrence, with a name and a date ? "
" Positive. Definite. I don t know about the
* name, but, oh, with a date ! "
He found himself again too helplessly at sea. " But
come in the night come and passed me by? "
May Bartram had her strange, faint smile. " Oh
no, it hasn t passed you by ! "
" But if I haven t been aware of it, and it hasn t
touched me ?"
" Ah, your not being aware of it," and she seemed
to hesitate an instant to deal with this " your not
being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness.
It s the wonder of the wonder." She spoke as with
the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last,
at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a
sybil. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect
on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high char
acter, with the law that had ruled him. It was the
true voice of the law; so on her lips would the law
itself have sounded. " It has touched you," she went
on. " It has done its office. It has made you all its
own."
" So utterly without my knowing it? "
" So utterly without your knowing it." His hand,
as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and,
dimly smiling always now, she placed her own on it.
" It s enough if / know it."
" Oh ! " he confusedly sounded, as she herself of
late so often had done.
" What I long ago said is true. You ll never know
now, and I think you ought to be content. You ve
had it," said May Bartram.
"But had what?"
" Why, what was to have marked you out. The
proof of your law. It has acted. I m too glad," she
230
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
then bravely added, " to have been able to see what it s
not"
He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the
sense that it was all beyond him, and that she was
too, he would still have sharply challenged her, had
he not felt it an abuse of her weakness to do more
than take devoutly what she gave him, take it as hushed
as to a revelation. If he did speak, it was out of the
foreknowledge of his loneliness to come. " If you re
glad of what it s * not/ it might then have been
worse?"
She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before
her with which, after a moment : " Well, you know
our fears."
He wondered. " It s something then we never
feared?"
On this, slowly, she turned to him. " Did we ever
dream, with all our dreams, that we should sit and talk
of it thus?"
He tried for a little to make out if they had; but
it was as if their dreams, numberless enough, were in
solution in some thick, cold mist, in which thought lost
itself. " It might have been that we couldn t talk? "
" Well "she did her best for him" not from this
side. This, you see," she said, " is the other side."
" I think," poor Marcher returned, " that all sides
are the same to me." Then, however, as she softly
shook her head in correction : " We mightn t, as it
were, have got across ? "
" To where we are no. We re here " she made
her weak emphasis.
" And much good does it do us ! " was her friend s
frank comment.
" It does us the good it can. It does us the good
that it isn t here. It s past. It s behind," said May
Bartram. " Before " but her voice dropped.
He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to
231
THE BETTER SORT
combat his yearning. She after all told him nothing
but that his light had failed which he knew well
enough without her. "Before ?" he blankly
echoed.
" Before, you see, it was always to come. That kept
it present."
" Oh, I don t care what comes now ! Besides,"
Marcher added, " it seems to me I liked it better pres
ent, as you say, than I can like it absent with your
absence."
" Oh, mine ! " and her pale hands made light of it.
" With the absence of everything." He had a dread
ful sense of standing there before her for so far as
anything but this proved, this bottomless drop was con
cerned the last time of their life. It rested on him
with a weight he felt he could scarce bear, and this
weight it apparently was that still pressed out what
remained in him of speakable protest. " I believe you;
but I can t begin to pretend I understand. Nothing,
for me, is past; nothing will pass until I pass myself,
which I pray my stars may be as soon as possible.
Say, however," he added, " that I ve eaten my cake,
as you contend, to the last crumb how can the thing
I ve never felt at all be the thing I was marked out to
feel?"
She met him, perhaps, less directly, but she met him
unperturbed. " You take your feelings for granted.
You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily
to know it."
" How in the world when what is such knowledge
but suffering ? "
She looked up at him a while, in silence. " No
you don t understand."
I suffer," said John Marcher.
" Don t, don t ! "
" How can I help at least that? "
" Don t! " May Bartram repeated.
232
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her
weakness, that he stared an instant stared as if
some light, hitherto hidden, had shimmered across his
vision. Darkness again closed over it, but the gleam
had already become for him an idea. "Because I
haven t the right ? "
" Don t know when you needn t/ she mercifully
urged. " You needn t for we shouldn t."
"Shouldn t?" If he could but know what she
meant !
" No it s too much."
" Too much ? " he still asked but with a mystifica
tion that was the next moment, of a sudden, to give
way. Her words, if they meant something, affected
him in this light the light also of her wasted face
as meaning all, and the sense of what knowledge had
been for herself came over him with a rush which broke
through into a question. "Is it of that, then, you re
dying? "
She but watched him, gravely at first, as if to see,
with this, where he was, and she might have seen some
thing, or feared something, that moved her sympathy.
" I_wquld_live for you stillif I could." Her eyes
closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she
were, for a last time, trying. " But I can t! " she said
as she raised them again to take leave of him.
She couldn t indeed, as but too promptly and sharply
appeared, and he had no vision of her after this that
was anything but darkness and doom. They had
parted forever in that strange talk; access to her cham
ber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbid
den him; he was feeling now moreover, in the face of
doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives attracted
doubtless by the presumption of what she had to
" leave," how few were the rights, as they were called
in such cases, that he had to put forward, and how odd
it might even seem that their intimacy shouldn t have
233
THE BETTER SORT
given him more of them. The stupidest fourth cousin
had more, even though she had been nothing in such
a person s life. She had been a feature of features
in his, for what else was it to have been so indispensa
ble? Strange beyond saying were the ways of ex
istence, baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he
felt it to be, of producible claim. A woman might
have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might
yet present him in no connection that anyone ap
peared obliged to recognise. If this was the case in
these closing weeks it was the case more sharply on
the occasion of the last offices rendered, in the great
grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to
what had been precious, in his friend. The concourse
at her grave was not numerous, but he saw himself
treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than
if there had been a thousand others. He was in short
from this moment face to face with the fact that he
was to profit extraordinarily little by the interest May
Bartram had taken in him. He couldn t quite have
said what he expected, but he had somehow not ex
pected this approach to a double privation. Not only
had her interest failed him, but he seemed to feel him
self unattended and for a reason he couldn t sound
by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if noth
ing else, of the man markedly bereaved. It was as if,
in the view of society, he had not been markedly be
reaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of it,
and as if, none the less, his character could never be
affirmed, nor the deficiency ever made up. There were
moments, as the weeks went by, when he would have
liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand
on the intimacy of his loss, in order that it might be
questioned and his retort, to the relief of his spirit,
so recorded; but the moments of an irritation more
helpless followed fast on these, the moments during
which, turning things over with a good conscience but
234
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
with a bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he
oughtn t to have begun, so to speak, further back.
He found himself wondering indeed at many things,
and this last speculation had others to keep it company.
What could he have done, after all, in her lifetime,
without giving them both, as it were, away? He
couldn t have made it known she was watching him,
for that would have published the superstition of the
Beast. This was what closed his mouth now now
that the Jungle had been threshed to vacancy and that
the Beast had stolen away. It sounded too foolish
and too flat; the difference for him in this particular,
the extinction in his life of the element of suspense, was
such in fact as to surprise him. He could scarce have
said what the effect resembled; the abrupt cessation,
the positive prohibition, of music perhaps, more than
anything else, in some place all adjusted and all accus
tomed to sonoriety and to attention. If he could at
any rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image
at some moment of the past (what had he done, after
all, if not lift it to her?) so to do this to-day, to talk
to people at large of the jungle cleared and confide
to them that he now felt it as safe, would have been not
only to see them listen as to a goodwife s tale, but
really to hear himself tell one. What it presently came
to in truth was that poor Marcher waded through
his beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath
sounded, where no evil eye seemed to gleam from a
possible lair, very much as if vaguely looking for the
Beast, and still more as if missing it. He walked about
in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious,
and, stopping fitfully in places where the undergrowth
of life struck him as closer, asked himself yearningly,
wondered secretly and sorely, if it would have lurked
here or there. It would have at all events sprung;
what was at least complete was his belief in the truth
itself of the assurance given him. The change from
235
THE BETTER SORT
his old sense to his new was absolute and final : what
was to happen had so absolutely and finally happened
that he was as little able to know a fear for his future
as to know a hope ; so absent in short was any ques
tion of anything still to come. He was to live entirely
with the other question, that of his unidentified past,
that of his having to see his fortune impenetrably muf
fled and masked.
The torment of this vision became then his occupa
tion ; he couldn t perhaps have consented to live but for
the possibility of guessing. She had told him, his
friend, not to guess ; she had forbidden him, so far as
he might, to know, and she had even in a sort denied
the power in him to learn : which were so many things,
precisely, to deprive him of rest. It wasn t that he
wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything that had
happened to him should happen over again; it was
only that he shouldn t, as an anticlimax, have been
taken sleeping so sound as not to be able to win back
by an effort of thought the lost stuff of consciousness.
He declared to himself at moments that he would either
win it back or have done with consciousness for ever ;
he made this idea his one motive, in fine, made it so
much his passion that none other, to compare with it,
seemed ever to have touched him. The lost stuff of
consciousness became thus for him as a strayed or
stolen child to an unappeasable father; he hunted it
up and down very much as if he were knocking at doors
and inquiring of the police. This was the spirit in
which, inevitably, he set himself to travel; he started
on a journey that was to be as long as he could make
it; it danced before him that, as the other side of the
globe couldn t possibly have less to say to him, it might,
by a possibility of suggestion, have more. Before he
quitted London, however, he made a pilgrimage to
May Bartram s grave, took his way to it through the
endless avenues of the grim suburban necropolis,
236
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
sought it out in the wilderness of tombs, and, though
he had come but for the renewal of the act of farewell,
found himself, when he had at last stood by it, be
guiled into long intensities. He stood for an hour,
powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetrate
the darkness of death; fixing with his eyes her in
scribed name and date, beating his forehead against
the fact of the secret they kept, drawing his breath,
while he waited as if, in pity of him, some sense would
rise from the stones. He kneeled on the stones, how
ever, in vain; they kept what they concealed; and if
the face of the tomb did become a face for him it was
because her two names were like a pair of eyes that
didn t know him. He gave them a last long look, but
no palest light broke.
VI
HE stayed away, after this, for a year ; he visited the
depths of Asia, spending himself on scenes of romantic
interest, of superlative sanctity; but what was present
to him every where was that for a man who had known
what he had known the world was vulgar and vain.
The state of mind in which he had lived for so many
years shone out to him, in reflection, as a light that
coloured and refined, a light beside which the glow of
the East was garish, cheap and thin. The terrible
truth \vas that he had lost with everything else a
he saw couldn t help
being common when he had become common to look
at them. He was simply now one of them himself he
was in the dust, without a peg for the sense of differ
ence; and there were hours when, before the temples
of gods and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned,
for nobleness of association, to the barely discriminated
slab in the London suburb. That had become for him,
THE BETTER SORT
and more intensely with time and distance, his one
witness of a past glory. It was all that was left
to him for proof or pride, yet the past glories of Pha
raohs were nothing to him as he thought of it. Small
wonder then that he came back to it on the morrow
of his return. He was drawn there this time as ir
resistibly as the other, yet with a confidence, almost,
that was doubtless the effect of the many months that
had elapsed. He had lived, in spite of himself, into his
change of feeling, and in wandering over the earth had
wandered, as might be said, from the circumference
to the centre of his desert. He had settled to his safety
and accepted perforce his extinction; figuring to him
self, with some colour, in the likeness of certain little
old men he remembered to have seen, of whom, all
meagre and wizened as they might look, it was related
that they had in their time fought twenty duels or
been loved by ten princesses. They indeed had been
wondrous for others, while he was but wondrous for
himself; which, however, was exactly the cause of his
haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might
put it, into his own presence. That had quickened his
steps and checked his delay. If his visit was prompt
it was because he had been separated so long from the
part of himself that alone he now valued.
It is accordingly not false to say that he reached his
goal with a certain elation, and stood there again with
a certain assurance. The creature beneath the sod
knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely now, the
place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression.
It met him in mildness not, as before, in mockery;
it wore for him the air of conscious greeting that we
find, after absence, in things that have closely belonged
to us and which seem to confess of themselves to the
connection. The plot of ground, the graven tablet, the
tended flowers affected him so as belonging to him that
he quite felt for the hour like a contented landlord
238
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
reviewing a piece of property. Whatever had hap
pened well, had happened. He had not come back
this time with the vanity of that question, his former
worrying, " What, what? " now practically so spent.
Yet he would, none the less, never again so cut himself
off from the spot; he would come back to it every
month, for if he did nothing else by its aid he at least
held up his head. It thus grew for him, in the oddest
way, a positive resource; he carried out his idea of
periodical returns, which took their place at last among
the most inveterate of his habits. What it all amount
ed to, oddly enough, was that, in his now so simplified
world, this garden of death gave him the few square
feet of earth on which he could still most live. It was
as if, being nothing anywhere else for anyone, nothing
even for himself, he were just everything here, and if
not for a crowd of witnesses, or indeed for any witness
but John Marcher, then by clear right of the register
that he could scan like an open page. The open page
was the tomb of his friend, and there were the facts
of the past, there the truth of his life, there the back
ward reaches in which he could lose himself. He did
this, from time to time, with such effect that he seemed
to wander through the old years with his hand in the
arm of a companion who was, in the most extraor
dinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to
wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and
round a third presence not wandering she, but sta
tionary, still, whose eyes, turning with his revolution,
never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his
point, so to speak, of orientation. Thus in short he
settled to live feeding only on the sense that he once
had lived, and dependent on it not only for a support
but for an identity.
It sufficed him, in its way, for months, and the year
elapsed; it would doubtless even have carried him
further but for an accident, superficially slight, which
239
THE BETTER SORT
moved him, in a quite other direction, with a force
beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India.
It was a thing of the merest chance the turn, as he
afterwards felt, of a hair, though he was indeed to live
to believe that if light hadn t come to him in this par
ticular fashion it would still have come in another.
He was to live to believe this, I say, though he was
not to live, I may not less definitely mention, to do
much else. We allow him at any rate the benefit of
the conviction, struggling up for him at the end, that,
whatever might have happened or not happened, he
would have come round of himself to the light. The
incident of an autumn day had put the match to the
train laid from of old by his misery. With the light
before him he knew that even of late his ache had only
been smothered. It was strangely drugged, but it
throbbed ; at the touch it began to bleed. AndL the
touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow-mortak
This face, one grey afternoon when the leaves were
thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher s own, at the
cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade.
He felt it, that is, so deep down that he winced at
the steady thrust. The person who so mutely assaulted
him was a figure he had noticed, on reaching his own
goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance away, a
grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the vis
itor would probably match it for frankness. This fact
alone forbade further attention, though during the
time he stayed he remained vaguely conscious of his
neighbour, a middle-aged man apparently, in mourning,
whose bowed back, among the clustered monuments
and mortuary yews, was constantly presented. March
er s theory that these were elements in contact with
which he himself revived, had suffered, on this occa
sion, it may be granted, a sensible though inscrutable
check. The autumn day was dire for him as none had
recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had
240
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
not yet known on the low stone table that bore May
Bartram s name. He rested without power to move,
as if some spring in him, some spell vouchsafed, had
suddenly been broken forever. If he could have done
that moment as he wanted he would simply have
stretched himself on the slab that was ready to take
him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last
sleep. What in all the wide world had he now to keep
awake for? He stared before him with the question,
and it was then that, as one of the cemetery walks
passed near him, he caught the shock of the face.
His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as
he himself, with force in him to move, would have done
by now, and was advancing along the path on his way
to one of the gates. This brought him near, and his
pace was slow, so that and all the more as there was
a kind of hunger in his look the two men were for a
minute directly confronted. Marcher felt him on the
spot as one of the deeply stricken a perception so
sharp that nothing else in the picture lived for it,
neither his dress, his age, nor his presumable character
and class; nothing lived but the deep ravage of the
features that he showed. He shoived them that was
the point; he was moved, as he passed, by some im
pulse that was either a signal for sympathy or, more
possibly, a challenge to another sorrow. He might
already have been aware of our friend, might, at some
previous hour, have noticed in him the smooth habit
of the scene, with which the state of his own senses so
scantly consorted, and might thereby have been stirred
as by a kind of overt discord. What Marcher was at
all events conscious of was, in the first place, that the
imaged of scarred passion presented to him was con
scious too of something that profaned the air; and,
in the second, that, roused, startled, shocked, he was
yet the next moment looking after it, as it went, with
envy. The most extraordinary thing that had happened
241
THE BETTER SORT
to him though he had given that name to other mat
ters as well took place, after his immediate vague
stare, as a consequence of this impression. The stran
ger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained,
making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what
wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed.
What had the man had to make him, by the loss of it,
so bleed and yet live?
Something and this reached him with a pang
that he, John Marcher, hadn t ; the proof of which was
precisely John Marcher s arid end. No passion had
ever touched him, for this was what passion meant;
he had survived and maundered and pined, but where
had been his deep ravage? The extraordinary thing
we speak of was the sudden rush of the result of this
question. The sight that had just met his eyes named
to him, as in letters of quick flame, something he had
utterly, insanely missed, and what he had missed;
made these things a train of fire, made them mark
themselves in an anguish of inward throbs. He had
seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way
a woman was mourned when she had been loved for
herself; such was the force of his conviction of the
meaning of the stranger s face, which still flared for
him like a smoky torch. It had not come to him, the
knowledge, on the wings of experience ; it had brushed
him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of
chance, the insolence of an accident. Now that the il
lumination had begun, however, it blazed to the zenith,
and what he presently stood there gazing at was the
sounded void of his life. He gazed, he drew breath,
in pain ; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had
before him in sharper incision than ever the open page
of his story. The name on the table smote him as the
passage of his neighbour had done, and what it said to
him, full in the face, was that she was what he had
missed.. This was the awful thought, the answer to
242
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
all the past, the vision at the dread clearness of which
he turned as cold as the stone beneath him. Every
thing fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed ;
leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he
had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he
had met with a vengeance he had emptied the cup
to the lees; he had been the man of his time, the man,
to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. That
was the rare stroke that was his visitation. So he saw
it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and
fitted. So she had seen it, while he didn t, and so she
served at this hour to drive the truth home. It was
the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he
had waited the wait was itself his portion. This the
companion of his vigil had at a given moment per
ceived, and she had then offered him the chance to
baffle his doom. One s doom, however, was never
baffled, and on the day she had told him that his own
had come down she had seen him but stupidly stare
at the escape she offered him.
The escape would have been to love her ; then, then
he would have lived. Sfy> had hVrf wh n rnnlH <^y
now with what passion ? since she had loved him for
himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah,
how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his
egotism and the light of her use. Her spoken words
came back to him, and the chain stretched and stretched.
The beast had lurked indeed, and the beast, at its hour,
had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold
April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and per
haps even then recoverable, she had risen from her
chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess.
It had sprung as he didn t guess ; it had sprung as she
hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time
he left her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had
justified his fear and achieved his fate ; he had failed,
with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and
243
THE BETTER SORT
a moan now rose/lo his lips as he remembered she had
prayed he mightn t knowjH_This horror of waking
this was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of
which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze.
Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold
it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel
the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had some
thing of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly
sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in
the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been
appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life
and saw the lurking Beast ; then, while he looked, per
ceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous,
for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes dark
ened it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his
hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, on his face,
on the tomb.
THE BIRTHPLACE
IT seemed to them at first, the offer, too good to be
true, and their friend s letter, addressed to them
to feel, as he said, the ground, to sound them as to in
clinations and possibilities, had almost the effect of a
brave joke at their expense. Their friend, Mr. Grant-
Jackson, a highly preponderant, pushing person, great
in discussion and arrangement, abrupt in overture, un
expected, if not perverse, in attitude, and almost equal
ly acclaimed and objected to in the wide midland
region to which he had taught, as the phrase was, the
size of his foot their friend had launched his bolt
quite out of the blue and had thereby so shaken them
as to make them fear almost more than hope. The
place had fallen vacant by the death of one of the two
ladies, mother and daughter, who had discharged its
duties for fifteen years; the daughter was staying on
alone, to accommodate, but had found, though ex
tremely mature, an opportunity of marriage that in
volved retirement, and the question of the new in
cumbents was not a little pressing. The want thus
determined was of a united couple of some sort, of the
right sort, a pair of educated and competent sisters
possibly preferred, but a married pair having its ad
vantages if other qualifications were marked. Appli
cants, candidates, besiegers of the door of everyone
supposed to have a voice in the matter, were already
beyond counting, and Mr. Grant- Jackson, who was in
245
THE BETTER SORT
his way diplomatic and whose voice, though not per
haps of the loudest, possessed notes of insistence, had
found his preference fixing itself on some person or
brace of persons who had been decent and dumb. The
Gedges appeared to have struck him as waiting in
silence though absolutely, as happened, no busybody
had brought them, far away in the north, a hint either
of bliss or of danger; and the happy spell, for the
rest, had obviously been wrought in him by a remem
brance which, though now scarcely fresh, had never
before borne any such fruit.
Morris Gedge had for a few years, as a young man,
carried on a small private school of the order known
as preparatory, and had happened then to receive under
his roof the small son of the great man, who was not
at that time so great. The little boy, during an ab
sence of his parents from England, had been danger
ously ill, so dangerously that they had been recalled
in haste, though with inevitable delays, from a far
country they had gone to America, with the whole
continent and the great sea to cross again and had
got back to find the child saved, but saved, as couldn t
help coming to light, by the extreme devotion and per
fect judgment of Mrs. Gedge. Without children of her
own, she had particularly attached herself to this tini
est and tenderest of her husband s pupils, and they had
both dreaded as a dire disaster the injury to their little
enterprise that would be caused by their losing him.
Nervous, anxious, sensitive persons, with a pride
as they were for that matter well aware above their
position, never, at the best, to be anything but dingy,
they had nursed him in terror and had brought him
through in exhaustion. Exhaustion, as befell, had thus
overtaken them early and had for one reason and an
other managed to assert itself as their permanent por
tion. The little boy s death would, as they said, have
done for them, yet his recovery hadn t saved them;
246
THE BIRTHPLACE
with which it was doubtless also part of a shy but
stiff candour in them that they didn t regard themselves
as having in a more indirect manner laid up treasure.
Treasure was not to be, in any form whatever, of their
dreams or of their waking sense; and the years that
followed had limped under their weight, had now and
then rather grievously stumbled, had even barely es
caped laying them in the dust. The school had not
prospered, had but dwindled to a close. Gedge s health
had failed, and, still more, every sign in him of a capac
ity to publish himself as practical. He had tried several
things, he had tried many, but the final appearance was
of their having tried him not less. They mostly, at
the time I speak of, were trying his successors, while
he found himself, with an effect of dull felicity that had
come in this case from the mere postponement of
change, in charge of the grey town library of Black-
port-on-Dwindle, all granite, fog and female fiction.
This was a situation in which his general intelligence
acknowledged as his strong point was doubtless
conceived, around him, as feeling less of a strain than
that mastery of particulars in which he was recognised
as weak.
It was at Blackport-on-Dwindle that the silver shaft
reached and pierced him ; it was as an alternative to
dispensing dog s-eared volumes the very titles of which,
on the lips of innumerable glib girls, were a challenge
to his temper, that the wardenship of so different a
temple presented itself. The stipend named differed
little from the slim wage at present paid him, but even
had it been less the interest and the honour would have
struck him as determinant. The shrine at which he
was to preside though he had always lacked occasion
to approach it figured to him as the most sacred
known to the steps of men, the early home of the su
preme poet, the Mecca of the English-speaking race.
The tears came into his eyes sooner still than into his
247
THE BETTER SORT
wife s while he looked about with her at their actual
narrow prison, so grim with enlightenment, so ugly
with industry, so turned away from any dream, so in
tolerable to any taste. He felt as if a window had
opened into a great green woodland, a woodland that
had a name, glorious, immortal, that was peopled with
vivid figures, each of them renowned, and that gave
out a murmur, deep as the sound of the sea, which was
the rustle in forest shade of all the poetry, the beauty,
the colour of life. It would be prodigious that of this
transfigured world he should keep the key. No he
couldn t believe it, not even when Isabel, at sight of his
face, came and helpfully kissed him. He shook his
head with a strange smile. " We sha n t get it. Why
should we? It s perfect."
" If we don t he ll simply have been cruel ; which
is impossible when he has waited all this time to be
kind." Mrs. Gedge did believe she would; since the
wide doors of the world of poetry had suddenly pushed
back for them it was in the form of poetic justice that
they were first to know it. She had her faith in their
patron ; it was sudden, but it was now complete. " He
remembers that s all ; and that s our strength."
" And what s his? " Gedge asked. " He may want
to put us through, but that s a different thing from
being able. What are our special advantages? "
" Well, that we re just the thing." Her knowledge
of the needs of the case was, as yet, thanks to scant
information, of the vaguest, and she had never, more
than her husband, stood on the sacred spot; but she
saw herself waving a nicely-gloved hand over a collec
tion of remarkable objects and saying to a compact
crowd of gaping, awe-struck persons : " And now,
please, this way." She even heard herself meeting with
promptness and decision an occasional inquiry from a
visitor in whom audacity had prevailed over awe. She
had been once, with a cousin, years before, to a great
248
THE BIRTHPLACE
northern castle, and that was the way the housekeeper
had taken them round. And it was not moreover,
either, that she thought of herself as a housekeep
er : she was well above that, and the wave of her hand
wouldn t fail to be such as to show it. This, and much
else, she summed up as she answered her mate. " Our
special advantages are that you re a gentleman."
" Oh ! " said Gedge, as if he had never thought of
it, and yet as if too it were scarce worth thinking of.
" I see it all," she went on ; " they ve had the vulgar
they find they don t do. We re poor and we re mod
est, but anyone can see what we are."
Gedge wondered. "Do you mean ?" More
modest than she, he didn t know quite what she meant.
We re refined. We know how to speak."
"Do we?" he still, suddenly, wondered.
But she was, from the first, surer of everything than
he; so that when a few weeks more had elapsed and
the shade of uncertainty though it was only a shade
had grown almost to sicken him, her triumph was to
come with the news that they were fairly named.
" We re on poor pay, though we manage " she had
on the present occasion insisted on her point. " But
we re highly cultivated, and for them to get that, don t
you see? without getting too much with it in the way
of pretentious and demands, must be precisely their
dream. We ve no social position, but we don t mind
that we haven t, do we? a bit; which is because we
know the difference between realities and shams. We
hold to reality, and that gives us common sense, which
the vulgar have less than anything, and which yet must
be wanted there, after all, as well as anywhere else."
Her companion followed her, but musingly, as if his
horizon had within a few moments grown so great that
he was almost lost in it and required a new orientation.
The shining spaces surrounded him; the association
alone gave a nobler arch to the sky. " Allow that we
249
THE BETTER SORT
hold also a little to the romance. It seems to me that
that s the beauty. We ve missed it all our life, and
now it s come. We shall be at head-quarters for it.
We shall have our fill of it."
She looked at his face, at the effect in it of these
prospects, and her own lighted as if he had suddenly
grown handsome. " Certainly we shall live as in a
fairy-tale. But what I mean is that we shall give,
in a way and so gladly quite as much as we get.
With all the rest of it we re, for instance, neat." Their
letter had come to them at breakfast, and she picked
a fly out of the butter-dish. " It s the way we ll
keep the place " with which she removed from the
sofa to the top of the cottage-piano a tin of biscuits
that had refused to squeeze into the cupboard. At
Blackport they were in lodgings of the lowest descrip
tion, she had been known, with a freedom felt by Black-
port to be slightly invidious, to declare. The Birth
place and that itself, after such a life, was exaltation
wouldn t be lodgings, since a house close beside it was
set apart for the warden, a house joining on to it as
a sweet old parsonage is often annexed to a quaint
old church. It would all together be their home, and
such a home as would make a little world that they
would never want to leave. She dwelt on the gain, for
that matter, to their income ; as-, obviously, though the
salary was not a change for the better, the house, given
them, would make all the difference. He assented to
this, but absently, and she was almost impatient at the
range of his thoughts. It was as if something, for him
the very swarm of them veiled the view ; and he
presently, of himself, showed what it was.
" What I can t get over is its being such a man ! "
He almost, from inward emotion, broke down.
"Such a man ?"
" Him, him, HIM ! " It was too much.
" Grant-Jackson ? Yes, it s a surprise, but one sees
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how he has been meaning, all the while, the right
thing by us."
" I mean Him," Gedge returned more coldly; " our
becoming familiar and intimate for that s what it will
come to. We shall just live with Him."
" Of course it is the beauty." And she added quite
gaily : " The more we do the more we shall love Him."
" No doubt but it s rather awful. The more we
knozv Him," Gedge reflected, " the more we shall love
Him. We don t as yet, you see, know Him so very
tremendously."
" We do so quite as well, I imagine, as the sort of
people they ve had. And that probably isn t unless
you care, as we do so awfully necessary. For there
are the facts."
" Yes there are the facts."
" I mean the principal ones. They re all that the
people the people who come want."
" Yes they must be all they want."
" So that they re all that those who ve been in charge
have needed to know."
" Ah," he said as if it were a question of honour,
" we must know everything."
She cheerfully acceded: she had the merit, he felt,
of keeping the case within bounds. " Everything.
But about him personally," she added, " there isn t,
is there? so very, very much."
" More, I believe, than there used to be. They ve
made discoveries."
It was a grand thought. " Perhaps we shall make
some ! "
" Oh, I shall be content to be a little better up in
what has been done." And his eyes rested on a shelf
of books, half of which, little worn but much faded,
were of the florid " gift " order and belonged to the
house. Of those among them that were his own most
were common specimens of the reference sort, not ex-
251
THE BETTER SORT
eluding an old Bradshaw and a catalogue of the
town-library. " We ve not even a Set of our own.
Of the Works," he explained in quick repudiation of
the sense, perhaps more obvious, in which she might
have taken it.
As a proof of their scant range of possessions this
sounded almost abject, till the painful flush with which
they met on the admission melted presently into a dif
ferent glow. It was just for that kind of poorness that
their new situation was, by its intrinsic charm, to con
sole them. And Mrs. Gedge had a happy thought.
" Wouldn t the Library more or less have them ? "
" Oh no, we ve nothing of that sort : for what do
you take us ? " This, however, was but the play of
Gedge s high spirits : the form both depression and ex
hilaration most frequently took with him being a bitter
ness on the subject of the literary taste of Blackport.
No one w r as so deeply acquainted with it. It acted with
him in fact as so lurid a sign of the future that the
charm of the thought of removal was sharply enhanced
by the prospect of escape from it. The institution he
served didn t of course deserve the particular reproach
into which his irony had flowered; and indeed if the
several Sets in which the Works were present were a
trifle dusty, the dust was a little his own fault. To
make up for that now he had the vision of immediately
giving his time to the study of them; he saw himself
indeed, inflamed with a new passion, earnestly com
menting and collating. Mrs. Gedge, who had sug
gested that they ought, till their move should come,
to read Him regularly of an evening certain as they
were to do it still more when in closer quarters with
Him Mrs. Gedge felt also, in her degree, the spell;
so that the very happiest time of their anxious life was
perhaps to have been the series of lamplight hours, after
supper, in which, alternately taking the book, they de
claimed, they almost performed, their beneficent author.
252
THE BIRTHPLACE
He became speedily more than their author their per
sonal friend, their universal light, their final authority
and divinity. Where in the world, they were already
asking themselves, would they have been without him ?
By the time their appointment arrived in form their
relation to him had immensely developed. It was
amusing to Morris Gedge that he had so lately blushed
for his ignorance, and he made this remark to his wife
during the last hour they were able to give to their
study, before proceeding, across half the country, to
the scene of their romantic future. It was as if, in
deep, close throbs, in cool after-waves that broke of
a sudden and bathed his mind, all possession and com
prehension and sympathy, all the truth and the life
and the story, had come to him, and come, as the news
papers said, to stay. " It s absurd," he didn t hesitate
to say, " to talk of our not knowing. So far as we
don t it s because we re donkeys. He s in the thing,
over His ears, and the more we get into it the more
we re with Him. I seem to myself at any rate," he
declared, " to see Him in it as if He were painted on
the wall."
" Oh, doesn t one rather, the dear thing ? And don t
you feel where it is? " Mrs. Gedge finely asked. " We
see Him because we love Him that s what we do.
How can we not, the old darling with what He s
doing for us? There s no light" she had a senten
tious turn " like true affection."
" Yes," I suppose that s it. And yet," her husband
mused, " I see, confound me, the faults."
" That s because you re so critical. You see them,
but you don t mind them. You see them, but you for
give them. You mustn t mention them there. We
sha n t, you know, be there for that."
" Dear no ! " he laughed : " we ll chuck out anyone
who hints at them."
253
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II
IF the sweetness of the preliminary months had been
great, great too, though almost excessive as agitation,
was the wonder of fairly being housed with Him, of
treading day and night in the footsteps He had worn,
of touching the objects, or at all events the surfaces,
the substances, over which His hands had played, which
his arms, his shoulders had rubbed, of breathing the
air or something not too unlike it in which His
voice had sounded. They had had a little at first their
bewilderments, their disconcertedness ; the place was
both humbler and grander than they had exactly pre
figured, more at once of a cottage and of a museum,
a little more archaically bare and yet a little more
richly official. But the sense was strong with them
that the point of view, for the inevitable ease of the
connection, patiently, indulgently awaited them ; in ad
dition to which, from the first evening, after closing-
hour, when the last blank pilgrim had gone, the mere
spell, the mystic presence as if they had had it quite
to themselves were all they could have desired. They
had received, by Grant- Jackson s care and in addition
to a table of instructions and admonitions by the num
ber, and in some particulars by the nature, of which
they found themselves slightly depressed, various little
guides, handbooks, travellers tributes, literary memo
rials and other catch-penny publications, which, how
ever, were to be for the moment swallowed up in the
interesting episode of the induction or initiation ap
pointed for them in advance at the hands of several
persons whose connection with the establishment was,
as superior to their own, still more official, and at those
in especial of one of the ladies who had for so many
years borne the brunt. About the instructions from
above, about the shilling books and the well-known
254
THE BIRTHPLACE
facts and the full-blown legend, the supervision, the
subjection, the submission, the view as of a cage in
which he should circulate and a groove in which he
should slide, Gedge had preserved a certain play of
mind; but all power of reaction appeared suddenly to
desert him in the presence of his so visibly competent
predecessor and as an effect of her good offices. He
had not the resource, enjoyed by his wife, of seeing
himself, with impatience, attired in black silk of a make
characterised by just the right shade of austerity; so
that this firm, smooth, expert and consummately re
spectable middle-aged person had him somehow, on
the whole ground, completely at her mercy.
It was evidently something of a rueful moment when,
as a lesson she being for the day or two still in the
field he accepted Miss Putchin s suggestion of " going
round " with her and with the successive squads of
visitors she was there to deal with. He appreciated her
method he saw there had to be one; he admired her
as succinct and definite; for there were the facts, as
his wife had said at Blackport, and they were to be
disposed of in the time; yet he felt like a very little
boy as he dangled, more than once, with Mrs. Gedge,
at the tail of the human comet. The idea had been
that they should, by this attendance, more fully em
brace the possible accidents and incidents, as it were,
of the relation to the great public in which they were
to find themselves; and the poor man s excited per
ception of the great public rapidly became such as to
resist any diversion meaner than that of the admirable
manner of their guide. It wandered from his gaping
companions to that of the priestess in black silk, whom
he kept asking himself if either he or Isabel could hope
by any possibility ever remotely to resemble; then it
bounded restlessly back to the numerous persons who
revealed to him, as it had never yet been revealed, the
happy power of the simple to hang upon the lips of
255
THE BETTER SORT
the wise. The great thing seemed to be and quite
surprisingly that the business was easy and the strain,
which as a strain they had feared, moderate ; so that he
might have been puzzled, had he fairly caught himself
in the act, by his recognising as the last effect of the
impression an odd absence of the ability to rest in it,
an agitation deep within him that vaguely threatened
to grow. " It isn t, you see, so very complicated," the
black silk lady seemed to throw off, with everything
else, in her neat, crisp, cheerful way ; in spite of which
he already, the very first time that is after several
parties had been in and out and up and down went
so far as to wonder if there weren t more in it than
she imagined. She was, so to speak, kindness itself
was all encouragement and reassurance; but it was
just her slightly coarse redolence of these very things
that, on repetition, before they parted, dimmed a little,
as he felt, the light of his acknowledging smile. That,
again, she took for a symptom of some pleading weak
ness in him he could never be as brave as she; so
that she wound up w r ith a few pleasant words from
the very depth of her experience. " You ll get into it,
never fear it will come; and then you ll feel as if you
had never done anything else." He was afterwards to
know that, on the spot, at this moment, he must have
begun to wince a little at such a menace ; that he might
come to feel as if he had never done anything but what
Miss Putchin did loomed for him, in germ, as a penalty
to pay. The support she offered, none the less, con
tinued to strike him; she put the whole thing on so
sound a basis when she said : " You see they re so nice
about it they take such an interest. And they never
do a thing they shouldn t. That was always every
thing to mother and me." " They," Gedge had al
ready noticed, referred constantly and hugely, in the
good woman s talk, to the millions who shuffled
through the house; the pronoun in question was for-
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ever on her lips, the hordes it represented filled her
consciousness, the addition of their numbers ministered
to her glory. Mrs. Gedge promptly met her. "It
must be indeed delightful to see the effect on so many,
and to feel that one may perhaps do something to make
it well, permanent." But he was kept silent by his
becoming more sharply aware that this was a new
view, for him, of the reference made, that he had never
thought of the quality of the place as derived from
Them, but from Somebody Else, and that They, in
short, seemed to have got into the way of crowding
out Him. He found himself even a little resenting
this for Him, which perhaps had something to do with
the slightly invidious cast of his next inquiry.
" And are They always, as one might say a
stupid?"
" Stupid ! " She stared, looking as if no one could
be such a thing in such a connection. No one had ever
been anything but neat and cheerful and fluent, except
to be attentive and unobjectionable and, so far as was
possible, American.
" What I mean is," he explained, " is there any per
ceptible proportion that take an interest in Him ? "
His wife stepped on his toe; she deprecated irony.
But his mistake fortunately was lost on their friend.
" That s just why they come, that they take such an
interest. I sometimes think they take more than about
anything else in the world." With which Miss Putchin
looked about at the place. " It is pretty, don t you
think, the way they ve got it now ? " This, Gedge
saw, was a different " They " ; it applied to the pow
ers that were the people who had appointed him, the
governing, visiting Body, in respect to which he was
afterwards to remark to Mrs. Gedge that a fellow
it was the difficulty didn t know " where to have her."
His wife, at a loss, questioned at that moment the neces
sity of having her anywhere, and he said, good-hu-
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THE BETTER SORT
mouredly, " Of course; it s all right." He was in fact
content enough with the last touches their friend had
given the picture. " There are many who know all
about it when they come, and the Americans often are
tremendously up. Mother and me really enjoyed "
it was her only slip " the interest of the Americans.
We ve sometimes had ninety a day, and all wanting
to see and hear everything. But you ll work them off ;
you ll see the way it s all experience." She came
back, for his comfort, to that. She came back also to
other things : she did justice to the considerable class
who arrived positive and primed. " There are those
who know more about it than you do. But that only
comes from their interest."
Who know more about what ? " Gedge inquired.
" Why, about the place. I mean they have their
ideas of what everything is, and where it is, and what
it isn t, and where it should be. They do ask ques
tions," she said, yet not so much in warning as in the
complacency of being seasoned and sound ; " and
they re down on you when they think you go wrong.
As if you ever could! You know too much," she
sagaciously smiled ; " or you will."
" Oh, you mustn t know too much, must you ? " And
Gedge now smiled as well. He knew, he thought, what
he meant.
:< Well, you must know as much as anybody else.
I claim, at any rate, that I do," Miss Putchin declared.
" They never really caught me."
" I m very sure of that" Mrs. Gedge said with an
elation almost personal.
" Certainly," he added, " I don t want to be caught."
She rejoined that, in such a case, he would have Them
down on him, and he saw that this time she meant the
powers above. It quickened his sense of all the ele
ments that were to reckon with, yet he felt at the same
time that the powers above were not what he should
258
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most fear. " I m glad," he observed, " that they ever
ask questions; but I happened to notice, you know,
that no one did to-day."
" Then you missed several and no loss. There
were three or four put to me too silly to remember.
But of course they mostly are silly."
" You mean the questions? "
She laughed with all her cheer. " Yes, sir ; I don t
mean the answers."
Whereupon, for a moment snubbed and silent, he
felt like one of the crowd. Then it made him slightly
vicious. " I didn t know but you meant the people in
general till I remembered that I m to understand
from you that they re wise, only occasionally breaking
down."
It was not really till then, he thought, that she lost
patience; and he had had, much more than he meant
no doubt, a cross-questioning air. " You ll see for
yourself." Of which he was sure enough. He was in
fact so ready to take this that she came round to full
accommodation, put it frankly that every now and then
they broke out not the silly, oh no, the intensely in
quiring. " We ve had quite lively discussions, don t
you know, about well-known points. They want it all
their way, and I know the sort that are going to as
soon as I see them. That s one of the things you do
you get to know the sorts. And if it s what you re
afraid of their taking you up," she was further gra
cious enough to say, " you needn t mind a bit. What
do they know, after all, when for us it s our life? I ve
never moved an inch, because, you see, I shouldn t have
been here if I didn t know where I was. No more will
you be a year hence you know what I mean, put
ting it impossibly if you don t. I expect you do, in
spite of your fancies." And she dropped once more to
bed-rock. " There are the facts. Otherwise where
would any of us be ? That s all you ve got to go upon.
259
THE BETTER SORT
A person, however cheeky, can t have them his way
just because he takes it into his head. There can only
be one way, and," she gaily added as she took leave
of them, " I m sure it s quite enough ! "
III
GEDGE not only assented eagerly one way was quite
enough if it were the right one but repeated it, after
this conversation, at odd moments, several times over
to his wife. "There can only be one way, one way,"
he continued to remark though indeed much as if it
were a joke ; till she asked him how many more he sup
posed she wanted. He failed to answer this question,
but resorted to another repetition, "There are the facts,
the facts," which, perhaps, however, he kept a little
more to himself, sounding it at intervals in different
parts of the house. Mrs. Gedge was full of comment
on their clever introductress, though not restrictively
save in the matter of her speech, "Me and mother," and
a general tone which certainly was not their sort of
thing. "I don t know," he said, "perhaps it comes with
the place, since speaking in immortal verse doesn t
seem to come. It must be, one seems to see, one thing
or the other. I dare say that in a few months I shall
also be at it me and the wife.
"Why not me and the missus at once?" Mrs. Gedge
resentfully inquired. "I don t think," she observed at
another time, "that I quite know what s the matter with
you."
"It s only that I m excited, awfully excited as I
don t see how one can not be. You wouldn t have a
fellow drop into this berth as into an appointment at
the Post Office. Here on the spot it goes to my head ;
how can that be helped ? But we shall live into it, and
perhaps," he said with an implication of the other pos
sibility that was doubtless but part of his fine ecstasy,
260
THE BIRTHPLACE
"we shall live through it." The place acted on his
imagination how, surely, shouldn t it? And his
imagination acted on his nerves, and these things to
gether, with the general vividness and the new and
complete immersion, made rest for him almost impos
sible, so that he could scarce go to bed at night and even
during the first week more than once rose in the small
hours to move about, up and down, with his lamp,
standing, sitting, listening, wondering, in the stillness,
as if positively to recover some echo, to surprise some
secret, of the genius loci. He couldn t have explained
it and didn t in fact need to explain it, at least to him
self, since the impulse simply held him and shook him ;
but the time after closing, the time above all after the
people Them, as he felt himself on the way to think
of them, predominant, insistent, all in the foreground
brought him, or ought to have brought him, he seemed
to see, nearer to the enshrined Presence, enlarged the
opportunity for communion and intensified the sense of
it. These nightly prowls, as he called them, were dis
quieting to his wife, who had no disposition to share in
them, speaking with decision of the whole place as just
the place to be forbidding after dark. She rejoiced in
the distinctness, contiguous though it was, of their own
little residence, where she trimmed the lamp and stirred
the fire and heard the kettle sing, repairing the while the
omissions of the small domestic who slept out ; she fore
saw herself with some promptness, drawing rather
sharply the line between her own precinct and that in
which the great spirit might walk. It would be with
them, the great spirit, all day even if indeed on her
making that remark, and in just that form, to her hus
band, he replied with a queer "But will he though?"
And she vaguely imaged the development of a domestic
antidote after a while, precisely, in the shape of cur
tains more markedly drawn and everything most mod
ern and lively, tea, "patterns," the newspapers, the fe-
261
THE BETTER SORT
male fiction itself that they had reacted against at
Blackport, quite defiantly cultivated.
These possibilities, however, were all right, as her
companion said it was, all the first autumn they had
arrived at summer s end ; as if he were more than con
tent with a special set of his own that he had access to
from behind, passing out of their low door for the few
steps between it and the Birthplace. With his lamp
ever so carefully guarded, and his nursed keys that
made him free of treasures, he crossed the dusky inter
val so often that she began to qualify it as a habit that
" grew." She spoke of it almost as if he had taken to
drink, and he humoured that view of it by confessing
that the cup was strong. This had been in truth, al
together, his immediate sense of it; strange and deep
for him the spell of silent sessions before familiarity
and, to some small extent, disappointment had set in.
The exhibitional side of the establishment had struck
him, even on arrival, as qualifying too much its charac
ter ; he scarce knew what he might best have looked for,
but the three or four rooms bristled overmuch, in the
garish light of day, with busts and relics, not even
ostensibly always His, old prints and old editions, old
objects fashioned in His likeness, furniture "of the
time" and autographs of celebrated worshippers. In
the quiet hours and the deep dusk, none the less, under
the play of the shifted lamp and that of his own emo
tion, these things too recovered their advantage, min
istered to the mystery, or at all events to the impression,
seemed consciously to offer themselves as personal to
the poet. Not one of them was really or unchallenge-
ably so, but they had somehow, through long associa
tion, got, as Gedge always phrased it, into the secret,
and it was about the secret he asked them while he rest
lessly wandered. It was not till months had elapsed
that he found how little they had to tell him, and he was
quite at his ease with them when he knew they were
262
THE BIRTHPLACE
by no means where his sensibility had first placed them.
They were as out of it as he ; only, to do them justice,
they had made him immensely feel. And still, too, it
was not they who had done that most, since his senti
ment had gradually cleared itself to deep, to deeper re
finements.
The Holy of Holies of the Birthplace was the low, the
sublime Chamber of Birth, sublime because, as the
Americans usually said unlike the natives they mostly
found words it was so pathetic ; and pathetic because
it was well, really nothing else in the world that one
could name, number or measure. It was as empty as a
shell of which the kernel has withered, and contained
neither busts nor prints nor early copies; it contained
only the Fact the Fact itself which, as he stood sen
tient there at midnight, our friend, holding his breath,
allowed to sink into him. He had to take it as the
place where the spirit would most walk and where he
would therefore be most to be met, with possibilities of
recognition and reciprocity. He hadn t, most prob
ably He hadn t much inhabited the room, as men
weren t apt, as a rule, to convert to their later use and
involve in their wider fortune the scene itself of their
nativity. But as there were moments when, in the
conflict of theories, the sole certainty surviving for the
critic threatened to be that He had not unlike other
successful men not been born, so Gedge, though little
of a critic, clung to the square feet of space that con
nected themselves, however feebly, with the positive
appearance. He was little of a critic he was nothing
of one; he hadn t pretended to the character before
coming, nor come to pretend to it ; also, luckily for him,
he was seeing day by day how little use he could pos
sibly have for it. It would be to him, the attitude of a
high expert, distinctly a stumbling-block, and that he
rejoiced, as the winter waned, in his ignorance, was one
of the propositions he betook himself, in his odd man-
263
THE BETTER SORT
ner, to enunciating to his wife. She denied it, for
hadn t she, in the first place, been present, wasn t she
still present, at his pious, his tireless study of every
thing connected with the subject? so present that she
had herself learned more about it than had ever seemed
likely. Then, in the second place, he was not to pro
claim on the housetops any point at which he might be
weak, for who knew, if it should get abroad that they
were ignorant, what effect might be produced ?
"On the attraction" he took her up "of the
Show?"
He had fallen into the harmless habit of speaking of
the place as the "Show"; but she didn t mind this so
much as to be diverted by it. "No ; on the attitude of
the Body. You know they re pleased with us, and I
don t see why you should want to spoil it. We got in
by a tight squeeze you know we ve had evidence of
that, and that it was about as much as our backers could
manage. But we re proving a comfort to them, and
it s absurd of you to question your suitability to people
who were content with the Putchins."
"I don t, my dear," he returned, "question anything :
but if I should do so it would be precisely because of the
greater advantage constituted for the Putchins by the
simplicity of their spirit. They were kept straight by
the quality of their ignorance which was denser even
than mine. It was a mistake in us, from the first, to
have attempted to correct or to disguise ours. We
should have waited simply to become good parrots, to
learn our lesson all on the spot here, so little of it is
wanted and squawk if off."
"Ah, squawk, love what a word to use about
Him!"
"It isn t about Him nothing s about Him. None
of Them care tuppence about Him. The only thing
They care about is this empty shell or rather, for it
isn t empty, the extraneous, preposterous stuffing of
it."
264
THE BIRTHPLACE
"Preposterous ?" he made her stare with this as he
had not yet done.
At sight of her look, however the gleam, as it
might have been, of a queer suspicion he bent to her
kindly and tapped her cheek. "Oh, it s all right. We
must fall back on the Putchins. Do you remember
what she said ? They ve made it so pretty now. They
have made it pretty, and it s a first-rate show. It s a
first-rate show and a first-rate billet, and He was a first-
rate poet, and you re a first-rate woman to put up so
sweetly, I mean, with my nonsense."
She appreciated his domestic charm and she justified
that part of his tribute which concerned herself. "I
don t care how much of your nonsense you talk to me,
so long as you keep it all for me and don t treat Them
to it."
"The pilgrims? No," he conceded "it isn t fair to
Them. They mean well."
"What complaint have we, after all, to make of Them
so long as They don t break off bits as They used,
Miss Putchin told us, so awfully to conceal about
Their Persons? She broke them at least of that."
"Yes," Gedge mused again; "I wish awfully she
hadn t!"
"You would like the relics destroyed, removed?
That s all that s wanted!"
"There are no relics."
"There won t be any soon, unless you take care."
But he was already laughing, and the talk was not
dropped without his having patted her once more. An
impression or two, however, remained with her from it,
as he saw from a question she asked him on the morrow.
"What did you mean yesterday about Miss Putchin s
simplicity its keeping her straight ? Do you mean
mentally?"
Her "mentally" was rather portentous, but he prac
tically confessed. "Well, it kept her up. I mean," he
amended, laughing, "it kept her down."
265
THE BETTER SORT
It was really as if she had been a little uneasy. "You
consider there s a danger of your being affected ? You
know what I mean. Of its going to your head. You
do know," she insisted as he said nothing, " through
your caring for him so. You d certainly be right in
that case about its having been a mistake for you to
plunge so deep." And then as his listening without re
ply, though with his look a little sad for her, might
have denoted that, allowing for extravagance of state
ment, he saw there was something in it : "Give up
your prowls. Keep it for daylight. Keep it for
Them."
"Ah," he smiled, "if one could! My prowls," he
added, "are what I most enjoy. They re the only time,
as I ve told you before, that I m really with Him. Then
I don t see the place. He isn t the place."
"I don t care for what you don t see," she replied
with vivacity; "the question is of what you do see."
Well, if it was, he waited before meeting it. "Do
you know what I sometimes do?" And then as she
waited too : "In the Birthroom there, when I look in
late, I often put out my light. That makes it better."
"Makes what ?"
"Everything."
"What is it then you see in the dark?"
"Nothing!" said Morris Gedge.
"And what s the pleasure of that ?"
"Well, what the American ladies say. It s so fas
cinating."
IV
THE autumn was brisk, as Miss Putchin had told them
it would be, but business naturally fell off with the
winter months and the short days. There was rarely
an hour indeed without a call of some sort, and they
were never allowed to forget that they kept the shop in
all the world, as they might say, where custom was
266
THE BIRTHPLACE
least fluctuating. The seasons told on it, as they tell
upon travel, but no other influence, consideration or
convulsion to which the population of the globe is ex
posed. This population, never exactly in simultaneous
hordes, but in a full, swift and steady stream, passed
through the smoothly-working mill and went, in its
variety of degrees duly impressed and edified, on its
artless way. Gedge gave himself up, with much in
genuity of spirit, to trying to keep in relation with it;
having even at moments, in the early time, glimpses of
the chance that the impressions gathered from so rare
an opportunity for contact with the general mind might
prove as interesting as anything else in the connection.
Types, classes, nationalities, manners, diversities of be
haviour, modes of seeing, feeling, of expression, would
pass before him and become for him, after a fashion,
the experience of an untravelled man. His journeys
had been short and saving, but poetic justice again
seemed inclined to work for him in placing him just at
the point in all Europe perhaps where the confluence of
races was thickest. The theory, at any rate, carried
him on, operating helpfully for the term of his anxious
beginnings and gilding in a manner it was the way he
characterised the case to his wife the somewhat stodgy
gingerbread of their daily routine. They had not
known many people, and their visiting-list was small
which made it again poetic justice that they should be
visited on such a scale. They dressed and were at
home, they were under arms and received, and except
for the offer of refreshment and Gedge had his view
that there would eventually be a buffet farmed out to a
great firm their hospitality would have made them
princely if mere hospitality ever did. Thus they were
launched, and it was interesting, and from having been
ready to drop, originally, with fatigue, they emerged
even-winded and strong in the legs, as if they had had
an Alpine holiday. This experience, Gedge opined,
267
THE BETTER SORT
also represented, as a gain, a like seasoning of the
spirit by which he meant a certain command of im
penetrable patience.
The patience was needed for the particular feature
of the ordeal that, by the time the lively season was with
them again, had disengaged itself as the sharpest the
immense assumption of veracities and sanctities, of the
general soundness of the legend with which everyone
arrived. He was well provided, certainly, for meeting
it, and he gave all he had, yet he had sometimes the
sense of a vague resentment on the part of his pilgrims
at his not ladling out their fare with a bigger spoon.
An irritation had begun to grumble in him during the
comparatively idle months of winter when a pilgrim
would turn up singly. The pious individual, enter
tained for the half-hour, had occasionally seemed to
offer him the promise of beguilement or the semblance
of a personal relation; it came back again to the few
pleasant calls he had received in the course of a life
almost void of social amenity. Sometimes he liked the
person, the face, the speech : an educated man, a gentle
man, not one of the herd; a graceful woman, vague,
accidental, unconscious of him, but making him won
der, while he hovered, who she was. These chances
represented for him light yearnings and faint flutters;
they acted indeed, within him, in a special, an ex
traordinary way. He would have liked to talk with
such stray companions, to talk with them really, to
talk with them as he might have talked if he had
met them where he couldn t meet them at dinner,
in the " world," on a visit at a country-house. Then
he could have said and about the shrine and the
idol always things he couldn t say now. The form
in which his irritation first came to him was that
of his feeling obliged to say to them to the
single visitor, even when sympathetic, quite as to
the gaping group the particular things, a dreadful
268
THE BIRTHPLACE
dozen or so, that they expected. If he had thus ar
rived at characterising these things as dreadful the
reason touches the very point that, for a while turning
everything over, he kept dodging, not facing, trying to
ignore. The point was that he was on his way to be
come two quite different persons, the public and the pri
vate, and yet that it would somehow have to be man
aged that these persons should live together. He was
splitting into halves, unmistakeably he who, whatever
else he had been, had at least always been so entire and,
in his way, so solid. One of the halves, or perhaps
even, since the split promised to be rather unequal, one
of the quarters, was the keeper, the showman, the priest
of the idol; the other piece was the poor unsuccessful
honest man he had always been.
There were moments when he recognized this pri
mary character as he had never done before; when he
in fact quite shook in his shoes at the idea that it per
haps had in reserve some supreme assertion of its
identity. It was honest, verily, just by reason of the pos
sibility. It was poor and unsuccessful because here it
was just on the verge of quarrelling with its bread and
butter. Salvation would be of course the salvation
of the showman rigidly to keep it on the verge; not to
let it, in other words, overpass by an inch. He might
count on this, he said to himself, if there weren t any
public if there weren t thousands of people demand
ing of him what he was paid for. He saw the approach
of the stage at which they would affect him, the thou
sands of people and perhaps even more the earnest
individual as coming really to see if he were earning
his wage. Wouldn t he soon begin to fancy them in
league with the Body, practically deputed by it given,
no doubt, a kindled suspicion to look in and report
observations? It was the way he broke down with the
lonely pilgrim that led to his first heart-searchings
broke down as to the courage required for damping an
269
THE BETTER SORT
uncritical faith. What they all most wanted was to
feel that everything was " just as it was"; only the
shock of having to part with that vision was greater
than any individual could bear unsupported. The bad
moments were upstairs in the Birthroom, for here the
forces pressing on the very edge assumed a dire in
tensity. The mere expression of eye, all-credulous,
omnivorous and fairly moistening in the act, with
which many persons gazed about might eventually
make it difficult for him to remain fairly civil. Often
they came in pairs sometimes one had come before
and then they explained to each other. He never
in that case corrected; he listened, for the lesson of
listening: after which he would remark to his wife that
there was no end to what he was learning. He saw
that if he should really ever break down it would be
with her he would begin. He had given her hints and
digs enough, but she was so inflamed with appreciation
that she either didn t feel them or pretended not to
understand.
This was the greater complication that, with the re
turn of the spring and the increase of the public, her
services were more required. She took the field with
him, from an early hour ; she was present with the party
above while he kept an eye, and still more an ear, on the
party below ; and how could he know, he asked himself,
what she might say to them and what she might suffer
Them to say or in other words, poor wretches, to be
lieve while removed from his control ? Some day or
other, and before too long, he couldn t but think, he
must have the matter out with her the matter, name
ly, of the morality of their position. The morality of
women was special he was getting lights on that.
Isabel s conception of her office was to cherish and en
rich the legend. It was already, the legend, very tak
ing, but what was she there for but to make it more so ?
She certainly wasn t there to chill any natural piety.
270
THE BIRTHPLACE
If it was all in the air all in their "eye," as the vulgar
might say that He had been born in the Birthroom,
where was the value of the sixpences they took ? where
the equivalent they had engaged to supply? "Oh dear,
yes just about here;" and she must tap the place with
her foot. "Altered? Oh dear, no save in a few
trifling particulars; you see the place and isn t that
just the charm of it ? quite as He saw it. Very poor
and homely, no doubt ; but that s just what s so wonder
ful." He didn t want to hear her, and yet he didn t
want to give her her head ; he didn t want to make dif
ficulties or to snatch the bread from her mouth. But
he must none the less give her a warning before they
had gone too far. That was the way, one evening in
June, he put it to her; the affluence, with the finest
weather, having lately been of the largest, and the
crowd, all day, fairly gorged with the story. "We
mustn t, you know, go too far."
The odd thing was that she had now ceased to be
even conscious of what troubled him she was so
launched in her own career. "Too far for what ?"
"To save our immortal souls. We mustn t, love, tell
too many lies."
She looked at him with dire reproach. "Ah now,
are you going to begin again ?"
"I never have begun ; I haven t wanted to worry you.
But, you know, we don t know anything about it."
And then as she stared, flushing : "About His having
been born up there. About anything, really. Not the
least little scrap that would weigh, in any other connec
tion, as evidence. So don t rub it in so."
"Rub it in how?"
"That He was born " But at sight of her face
he only sighed. "Oh dear, oh dear !"
"Don t you think," she replied cuttingly, "that He
was born anywhere ?"
He hesitated it was such an edifice to shake. "Well,
271
THE BETTER SORT
we don t know. There s very little to know. He cov
ered His tracks as no other human being has ever
done."
She was still in her public costume and had not taken
off the gloves that she made a point of wearing as a part
of that uniform; she remembered how the rustling
housekeeper in the Border castle, on whom she had be
gun by modelling herself, had worn them. She seemed
official and slightly distant. "To cover His tracks. He
must have had to exist. Have we got to give that up ?"
"No, I don t ask you to give it up yet. But there s
very little to go upon."
"And is that what I m to tell Them in return for
everything?"
Gedge waited he walked about. The place was
doubly still after the bustle of the day, and the summer
evening rested on it as a blessing, making it, in its small
state and ancientry, mellow and sweet. It was good to
be there, and it would be good to stay. At the same
time there was something incalculable in the effect on
one s nerves of the great gregarious density. That was
an attitude that had nothing to do with degrees and
shades, the attitude of wanting all or nothing. And
you couldn t talk things over with it. You could only
do this with friends, and then but in cases where you
were sure the friends wouldn t betray you. "Couldn t
you adopt," he replied at last, "a slightly more discreet
method? What we can say is that things have been
said; that s all we have to do with. And is this really
when they jam their umbrellas into the floor the
very spot where He was born? So it has, from a
long time back, been described as being. Couldn t one
meet Them, to be decent a little, in some such way as
that?"
She looked at him very hard. "Is that the way you
meet them?"
"No; I ve kept on lying without scruple, without
shame."
272
THE BIRTHPLACE
"Then why do you haul me up ?"
"Because it has seemed to me that we might, like true
companions, work it out a little together."
This was not strong, he felt, as, pausing with his
hands in his pockets, he stood before her ; and he knew
it as weaker still after she had looked at him a minute.
"Morris Gedge, I propose to be your true companion,
and I ve come here to stay. That s all I ve got to say."
It was not, however, for "You had better try yourself
and see," she presently added. "Give the place, give
the story away, by so much as a look, and well, I d
allow you about nine days. Then you d see."
He feigned, to gain time, an innocence. "They d
take it so ill ?" And then, as she said nothing : "They d
turn and rend me ? They d tear me to pieces ?"
But she wouldn t make a joke of it. "They wouldn t
have it, simply."
"No they wouldn t. That s what I say. They
won t."
"You had better," she went on, "begin with Grant-
Ja-ckson. But even that isn t necessary. It would get
to him, it would get to the Body, like wildfire."
"I see," said poor Gedge. And indeed for the mo
ment he did see, while his companion followed up what
she believed her advantage.
" Do you consider it s all a fraud? "
"Well, I grant you there was somebody. But. the
details are naught. The links are missing. The evi
dence in particular about that room upstairs, in itself
our Casa Santa is nil. It was so awfully long ago."
Which he knew again sounded weak.
"Of course it was awfully long ago that s just the
beauty and the interest. Tell Them, tell Them," she
continued, "that the evidence is nil, and I ll tell them
something else." She spoke it with such meaning that
his face seemed to show a question, to which she was
on the spot of replying "I ll tell them that you re a "
273
THE BETTER SORT
She stopped, however, changing it. " I ll tell them
exactly the opposite. And I ll find out what you say
it won t take long to do it. If we tell different
stories, that possibly may save us."
"I see what you mean. It would perhaps, as an odd
ity, have a success of curiosity. It might become a
draw. Still, they but want broad masses." And he
looked at her sadly. "You re no more than one of
Them."
"If it s being no more than one of them to love it,"
she answered, "then I certainly am. And I am not
ashamed of my company."
"To love what?" said Morris Gedge.
"To love to think He was born there."
"You think too much. It s bad for you." He
turned away with his chronic moan. But it was with
out losing what she called after him.
"I decline to let the place down." And what was
there indeed to say ? They were there to keep it up.
V
HE kept it up through the summer, but with the queer
est consciousness, at times, of the want of proportion
between his secret rage and the spirit of those from
whom the friction came. He said to himself so sore
as his sensibility had grown that They were gregari
ously ferocious at the very time he was seeing Them
as individually mild. He said to himself that They
were mild only because he was he flattered himself
that he was divinely so, considering what he might be ;
and that he should, as his wife had warned him, soon
enough have news of it were he to deflect by a hair s
breath from the line traced for him. That was the col
lective fatuity that it was capable of turning, on the
instant, both to a general and to a particular resentment.
Since the least breath of discrimination would get him
274
THE BIRTHPLACE
the sack without mercy, it was absurd, he reflected, to
speak of his discomfort as light. He was gagged, he
was goaded, as in omnivorous companies he doubtless
sometimes showed by a strange silent glare. They
would get him the sack for that as well, if he didn t
look out ; therefore wasn t it in effect ferocity when you
mightn t even hold your tongue? They wouldn t let
you off with silence They insisted on your committing
yourself. It was the pound of flesh They would have
it; so under his coat he bled. But a wondrous peace,
by exception, dropped on him one afternoon at the end
of August. The pressure had, as usual, been high, but
it had diminished with the fall of day, and the place
was empty before the hour for closing. Then it was
that, within a few minutes of this hour, there presented
themselves a pair of pilgrims to whom in the ordinary
course he would have remarked that they were, to his
regret, too late. He was to wonder afterwards why
the course had, at sight of the visitors a gentleman
and a lady, appealing and fairly young shown for
him as other than ordinary; the consequence sprang
doubtless from something rather fine and unnameable,
something, for instance, in the tone of the young man,
or in the light of his eye, after hearing the statement on
the subject of the hour. "Yes, we know it s late; but
it s just, I m afraid, because of that. We ve had rather
a notion of escaping the crowd as, I suppose, you
mostly have one now ; and it was really on the chance of
finding you alone !"
These things the young man said before being quite
admitted, and they were words that any one might have
spoken who had not taken the trouble to be punctual
or who desired, a little ingratiatingly, to force the door.
Gedge even guessed at the sense that might lurk in
them, the hint of a special tip if the point were stretched.
There were no tips, he had often thanked his stars, at
the Birthplace ; there was the charged fee and nothing
THE BETTER SORT
more ; everything else was out of order, to the relief of
a palm not formed by nature for a scoop. Yet in spite
of everything, in spite especially of the almost audible
chink of the gentleman s sovereigns, which might in
another case exactly have put him out, he presently
found himself, in the Birthroom, access to which he had
gracefully enough granted, almost treating the visit as
personal and private. The reason well, the reason
would have been, if anywhere, in something naturally
persuasive on the part of the couple, unless it had been,
rather, again, in the way the young man, once he was
in the place, met the caretaker s expression of face, held
it a moment and seemed to w r ish to sound it. That they
were Americans was promptly clear, and Gedge could
very nearly have told what kind ; he had arrived at the
point of distinguishing kinds, though the difficulty
might have been with him now that the case before him
was rare. He saw it, in fact, suddenly, in the light of
the golden midland evening, which reached them
through low old windows, saw it with a rush of feeling,
unexpected and smothered, that made him wish for a
moment to keep it before him as a case of inordinate
happiness. It made him feel old, shabby, poor, but he
watched it no less intensely for its doing so. They were
children of fortune, of the greatest, as it might seem to
Morris Gedge, and they were of course lately married ;
the husband, smooth-faced and soft, but resolute and
fine, several years older than the wife, and the wife
vaguely, delicately, irregularly, but mercilessly pretty.
Somehow, the world was theirs; they gave the person
who took the sixpences at the Birthplace such a sense of
the high luxury of freedom as he had never had. The
thing was that the world was theirs not simply because
they had money he had seen rich people enough but
because they could in a supreme degree think and feel
and say what they liked. They had a nature and a cult
ure, a tradition, a facility of some sort and all pro-
276
THE BIRTHPLACE
ducing in them an effect of positive beauty that gave a
light to their liberty and an ease to their tone. These
things moreover suffered nothing from the fact that
they happened to be in mourning; this was probably
worn for some lately-deceased opulent father, or some
delicate mother who would be sure to have been a part
of the source of the beauty, and it affected Gedge, in
the gathered twilight and at his odd crisis, as the very
uniform of their distinction.
He couldn t quite have said afterwards by what steps
the point had been reached, but it had become at the end
of five minutes a part of their presence in the Birth-
room, a part of the young man s look, a part of the
charm of the moment, and a part, above all, of a strange
sense within him of "Now or never!" that Gedge had
suddenly, thrillingly, let himself go. He had not been
definitely conscious of drifting to it; he had been, for
that, too conscious merely of thinking how different, in
all their range, were such a united couple from another
united couple that he knew. They were everything he
and his wife were not; this was more than anything
else the lesson at first of their talk. Thousands of
couples of whom the same was true certainly had passed
before him, but none of whom it was true with just that
engaging intensity. This was because of their tran
scendent freedom; that was what, at the end of five
minutes, he saw it all come back to. The husband had
been there at some earlier time, and he had his impres
sion, which he wished now to make his wife share.
But he already, Gedge could see, had not concealed it
from her. A pleasant irony, in fine, our friend seemed
to taste in the air he who had not yet felt free to taste
his own.
"I think you weren t here four years ago" that was
what the young man had almost begun by remarking.
Gedge liked his remembering it, liked his frankly
speaking to him; all the more that he had given him,
277
THE BETTER SORT
as it were, no opening. He had let them look about be
low, and then had taken them up, but without words,
without the usual showman s song, of which he would
have been afraid. The visitors didn t ask for it; the
young man had taken the matter out of his hands by
himself dropping for the benefit of the young woman a
few detached remarks. What Gedge felt, oddly, was
that these remarks were not inconsiderate of him; he
had heard others, both of the priggish order and the
crude, that might have been called so. And as the
young man had not been aided to this cognition of him
as new, it already began to make for them a certain
common ground. The ground became immense when
the visitor presently added with a smile : "There was
a good lady, I recollect, who had a great deal to say."
It was the gentleman s smile that had done it; the
irony was there. "Ah, there has been a great deal
said." And Gedge s look at his interlocutor doubtless
showed his sense of being sounded. It was extraordi
nary of course that a perfect stranger should have
guessed the travail of his spirit, should have caught the
gleam of his inner commentary. That probably, in
spite of him, leaked out of his poor old eyes. "Much
of it, in such places as this," he heard himself adding,
" is of course said very irresponsibly." Such places
as this! he winced at the words as soon as he had ut
tered them.
There was no wincing, however, on the part of his
pleasant companions. "Exactly so; the whole thing
becomes a sort of stiff, smug convention, like a dressed-
up sacred doll in a Spanish church which you re a
monster if you touch."
"A monster," said Gedge, meeting his eyes.
The young man smiled, but he thought he looked at
him a little harder. "A blasphemer."
"A blasphemer."
It seemed to do his visitor good he certainly was
THE BIRTHPLACE
looking at him harder. Detached as he was he was in
terested he was at least amused. "Then you don t
claim, or at any rate you don t insist ? I mean you
personally."
He had an identity for him, Gedge felt, that he
couldn t have had for a Briton, and the impulse was
quick in our friend to testify to this perception. " I
don t insist to you"
The young man laughed. "It really I assure you
if I may wouldn t do any good. I m too awfully in
terested."
"Do you mean," his wife lightly inquired, "in a
pulling it down? That is in what you ve said to me."
"Has he said to you," Gedge intervened, though
quaking a little, "that he would like to pull it down?"
She met, in her free sweetness, this directness with
such a charm ! "Oh, perhaps not quite the house /"
"Good. You see we live on it I mean we people."
The husband had laughed, but had now so complete
ly ceased to look about him that there seemed nothing
left for him but to talk avowedly with the caretaker.
"I m interested," he explained, "in what, I think, is the
interesting thing or at all events the eternally tor
menting one. The fact of the abysmally little that, in
proportion, we know."
"In proportion to what?" his companion asked.
"Well, to what there must have been to what in
fact there is to wonder about. That s the interest ; it s
immense. He escapes us like a thief at night, carrying
off well, carrying off everything. And people pre
tend to catch Him like a flown canary, over whom you
can close your hand and put Him back. He won t go
back ; he won t come back. He s not" the young man
laughed "such a fool ! It makes Him the happiest
of all great men."
He had begun by speaking to his wife, but had ended,
with his friendly, his easy, his indescribable competence,
279
THE BETTER SORT
for Gedge poor Gedge who quite held his breath and
who felt, in the most unexpected way, that he had
somehow never been in such good society. The young
wife, who for herself meanwhile had continued to look
about, sighed out, smiled out Gedge couldn t have
told which her little answer to these remarks. "It s
rather a pity, you know, that He isn t here. I mean as
Goethe s at Weimar. For Goethe is at Weimar."
"Yes, my dear; that s Goethe s bad luck. There he
sticks. This man isn t anywhere. I defy you to catch
Him."
"Why not say, beautifully," the young woman
laughed, "that, like the wind, He s everywhere?"
It wasn t of course the tone of discussion, it was the
tone of joking, though of better joking, Gedge seemed
to feel, and more within his own appreciation, than he
had ever listened to; and this was precisely why the
young man could go on without the effect of irritation,
answering his wife but still with eyes for their com
panion. "I ll be hanged if He s here!"
It was almost as if he were taken that is, struck
and rather held by their companion s unruffled state,
which they hadn t meant to ruffle, but which suddenly
presented its interest, perhaps even projected its light.
The gentleman didn t know, Gedge was afterwards to
say to himself, how that hypocrite was inwardly all of a
tremble, how it seemed to him that his fate was being
literally pulled down on his head. He was trembling
for the moment certainly too much to speak ; abject he
might be, but he didn t want his voice to have the ab
surdity of a quaver. And the young woman charm
ing creature ! still had another word. It was for the
guardian of the spot, and she made it, in her way, de
lightful. They had remained in the Holy of Holies,
and she had been looking for a minute, with a rueful
ness just marked enough to be pretty, at the queer old
floor. "Then if you say it wasn t in this room He was
born well, what s the use ?"
280
THE BIRTHPLACE
"What s the use of what?" her husband asked. "The
use, you mean, of our coming here? Why, the place
is charming in itself. And it s also interesting," he
added to Gedge, "to know how you get on."
Gedge looked at him a moment in silence, but he
answered the young woman first. If poor Isabel, he
was thinking, could only have been like that! not as
to youth, beauty, arrangement of hair or picturesque
grace of hat these things he didn t mind; but as to
sympathy, facility, light perceptive, and yet not cheap,
detachment ! "I don t say it wasn t but I don t say it
was."
"Ah, but doesn t that," she returned, "come very
much to the same thing? And don t They want also
to see where He had His dinner and where He had His
tea?"
"They want everything," said Morris Gedge. "They
want to see where He hung up His hat and where He
kept His boots and where His mother boiled her pot."
"But if you don t show them ?"
"They show me. It s in all their little books."
"You mean," the husband asked, "that you ve only
to hold your tongue?"
"I try to," said Gedge.
"Well," his visitor smiled, "I see you can."
Gedge hesitated. "I can t."
"Oh, well," said his friend, "what does it matter?"
"I do speak," he continued. " I can t sometimes
not."
"Then how do you get on ?"
Gedge looked at him more abjectly, to his own sense,
than he had ever looked at anyone even at Isabel when
she frightened him. "I don t get on. I speak," he
said, "since I ve spoken to you."
"Oh, we sha n t hurt you ! " the young man reassur
ingly laughed.
The twilight meanwhile had sensibly thickened ; the
281
THE BETTER SORT
end of the visit was indicated. They turned together
out of the upper room, and came down the narrow stair.
The words just exchanged might have been felt as pro
ducing an awkwardness which the young woman grace
fully felt the impulse to dissipate. "You must rather
wonder why we ve come." And it was the first note,
for Gedge, of a further awkwardness as if he had
definitely heard it make the husband s hand, in a full
pocket, begin to fumble.
It was even a little awkwardly that the husband still
held off. "Oh, we like it as it is. There s always
something." With which they had approached the
door of egress.
"What is there, please?" asked Morris Gedge, not yet
opening the door, as he would fain have kept the pair
on, and conscious only for a moment after he had
spoken that his question was just having, for the young
man, too dreadfully wrong a sound. This personage
wondered, yet feared, had evidently for some minutes
been asking himself ; so that, with his preoccupation, the
caretaker s words had represented to him, inevitably,
"What is there, please, for me?" Gedge already knew,
with it, moreover, that he wasn t stopping him in time.
He had put his question, to show he himself wasn t
afraid, and he must have had in consequence, he was
subsequently to reflect, a lamentable air of waiting.
The visitor s hand came out. "I hope I may take the
liberty ?" What afterwards happened our friend
scarcely knew, for it fell into a slight confusion, the con
fusion of a queer gleam of gold a sovereign fairly
thrust at him ; of a quick, almost violent motion on his
own part, which, to make the matter worse, might well
have sent the money rolling on the floor; and then of
marked blushes all round, and a sensible embarrass
ment ; producing indeed, in turn, rather oddly, and ever
so quickly, an increase of communion. It was as if the
young man had offered him money to make up to him
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THE BIRTHPLACE
for having, as it were, led him on, and then, perceiving
the mistake, but liking him the better for his refusal,
had wanted to obliterate this aggravation of his orig
inal wrong. He had done so, presently, while Gedge
got the door open, by saying the best thing he could,
and by saying it frankly and gaily. "Luckily it doesn t
at all affect the work!"
The small town-street, quiet and empty in the sum
mer eventide, stretched to right and left, with a gabled
and timbered house or two, and fairly seemed to have
cleared itself to congruity with the historic void over
which our friends, lingering an instant to converse,
looked at each other. The young wife, rather, looked
about a moment at all there wasn t to be seen, and then,
before Gedge had found a reply to her husband s re
mark, uttered, evidently in the interest of conciliation, a
little question of her own that she tried to make earnest.
"It s our unfortunate ignorance, you mean, that
doesn t?"
"Unfortunate or fortunate. I like it so," said the
husband. " The play s the thing. Let the author
alone."
Gedge, with his key on his forefinger, leaned against
the door-post, took in the stupid little street, and was
sorry to see them go they seemed so to abandon him.
"That s just what They won t do not let me do. It s
all I want to let the author alone. Practically" he
felt himself getting the last of his chance "there is
no author; that is for us to deal with. There are all
the immortal people in the work; but there s nobody
else."
"Yes," said the young man "that s what it comes
to. There should really, to clear the matter up, be no
such Person."
"As you say," Gedge returned, "it s what it comes to.
There is no such Person."
The evening air listened, in the warm, thick midland
283
THE BETTER SORT
stillness, while the wife s little cry rang out. "But
wasn t there ?"
"There was somebody," said Gedge, against the
doorpost. "But They ve killed Him. And, dead as
He is, They keep it up, They do it over again, They ki
Him every day."
He was aware of saying this so grimly more grim
ly than he wished that his companions exchanged a
glance and even perhaps looked as if they felt him ex
travagant. That was the way, really, Isabel had
warned him all the others would be looking if he should
talk to Them as he talked to her. He liked, however,
for that matter, to hear how he should sound when pro
nounced incapable through deterioration of the brain.
"Then if there s no author, if there s nothing to be said
but that there isn t anybody," the young woman smil
ingly asked, "why in the world should there be a
house?"
"There shouldn t," said Morris Gedge.
Decidedly, yes, he affected the young man. "Oh, I
don t say, mind you, that you should pull it down !"
"Then where would you go?" their companion
sweetly inquired.
"That s what my wife asks," Gedge replied.
"Then keep it up, keep it up!" And the husband
held out his hand.
"That s what my wife says," Gedge went on as he
shook it.
The young woman, charming creature, emulated the
other visitor; she offered their remarkable friend her
handshake. "Then mind your wife."
The poor man faced her gravely. "I would if she
were such a wife as you !"
THE BIRTHPLACE
VI
IT had made for him, all the same, an immense differ
ence; it had given him an extraordinary lift, so that a
certain sweet after-taste of his freedom might, a couple
of months later, have been suspected of aiding to pro
duce for him another, and really a more considerable,
adventure. It was an odd way to think of it, but he
had been, to his imagination, for twenty minutes in
good society that being the term that best described
for him the company of people to whom he hadn t to
talk, as he further phrased it, rot. It was his title to
society that he had, in his doubtless awkward way, af
firmed; and the difficulty was just that, having affirmed
it, he couldn t take back the affirmation. Few things
had happened to him in life, that is few that were agree
able, but at least this had, and he wasn t so constructed
that he could go on as if it hadn t. It was going on as
if it had, however, that landed him, alas! in the situa
tion unmistakeably marked by a visit from Grant- Jack
son, late one afternoon toward the end of October. This
had been the hour of the call of the young Americans.
Every day that hour had come round something of
the deep throb of it, the successful secret, woke up ; but
the two occasions were, of a truth, related only by being
so intensely opposed. The secret had been successful
in that he had said nothing of it to Isabel, who, occu
pied in their own quarter while the incident lasted, had
neither heard the visitors arrive nor seen them depart.
It was on the other hand scarcely successful in guarding
itself from indirect betrayals. There were two persons
in the world, at least, who felt as he did ; they were per
sons, also, who had treated him, benignly, as feeling as
they did, who had been ready in fact to overflow in gifts
as a sign of it, and though they were now off in space
they were still with him sufficiently in spirit to make
285
THE BETTER SORT
him play, as it were, with the sense of their sympathy.
This in turn made him, as he was perfectly aware, more
than a shade or two reckless, so that, in his reaction
from that gluttony of the public for false facts which
had from the first tormented him, he fell into the habit
of sailing, as he would have said, too near the wind, or
in other words all in presence of the people of wash
ing his hands of the legend. He had crossed the line
he knew it ; he had struck wild They drove him to it ;
he had substituted, by a succession of uncontrollable pro
fanities, an attitude that couldn t be understood for an
attitude that but too evidently had been.
This was of course the franker line, only he hadn t
taken it, alas ! for frankness hadn t in the least, really,
taken it, but had been simply himself caught up and dis
posed of by it, hurled by his fate against the bedizened
walls of the temple, quite in the way of a priest pos
sessed to excess of the god, or, more vulgarly, that of a
blind bull in a china-shop an animal to which he often
compared himself. He had let himself fatally go, in
fine, just for irritation, for rage, having, in his predica
ment, nothing at all to do with frankness a luxury re
served for quite other situations. It had always been
his sentiment that one lived to learn; he had learned
something every hour of his life, though people
mostly never knew what, in spite of its having generally
been hadn t it? at somebody s expense. What he
was at present continually learning was the sense of a
form of words heretofore so vain the famous "false
position" that had so often helped out a phrase. One
used names in that way without knowing what they
were worth ; then of a sudden, one fine day, their mean
ing was bitter in the mouth. This was a truth with the
relish of which his fireside hours were occupied, and he
was quite conscious that a man was exposed who looked
so perpetually as if something had disagreed with him.
The look to be worn at the Birthplace was properly the
286
THE BIRTHPLACE
beatific, and when once it had fairly been missed by
those who took it for granted, who, indeed, paid six
pence for it like the table-wine in provincial France,
it was compris one would be sure to have news of the
remark.
News accordingly was what Gedge had been expect
ing and what he knew, above all, had been expected
by his wife, who had a way of sitting at present as with
an ear for a certain knock. She didn t watch him,
didn t follow him about the house, at the public hours,
to spy upon his treachery ; and that could touch him even
though her averted eyes went through him more than
her fixed. Her mistrust was so perfectly expressed by
her manner of showing she trusted that he never felt
so nervous, never so tried to keep straight, as when she
most let him alone. When the crowd thickened and
they had of necessity to receive together he tried him
self to get off by allowing her as much as possible the
word. When people appealed to him he turned to her
and with more of ceremony than their relation war
ranted : he couldn t help this either, .if it seemed ironic
as to the person most concerned or most competent.
He flattered himself at these moments that no one
would have guessed her being his wife; especially as, to
do her justice, she met his manner with a wonderful
grim bravado grim, so to say, for himself, grim by its
outrageous cheerfulness for the simple-minded. The
lore she did produce for them, the associations of the
sacred spot that she developed, multiplied, embroidered ;
the things in short she said and the stupendous way she
said them! She wasn t a bit ashamed; for why need
virtue be ever ashamed? It was virtue, for it put
bread into his mouth he meanwhile, on his side, taking
it out of hers. He had seen Grant-Jackson, on the
October day, in the Birthplace itself the right setting
of course for such an interview ; and what occurred was
that, precisely, when the scene had ended and he had
287
THE BETTER SORT
come back to their own sitting-room, the question she
put to him for information was : "Have you settled it
that I m to starve?"
She had for a long time said nothing to him so
straight which was but a proof of her real anxiety;
the straightness of Grant- Jackson s visit, following on
the very slight sinuosity of a note shortly before re
ceived from him, made tension show for what it was.
By this time, really, however, his decision had been
taken; the minutes elapsing between his reappearance
at the domestic fireside and his having, from the other
threshold, seen Grant- Jackson s broad, well-fitted back,
the back of a banker and a patriot, move away, had,
though few, presented themselves to him as supremely
critical. They formed, as it were, the hinge of his
door, that door actually ajar so as to show him a pos
sible fate beyond it, but which, with his hand, in a
spasm, thus tightening on the knob, he might either
open wide or close partly and altogether. He stood,
in the autumn dusk, in the little museum that consti
tuted the vestibule of the temple, and there, as with a
concentrated push at the crank of a windlass, he brought
himself round. The portraits on the walls seemed
vaguely to watch for it ; it was in their august presence
kept dimly august, for the moment, by Grant-Jack
son s impressive check of his application of a match to
the vulgar gas that the great man had uttered, as if it
said all, his "You know, my dear fellow, really !"
He had managed it with the special tact of a fat man,
always, when there was any, very fine ; he had got the
most out of the time, the place, the setting, all the little
massed admonitions and symbols; confronted there
with his victim on the spot that he took occasion to
name to him afresh as, to his piety and patriotism, the
most sacred on earth, he had given it to be understood
that in the first place he was lost in amazement and that
in the second he expected a single warning now to suf-
288
THE BIRTHPLACE
fice. Not to insist too much moreover on the question
of gratitude, he would let his remonstrance rest, if need
be, solely on the question of taste. As a matter of taste
alone ! But he was surely not to be obliged to fol
low that up. Poor Gedge indeed would have been sorry
to oblige him, for he saw it was precisely to the atro
cious taste of unthankfulness that the allusion was
made. When he said he wouldn t dwell on what the
fortunate occupant of the post owed him for the stout
battle originally fought on his behalf, he simply meant
he would. That was his tact which, with everything
else that had been mentioned, in the scene, to help, really
had the ground to itself. The day had been when
Gedge couldn t have thanked him enough though he
had thanked him, he considered, almost fulsomely
and nothing, nothing that he could coherently or rep
utably name, had happened since then. From the mo
ment he was pulled up, in short, he had no case, and if
he exhibited, instead of one, only hot tears in his eyes,
the mystic gloom of the temple either prevented his
friend from seeing them or rendered it possible that
they stood for remorse. He had dried them, with the
pads formed by the base of his bony thumbs, before he
went in to Isabel. This was the more fortunate as, in
spite of her inquiry, prompt and pointed, he but moved
about the room looking at her hard. Then he stood
before the fire a little with his hands behind him and his
coat-tails divided, quite as the person in permanent pos
session. It was an indication his wife appeared to take
in ; but she put nevertheless presently another question.
"You object to telling me what he said?"
"He said You know, my dear fellow, really !
"And is that all?"
"Practically. Except that I m a thankless beast."
"Well !" she responded, not with dissent.
"You mean that I amf"
"Are those the words he used?" she asked with a
scruple.
289
THE BETTER SORT
Gedge continued to think. "The words he used were
that I give away the Show and that, from several
sources, it has come round to Them."
"As of course a baby would have known!" And
then as her husband said nothing: "Were those the
words he used ?"
" Absolutely. He couldn t have used better ones."
"Did he call it," Mrs. Gedge inquired, "the Show ?"
" Of course he did. The Biggest on Earth."
She winced, looking at him hard she wondered,
but only for a moment. "Well, it is."
"Then it s something," Gedge went on, "to have
given that away. But," he added, "I ve taken it back."
"You mean you ve been convinced ?"
"I mean I ve been scared."
"At last, at last !" she gratefully breathed.
"Oh, it was easily done. It was only two words.
But here I am."
Her face was now less hard for him. "And what
two words?"
" You know, Mr. Gedge, that it simply won t do/
That was all. But it was the way such a man says
them."
"I m glad, then," Mrs. Gedge frankly averred, "that
he is such a man. How did you ever think it could
do?"
"Well, it was my critical sense. I didn t ever know
I had one till They came and (by putting me here)
waked it up in me. Then I had, somehow, don t you
see ? to live with it ; and I seemed to feel that, somehow
or other, giving it time and in the long run, it might, it
ought to, come out on top of the heap. Now that s
where, he says, it simply won t do. So I must put it
I have put it at the bottom."
"A very good place, then, for a critical sense !" And
Isabel, more placidly now, folded her work. "If, that
is, you can only keep it there. If it doesn t struggle
up again."
290
THE BIRTHPLACE
"It can t struggle." He was still before the fire,
looking round at the warm, low room, peaceful in the
lamplight, with the hum of the kettle for the ear, with
the curtain drawn over the leaded casement, a short
moreen curtain artfully chosen by Isabel for the effect
of the olden time, its virtue of letting the light within
show ruddy to the street. "It s dead," he went on; "I
killed it just now."
He spoke, really, so that she wondered. "Just
now?"
"There in the other place I strangled it, poor thing,
in the dark. If you ll go out and see, there must be
blood. Which, indeed," he added, "on an altar of sac
rifice, is all right. But the place is forever spattered."
"I don t want to go out and see." She rested her
locked hands on the needlework folded on her knee,
and he knew, with her eyes on him, that a look he had
seen before was in her face. "You re off your head
you know, my dear, in a way." Then, however, more
cheer ingly : "It s a good job it hasn t been too late."
"Too late to get it under ?"
"Too late for Them to give you the second chance
that I thank God you accept."
"Yes, if it had been !" And he looked away as
through the ruddy curtain and into the chill street.
Then he faced her again. "I ve scarcely got over my
fright yet. I mean," he went on, "for you."
"And I mean for you. Suppose what you had come
to announce to me now were that we had got the sack.
How should I enjoy, do you think, seeing you turn
out? Yes, out there!" she added as his eyes again
moved from their little warm circle to the night of early
winter on the other side of the pane, to the rare, quick
footsteps, to the closed doors, to the curtains drawn
like their own, behind which the small flat town, in
trinsically dull, was sitting down to supper.
He stiffened himself as he warmed his back ; he held
291
THE BETTER SORT
up his head, shaking himself a little as if to shake the
stoop out of his shoulders, but he had to allow she was
right. "What would have become of us?"
"What indeed ? We should have begged our bread
or I should be taking in washing."
He was silent a little. "I m too old. I should have
begun sooner."
"Oh, God forbid !" she cried.
"The pinch," he pursued, "is that I can do nothing
else."
"Nothing whatever !" she agreed with elation.
"Whereas here if I cultivate it I perhaps can still
lie. But I must cultivate it."
"Oh, you old dear !" And she got up to kiss him.
"I ll do my best," he said.
VII
"Do you remember us?" the gentleman asked and
smiled with the lady beside him smiling too; speak
ing so much less as an earnest pilgrim or as a tiresome
tourist than as an old acquaintance. It was history re
peating itself as Gedge had somehow never expected,
with almost everything the same except that the evening
was now a mild April-end, except that the visitors had
put off mourning and showed all their bravery besides
showing, as he doubtless did himself, though so differ
ently, for a little older ; except, above all, that oh, see
ing them again suddenly affected him as not a bit the
thing he would have thought it. "We re in England
again, and we were near ; I ve a brother at Oxford with
whom we ve been spending a day, and we thought we d
come over." So the young man pleasantly said while
our friend took in the queer fact that he must himself
seem to them rather coldly to gape. They had come in
the same way, at the quiet close; another August had
passed, and this was the second spring ; the Birthplace,
292
THE BIRTHPLACE
given the hour, was about to suspend operations till
the morrow ; the last lingerer had gone, and the fancy
of the visitors was, once more, for a look round by
themselves. This represented surely no greater pre
sumption than the terms on which they had last parted
with him seemed to warrant; so that if he did inconse-
quently stare it was just in fact because he was so su
premely far from having forgotten them. But the
sight of the pair luckily had a double effect, and the
first precipitated the second the second being really
his sudden vision that everything perhaps depended for
him on his recognising no complication. He must go
straight on, since it was what had for more than a year
now so handsomely answered; he must brazen it out
consistently, since that only was what his dignity was at
last reduced to. He mustn t be afraid in one way any
more than he had been in another; besides which it
came over him with a force that made him flush that
their visit, in its essence, must have been for himself.
It was good society again, and they were the same. It
wasn t for him therefore to behave as if he couldn t
meet them.
These deep vibrations, on Gedge s part, were as
quick as they were deep; they came in fact all at
once, so that his response, his declaration that it was
all right " Oh, rather; the hour doesn t matter for
you! " had hung fire but an instant; and when they
were within and the door closed behind them, with
in the twilight of the temple, where, as before, the
votive offerings glimmered on the walls, he drew
the long breath of one who might, by a self-be
trayal, have done something too dreadful. For
what had brought them back was not, indubitably,
the sentiment of the shrine itself since he knew
their sentiment; but their intelligent interest in the
queer case of the priest. Their call was the tribute of
curiosity, of sympathy, of a compassion really, as such
293
THE BETTER SORT
things went, exquisite a tribute to that queerness
which entitled them to the frankest welcome. They
had wanted, for the generous wonder of it, to see how
he was getting on, how such a man in such a place
could; and they had doubtless more than half expected
to see the door opened by somebody who had succeeded
him. Well, somebody had only with a strange equiv
ocation; as they would have, poor things, to make out
for themselves, an embarrassment as to which he pitied
them. Nothing could have been more odd, but verily
it was this troubled vision of their possible bewilder
ment, and this compunctious view of such a return for
their amenity, that practically determined for him his
tone. The lapse of the months had but made their
name familiar to him ; they had on the other occasion
inscribed it, among the thousand names, in the current
public register, and he had since then, for reasons of
his own, reasons of feeling, again and again turned
back to it. It was nothing in itself ; it told him noth
ing "Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes, New York" one
of those American labels that were just like every other
American label and that were, precisely, the most re
markable thing about people reduced to achieving an
identity in such other ways. They could be Mr. and
Mrs. B. D. Hayes and yet they could be, with all pre
sumptions missing well, what these callers were. It
had quickly enough indeed cleared the situation a little
further that his friends had absolutely, the other time,
as it came back to him, warned him of his original dan
ger, their anxiety about which had been the last note
sounded between them. What he was afraid of, with
this reminiscence, was that, finding him still safe, they
would, the next thing, definitely congratulate him and
perhaps even, no less candidly, ask him how he had
managed. It was with the sense of nipping some such
inquiry in the bud that, losing no time and holding
himself with a firm grip, he began, on the spot, down-
294
THE BIRTHPLACE
stairs, to make plain to them how he had managed.
He averted the question in short by the assurance of his
answer. "Yes, yes, I m still here ; I suppose it is in a
manner to one s profit that one does, such as it is, one s
best." He did his best on the present occasion, did it
with the gravest face he had ever worn and a soft se
renity that was like a large damp sponge passed over
their previous meeting over everything in it, that is,
but the fact of its pleasantness.
"We stand here, you see, in the old living-room, hap
pily still to be reconstructed in the mind s eye, in spite
of the havoc of time, which we have fortunately, of late
years, been able to arrest. It was of course rude and
humble, but it must have been snug and quaint, and we
have at least the pleasure of knowing that the tradition
in respect to the features that do remain is delightfully
uninterrupted. Across that threshold He habitually
passed ; through those low windows, in childhood, He
peered out into the world that He was to make so much
happier by the gift to it of His genius; over the boards
of this floor that is over some of them, for we mustn t
be carried away ! his little feet often pattered ; and the
beams of this ceiling (we must really in some places
take care of our heads!) he endeavoured, in boyish
strife, to jump up and touch. It s not often that in the
early home of genius and renown the whole tenor
of existence is laid so bare, not often that we are
able to retrace, from point to point and from step
to step, its connection with objects, with influences
to build it round again with the little solid facts
out of which it sprang. This, therefore, I need
scarcely remind you, is what makes the small space
between these walls so modest to measurement, so
insignificant of aspect unique on all the earth.
There is nothing like it" Morris Gedge went on, insist
ing as solemnly and softly, for his bewildered hearers,
as over a pulpit-edge ; "there is nothing at all like it any-
295
THE BETTER SORT
where in the world. There is nothing, only reflect, for
the combination of greatness, and, as we venture to say,
of intimacy. You may find elsewhere perhaps abso
lutely fewer changes, but where shall you find a pres
ence equally diffused, uncontested and undisturbed?
Where in particular shall you find, on the part of the
abiding spirit, an equally towering eminence? You
may find elsewhere eminence of a considerable order,
but where shall you find with it, don t you see, changes,
after all, so few, and the contemporary element caught
so, as it were, in the very fact? " His visitors, at first
confounded, but gradually spellbound, were still gaping
with the universal gape wondering, he judged, into
what strange pleasantry he had been suddenly moved to
break out, and yet beginning to see in him an intention
beyond a joke, so that they started, at this point, al
most jumped, when, by as rapid a transition, he made,
toward the old fireplace, a dash that seemed to illustrate,
precisely, the act of eager catching. "It is in this old
chimney corner, the quaint inglenook of our ancestors
just there in the far angle, where His little stool was
placed, and where, I dare say, if we could look close
enough, we should find the hearthstone scraped with
His little feet that we see the inconceivable child gaz
ing into the blaze of the old oaken logs and making out
there pictures and stories, see Him conning, with curly
bent head, His well-worn hornbook, or poring over
some scrap of an ancient ballad, some page of some such
rudely bound volume of chronicles as lay, we may be
sure, in His father s window-seat."
It was, he even himself felt at this moment, wonder
fully done ; no auditors, for all his thousands, had ever
yet so inspired him. The odd, slightly alarmed shy
ness in the two faces, as if in a drawing-room, in their
" good society," exactly, some act incongruous, some
thing grazing the indecent, had abruptly been perpe
trated, the painful reality of which faltered before com-
296
THE BIRTHPLACE
ing home the visible effect on his friends, in fine,
wound him up as to the sense that they were worth the
trick. It came of itself now he had got it so by
heart; but perhaps really it had never come so well, with
the staleness so disguised, the interest so renewed and
the clerical unction, demanded by the priestly character,
so successfully distilled. Mr. Hayes of New York had
more than once looked at his wife, and Mrs. Hayes of
New York had more than once looked at her husband
only, up to now, with a stolen glance, with eyes it had
not been easy to detach from the remarkable counte
nance by the aid of which their entertainer held them.
At present, however, after an exchange less furtive,
they ventured on a sign that they had not been ap
pealed to in vain. "Charming, charming, Mr. Gedge !"
Mr. Hayes broke out ; "we feel that we ve caught you
in the rnood."
His wife hastened to assent it eased the tension. "It
would be quite the way ; except," she smiled, "that you d
be too dangerous. You re really a genius!"
Gedge looked at her hard, but yielding no inch, even
though she touched him there at a point of conscious
ness that quivered. This was the prodigy for him, and
had been, the year through that he did it all, he found,
easily, did it better than he had done anything else in his
life; with so high and broad an effect, in truth, an in
spiration so rich and free, that his poor wife now, liter
ally, had been moved more than once to fresh fear.
She had had her bad moments, he knew, after taking
the measure of his new direction moments of read
justed suspicion in which she wondered if he had not
simply embraced another, a different perversity. There
\vould be more than one fashion of giving away the
show, and wasn t this perhaps a question of giving it
away by excess ? He could dish them by too much ro
mance as well as by too little ; she had not hitherto fairly
apprehended that there might be too much. It was a
297
THE BETTER SORT
way like another, at any rate, of reducing the place to
the absurd ; which reduction, if he didn t look out, would
reduce them again to the prospect of the streets, and this
time surely without an appeal. It all depended, indeed
he knew she knew that on how much Grant-Jackson
and the others, how much the Body, in a word, would
take. He knew she knew what he himself held it would
take that he considered no limit could be drawn to the
quantity. They simply wanted it piled up, and so did
everybody else; wherefore, if no one reported him, as
before, why were They to be uneasy ? It was in conse
quence of idiots brought to reason that he had been
dealt with before; but as there was now no form of
idiocy that he didn t systematically flatter, goading it on
really to its own private doom, who was ever to pull the
string of the guillotine ? The axe was in the air yes ;
but in a world gorged to satiety there were no revolu
tions. And it had been vain for Isabel to ask if the
other thunder-growl also hadn t come out of the blue.
There was actually proof positive that the winds were
now at rest. How could they be more so? he ap
pealed to the receipts. These were golden days the
show had never so flourished. So he had argued, so he
was arguing still and, it had to be owned, with every
appearance in his favour. Yet if he inwardly winced
at the tribute to his plausibility rendered by his flushed
friends, this was because he felt in it the real ground of
his optimism. The charming woman before him ac
knowledged his "genius" as he himself had had to do.
He had been surprised at his facility until he had grown
used to it. Whether or no he had, as a fresh menace
to his future, found a new perversity, he had found a
vocation much older, evidently, than he had at first been
prepared to recognise. He had done himself injustice.
He liked to be brave because it came so easy ; he could
measure it off by the yard. It was in the Birthroom,
above all, that he continued to do this, having ushered
298
THE BIRTHPLACE
up his companions without, as he was still more elated
to feel, the turn of a hair. She might take it as she
liked, but he had had the lucidity all, that is, for his
own safety to meet without the grace of an answer the
homage of her beautiful smile. She took it apparently,
and her husband took it, but as a part of his odd hu
mour, and they followed him aloft with faces now a
little more responsive to the manner in which, on that
spot, he would naturally come out. He came out,
according to the word of his assured private receipt,
" strong." He missed a little, in truth, the usual
round-eyed question from them the inveterate art
less cue with which, from moment to moment, clus
tered troops had, for a year, obliged him. Mr. and
Mrs. Hayes were from New York, but it was a little
like singing, as he had heard one of his Americans
once say about something, to a Boston audience. He
did none the less what he could, and it was ever his
practice to stop still at a certain spot in the room and,
after having secured atention by look and gesture,
suddenly shoot off: " Here! "
They always understood, the good people he could
fairly love them now for it; they always said, breath
lessly and unanimously, There ?" and stared down at
the designated point quite as if some trace of the grand
event were still to be made out. This movement pro
duced, he again looked round. "Consider it well : the
spot of earth !" "Oh, but it isn t earth!" the bold
est spirit there was always a boldest would gener
ally pipe out. Then the guardian of the Birthplace
would be truly superior as if the unfortunate had fig
ured the Immortal coming up, like a potato, through
the soil. "I m not suggesting that He was born on the
bare ground. He was born here!" with an uncom
promising dig of his heel. "There ought to be a brass,
with an inscription, let in." "Into the floor?" it al
ways came. "Birth and burial : seedtime, summer,
299
THE BETTER SORT
autumn !" that always, with its special, right cadence,
thanks to his unfailing spring, came too. "Why not
as well as into the pavement of the church? youVe
seen our grand old church?" The former of which
questions nobody ever answered abounding, on the
other hand, to make up, in relation to the latter. Mr.
and Mrs. Hayes even were at first left dumb by it not
indeed, to do them justice, having uttered the word that
produced it. They had uttered no word while he kept
the game up, and (though that made it a little more
difficult) he could yet stand triumphant before them
after he had finished with his flourish. Then it was
only that Mr. Hayes of New York broke silence.
" Well, if we wanted to see, I think I may say we re
quite satisfied. As my wife says, it zvould seem to be
your line." He spoke now, visibly, with more ease, as
if a light had come : though he made no joke of it, for a
reason that presently appeared. They were coming
down the little stair, and it was on the descent that his
companion added her word.
"Do you know what we half did think ?" And
then to her husband : "Is it dreadful to tell him?"
They were in the room below, and the young woman,
also relieved, expressed the feeling with gaiety. She
smiled, as before, at Morris Gedge, treating him as a
person with whom relations were possible, yet remain
ing just uncertain enough to invoke Mr. Hayes s opin
ion. "We have awfully wanted from what we had
heard." But she met her husband s graver face; he
was not quite out of the wood. At this she was slight
ly flurried but she cut it short. "You must know
don t you? that, with the crowds who listen to you,
we d have heard."
He looked from one to the other, and once more
again, with force, something came over him. They had
kept him in mind, they were neither ashamed nor afraid
to show it, and it was positively an interest, on the part
300
THE BIRTHPLACE
of this charming creature and this keen, cautious gen
tleman, an interest resisting oblivion and surviving sep
aration, that had governed their return. Their other
visit had been the brightest thing that had ever hap
pened to him, but this was the gravest ; so that at the end
of a minute something broke in him and his mask, of it
self, fell off. He chucked, as he would have said, con
sistency; which, in its extinction, left the tears in his
eyes. His smile was therefore queer. "Heard how
I m going it?"
The young man, though still looking at him hard,
felt sure, with this, of his own ground. " Of course,
you re tremendously talked about. You ve gone round
the world."
" You ve heard of me in America ?"
"Why, almost of nothing else!"
"That was what made us feel !" Mrs. Hayes
contributed.
"That you must see for yourselves?" Again he
compared, poor Gedge, their faces. " Do you mean I
excite a scandal? "
" Dear no ! Admiration. You renew so," the
young man observed, " the interest."
" Ah, there it is ! " said Gedge with eyes of advent
ure that seemed to rest beyond the Atlantic.
" They listen, month after month, when they re out
here, as you must have seen ; and they go home and talk.
But they sing your praise."
Our friend could scarce take it in. "Over there?"
"Over there. I think you must be even in the
papers."
"Without abuse? "
"Oh, we don t abuse everyone."
Mrs. Hayes, in her beauty, it was clear, stretched the
point. " They rave about you."
" Then they don t know ? "
"Nobody knows," the young man declared; "it
301
THE BETTER SORT
wasn t anyone s knowledge, at any rate, that made us
uneasy."
" It was your own ? I mean your own sense ? "
"Well, call it that. We remembered, and we won
dered what had happened. So," Mr. Hayes now
frankly laughed, " we came to see."
Gedge stared through his film of tears. " Came
from America to see me? "
"Oh, a part of the way. But we wouldn t in Eng
land, not have seen you."
"And now we have ! " the young woman soothingly
added.
Gedge still could only gape at the candour of the
tribute. But he tried to meet them it was what was
least poor for him in their own key. "Well, how do
you like it ? "
Mrs. Hayes, he thought if their answer were im
portant laughed a little nervously. "Oh, you see."
Once more he looked from one to the other. " It s
too beastly easy, you know."
Her husband raised his eyebrows. " You conceal
your art. The emotion yes; that must be easy; the
general tone must flow. But about your facts you ve
so many : how do you get them through ? "
Gedge wondered. " You think I get too many ? "
At this they were amused together. " That s just
what we came to see ! "
"Well, you know, I ve felt my way ; I ve gone step by
step ; you wouldn t believe how I ve tried it on. This
where you see me is where I ve come out." After
which, as they said nothing : " You hadn t thought I
could come out ? "
Again they just waited, but the husband spoke : "Are
you so awfully sure you are out? "
Gedge drew himself up in the manner of his moments
of emotion, almost conscious even that, with his sloping
shoulders, his long lean neck and his nose so prominent
302
THE BIRTHPLACE
in proportion to other matters, he looked the more like
a giraffe. It was now at last that he really caught on.
" I may be in danger again and the danger is what
has moved you ? Oh ! " the poor man fairly moaned.
His appreciation of it quite weakened him, yet he pulled
himself together. " You ve your view of my dan-
ger?"
It was wondrous how, with that note definitely
sounded, the air was cleared. Lucid Mr. Hayes, at the
end of a minute, had put the thing in a nutshell. " I
don t know what you ll think of us for being so beast
ly curious."
" I think," poor Gedge grimaced, " you re only too
beastly kind."
" It s all your own fault," his friend returned, " for
presenting us (who are not idiots, say) with so striking
a picture of a crisis. At our other visit, you remem
ber," he smiled, " you created an anxiety for the op
posite reason. Therefore if this should again be a crisis
for you, you d really give us the case with an ideal
completeness."
"You make me wish," said Morris Gedge, " that it
might be one."
"Well, don t try for our amusement to bring one
on. I don t see, you know, how you can have much
margin. Take care take care."
Gedge took it pensively in. "Yes, that was what
you said a year ago. You did me the honour to be un
easy as my wife was."
Which determined on the young woman s part an
immediate question. " May I ask, then, if Mrs. Gedge
is now at rest ? "
" No ; since you do ask. She fears, at least, that I go
too far; she doesn t believe in my margin. You see,
we had our scare after your visit. They came down."
His friends were all interest. "Ah ! They came
down?"
303
THE BETTER SORT
" Heavy. They brought ine down. That s why-
" Why you are down ? " Mrs. Hayes sweetly de
manded.
"Ah, but my dear man," her husband interposed,
" you re not down ; you re up! You re only up a differ
ent tree, but you re up at the tip-top."
"You mean I take it too high? "
" That s exactly the question," the young man
answered ; " and the possibility, as matching your first
danger, is just what we felt we couldn t, if you didn t
mind, miss the measure of."
Gedge looked at him. " I feel that I know what you
at bottom hoped."
"We at bottom hope, surely, that you re all right."
" In spite of the fool it makes of every one? "
Mr. Hayes of New York smiled. "Say because
of that. We only ask to believe that everyone is a
fool ! "
"Only you haven t been, without reassurance, able to
imagine fools of the size that my case demands ? " And
Gedge had a pause, while, as if on the chance of some
proof, his companion waited. "Well, I won t pretend
to you that your anxiety hasn t made me, doesn t threat
en to make me, a bit nervous ; though I don t quite un
derstand it if, as you say, people but rave about me."
"Oh, that report was from the other side; people in
our country so very easily rave. You ve seen small
children laugh to shrieks when tickled in a new place.
So there are amiable millions with us who are but small
children. They perpetually present new places for the
tickler. What we ve seen in further lights," Mr.
Hayes good-humouredly pursued, "is your people here
the Committee, the Board, or whatever the powers to
whom you re responsible."
"Call them my friend Grant-Jackson then my orig
inal backer, though I admit, for that reason, perhaps
my most formidable critic. It s with him, practically,
34
THE BIRTHPLACE
I deal; or rather it s by him I m dealt with was dealt
with before. I stand or fall by him. But he has given
me my head."
" Mayn t he then want you," Mrs. Hayes inquired,
" just to show as flagrantly running away? "
"Of course I see what you mean. I m riding,
blindly for a fall, and They re watching (to be tender
of me!) for the smash that may come of itself. It s
Machiavellic but everything s possible. And what
did you just now mean," Gedge asked " especially if
you ve only heard of my prosperity by your further
lights ?"
His friends for an instant looked embarrassed, but
Mr. Hayes came to the point. "We ve heard of your
prosperity, but we ve also, remember, within a few
minutes, heard you."
" I was determined you should," said Gedge. " I m
good then but I overdo?" His strained grin was
still sceptical.
Thus challenged, at any rate, his visitor pronounced.
"Well, if you don t; if at the end of six months more
it s clear that you haven t overdone ; then, then "
"Then what?"
Then it s great."
" But it is great greater than anything of the sort
ever was. I overdo, thank goodness, yes; or I would
if it were a thing you could."
"Oh, well, if there s proof that you can t !"
With which, and an expressive gesture, Mr. Hayes
threw up his fears.
His wife, however, for a moment, seemed unable to
let them go. " Don t They want then any truth?
none even for the mere look of it ? "
" The look of it," said Morris Gedge, " is what I
give ! "
It made them, the others, exchange a look of their
own. Then she smiled. " Oh, well, if they think
305
THE BETTER SORT
"You at least don t? You re like my wife which
indeed, I remember," Gedge added, "is a similarity I
expressed a year ago the wish for! At any rate I
frighten her."
The young husband, with an "Ah, wives are ter
rible ! " smoothed it over, and their visit would have
failed of further excuse had not, at this instant, a move
ment at the other end of the room suddenly engaged
them. The evening had so nearly closed in, though
Gedge, in the course of their talk, had lighted the lamp
nearest them, that they had not distinguished, in con
nection with the opening of the door of communication
to the warden s lodge, the appearance of another person,
an eager woman, who, in her impatience, had barely
paused before advancing. Mrs. Gedge her identity
took but a few seconds to become vivid was upon
them, and she had not been too late for Mr. Hayes s
last remark. Gedge saw at once that she had come
with news; no need even, for that certitude, of her
quick retort to the words in the air " You may say as
well, sir, that they re often, poor wives, terrified ! "
She knew nothing of the friends whom, at so unnatural
an hour, he was showing about ; but there was no live
lier sign for him that this didn t matter than the pos
sibility with which she intensely charged her "Grant-
Jackson, to see you at once ! " letting it, so to speak,
fly in his face.
" He has been with you? "
" Only a minute he s there. But it s you he wants
to see."
He looked at the others. "And what does he want,
dear?"
" God knows ! There it is. It s his horrid hour
it was that other time."
She had nervously turned to the others, overflowing
to them, in her dismay, for all their strangeness quite,
as he said to himself, like a woman of the people. She
306
THE BIRTHPLACE
was the bare-headed good wife talking in the street about
the row in the house, and it was in this character that
he instantly introduced her : " My dear doubting wife,
who will do her best to entertain you while I wait upon
our friend." And he explained to her as he could his
now protesting companions " Mr. and Mrs. Hayes
of New York, who have been here before." He knew,
without knowing why, that her announcement chilled
him ; he failed at least to see why it should chill him so
much. His good friends had themselves been visibly
affected by it, and heaven knew that the depths of
brooding fancy in him were easily stirred by contact.
If they had wanted a crisis they accordingly had found
one, albeit they had already asked leave to retire before
it. This he wouldn t have. "Ah no, you must really
see ! "
" But we sha n t be able to bear it, you know," said
the young woman, " if it -is to turn you out."
Her crudity attested her sincerity, and it was the
latter, doubtless, that instantly held Mrs. Gedge. " It
is to turn us out."
"Has he told you that, madam?" Mr. Hayes in
quired of her it being wondrous how the breath of
doom had drawn them together.
"No, not told me; but there s something in him
there I mean in his awful manner that matches too
well with other things. We ve seen," said the poor
pale lady, " other things enough."
The young woman almost clutched her. " Is his
manner very awful? "
" It s simply the manner," Gedge interposed, " of a
very great man."
"Well, very great men," said his wife, " are very aw
ful things."
" It s exactly," he laughed, " what we re finding out!
But I mustn t keep him waiting. .Our friends here,"
he went on, " are directly interested. You mustn t,
mind you, let them go until we know."
307
THE BETTER SORT
Mr. Hayes, however, held him; he found himself
stayed. "We re so directly interested that I want you
to understand this. If anything happens "
" Yes? " said Gedge, all gentle as he faltered.
"Well, zve must set you up."
Mrs. Hayes quickly abounded. "Oh, do come to
us !"
Again he could but look at them. They were really
wonderful folk. And but Mr. and Mrs. Hayes! It
affected even Isabel, through her alarm; though the
balm, in a manner, seemed to foretell the wound. He
had reached the threshold of his own quarters ; he stood
there as at the door of the chamber of judgment. But
he laughed; at least he could be gallant in going up
for sentence. "Very good then I ll come to you ! "
This was very well, but it didn t prevent his heart, a
minute later, at the end of the passage, from thumping
with beats he could count. He had paused again before
going in ; on the other side of this second door his poor
future was to be let loose at him. It was broken, at
best, and spiritless, but wasn t Grant-Jackson there,
like a beast-tamer in a cage, all tights and spangles and
circus attitudes, to give it a cut with the smart official
whip and make it spring at him? It was during this
moment that he fully measured the effect for his nerves
of the impression made on his so oddly earnest friends
whose earnestness he in fact, in the spasm of this
last effort, came within an ace of resenting. They had
upset him by contact ; he was afraid, literally, of meet
ing his doom on his knees ; it wouldn t have taken much
more, he absolutely felt, to make him approach with his
forehead in the dust the great man whose wrath was to
be averted. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New York had
brought tears to his eyes ; but was it to be reserved for
Grant- Jackson to make him cry like a baby? He
wished, yes, while he palpitated, that Mr. and Mrs.
Hayes of New York hadn t had such an eccentricity
THE BIRTHPLACE
of interest, for it seemed somehow to come from
tlmn that he was going so fast to pieces. Before
he turned the knob of the door, however, he had
another queer instant; making out that it had been,
strictly, his case that was interesting, his funny power,
however accidental, to show as in a picture the at
titude of others not his poor, dingy personality.
It was this latter quantity, none the less, that was
marching to execution. It is to our friend s credit
that he believed, as he prepared to turn the knob,
that he was going to be hanged; and it is certainly
not less to his credit that his wife, on the chance,
had his supreme thought. Here it was that possibly
with his last articulate breath he thanked his stars,
such as they were, for Mr. and Mrs. Hayes of New
York. At least they would take care of her.
They were doing that certainly with some success
when, ten minutes later, he returned to them. She sat
between them in the beautified Birthplace, and he
couldn t have been sure afterwards that each wasn t
holding her hand. The three together, at any rate, had
the effect of recalling to him it was too whimsical
some picture, a sentimental print, seen and admired in
his youth, a " Waiting for the Verdict," a " Counting
the Hours," or something of that sort; humble respect
ability in suspense about humble innocence. He didn t
know how he himself looked, and he didn t care; the
great thing was that he wasn t crying though he
might have been; the glitter in his eyes was assuredly
dry, though that there was a glitter, or something
slightly to bewilder, the faces of the others, as they
rose to meet him, sufficiently proved. His wife s eyes
pierced his own, but it was Mrs. Hayes of New York
who spoke. " Was it then for that ? "
He only looked at them at first he felt he might
now enjoy it. " Yes, it was for that. I mean it was
about the way I ve been going on. He came to speak
of it,"
309
THE BETTER SORT
" And he s gone? " Mr. Hayes permitted himself to
inquire.
" He s gone."
" It s over ? " Isabel hoarsely asked.
" It s over."
Then we go?"
This it was that he enjoyed. "No, my dear; we
stay."
There was fairly a triple gasp; relief took time to
operate. " Then why did he, come? "
" In the fulness of his kind heart and of Their dis
cussed and decreed satisfaction. To express Their
sense !"
Mr. Hayes broke into a laugh, but his wife wanted
to know. " Of the grand work you re doing? "
" Of the way I polish it off. They re most hand
some about it. The receipts, it appears, speak "
He was nursing his effect; Isabel intently watched
him, and the others hung on his lips. " Yes,
speak ? "
" Well, volumes. They tell the truth."
At this Mr. Hayes laughed again. " Oh, they at
least do?"
Near him thus, once more, Gedge knew their intelli
gence as one which was so good a consciousness to
get back that his tension now relaxed as by the snap of
a spring and he felt his old face at ease. " So you can t
say," he continued, " that we don t want it."
" I bow to it," the young man smiled. " It s what I
said then. It s great"
" It s great," said Morris Gedge. " It couldn t be
greater."
His wife still watched him ; her irony hung behind.
" Then we re just as we were? "
" No, not as we were."
She jumped at it. " Better? "
" Better. They give us a rise."
310
THE BIRTHPLACE
"Of income?"
" Of our sweet little stipend by a vote of the Com
mittee. That s what, as Chairman, he came to an
nounce."
The very echoes of the Birthplace were themselves,
for the instant, hushed; the warden s three companions
showed, in the conscious air, a struggle for their own
breath. But Isabel, with almost a shriek, was the first
to recover hers. " They double us ? "
" Well call it that. In recognition. There you
are." Isabel uttered another sound but this time in
articulate; partly beacuse Mrs. Hayes of New York
had already jumped at her to kiss her. Mr. Hayes
meanwhile, as with too much to say, but put out his
hand, which our friend took in silence. So Gedge had
the last word. " And there you are ! "
THE PAPERS
THERE was a longish period the dense duration
of a London winter, cheered, if cheered it could
be called, with lurid electric, with fierce " incandes
cent " flares and glares when they repeatedly met, at
feeding-time, in a small and not quite savoury pot
house a stone s throw from the Strand. They talked
always of pot-houses, of feeding-time by which they
meant any hour between one and four of the afternoon ;
they talked of most things, even of some of the great
est, in a manner that gave, or that they desired to show
as giving, in respect to the conditions of their life, the
measure of their detachment, their contempt, their gen
eral irony. Their general irony, which they tried at the
same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to
each other, was their refuge from the want of savour,
the want of napkins, the want, too often, of shillings,
and of many things besides that they would have liked
to have. Almost all they had with any security was
their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly invulner
able, or as yet inattackable ; for they didn t count their
talent, which they had originally taken for granted and
had since then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed
as any offensive reason, to reappraise. They were
taken up with other questions and other estimates
the remarkable limits, for instance, of their luck, the
remarkable smallness of the talent of their friends.
They were above all in that phase of youth and in that
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THE PAPERS
state of aspiration in which " luck " is the subject of
most frequent reference, as definite as the colour red,
and in which it is the elegant name for money when
people are as refined as they are poor. She was only a
suburban young woman in a sailor hat, and he a young
man destitute, in strictness, of occasion for a " topper " ;
but they felt that they had in a peculiar way the free
dom of the town, and the town, if it did nothing else,
gave a range to the spirit. They sometimes went, on
excursions that they groaned at as professional, far
afield from the Strand, but the curiosity with which
they came back was mostly greater than any other, the
Strand being for them, with its ampler alternative Fleet
Street, overwhelmingly the Papers, and the Papers be
ing, at a rough guess, all the furniture of their con
sciousness.
The Daily Press played for them the part played by
the embowered nest on the swaying bough for the par
ent birds that scour the air. It was, as they mainly
saw it, a receptacle, owing its form to the instinct more
remarkable, as they held the journalistic, than that even
of the most highly organised animal, into which, regu
larly, breathlessly, contributions had to be dropped
odds and ends, all grist to the mill, all somehow digest
ible and convertible, all conveyed with the promptest
possible beak and the flutter, often, of dreadfully fa
tigued little wings. If there had been no Papers there
would have been no young friends for us of the figure
we hint at, no chance mates, innocent and weary, yet
acute even to penetration, who were apt to push off their
plates and rest their elbows on the table in the interval
between the turn-over of the pint-pot and the call for
the awful glibness of their score. Maud Blandy drank
beer and welcome, as one may say; and she smoked
cigarettes when privacy permitted, though she drew the
line at this in the right place, just as she flattered her
self she knew how to draw it, journalistically, where
313
THE BETTER SORT
other delicacies were concerned. She was fairly a prod
uct of the day so fairly that she might have been
born afresh each morning, to serve, after the fashion
of certain agitated ephemeral insects, only till the mor
row. It was as if a past had been wasted on her and a
future were not to be fitted ; she was really herself, so
far at least as her great preoccupation went, an edition,
an " extra special," coming out at the loud hours and
living its life, amid the roar of vehicles, the hustle of
pavements, the shriek of newsboys, according to the
quantity of shock to be proclaimed and distributed, the
quantity to be administered, thanks to the varying tem
per of Fleet Street, to the nerves of the nation. Maud
was a shocker, in short, in petticoats, and alike for the
thoroughfare, the club, the suburban train and the
humble home; though it must honestly be added that
petticoats were not of her essence. This was one of
the reasons, in an age of " emancipations," of her in
tense actuality, as well as, positively, of a good fortune
to which, however impersonal she might have ap
peared, she was not herself in a position to do full jus
tice; the felicity of her having about her naturally so
much of the young bachelor that she was saved the dis
figurement of any marked straddling or elbowing. It
was literally true of her that she would have pleased
less, or at least have offended more, had she been
obliged, or been prompted, to assert all too vainly, as
it would have been sure to be her superiority to sex.
Nature, constitution, accident, whatever we happen to
call it, had relieved her of this care; the struggle for
life, the competition with men, the taste of the day, the
fashion of the hour had made her superior, or had at
any rate made her indifferent, and she had no difficulty
in remaining so. The thing was therefore, with the
aid of an extreme general flatness of person, directness
of step and simplicity of motive, quietly enough done,
without a grace, a weak inconsequence, a stray reminder
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to interfere with the success ; and it is not too much to
say that the success by which I mean the plainness of
the type would probably never have struck you as so
great as at the moments of our young lady s chance
comradeship with Howard Bight. For the young
man, though his personal signs had not, like his
friend s, especially the effect of one of the stages of an
evolution, might have been noted as not so fiercely
or so freshly a male as to distance Maud in the show.
She presented him in truth, while they sat together,
as comparatively girlish. She fell naturally into gest
ures, tones, expressions, resemblances, that he either
suppressed, from sensibility to her personal predomi
nance, or that were merely latent in him through much
taking for granted. Mild, sensitive, none too solidly
nourished, and condemned, perhaps by a deep delusion
as to the final issue of it, to perpetual coming and going,
he was so resigned to many things, and so disgusted
even with many others, that the least of his cares was
the cultivation of a bold front. What mainly con
cerned him was its being bold enough to get him his
dinner, and it was never more void of aggression than
when he solicited in person those scraps of information,
snatched at those floating particles of news, on which
his dinner depended. Had he had time a little more
to try his case, he would have made out that if he liked
Maud Blandy it was partly by the impression of what
she could do for him : what he could do for herself had
never entered into his head. The positive quantity,
moreover, was vague to his mind ; it existed, that is, for
the present, but as the proof of how, in spite of the
want of encouragement, a fellow could keep going.
She struck him in fact as the only encouragement he
had, and this altogether by example, since precept,
frankly, was deterrent on her lips, as speech was free,
judgment prompt, and accent not absolutely pure.
The point was that, as the easiest thing to be with
315
THE BETTER SORT
her, he was so passive that it almost made him grace
ful and so attentive that it almost made him dis
tinguished. She was herself neither of these things,
and they were not of course what a man had most
to be; whereby she contributed to their common
view the impatiences required by a proper reaction,
forming thus for him a kind of protective hedge
behind which he could wait. Much waiting, for
either, was, I hasten to add, always in order, inas
much as their novitiate seemed to them interminable
and the steps of their ladder fearfully far apart. It
rested the ladder against the great stony wall of
the public attention a sustaining mass which appar
ently wore somewhere, in the upper air, a big, thank
less, expressionless face, a countenance equipped with
eyes, ears, an uplifted nose and a gaping mouth all
convenient if they could only be reached. The ladder
groaned meanwhile, swayed and shook with the weight
of the close-pressed climbers, tier upon tier, occupying
the upper, the middle, the nethermost rounds and quite
preventing, for young persons placed as our young
friends were placed, any view of the summit. It was
meanwhile moreover only Howard s Bight s perverse
view he was confessedly perverse that Miss Blandy
had arrived at a perch superior to his own.
She had hitherto recognised in herself indeed but a
tighter clutch and a grimmer purpose; she had recog
nised, she believed, in keen moments, a vocation; she
had recognised that there had been eleven of them at
home, with herself as youngest, and distinctions by that
time so blurred in her that she might as easily have been
christened John. She had recognised truly, most of
all, that if they came to talk they both were nowhere;
yet this was compatible with her insisting that Howard
had as yet comparatively had the luck. When he wrote
to people they consented, or at least they answered ; al
most always, for that matter, they answered with greed,
316
THE PAPERS
so that he was not without something of some sort to
hawk about to buyers. Specimens indeed of human
greed the greed, the great one, the eagerness to figure,
the snap at the bait of publicity, he had collected in
such store as to stock, as to launch, a museum. In this
museum the prize object, the high rare specimen, had
been for some time established ; a celebrity of the day
enjoying, uncontested, a glass case all to himself, more
conspicuous than any other, before which the arrested
visitor might rebound from surprised recognition. Sir
A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., stood forth there
as large as life, owing indeed his particular place to the
shade of direct acquaintance with him that Howard
Bight could boast, yet with his eminent presence in such
a collection but too generally and notoriously justified.
He was universal and ubiquitous, commemorated, un
der some rank rubric, on every page of every public
print every day in every year, and as inveterate a feature
of each issue of any self-respecting sheet as the name,
the date, the tariffed advertisements. He had always
done something, or was about to do something, round
which the honours of announcement clustered, and in
deed, as he had inevitably thus become a subject of falla
cious report, one half of his chronicle appeared to con
sist of official contradiction of the other half. His ac
tivity if it had not better been called his passivity
was beyond any other that figured in the public eye,
for no other assuredly knew so few or such brief inter-
mittences. Yet, as there was the inside as well as the
outside view of his current history, the quantity of it
was easy to analyse for the possessor of the proper cru
cible. Howard Bight, with his arms on the table, took
it apart and put it together again most days in the year,
so that an amused comparison of notes on the subject
often added a mild spice to his colloquies with Maud
Blandy. They knew, the young pair, as they consid
ered, many secrets, but they liked to think that they
317
THE BETTER SORT
knew none quite so scandalous as the way that, to put
it roughly, this distinguished person maintained his
distinction.
It was known certainly to all who had to do with
the Papers, a brotherhood, a sisterhood of course inter
ested for what was it, in the last resort, but the inter
est of their bread and butter? in shrouding the ap
proaches to the oracle, in not telling tales out of school.
They all lived alike on the solemnity, the sanctity of
the oracle, and the comings and goings, the doings and
undoings, the intentions and retractations of Sir A. B.
C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., were in their degree a
part of that solemnity. The Papers, taken together
the glory of the age, were, though superficially multi
fold, fundamentally one, so that any revelation of their
being procured or procurable to float an object not in
trinsically buoyant would very logically convey dis
credit from the circumference where the revelation
would be likely to be made to the centre. Of so much
as this our grim neophytes, in common with a thousand
others, were perfectly aware ; but something in the nat
ure of their wit, such as it was, or in the condition of
their nerves, such as it easily might become, sharpened
almost to acerbity their relish of so artful an imitation
of the voice of fame. The fame was all voice, as they
could guarantee who had an ear always glued to the
speaking-tube; the items that made the sum were in
dividually of the last vulgarity, but the accumulation
was a triumph one of the greatest the age could show
of industry and vigilance. It was after all not true
that a man had done nothing who for ten years had so
fed, so dyked and directed and distributed the fitful
sources of publicity. He had laboured, in his way, like
a navvy with a spade ; he might be said to have earned
by each night s work the reward, each morning, of his
small spurt of glory. Even for such a matter as its
not being true that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B.,
318
THE PAPERS
M.P., was to start on his visit to the Sultan of Samar-
cand on the 23rd, but- being true that he was to start
on the 29th, the personal attention required was no
small affair, taking the legend with the fact, the myth
with the meaning, the original artless error with the
subsequent earnest truth allowing in fine for the
statement still to come that the visit would have to be
relinquished in consequence of the visitor s other press
ing engagements, and bearing in mind the countless
channels to be successively watered. Our young man,
one December afternoon, pushed an evening paper
across to his companion, keeping his thumb on a para
graph at which she glanced without eagerness. She
might, from her manner, have known by instinct what
it would be, and her exclamation had the note of satiety.
" Oh, he s working them now? "
" If he has begun he ll work them hard. By the
time that has gone round the world there ll be some
thing else to say. We are authorised to state that the
marriage of Miss Miranda Beadel-Muffet to Captain
Guy Devereux, of the Fiftieth Rifles, will not take
place. Authorised to state rather! when every
wire in the machine has been pulled over and over.
They re authorised to state something every day in
the year, and the authorisation is not difficult to get.
Only his daughters, now that they re coming on,
poor things and I believe there are many will
have to be chucked into the pot and produced on
occasions when other matter fails. How pleasant for
them to find themselves hurtling through the air,
clubbed by the paternal hand, like golf-balls in a
suburb! Not that I suppose they don t like it
why should one suppose anything of the sort? "
Howard Bight s impression of the general appetite
appeared to-day to be especially vivid, and he and
his companion were alike prompted to one of those
slightly violent returns on themselves and the work they
THE BETTER SORT
were doing which none but the vulgar-minded alto
gether avoid. " People as I see them would almost
rather be jabbered about unpleasantly than not be jab
bered about at all : whenever you try them whenever,
at least, I do I m confirmed in that conviction. It
isn t only that if one holds out the mere tip of the perch
they jump at it like starving fish; it is that they leap
straight out of the water themselves, leap in their thou
sands and come flopping, open-mouthed and goggle-
eyed, to one s very door. What is the sense of the
French expression about a person s making dcs yeux
de carpe? It suggests the eyes that a young newspaper
man seems to see all round him, and I declare I some
times feel that, if one has the courage not to blink at
the show, the gilt is a good deal rubbed off the ginger
bread of one s early illusions. They all do it, as the
song is at the music-halls, and it s some of one s sur
prises that tell one most. You ve thought there were
some high souls that didn t do it that wouldn t, I
mean, to work the oracle, lift a little finger of their own.
But, Lord bless you, give them a chance you ll find
some of the greatest the greediest. I give you my word
for it, I haven t a scrap of faith left in a single human
creature. Except, of course," the young man added,
" the grand creature that you are, and the cold, calm,
comprehensive one whom you thus admit to your fa
miliarity. We face the music. We see, we under
stand; we know we ve got to live, and how we do it.
But at least, like this, alone together, we take our in
tellectual revenge, we escape the indignity of being
fools dealing with fools. I don t say we shouldn t en
joy it more if we were. But it can t be helped; we
haven t the gift the gift, I mean, of not seeing. We
do the worst we can for the money."
" You certainly do the worst you can," Maud Blandy
soon replied, " when you sit there, with your wanton
wiles, and take the spirit out of me. I require a work-
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THE PAPERS
ing faith, you know. If one isn t a fool, in our world,
where is one? "
" Oh, I say ! " her companion groaned without
alarm. "Don t you fail me, mind you."
They looked at each other across their clean platters,
and, little as the light of romance seemed superficially
to shine in them or about them, the sense was visibly
enough in each of being involved in the other. He
would have been sharply alone, the softly sardonic
young man, if the somewhat dry young woman hadn t
affected him, in a way he was even too nervous to put
to the test, as saving herself up for him; and the con
sciousness of absent resources that was on her own side
quite compatible with this economy grew a shade or
two less dismal with the imagination of his somehow
being at costs for her. It wasn t an expense of shil
lingsthere was not much question of that; what it
came to was perhaps nothing more than that, being, as
he declared himself, " in the know," he kept pulling her
in too, as if there had been room for them both. He
told her everything, all his secrets. He talked and
talked, often making her think of herself as a lean, stiff
person, destitute of skill or art, but with ear enough to
be performed to, sometimes strangely touched, at mo
ments completely ravished, by a fine violinist. He was
her fiddler and genius; she was sure neither of her
taste nor of his tunes, but if she could do nothing else
for him she could hold the case while he handled the
instrument. It had never passed between them that
they could draw nearer, for they seemed near, near
verily for pleasure, when each, in a decent young life,
was so much nearer to the other than to anything else.
There was no pleasure known to either that wasn t
further off. What held them together was in short
that they were in the same boat, a cockle-shell in a great
rough sea, and that the movements required for keep
ing it afloat not only were what the situation safely
321
THE BETTER SORT
permitted, but also made for reciprocity and intimacy.
These talks over greasy white slabs, repeatedly mopped
with moist grey cloths by young women in black uni
forms, with inexorable braided " buns " in the nape of
weak necks, these sessions, sometimes prolonged, in
halls of oilcloth, among penal-looking tariffs and pyra
mids of scones, enabled them to rest on their oars ; the
more that they were on terms with the whole families,
chartered companies, of food-stations, each a race of
innumerable and indistinguishable members, and had
mastered those hours of comparative elegance, the
earlier and the later, when the little weary ministrants
were limply sitting down and the occupants of the red
benches bleakly interspaced. So it was, that, at times,
they renewed their understanding, and by signs, man
nerless and meagre, that would have escaped the notice
of witnesses. Maud Blandy had no need to kiss her
hand across to him to show she felt what he meant; she
had moreover never in her life kissed her hand to any
one, and her companion couldn t have imagined it of
her. His romance was so grey that it wasn t romance
at all ; it was a reality arrived at without stages, shades,
forms. If he had been ill or stricken she would have
taken him other resources failing into her lap; but
would that, which would scarce even have been mother
ly, have been romantic ? She nevertheless at this mo
ment put in her plea for the general element. " I can t
help it, about Beadel-Muffet ; it s too magnificent it
appeals to me. And then I ve a particular feeling about
him I m waiting to see what will happen. It is genius,
you know, to get yourself so celebrated for nothing to
carry out your idea in the face of everything. I mean
your idea of being celebrated. It isn t as if he had done
even one little thing. What has he done when you come
to look?"
" Why, my dear chap, he has done everything. He
has missed nothing. He has been in everything, of
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THE PAPERS
everything, at everything, over everything, under
everything, that has taken place for the last twenty
years. He s always present, and, though he never
makes a speech, he never fails to get alluded to in the
speeches of others. That s doing it cheaper than any
one else does it, but it s thoroughly doing it which is
what we re talking about. And so far," the young
man contended, " from its being in the face of any
thing, it s positively with the help of everything, since
the Papers are everything and more. They re made
for such people, though no doubt he s the person who
has known best how to use them. I ve gone through
one of the biggest sometimes, from beginning to end-
it s quite a thrilling little game to catch him once out.
It has happened to me to think I was near it when, on
the last column of the last page I count advertise
ments, heaven help us, out ! I ve found him as large
as life and as true as the needle to the pole. But at
last, in a way, it goes, it can t help going, of itself. He
comes in, he breaks out, of himself; the letters, under
the compositor s hand, form themselves, from the force
of habit, into his name any connection for it, any
context, being as good as any other, and the wind,
which he has originally raised, but which continues
to blow, setting perpetually in his favour. The thing
would really be now, don t you see, for him to keep
himself out. That would be, on my honour, it strikes
me his getting himself out the biggest fact in his
record."
The girl s attention, as her friend developed the pict
ure, had become more present. " He can t get him
self out. There he is." She had a pause ; she had been
thinking. " That s just my idea."
" Your idea ? Well, an idea s always a blessing.
What do you want for it? "
She continued to turn it over as if weighing its
value. " Something perhaps could be done with it
only it would take imagination."
323
THE BETTER SORT
He wondered, and she seemed to wonder that he
didn t see. " Is it a situation for a ply ? "
" No, it s too good for a ply yet it isn t quite good
enough for a short story."
" It would do then for a novel? "
" Well, I seem to see it," Maud said " and with a
lot in it to be got out. But I seem to see it as a ques
tion not of what you or I might be able to do with it,
but of what the poor man himself may. That s what
I meant just now," she explained, " by my having a
creepy sense of what may happen for him. It has al
ready more than once occurred to me. Then," she
wound up, " we shall have real life, the case itself."
"Do you know youve got imagination?" Her
friend, rather interested, appeared by this time to have
seized her thought.
" I see him having for some reason, very imperative,
to seek retirement, lie low, to hide, in fact, like a man
wanted, but pursued all the while by the lurid glare
that he has himself so started and kept up, and at last
literally devoured ( like Frankenstein, of course !) by
the monster he has created."
" I say, you have got it ! " and the young man
flushed, visibly, artistically, with the recognition of ele
ments which his eyes had for a minute earnestly fixed.
" But it will take a lot of doing."
" Oh," said Maud, " we sha n t have to do it. He ll
do it himself."
" I wonder." Howard Bight really wondered. " The
fun would be for him to do it for us. I mean for him to
want us to help him somehow to get out."
" Oh, us ! " the girl mournfully sighed.
" Why not, when he comes to us to get in? "
Maud Blandy stared. " Do you mean to you per
sonally? You surely know by this time that no one
ever comes to me."
" Why, I went to him in the first instance; I made up
324
THE PAPERS
to him straight, I did him at home/ somewhere, as
I ve surely mentioned to you before, three years ago.
He liked, I believe for he s really a delightful old ass
the way I did it ; he knows my name and has my ad
dress, and has written me three or four times since,
with his own hand, a request to be so good as to make
use of my (he hopes) still close connection with the
daily Press to rectify the rumour that he has recon
sidered his opinion on the subject of the blankets sup
plied to the Upper Tooting Workhouse Infirmary.
He has reconsidered his opinion on no subject what
ever which he mentions, in the interest of historic
truth, without further intrusion on my valuable time.
And he regards that sort of thing as a commodity
that I can dispose of thanks to my close connection
for several shillings."
"And can you?"
" Not for several pence. They re all tariffed, but
he s tariffed low having a value, apparently, that
money doesn t represent. He s always welcome, but he
isn t always paid for. The beauty, however, is in his
marvellous memory, his keeping us all so apart and not
muddling the fellow to whom he has written that he
hasn t done this, that or the other with the fellow to
whom he has written that he has. He ll write to me
again some day about something else about his al
leged position on the date of the next school-treat of
the Chelsea Cabmen s Orphanage. I shall seek a market
for the precious item, and that will keep us in touch ; so
that if the complication you have the sense of it in your
bones does come into play the thought s too beauti
ful! he may once more remember me. Fancy his
coming to one with a What can you do for me now?
Bight lost himself in the happy vision ; it gratified so his
cherished consciousness of the " irony of fate " a con
sciousness so cherished that he never could write ten
lines without use of the words.
325
THE BETTER SORT
Maud showed however at this point a reserve which
appeared to have grown as the possibility opened out.
" I believe in it it must come. It can t not. It s the
only end. He doesn t know; nobody knows the
simple-minded all : only you and I know. But it won t
be nice, remember."
" It won t be funny? "
" It will be pitiful. There ll have to be a reason."
"For his turning round?" the young man nursed the
vision. " More or less I see what you mean. But
except for a ply will that so much matter ? His rea
son will concern himself. What will concern us will be
his funk and his helplessness, his having to stand there
in the blaze, with nothing and nobody to put it out.
We shall see him, shrieking for a bucket of water,
wither up in the central flame."
Her look had turned sombre. " It makes one cruel.
That is it makes you. I mean our trade does."
" I dare say I see too much. But I m willing to
chuck it."
" Well," she presently replied, " I m not willing to,
but it seems pretty well on the cards that I shall have
to. / don t see too much. I don t see enough. So,
for all the good it does me ! "
She had pushed back her chair and was looking
round for her umbrella. " Why, what s the matter? "
Howard Bight too blankly inquired.
She met his eyes while she pulled on her rusty old
gloves. " Well, I ll tell you another time."
He kept his place, still lounging, contented where
she had again become restless. " Don t you call it see
ing enough to see to have had so luridly revealed to
you the doom of Beadel-MufYet ? "
" Oh, he s not my business, he s yours. You re his
man, or one of his men he ll come back to you. Be
sides, he s a special case, and, as I say, I m too sorry
for him."
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"That s a proof then of what you do see."
Her silence for a moment admitted it, though evi
dently she was making, for herself, a distinction, which
she didn t express. " I don t then see what I want,
what I require. And he" she added, " if he does have
some reason, will have to have an awfully strong one.
To be strong enough it will have to be awful."
" You mean he ll have done something? "
Yes, that may remain undiscovered if he can only
drop out of the papers, sit for a while in darkness.
You ll know what it is ; you ll not be able to help your
self. But I sha n t want to, for anything."
She had got up as she said it, and he sat looking at
her, thanks to her odd emphasis, with an interest that,
as he also rose, passed itself off as a joke. " Ah, then,
you sweet sensitive thing, I promise to keep it from
you."
II
THEY met again a few days later, and it seemed the law
of their meetings that these should take place mainly
within moderate eastward range of Charing Cross.
An afternoon performance of a play translated from the
Finnish, already several times given, on a series of Sat
urdays, had held Maud for an hour in a small, hot,
dusty theatre where the air hung as heavy about the
great " trimmed " and plumed hats of the ladies as over
the flora and fauna of a tropical forest ; at the end of
which she edged out of her stall in the last row, to join
a small band of unattached critics and correspondents,
spectators with ulterior views and pencilled shirtcuffs,
who, coming together in the lobby for an exchange of
ideas, were ranging from "Awful rot " to " Rather
jolly." Ideas, of this calibre, rumbled and flashed, so
that, lost in the discussion, our young woman failed at
first to make out that a gentleman on the other side of
327
THE BETTER SORT
the group, but standing a little off, had his eyes on her
for some extravagant, though apparently quite respect
able, purpose. He had been waiting for her to recog
nise him, and as soon as he had caught her attention he
came round to her with an eager bow. She had by this
time entirely placed him placed him as the smoothest
and most shining subject with which, in the exercise of
her profession, she had yet experimented; but her rec
ognition was accompanied with a pang that his ami
able address made but the sharper. She had her reason
for awkwardness in the presence of a rosy, glossy,
kindly, but discernibly troubled personage whom she
had waited on "at home " at her own suggestion
promptly welcomed and the sympathetic element in
whose " personality," the Chippendale, the photograph
ic, the autographic elements in whose flat in the Earl s
Court Road, she had commemorated in the liveliest
prose of which she was capable. She had described
with humour his favourite pug, she had revealed with
permission his favourite make of Kodak, she had
touched upon his favourite manner of spending his
Sundays and had extorted from him the shy confession
that he preferred after all the novel of adventure to
the novel of subtlety. Her embarrassment was there
fore now the greater as, touching to behold, he so
clearly had approached her with no intention of asper
ity, not even at first referring at all to the matter that
couldn t have been gracefully explained.
She had seen him originally had had the instinct of
it in making up to him as one of the happy of the
earth, and the impression of him " at home," on his
proving so goodnatured about the interview, had begot
ten in her a sharper envy, a hungrier sense of the in
vidious distinctions of fate, than any her literary con
science, which she deemed rigid, had yet had to reckon
with. He must have been rich, rich by such estimates
as hers ; he at any rate had everything, while she had
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THE PAPERS
nothing nothing but the vulgar need of offering him
to brag, on his behalf, for money, if she could get it,
about his luck. She hadn t in fact got money, hadn t
so much as managed to work in her stuff anywhere ; a
practical comment sharp enough on her having repre
sented to him with wasted pathos, she was indeed
soon to perceive how " important " it was to her that
people should let her get at them. This dim celebrity
had not needed that argument; he had not only, with
his alacrity, allowed her, as she had said, to try her
hand, but had tried with her, quite feverishly, and all
to the upshot of showing her that there were even
greater outsiders than herself. He could have put
down money, could have published, as the phrase was
a bare two columns at his own expense; but it was
just a part of his rather irritating luxury that he had a
scruple about that, wanted intensely to taste the sweet,
but didn t want to owe it to any wire-pulling. He
wanted the golden apple straight from the tree, where
it yet seemed so unable to grow for him by any exuber
ance of its own. He had breathed to her his real secret
that to be inspired, to work with effect, he had to
feel he was appreciated, to have it all somehow come
back to him. The artist, necessarily sensitive, lived on
encouragement, on knowing and being reminded that
people cared for him a little, cared even just enough to
flatter him a wee bit. They had talked that over, and
he had really, as he called it, quite put himself in her
power. He had whispered in her ear that it might be
very weak and silly, but that positively to be himself,
to do anything, certainly to do his best, he required the
breath of sympathy. He did love notice, let alone
praise there it was. To be systematically ignored
well, blighted him at the root. He was afraid she
would think he had said too much, but she left him
with his leave, none the less, to repeat a part of it. They
had agreed that she was to bring in prettily, somehow,
329
THE BETTER SORT
that he did love praise ; for just the right way he was
sure he could trust to her taste.
She had promised to send him the interview in proof,
but she had been able, after all, to send it but in type-
copy. If she, after all, had had a flat adorned as to
the drawing-room alone with eighty-three photo
graphs, and all in plush frames ; if she had lived in the
Earl s Court Road, had been rosy and glossy and well
filled out; and if she had looked withal, as she always
made a point of calling it when she wished to refer
without vulgarity to the right place in the social scale,
" unmistakeably gentle " if she had achieved these
things she would have snapped her fingers at all other
sweets, have sat as tight as possible and let the world
wag, have spent her Sundays in silently thanking her
stars, and not have cared to know one Kodak, or even
one novelist s " methods," from another. Except for
his unholy itch he was in short so just the person she
would have liked to be that the last consecration was
given for her to his character by his speaking quite as if
he had accosted her only to secure her view of the
strange Finnish " soul." He had come each time
there had been four Saturdays ; whereas Maud herself
had had to wait till to-day, though her bread depended
on it, for the roundabout charity of her publicly bad
seat. It didn t matter why he had come so that he
might see it somewhere printed of him that he was " a
conspicuously faithful attendant " at the interesting
series; it only mattered that he was letting her off so
easily, and yet that there was a restless hunger, odd on
the part of one of the filled-out, in his appealing eye,
which she now saw not to be a bit intelligent, though
that didn t matter either. Howard Bight came into
view while she dealt with these impressions, whereupon
she found herself edging a little away from her patron.
Her other friend, who had but just arrived and was ap
parently waiting to speak to her, would be a pretext for
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THE PAPERS
a break before the poor gentleman should begin to ac
cuse her of having failed him. She had failed herself
so much more that she would have been ready to reply
to him that he was scarce the one to complain ; fortu
nately, however, the bell sounded the end of the inter
val and her tension was relaxed. They all flocked
back to their places, and her camarade she knew
enough often so to designate him was enabled, thanks
to some shifting of other spectators, to occupy a seat
beside her. He had brought with him the breath of
business; hurrying from one appointment to another
he might have time but for a single act. He had seen
each of the others by itself, and the way he now
crammed in the third, after having previously snatched
the fourth, brought home again to the girl that he was
leading the real life. Her own was a dull imitation of
it. Yet it happened at the same time that before the
curtain rose again he had, with a " Who s your fat
friend ? " professed to have caught he. in the act of
making her own brighter.
" Mortimer Marshal ? " he echoed after she had,
a trifle dryly, satisfied him. " Never heard of him."
" Well, I sha n t tell him that. But you have" she
said ; " you ve only forgotten. I told you after I had
been to him."
Her friend thought it came back to him. " Oh
yes, and showed me what you had made of it. I re
member your stuff was charming."
" I see you remember nothing," Maud a little more
dryly said. " I didn t show you what I had made of it.
I ve never made anything. You ve not seen my stuff,
and nobody has. They won t have it."
She spoke with a smothered vibration, but, as they
were still waiting, it had made him look at her; by
which she was slightly the more disconcerted. " Who
won t?"
" Everyone, everything won t. Nobody, nothing
THE BETTER SORT
will. He s hopeless^ or rather / am. I m no good.
And he knows it."
"O oh ! " the young man kindly but vaguely pro
tested. " Has he been making that remark to you ? "
" No that s the worst of it. He s too dreadfully
civil. He thinks I can do something."
" Then why do you say he knows you can t."
She was impatient; she gave it up. " Well, I don t
know what he knows except that he does want to be
loved."
" Do you mean he has proposed to you to love him ? "
" Loved by the great heart of the public speaking
through its natural organ. He wants to be well,
where Beadel-MufTet is."
"Oh, I hope not ! " said Bight with grim amuse
ment.
His friend was struck with his tone. " Do you
mean it s coming on for Beadel-MufTet what we talked
about ? " And then as he looked at her so queerly that
her curiosity took a jump : " It really and truly is?
Has anything happened ? "
" The rummest thing in the world since I last saw
you. We re wonderful, you know, you and I together
we see. And what we see always takes place, usually
within the week. It wouldn t be believed. But it will
do for us. At any rate it s high sport."
" Do you mean," she asked, " that his scare has liter
ally begun? "
He meant, clearly, quite as much as he said. " He
has written to me again he wants to see me, and we ve
an appointment for Monday."
" Then why isn t it the old game? "
" Because it isn t. He wants to gather from me, as
I have served him before, if something can t be done.
On a souvent besoin d un plus petit que soi. Keep quiet,
and we shall see something."
This was very well ; only his manner visibly had for
332
THE PAPERS
her the effect of a chill in the air. " I hope," she said,
" you re going at least to be decent to him."
"Well, you ll judge. Nothing at all can be done
it s too ridiculously late. And it serves him right. I
sha n t deceive him, certainly, but I might as well en
joy him."
The fiddles were still going, and Maud had a pause.
"Well, you know you ve more or less lived on him. I
mean it s the kind of thing you are living on."
" Precisely that s just why I loathe it."
Again she hesitated. " You mustn t quarrel, you
know, with your bread and butter."
He looked straight before him, as if she had been
consciously, and the least bit disagreeably, sententious.
"What in the world s that but what I shall just be not
doing? If our bread and butter is the universal push I
consult our interest by not letting it trifle with us.
They re not to blow hot and cold it won t do. There
he is let him get out himself. What I call sport is to
see if he can."
"And not poor wretch to help him ? "
But Bight was ominously lucid. " The devil is that
he can t be helped. His one idea of help, from the day
he opened his eyes, has been to be prominently damn
the word ! mentioned : it s the only kind of help that
exists in connection with him. What therefore is a
fellow to do when he happens to want it to stop wants
a special sort of prominence that will work like a trap in
a pantomime and enable him to vanish when the situa
tion requires it ? Is one to mention that he wants not
to be mentioned never, never, please, any more ? Do
you see the success of that, all over the place, do you see
the headlines in the American papers? No, he must
die as he has lived the Principal Public Person of his
time."
"Well," she sighed, " it s all horrible." And then
without a transition : "What do you suppose has hap
pened to him?*"
333
THE BETTER SORT
" The dreadfulness I wasn t to tell you ? "
" I only mean if you suppose him in a really bad
hole."
The young man considered. " It can t certainly be
that he has had a change of heart never. It may be
nothing worse than that the woman he wants to marry
has turned against it."
" But I supposed him with his children all so
boomed to be married."
" Naturally ; else he couldn t have got such a boom
from the poor lady s illness, death and burial. Don t
you remember two years ago? We are given to un-
stand that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., par
ticularly desires that no flowers be sent for the late
Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet s funeral. And then, the
next day : We are authorised to state that the im
pression, so generally prevailing, that Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet has expressed an objection to flowers in
connection with the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet s
obsequies, rests on a misapprehension of Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet s markedly individual views. The floral
tributes already delivered in Queen s Gate Gardens, and
remarkable for number and variety, have been the
source of such gratification to the bereaved gentleman
as his situation permits. With a wind-up of course
for the following week the inevitable few heads of re
mark, on the part of the bereaved gentleman, on the
general subject of Flowers at Funerals as a Fashion,
vouchsafed, under pressure possibly indiscreet, to a ris
ing young journalist always thirsting for the authentic
word."
" I guess now," said Maud, after an instant, " the
rising young journalist. You egged him on."
" Dear, no. I panted in his rear."
" It makes you," she added, " more than cynical."
" And what do you call more than cynical? "
" It makes you sardonic. Wicked," she continued;
" devilish."
334
THE PAPERS
" That s it that is cynical. Enough s as good as a
feast." But he came back to the ground they had
quitted. "What were you going to say he s prominent
for, Mortimer Marshal ? "
She wouldn t, however, follow him there yet, her
curiosity on the other issue not being spent. " Do you
know then as a fact, that he s marrying again, the be
reaved gentleman?"
Her friend, at this, showed impatience. " My dear
fellow, do you see nothing ? We had it all, didn t we,
three months ago, and then we didn t have it, and then
we had it again; and goodness knows where we are.
But I throw out the possibility. I forget her bloated
name, but she may be rich, and she may be decent. She
may make it a condition that he keeps out out, I
mean, of the only things he has really ever been in.
1 The Papers?"
" The dreadful, nasty, vulgar Papers. She may put
it to him I see it dimly and queerly, but I see it that
he must get out first, and then they ll talk; then she ll
say yes, then he ll have the money. I see it and much
more sharply that he wants the money, needs it I
mean, badly, desperately, so that this necessity may
very well make the hole in which he finds himself.
Therefore he must do something what he s trying to
do. It supplies the motive that our picture, the other
day, rather missed."
Maud Blandy took this in, but it seemed to fail to
satisfy her. " It must be something worse. You make
it out that, so that your practical want of mercy, which
you ll not be able to conceal from me, shall affect me as
less inhuman."
" I don t make it out anything, and I don t care what
it is ; the queerness, the grand irony of the case is it
self enough for me. You, on your side, however, I
think, make it out what you call something worse, be
cause of the romantic bias of your mind. You see
335
THE BETTER SORT
red. Yet isn t it, after all, sufficiently lurid that he
shall lose his blooming bride?"
"You re sure," Maud appealed, "that he ll lose
her?"
" Poetic justice screams for it ; and my whole inter
est in the matter is staked on it."
But the girl continued to brood. " I thought you
contend that nobody s half decent. Where do you
find a woman to make such a condition ? "
" Not easily, I admit." The young man thought.
" It will be his luck to have found her. That s his
tragedy, say, that she can financially save him, but that
she happens to be just the one freak, the creature whose
stomach has turned. The spark I mean of decency
has got, after all, somehow to be kept alive ; and it may
be lodged in this particular female form."
" I see. But why should a female form that s so
particular confess to an affinity with a male form that s
so fearfully general? As he s all self-advertisement,
why isn t it much more natural to her simply to loathe
him?"
" Well, because, oddly enough, it seems that people
don t."
" You do," Maud declared. " You ll kill him."
He just turned a flushed cheek to her, and she saw
that she had touched something that lived in him.
"We can," he consciously smiled, " deal death. And
the beauty is that it s in a perfectly straight way. We
can lead them on. But have you ever seen Beadel-
Muffet for yourself? " he continued.
" No. How often, please, need I tell you that I ve
seen nobody and nothing? "
"Well, if you had you d understand."
"You mean he s so fetching?"
" Oh, he s great. He s not all self-advertisement
or at least he doesn t seem to be : that s his pull. But I
see, you female humbug," Bight pursued, " how much
you d like him yourself."
336
THE PAPERS
" I want, while I m about it, to pity him in sufficient
quantity."
" Precisely. Which means, for a woman, with ex
travagance and to the point of immorality."
" I ain t a woman," Maud Blandy sighed. " I wish
I were ! "
" Well, about the pity," he went on; " you shall be
immoral, I promise you, before you ve done. Doesn t
Mortimer Marshal," he asked, " take you for a wo
man?"
" You ll have to ask him. How," she demanded,
" does one know those things? " And she stuck to her
Beadel-Muffet. " If you re to see him on Monday
sha n t you then get to the bottom of it? "
"Oh, I don t conceal from you that I promise myself
larks, but I won t tell you, positively I won t," Bight
said, " what I see. You re morbid. If it s only bad
enough I mean his motive you ll want to save him."
" Well, isn t that what you re to profess to him that
you want ? "
" Ah," the young man returned. " I believe you d
really invent a way."
" I would if I could." And with that she dropped
it. " There s my fat friend," she presently added, as
the entr acte still hung heavy and Mortimer Marshal,
from a row much in advance of them, screwed himself
round in his tight place apparently to keep her in his
eye.
" He does then," said her companion, " take you for
a woman. I seem to guess he s littery.
" That s it ; so badly that he wrote that littery ply
Corisanda, you must remember, with Beatrice Beau
mont in the principal part, which was given at three
matinees in this very place and which hadn t even the
luck of being slated. Every creature connected with
the production, from the man himself and Beatrice her-
self down to the mothers and grandmothers of the six-
337
THE BETTER SORT
penny young women, the young women of the pro
grammes, was interviewed both before and after, and
he promptly published the piece, pleading guilty to the
* littery charge which is the great stand he takes and
the subject of the discussion."
Bight had wonderingly followed. " Of what discus
sion?"
" Why, the one he thinks there ought to have been.
There hasn t been any, of course, but he wants it, dread
fully misses it. People won t keep it up whatever
they did do, though I don t myself make out that they
did anything. His state of mind requires something to
start with, which has got somehow to be provided.
There must have been a noise made, don t you see? to
make him prominent ; and in order to remain prominent
he has got to go for his enemies. The hostility to his
ply, and all because it s littery, we can do nothing
without that ; but it s uphill w r ork to come across it. We
sit up nights trying, but we seem to get no for arder.
The public attention would seem to abhor the whole
matter even as nature abhors a vacuum. We ve noth
ing to go upon, otherwise we might go far. But there
we are."
" I see," Bight commented. " You re nowhere at
all."
* No ; it isn t even that, for we re just where Cori-
sanda, on the stage and in the closet, put us at a stroke.
Only there we stick fast nothing seems to happen,
nothing seems to come or to be capable of being made
to come. We wait."
" Oh, if he waits with you! " Bight amicably jibed.
" He may wait for ever? "
" No, but resignedly. You ll make him forget his
wrongs."
" Ah, I m not of that sort, and I could only do it by
making him come into his rights. And I recognise
now that that s impossible. There are different cases,
338
THE PAPERS
you see, whole different classes of them, and his is the
opposite to Beadel-Muffet s."
Howard Bight gave a grunt. " Why the opposite if
you also pity him? I ll be hanged," he added, " if you
won t save him too."
But she shook her head. She knew. " No ; but it s
nearly, in its way, as lurid. Do you know," she asked,
what he has done? "
" Why, the difficulty appears to be that he can t have
done anything. He should strike once more hard,
and in the same place. He should bring out another
ply."
Why so? You can t be more than prominent, and
he is prominent. You can t do more than subscribe,
in your prominence, to thirty-seven press cutting
agencies in England and America, and, having done so,
you can t do more than sit at home with your ear on the
postman s knock, looking out for results. There comes
in the tragedy there are no results. Mortimer Mar
shal s postman doesn t knock ; the press-cutting agencies
can t find anything to cut. With thirty-seven, in the
whole English-speaking world, scouring millions of
papers for him in vain, and with a big slice of his pri
vate income all the while going to it, the * irony is too
cruel, and the way he looks at one, as in one s degree
responsible, does make one wince. He expected, nat
urally, most from the Americans, but it s they who have
failed him worst. Their silence is that of the tomb,
and it seems to grow, if the silence of the tomb can
grow. He won t admit that the thirty-seven look far
enough or long enough, and he writes them, I infer,
angry letters, wanting to know what the deuce they
suppose he has paid them for. But what are they
either, poor things, to do ? "
" Do? They can print his angry letters. That, at
least, will break the silence, and he ll like it better than
nothing."
339
THE BETTER SORT
This appeared to strike our young woman. " Upon
my word, I really believe he would." Then she thought
better of it. " But they d be afraid, for they do guar
antee, you know, that there s something for everyone.
They claim it s their strength that there s enough to
go round. They won t want to show that they break
down."
" Oh, well," said the young man, " if he can t man
age to smash a pane of glass somewhere ! "
" That s what he thought / would do. And it s
what / thought I might," Maud added ; " otherwise I
wouldn t have approached him. I did it on spec, but
I m no use. I m a fatal influence. I m a non-con
ductor."
She said it with such plain sincerity that it quickly
took her companion s attention. " I say! " he covertly
murmured. " Have you a secret sorrow ?
" Of course I ve a secret sorrow." And she stared
at it, stiff and a little sombre, not wanting it to be too
freely handled, while the curtain at last rose to the
lighted stage.
Ill
SHE was later on more open about it, sundry other
things, not wholly alien, having meanwhile happened.
One of these had been that her friend had waited with
her to the end of the Finnish performance and that it
had then, in the lobby, as they went out, not been pos
sible for her not to make him acquainted with Mr. Mor
timer Marshal. This gentleman had clearly waylaid
her and had also clearly divined that her companion
was of the Papers papery all through; which doubt
less had something to do with his having handsomely
proposed to them to accompany him somewhere to tea.
They hadn t seen why they shouldn t, it being an ad
venture, all in their line, like another ; and he had car
ried them, in a four-wheeler, to a small and refined
340
THE PAPERS
club in a region which was as the fringe of the Picca
dilly region, where even their own presence scarce
availed to contradict the implication of the exclusive.
The whole occasion, they were further to feel, was es
sentially a tribute to their professional connection, espe
cially that side of it which flushed and quavered, which
panted and pined in their host s personal nervousness.
Maud Blandy now saw it vain to contend with his de
lusion that she, underfed and imprinted, who had never
been so conscious as during these bribed moments of
her non-conducting quality, was papery to any purpose
a delusion that exceeded, by her measure, every other
form of pathos. The decoration of the tea-room was
a pale, aesthetic green, the liquid in the delicate cups a
copious potent amber; the bread and butter was thin
and golden, the muffins a revelation to her that she was
barbarously hungry. There were ladies at other tables
with other gentlemen ladies with long feather boas
and hats not of the sailor pattern, and gentlemen whose
straight collars were doubled up much higher than
Howard Bight s and their hair parted far more at the
side. The talk was so low, with pauses somehow so
not of embarrassment that it could only have been
earnest, and the air, an air of privilege and privacy to
our young woman s sense, seemed charged with fine
things taken for granted. If it hadn t been for Bight s
company she would have grown almost frightened, so
much seemed to be offered her for something she
couldn t do. That word of Bight s about smashing a
window-pane had lingered with her ; it had made her
afterwards wonder, while they sat in their stalls, if
there weren t some brittle surface in range of her own
elbow. She had to fall back on the consciousness of
how her elbow, in spite of her type, lacked practical
point, and that w r as just why the terms in which she saw
her services now, as she believed, bid for, had the effect
of scaring her. They came out most, for that matter,
THE BETTER SORT
in Mr. Mortimer Marshal s dumbly-insistent eyes, which
seemed to be perpetually saying : " You know what I
mean when I m too refined like everything here, don t
you see ? to say it out. You know there ought to be
something about me somewhere, and that really, with
the opportunities, the facilities you enjoy, it wouldn t
be so much out of your way just to well, reward this
little attention."
The fact that he was probably every day, in just the
same anxious flurry and with just the same superlative
delicacy, paying little attentions with an eye to little re
wards, this fact by itself but scantily eased her, con
vinced as she was that no luck but her own was as hope
less as his. He squared the clever young wherever he
could get at them, but it was the clever young, taking
them generally, who fed from his hand and then forgot
him. She didn t forget him ; she pitied him too much,
pitied herself, and was more and more, as she found,
now pitying everyone; only she didn t know how to
say to him that she could do, after all, nothing for him.
She oughtn t to have come, in the first place, and
wouldn t if it hadn t been for her companion. Her
companion was increasingly sardonic which was the
way in which, at best, she now increasingly saw him;
he was shameless in acceptance, since, as she knew, as
she felt at his side, he had come only, at bottom, to mis
lead and to mystify. He was, as she wasn t, on the
Papers and of them, and their baffled entertainer knew
it without either a hint on the subject from herself or a
need, on the young man s own lips, of the least vulgar
allusion. Nothing was so much as named, the whole
connection was sunk; they talked about clubs, muf
fins, afternoon performances, the effect of the Finnish
soul upon the appetite, quite as if they had met in
society. Nothing could have been less like society
she innocently supposed at least than the real
spirit of their meeting; yet Bight did nothing that
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he might do to keep the affair within bounds. When
looked at by their friend so hard and so hintingly,
he only looked back, just as dumbly, but just as
intensely and, as might be said, portentously; ever
so impenetrably, in fine, and ever so wickedly. He
didn t smile as if to cheer the least little bit ; which
he might be abstaining from on purpose to make his
promises solemn : so, as he tried to smile she couldn t,
it was all too dreadful she wouldn t meet her friend s
eyes, but kept looking, heartlessly, at the " notes " of
the place, the hats of the ladies, the tints of the rugs,
the intenser Chippendale, here and there, of the chairs
and tables, of the very guests, of the very waitresses.
It had come to her early : " I ve done him, poor man,
at home, and the obvious thing now will be to do him
at his club." But this inspiration plumped against
her fate even as an imprisoned insect against the win
dow-glass. She couldn t do him at his club without
decently asking leave ; whereby he would know of her
feeble feeler, feeble because she was so sure of refusals.
She would rather tell him, desperately, what she
thought of him than expose him to see again that she
was herself nowhere, herself nothing. Her one com
fort was that, for the half-hour it had made the sit
uation quite possible he seemed fairly hypnotised by
her colleague ; so that when they took leave. he,as good
as thanked her for what she had this time done for him.
It was one of the signs of his infatuated state that he
clearly viewed Bight as a mass of helpful cleverness,
though the cruel creature, uttering scarce a sound, had
only fixed him in a manner that might have been taken
for the fascination of deference. He might perfectly
have been an idiot for all the poor gentleman knew.
But the poor gentleman saw a possible " leg up " in
every bush; and nothing but impertinence would have
convinced him that she hadn t brought him, com-
punctiously as to the past, a master of the proper art.
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THE BETTER SORT
Now, more than ever, how he would listen for the
postman !
The whole occasion had broken so, for busy Bight,
into matters to be attended to before Fleet Street
warmed to its work, that the pair were obliged, outside,
to part company on the spot, and it was only on the
morrow, a Saturday, that they could taste again of that
comparison of notes which made for each the main
savour, albeit slightly acrid, of their current conscious
ness. The air was full, as from afar, of the grand in
difference of spring, of which the breath could be felt
so much before the face could be seen, and they had
bicycled side by side out to Richmond Park as with the
impulse to meet it on its way. They kept a Saturday,
when possible, sacred to the Suburbs as distinguished
from the Papers when possible being largely when
Maud could achieve the use of the somewhat fatigued
family machine. Many sisters contended for it, under
whose flushed pressure it might have been seen spin
ning in many different directions. Superficially, at
Richmond, our young couple rested found a quiet cor
ner to lounge deep in the Park, with their machines
propped by one side of a great tree and their associated
backs sustained by another. But agitation, finer than
the finest scorching, was in the air for them; it was
made sharp, rather abruptly, by a vivid outbreak from
Maud. It was very well, she observed, for her friend
to be clever at the expense of the general " greed ";
he saw it in the light of his own jolly luck, and what
she saw, as it happened, was nothing but the gen
eral art of letting you starve, yourself, in your hole.
At the end of five minutes her companion had turned
quite pale with having to face the large extent of
her confession. It was a confession for the reason
that in the first place it evidently cost her an effort
that pride had again and again successfully pre
vented, and because in the second she had thus the
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air of having lived overmuch on swagger. She could
scarce have said at this moment what, for a good
while, she had really lived on, and she didn t let him
know now to complain either of her privation or of
her disappointments. She did it to show why she
couldn t go with him when he was so awfully sweep
ing. There were at any rate apparently, all over, two
wholly different sets of people. If everyone rose to his
bait no creature had ever risen to hers ; and that was the
grim truth of her position, which proved at the least
that there were two quite different kinds of luck. They
told two different stories of human vanity ; they couldn t
be reconciled. And the poor girl put it in a nutshell.
" There s but one person I ve ever written to who has
so much as noticed my letter."
He wondered, painfully affected it rather over
whelmed him; he took hold of it at the easiest point.
" One person ? "
" The misguided man we had tea with. He alone
he rose."
" Well then, you see that when they do rise they are
misguided. In other words they re donkeys."
" What I see is that I don t strike the right ones and
that I haven t therefore your ferocity; that is my feroc
ity, if I have any, rests on a different ground. You ll
say that I go for the wrong people; but I don t, God
knows witness Mortimer Marshal fly too high. I
picked him out, after prayer and fasting, as just the
likeliest of the likely not anybody a bit grand and yet
not quite a nobody ; and by an extraordinary chance I
was justified. Then I pick out others who seem just
as good, I pray and fast, and no sound comes back. But
I work through my ferocity too," she stiffly continued,
" though at first it was great, feeling as I did that when
my bread and butter was in it people had no right not
to oblige me. It was their duty what they were prom
inent for to be interviewed, so as to keep me going;
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THE BETTER SORT
and I did as much for them any day as they would be
doing for me."
Bight heard her, but for a moment said nothing.
" Did you tell them that ? I mean say to them it was
your little all."
" Not vulgarly I know how. There are ways of
saying it s important ; and I hint it just enough to
see that the importance fetches them no more than any
thing else. It isn t important to them. And I, in their
place," Maud went on, " wouldn t answer either; I ll be
hanged if ever I would. That s what it comes to, that
there are two distinct lots, and that my luck, being born
so, is always to try the snubbers. You were born to
know by instinct the others. But it makes me more
tolerant."
" More tolerant of what? " her friend asked.
" Well, of what you described to me. Of what you
rail at."
" Thank you for me!" Bight laughed.
" Why not? Don t you live on it? "
" Not in such luxury you surely must see for your
self as the distinction you make seems to imply. It
isn t luxury to be nine-tenths of the time sick of every
thing. People moreover are worth to me but tup
pence apiece; there are too many, confound them so
many that I don t see really how any can be left over
for your superior lot. It is a chance," he pursued
" I ve had refusals too though I confess they ve some
times been of the funniest. Besides, I m getting out of
it," the young man wound up. "God knows I want to.
My advice to you," he added in the same breath, " is to
sit tight. There are as good fish in the sea ! "
She waited a moment. " You re sick of everything
and you re getting out of it; it s not good enough for
you, in other words, but it s still good enough for me.
Why am I to sit tight when you sit so loose ? "
" Because what you want will come can t help com-
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THE PAPERS
ing. Then, in time, you ll also get out of it. But then
you ll have had it, as I have, and the good of it."
" But what, really, if it breeds nothing but disgust,"
she asked, " do you call the good of it ? "
" Well, two things. First the bread and butter, and
then the fun. I repeat it sit tight."
"Where s the fun," she asked again, " of learning to
despise people? "
"You ll see when it comes. It will all be upon
you, it will change for you any day. Sit tight, sit
tight."
He expressed such confidence that she might for a
minute have been weighing it. " If you get out of it,
what will you do ? "
" Well, imaginative work. This job has made me at
least see. It has given me the loveliest tips."
She had still another pause. " It has given me my
experience has a lovely tip too."
" And what s that? "
" I ve told you before the tip of pity. I m so much
sorrier for them all panting and gasping for it like fish
out of water than I am anything else."
He wondered. " But I thought that was what just
isn t your experience."
"Oh, I mean then," she said impatiently, " that my
tip is from yours. It s only a different tip. I want
to save them."
"Well," the young man replied, and as if the idea had
had a meaning for him, " saving them may perhaps
work out as a branch. The question is can you be paid
for it?"
" Beadel-Muffet would pay me," Maud suddenly
suggested.
" Why, that s just what I m expecting," her com
panion laughed, " that he will, after to-morrow di
rectly or indirectly do me."
" Will you take it from him then only to get him in
347
THE BETTER SORT
deeper, as that s what you perfectly know you ll do?
You won t save him; you ll lose him."
" What then would you, in the case," Bight asked,
" do for your money ? "
Well, the girl thought. " I d get him to see me I
should have first, I recognise, to catch my hare and
then I d work up my stuff. Which would be boldly,
quite by a master-stroke, a statement of his fix of the
fix, I mean, of his wanting, his supplicating to be
dropped. I d give out that it would really oblige. Then
I d send my copy about, and the rest of the matter
would take care of itself. I don t say you could do it
that way you d have a different effect. But I should
be able to trust the thing, being mine, not to be looked
at, or, if looked at, chucked straight into the basket. I
should so have, to that extent, handled the matter, and
I should so, by merely touching it, have broken the
spell. That s my one line I stop things off by touch
ing them. There d never be a word about him more."
Her friend, with his legs out and his hands locked at
the back of his neck, had listened with indulgence.
" Then hadn t I better arrange it for you that Beadel-
Muffet shall see you? "
" Oh, not after you ve damned him ! "
You want to see him first? "
" It will be the only way to be of any use to him.
You ought to wire him in fact not to open his mouth
till he has seen me."
" Well, I will," said Bight at last. " But, you know,
we shall lose something very handsome his struggle,
all in vain, with his fate. Noble sport, the sight of it
all." He turned a little, to rest on his elbow, and,
cycling suburban young man as he was, he might have
been, outstretched under his tree, melancholy Jacques
looking off into a forest glade, even as sailor-hatted
Maud, in for elegance a new cotton blouse and a
long-limbed angular attitude, might have prosefully
348
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suggested the mannish Rosalind. He raised his face
in appeal to her. " Do you really ask me to sacrifice
it?"
" Rather than sacrifice him? Of course I do."
He said for a while nothing more; only, propped on
his elbow, lost himself again in the Park. After which
he turned back to her. "Will you have me? " he sud
denly asked.
" Have you ?"
" Be my bonny bride. For better, for worse. I
hadn t, upon my honour," he explained with obvious
sincerity, " understood you were so down."
" Well, it isn t so bad as that," said Maud Blandy.
" So bad as taking up with me? "
" It isn t as bad as having let you know when I
didn t want you to."
He sank back again with his head dropped, putting
himself more at his ease. " You re too proud that s
what s the matter with you. And I m too stupid."
" No, you re not," said Maud grimly. " Not
stupid."
" Only cruel, cunning, treacherous, cold-blooded,
vile?" He drawled the words out softly, as if they
sounded fair.
" And I m not stupid either," Maud Blandy went on.
" We just, poor creatures well, we just know."
" Of course we do. So why do you want us to drug
ourselves with rot? to go on as if we didn t know? "
She made no answer for a moment ; then she said :
" There s good to be known too."
" Of course, again. There are all sorts of things, and
some much better than others. That s why," the
young man added, " I just put that question to you."
"Oh no, it isn t. You put it to me because you
think I feel I m no good."
" How so, since I keep assuring you that you ve only
to wait ? How so, since I keep assuring you that if you
349
THE BETTER SORT
do wait it will all come with a rush? But say I am
sorry for you," Bight lucidly pursued ; " how does that
prove either that my motive is base or that I do you a
wrong? "
The girl waived this question, but she presently
tried another. " Is it your idea that we should live on
all the people ? "
" The people we catch ? Yes, old man, till we can do
better."
" My conviction is," she soon returned, " that if I
were to marry you I should dish you. I should spoil
the business. It would fall off ; and, as I can do noth
ing myself, then where should we be ? "
"Well," said Bight, " we mightn t be quite so high up
in the scale of the morbid."
" It s you that are morbid," she answered. " You ve,
in your way like everyone else, for that matter, all
over the place sport on the brain."
"Well," he demanded, "what is sport but success?
What is success but sport? "
" Bring that out somewhere. If it be true," she
said, " I m glad I m a failure."
After which, for a longish space, they sat together
in silence, a silence finally broken by a word from the
young man. " But about Mortimer Marshal how do
you propose to save him? "
It was a change of subject that might, by its so easy
introduction of matter irrelevant, have seemed intended
to dissipate whatever was left of his proposal of mar
riage. That proposal, however, had been somehow
both too much in the tone of familiarity to linger and
too little in that of vulgarity to drop. It had had no
form, but the mild air kept perhaps thereby the better
the taste of it. This was sensibly moreover in what the
girl found to reply. " I think, you know, that he d be
no such bad friend. I mean that, with his appetite,
there would be something to be done. He doesn t half
hate me."
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"Ah, my dear," her friend ejaculated, " don t, for
God s sake, be low."
But she kept it up. " He clings to me. You saw.
It s hideous, the way he s able to * do himself."
Bight lay quiet, then spoke as with a recall of the
Chippendale Club. " Yes, I couldn t do you as he
could. But if you don t bring it off ? "
"Why, then, does he cling? Oh, because, all the
same, I m potentially the Papers still. I m at any rate
the nearest he has got to them. And then I m other
things."
" I see."
" I m so awfully attractive," said Maud Blandy. She
got up with this and, shaking out her frock, looked at
her resting bicycle, looked at the distances possibly
still to be gained. Her companion paused, but at last
also rose, and by that time she was awaiting him, a
little gaunt and still not quite cool, as an illustration of
her last remark. He stood there watching her, and
she followed this remark up. " I do, you know, really
pity him."
It had almost a feminine fineness, and their eyes con
tinued to meet. "Oh, you ll work it ! " And the
young man went to his machine.
IV
IT was not till five days later that they again came to
gether, and during these days many things had hap
pened. Maud Blandy had, with high elation, for her
own portion, a sharp sense of this ; if it had at the time
done nothing more intimate for her the Sunday of bit
terness just spent with Howard Bight had started, all
abruptly, a turn of the tide of her luck. This turn had
not. in the least been in the young man s having spoken
to her of marriage since she hadn t even, up to the
late hour of their parting, so much as answered him
351
THE BETTER SORT
straight : she dated the sense of difference much rather
from the throb of a happy thought that had come to her
while she cycled home to Kilburnia in the darkness.
The throb had made her for the few minutes, tired as
she was, put on speed, and it had been the cause of still
further proceedings for her the first thing the next
morning. The active step that was the essence of
these proceedings had almost got itself taken before
she went to bed ; which indeed was what had happened
to the extent of her writing, on the spot, a meditated
letter. She sat down to it by the light of the guttering
candle that awaited her on the dining-room table and
in the stale air of family food that only had been a
residuum so at the mercy of mere ventilation that she
didn t so much as peep into a cupboard ; after which she
had been on the point of nipping over, as she would
have said, to drop it into that opposite pillar-box whose
vivid maw, opening out through thick London nights,
had received so many of her fruitless little ventures.
But she had checked herself and waited, waited to be
sure, with the morning, that her fancy wouldn t fade ;
posting her note in the end, however, with a confident
jerk, as soon as she was up. She had, later on, had
business, or at least had sought it, among the haunts
that she had taught herself to regard as professional;
but neither on the Monday nor on either of the days
that directly followed had she encountered there the
friend whom it would take a difference in more matters
than could as yet be dealt with to enable her to regard,
with proper assurance or with proper modesty, as a
lover. Whatever he was, none the less, it couldn t
otherwise have come to her that it was possible to feel
lonely in the Strand. That showed, after all, how
thick they must constantly have been which was
perhaps a thing to begin to think of in a new, in a
steadier light. But it showed doubtless still more that
her companion was probably up to something rather
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THE PAPERS
awful ; it made her wonder, holding her breath a little,
about Beadel-Muffet, made her certain that he and his
affairs would partly account for Bight s whirl of ab
sence.
Ever conscious of empty pockets, she had yet always
a penny, or at least a ha penny, for a paper, and those
she now scanned, she quickly assured herself, were
edited quite as usual. Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet
K.C.B., M.P., had returned on Monday from Undertone,
where Lord and Lady Wispers had, from the previous
Friday, entertained a very select party; Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., was to attend on Tuesday
the weekly meeting of the society of the Friends of Rest ;
Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., had kindly
consented to preside on Wednesday, at Samaritan
House, at the opening of the Sale of Work of the Mid
dlesex Incurables. These familiar announcements,
however, far from appeasing her curiosity, had an ef
fect upon her nerves ; she read into them mystic mean
ings that she had never read before. Her freedom of
mind in this direction was indeed at the same time lim
ited, for her own horizon was already, by the Monday
night, bristling with new possibilities, and the Tuesday
itself well, what had the Tuesday itself become, with
this eruption, from within, of interest amounting really
to a revelation, what had the Tuesday itself become but
the greatest day yet of her life? Such a description of
it would have appeared to apply predominantly to the
morning had she not, under the influence, precisely, of
the morning s thrill, gone, towards evening, with her
design, into the Charing Cross Station. There, at the
bookstall, she bought them all, every rag that was
hawked; and there, as she unfolded one at a venture,
in the crowd and under the lamps, she felt her con
sciousness further, felt it for the moment quite im
pressively, enriched. " Personal Peeps Number
Ninety-Three : a Chat with the New Dramatist " need-
353
THE BETTER SORT
ed neither the " H. B." as a terminal signature nor a
text spangled, to the exclusion of almost everything
else, with Mortimer Marshals that looked as tall as if
lettered on posters, to help to account for her young
man s use of his time. And yet, as she soon made out,
it had been used with an economy that caused her both
to wonder and to wince ; the " peep " commemorated
being none other than their tea with the artless creature
the previous Saturday, and the meagre incidents and
pale impressions of that occasion furnishing forth the
picture.
Bight had solicited no new interview ; he hadn t been
such a fool for she saw, soon enough, with all her in
telligence, that this was what he would have been, and
that a repetition of contact would have dished him.
What he had done, she found herself perceiving and
perceiving with an emotion that caused her face to glow
was journalism of the intensest essence; a column
concocted of nothing, an omelette made, as it were,
without even the breakage of the egg or two that might
have been expected to be the price. The poor gentle
man s whereabouts at five o clock was the only egg
broken, and this light and delicate crash was the sound
in the world that would be sweetest to him. What stuff
it had to be, since the writer really knew nothing about
him, yet how its being just such stuff made it perfectly
serve its purpose! She might have marvelled afresh,
with more leisure, at such purposes, but she was lost
in the wonder of seeing how, without matter, without
thought, without an excuse, without a fact and yet at
the same time sufficiently without a fiction, he had
managed to be as resonant as if he had beaten a drum
on the platform of a booth. And he had not been too
personal, not made anything awkward for her, had
given nothing and nobody away, had tossed the Chip
pendale Club into the air with such a turn that it had
fluttered down again, like a blown feather, miles from
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THE PAPERS
its site. The thirty-seven agencies would already be
posting to their subscriber thirty-seven copies, and their
subscriber, on his side, would be posting, to his ac
quaintance, many times thirty-seven, and thus at least
getting something for his money; but this didn t tell
her why her friend had taken the trouble if it had been
a trouble; why at all events he had taken the time,
pressed as he apparently was for that commodity.
These things she was indeed presently to learn, but they
were meanwhile part of a suspense composed of more
elements than any she had yet tasted. And the suspense
was prolonged, though other affairs too, that were not
part of it, almost equally crowded upon her; the week
having almost waned when relief arrived in the form
of a cryptic post-card. The post-card bore the H. B.,
like the precious " Peep," which had already had a won
drous sequel, and it appointed, for the tea-hour, a place
of meeting familiar to Maud, with the simple addition
of the significant word " Larks ! "
When the time he had indicated came she waited for
him, at their small table, swabbed like the deck of a
steam-packet, nose to nose with a mustard-pot and a
price-list, in the consciousness of perhaps after all hav
ing as much to tell him as to hear from him. It ap
peared indeed at first that this might well be the case,
for the questions that came up between them when he
had taken his place were overwhelmingly those he him
self insisted on putting. " What has he done, what has
he, and what will he?" that inquiry, not loud but deep,
had met him as he sat down ; without however produc
ing the least recognition. Then she as soon felt that
his silence and his manner were enough for her, or that,
if they hadn t been, his wonderful look, the straightest
she had ever had from him, would instantly have made
them so. He looked at her hard, hard, as if he had
meant " I say, mind your eyes ! " and it amounted
really to a glimpse, rather fearful, of the subject. It was
355
THE BETTER SORT
no joke, the subject, clearly, and her friend had fairly
gained age, as he had certainly lost weight, in his recent
dealings with it. It struck her even, with everything
else, that this was positively the way she would have
liked him to show if their union had taken the form they
hadn t reached the point of discussing; wearily coming
back to her from the thick of things, wanting to put on
his slippers and have his tea, all prepared by her and in
their place, and beautifully to be trusted to regale her
in his turn. He was excited, disavowedly, and it took
more disavowal still after she had opened her budget
which she did, in truth, by saying to him as her first
alternative : " What did you do him for, poor Mor
timer Marshal? It isn t that he s not in the seventh
heaven !"
"He is in the seventh heaven !" Bight quickly broke
in. " He doesn t want my blood ? "
" Did you do him," she asked, " that he should want
it? It s splendid how you could simply on that
show."
"That show? Why," said Howard Bight, "that
show was an immensity. That show was volumes,
stacks, abysses."
He said it in such a tone that she was a little at a
loss. " Oh, you don t want abysses."
" Not much, to knock off such twaddle. There isn t
a breath in it of what I saw. What I saw is my own
affair. I ve got the abysses for myself. They re in
my head it s always something. But the monster,"
he demanded, " has written you? "
" How couldn t he that night? I got it the next
morning, telling me how much he wanted to thank me
and asking me where he might see me. So I went,"
said Maud, " to see him."
" At his own place again? "
" At his own place again. What do I yearn for but
to be received at people s own places? "
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" Yes, for the stuff. But when you ve had as you
had had from him the stuff? "
* Well, sometimes, you see, I get more. He gives
me all I can take." It was in her head to ask if by
chance Bight were jealous, but she gave it another turn.
"We had a big palaver, partly about you. He appre
ciates."
"Me?"
" Me first of all, I think. All the more that I ve
had fancy ! a proof of my stuff, the despised and re
jected, as originally concocted, and that he has now
seen it. I tried it on again with Brains, the night of
your thing sent it off with your thing enclosed as a
rouser. They took it, by return, like a shot you ll see
on Wednesday. And if the dear man lives till then, for
impatience, I m to lunch with him that day."
" I see," said Bight. "Well, that was what I did it
for. It shows how right I was."
They faced each other, across their thick crockery,
with eyes that said more than their words, and that,
above all, said, and asked, other things. So she went
on in a moment : " I don t know what he doesn t ex
pect. And he thinks I can keep it up."
" Lunch with him every Wednesday ? "
" Oh, he d give me my lunch, and more. It was last
Sunday that you were right about my sitting close,"
she pursued. " I d have been a pretty fool to jump.
Suddenly, I see, the music begins. I m awfully
obliged to you."
" You feel," he presently asked, " quite differently
so differently that I ve missed my chance ? I don t care
for that serpent, but there s something else that you
don t tell me." The young man, detached and a little
spent, with his shoulder against the wall and a hand
vaguely playing over the knives, forks and spoons,
dropped his succession of sentences without an apparent
direction. " Something else has come up, and you re
357
THE BETTER SORT
as pleased as Punch. Or, rather, you re not quite en
tirely so, because you can t goad me to fury. You can t
worry me as much as you d like. Marry me first, old
man, and then see if I mind. Why shouldn t you keep
it up ? I mean lunching with him ? " His questions
came as in play that was a little pointless, without his
waiting more than a moment for answers; though it
was not indeed that she might not have answered even
in the moment, had not the pointless play been more
what she wanted. " Was it at the place," he went on,
"that he took us to?"
" Dear no at his flat, where I ve been before. You ll
see, in Brains, on Wednesday. I don t think I ve
muffed it it s really rather there. But he showed me
everything this time the bathroom, the refrigerator,
and the machines for stretching his trousers. He has
nine, and in constant use."
" Nine? " said Bight gravely.
" Nine."
"Nine trousers?"
" Nine machines. I don t know how many trou
sers."
"Ah, my dear," he said, "that s a grave omission;
the want of the information will be felt and resented.
But does it all, at any rate," he asked, " sufficiently
fetch you ? " After which, as she didn t speak, he
lapsed into helpless sincerity. " Is it really, you think,
his dream to secure you ? "
She replied, on this, as if his tone made it too amus
ing- " Quite. There s no mistaking it. He sees me
as, most days in the year, pulling the wires and beating
the drum somewhere ; that is he sees me of course not
exactly as writing about our home once I ve got
one myself, but as procuring others to do it through
my being (as you ve made him believe) in with the
Organs of Public Opinion. He doesn t see, if I m half
decent, why there shouldn t be something about him
THE PAPERS
every day in the week. He s all right, and he s all
ready. And who, after all, can do him so well as the
partner of his flat? It s like making, in one of those
big domestic siphons, the luxury of the poor, your own
soda-water. It comes cheaper, and it s always on the
sideboard. Vichy cliez soiJ The interviewer at
home."
Her companion took it in. " Your place is on my
sideboard you re really a first-class fizz! He steps
then, at any rate, into Beadel-Muffet s place."
" That," Maud assented, " is what he would like to
do." And she knew more than ever there was some
thing to wait for.
" It s a lovely opening," Bight returned. But he
still said, for the moment, nothing else ; as if, charged
to the brim though he had originally been, she had
rather led his thought away.
" What have you done with poor Beadel? " she con
sequently asked. " What is it, in the name of good
ness, you re doing to him? It s worse than ever."
" Of course it s worse than ever."
" He capers," said Maud, " on every housetop he
jumps out of every bush." With which her anxiety
really broke out. " Is it you that are doing it ? "
" If you mean am I seeing him, I certainly am. I m
seeing nobody else. I assure you he s spread thick."
" But you re acting for him ? "
Bight waited. " Five hundred people are acting for
him ; but the difficulty is that what he calls the terrific
forces of publicity by which he means ten thousand
other persons are acting against him. We ve all in
fact been turned on to turn everything off, and that s
exactly the job that makes the biggest noise. It ap
pears everywhere, in every kind of connection and every
kind of type, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B.,
M.P., desires to cease to appear anywhere; and then it
appears that his desiring to cease to appear is observed
359
THE BETTER SORT
to conduce directly to his more tremendously appearing,
or certainly, and in the most striking manner, to his
not in the least ^appearing. The workshop of silence
roars like the Zoo at dinner-time. He can t disappear ;
he hasn t weight enough to sink; the splash the diver
makes, you know, tells where he is. If you ask me
what I m doing," Bight wound up, " I m holding him
under water. But we re in the middle of the pond, the
banks are thronged with spectators, and I m expecting
from day to day^ to see stands erected and gate-money
taken. There, r he wearily smiled, " you have it. Be
sides," he then added with an odd change of tone, " I
rather think you ll see to-morrow."
He had made her at last horribly nervous. " What
shall I see?".
" It will all be out"
" Then why shouldn t you tell me? "
" Well," the young man said, " he has disappeared.
There you are. I mean personally. He s not to be
found. But nothing could make more, you see, for
ubiquity. The country will ring with it. He van
ished on Tuesday night was then last seen at his club.
Since then he has given no sign. How can a man dis
appear who does that sort of thing? It is, as you say,
to caper on the housetops. But it will only be known
to-night."
" Since when, then," Maud asked, " have you known
it?"
" Since three o clock to-day. But I ve kept it. I
am a while longer keeping it."
She wondered ; she was full of fears. "What do you
expect to get for it ? "
" Nothing if you spoil my market. I seem to make
out that you want to."
She gave this no heed; she had her thought. " Why
then did you three days ago wire me a mystic word? "
"Mystic ?"
360
THE PAPERS
" What do you call Larks ? "
" Oh, I remember. Well, it was because I saw larks
coming ; because I saw, I mean, what has happened. I
was sure it would have to happen."
" And what the mischief is it? "
Bight smiled. " Why, what I tell you. That he
has gone."
"Gone where?"
" Simply bolted to parts unknown. Where is what
nobody who belongs to him is able in the least to say,
or seems likely to be able."
" Any more than why? "
" Any more than why."
" Only you are able to say that? "
" Well," said Bight, " I can say what has so lately
stared me in the face, what he has been thrusting at me
in all its grotesqueness : his desire for a greater privacy
worked through the Papers themselves. He came to
me with it," the young man presently added. " I
didn t go to him."
" And he trusted you," Maud replied.
" Well, you see what I have given him the very
flower of my genius. What more do you want ? I m
spent, seedy, sore. I m sick," Bight declared, " of his
beastly funk."
Maud s eyes, in spite of it, were still a little hard. " Is
he thoroughly sincere? "
" Good God, no ! How can he be? Only trying it
as a cat, for a jump, tries too smooth a wall. He drops
straight back."
Then isn t his funk real?"
" As real as he himself is."
Maud wondered. " Isn t his flight ? "
" That s what we shall see ! "
" Isn t," she continued, " his reason? "
" Ah," he laughed out, " there you are again ! "
But she had another thought and was not discour
aged. "Mayn t he be, honestly, mad?"
361
THE BETTER SORT
" Mad oh yes. But not, I think, honestly. He s
not honestly anything in the world but the Beadel-
Muffet of our delight."
" Your delight," Maud observed after a moment,
" revolts me." And then she said : " When did you
last see him? "
" On Tuesday at six, love. I was one of the last."
" Decidedly, too, then, I judge, one of the worst."
She gave him her idea. " You hounded him on."
" I reported," said Bight, " success. Told him how
it was going."
" Oh, I can see you ! So that if he s dead "
" Well? " asked Bight blandly.
" His blood is on your hands."
He eyed his hands a moment. " They are dirty for
him ! But now, darling," he went on, " be so good as
to show me yours."
" Tell me first," she objected, " what you believe.
Is it suicide ? "
" I think that s the thing for us to make it. Till
somebody," he smiled, " makes it something else." And
he showed how he warmed to the view. " There are
weeks of it, dearest, yet."
He leaned more toward her, with his elbows on the
table, and in this position, moved by her extreme grav
ity, he lightly flicked her chin with his finger. She
threw herself, still grave, back from his touch, but they
remained thus a while closely confronted. " Well,"
she at last remarked, " I sha n t pity you."
" You make it, then, everyone except me ? "
" I mean," she continued, " if you do have to loathe
yourself."
" Oh, I sha n t miss it." And then as if to show how
little, " I did mean it, you know, at Richmond," he de
clared.
" I won t have you if you ve killed him," she present
ly returned.
362
THE PAPERS
" You ll decide in that case for the nine? " And as
the allusion, with its funny emphasis, left her blank:
" You want to wear all the trousers? "
" You deserve," she said, when light came, " that I
should take him." And she kept it up. " It s a lovely
flat."
Well, he could do as much. " Nine, I suppose, ap
peals to you as the number of the muses ? "
This short passage, remarkably, for all its irony,
brought them together again, to the extent at least of
leaving Maud s elbows on the table and of keeping
her friend, now a little back in his chair, firm while he
listened to her. So the girl came out. " I ve seen
Mrs. Chorner three times. I wrote that night, after
our talk at Richmond, asking her to oblige. And I put
on cheek as I had never, never put it. I said the public
would be so glad to hear from her * on the occasion of
her engagement.
" Do you call that cheek? " Bight looked amused.
" She at any rate rose straight."
" No, she rose crooked ; but she rose. What you had
told me there in the Park well, immediately hap
pened. She did consent to see me, and so far you had
been right in keeping me up to it. But what do you
think it was for ? "
To show you her flat, her tub, her petticoats ? "
" She doesn t live in a flat; she lives in a house of her
own, and a jolly good one, in Green Street, Park Lane ;
though I did, as happened, see her tub, which is a
dream all marble and silver, like a kind of a swagger
sarcophagus, a thing for the Wallace Collection; and
though her petticoats, as she first shows, seem all that,
if you wear petticoats yourself, you can look at.
There s no doubt of her money given her place and
her things, and given her appearance too, poor dear,
which would take some doing."
" She squints ? " Bight sympathetically asked.
363
THE BETTER SORT
" She s so ugly that she has to be rich she couldn t
afford it on less than five thousand a year. As it is,
I could well see, she can afford anything even such a
nose. But she s funny and decent; sharp, but a really
good sort. And they re not engaged."
" She told you so ? Then there you are ! "
" It all depends," Maud went on; " and you don t
know where I am at all. / know what it depends on."
Then there you are again ! It s a mine of gold."
" Possibly, but not in your sense. She wouldn t
give me the first word of an interview it wasn t for
that she received me. It was for something much bet
ter."
Well, Bight easily guessed. " For my job? "
" To see what can be done. She loathes his pub
licity."
The young man s face lighted. " She told you so? "
" She received me on purpose to tell me."
" Then why do you question my larks ? What
do you want more? "
" I want nothing with what I have : nothing, I
mean, but to help her. We made friends I like her.
And she likes me" said Maud Blandy.
" Like Mortimer Marshal, precisely."
" No, precisely not like Mortimer Marshal. I caught,
on the spot, her idea that was what took her. Her
idea is that I can help her help her to keep them quiet
about Beadel : for which purpose I seem to have struck
her as falling from the skies, just at the right moment,
into her lap."
Howard Bight followed, yet lingered by the way.
" To keep whom quiet ? "
" Why, the beastly Papers what we ve been talk
ing about. She wants him straight out of them
straight-"
She too ? " Bight wondered. " Then she s in ter
ror?
364
THE PAPERS
" No, not in terror or it wasn t that when I last saw
her. But in mortal disgust. She feels it has gone too
far which is what she wanted me, as an honest, decent,
likely young woman, up to my neck in it, as she sup
posed, to understand from her. My relation with her
is now that I do understand and that if an improvement
takes place I sha n t have been the worse for it. There
fore you see," Maud went on, " you simply cut my
throat when you prevent improvement."
" Well, my dear," her friend returned, " I won t let
you bleed to death." And he showed, with this, as
confessedly struck. " She doesn t then, you think,
know ?"
"Know what?"
" Why, what, about him, there may be to be known.
Doesn t know of his flight."
" She didn t certainly."
" Nor of anything to make it likely? "
" What you call his queer reason? No she named
it to me no more than you have ; though she does men
tion, distinctly, that he himself hates, or pretends to
hate, the exhibition daily made of him."
" She speaks of it," Bight asked, " as pretend
ing- -? r
Maud straightened it out. " She feels him that
she practically told me as rather ridiculous. She
honestly has her feeling ; and, upon my word, it s what
I like her for. Her stomach has turned and she has
made it her condition. Muzzle your Press, she
says ; then we ll talk. She gives him three months
she ll give him even six. And this, meanwhile when
he comes to you is how you forward the muzzling."
" The Press, my child," Bight said, " is the watch
dog of civilization, and the watchdog happens to be it
can t be helped in a chronic state of rabies. Muzzling
is easy talk; one can but keep the animal on the run.
Mrs. Chorner, however," he added, " seems a figure of
fable."
365
THE BETTER SORT
" It s what I told you she would have to be when,
some time back, you threw out, as a pure hypothesis, to
supply the man with a motive, your exact vision of her.
Your motive has come true," Maud went on " with
the difference only, if I understand you, that this doesn t
appear the whole of it. That doesn t matter " she
frankly paid him a tribute. " Your forecast was in
spiration."
" A stroke of genius " he had been the first to feel
it. But there were matters less clear. " When did
you see her last? "
" Four days ago. It was the third time."
" And even then she didn t imagine the truth about
him?"
" I don t know, you see," said Maud, " what you call
the truth."
" Well, that he quite by that time didn t know
where the deuce to turn. That s truth enough."
Maud made sure. " I don t see how she can have
known it and not have been upset. She wasn t," said
the girl, " upset. She isn t upset. But she s original."
" Well, poor thing," Bight remarked, " she ll have
to be?"
"Original?"
" Upset. Yes, and original too, if she doesn t give
up the job." It had held him an instant but there
were many things. " She sees the wild ass he is, and
yet she s willing ?"
Willing is just what I asked you three months
ago," Maud returned, " how she could be."
He had lost it he tried to remember. " What then
did I say?"
" Well, practically, that women are idiots. Also, I
believe, that he s a dazzling beauty."
" Ah yes, he is, poor wretch, though beauty to-day
in distress."
" Then there you are," said Maud. They had got
THE PAPERS
up, as at the end of their story, but they stood a mo
ment while he waited for change. " If it comes out,"
the girl dropped, " that will save him. If he s dishon
oured as I see her she ll have him, because then he
won t be ridiculous. And I can understand it."
Bight looked at her in such appreciation that he for
got, as he pocketed it, to glance at his change. " Oh,
you creatures ! "
"Idiots, aren t we?"
Bight let the question pass, but still with his eyes on
her. " You ought to want him to be dishonoured."
" I can t want him, then if he s to get the good of
it to be dead."
Still for a little he looked at her. "And if you re to
get the good ? " But she had turned away, and he went
with her to the door, before which, when they had
passed out, they had in the side-street, a backwater to
the flood of the Strand, a further sharp colloquy. They
were alone, the small street for a moment empty, and
they felt at first that they had adjourned to a greater
privacy, of which, for that matter, he took prompt ad
vantage. " You re to lunch again with the man of the
flat?"
" Wednesday, as I say; 1.45."
" Then oblige me by stopping away."
" You don t like it? " Maud asked.
" Oblige me, oblige me," he repeated.
" And disoblige him? "
" Chuck him. We ve started him. It s enough."
Well, the girl but wanted to be fair. " It s you who
started him; so I admit you re quits."
" That then started you made Brains repent ; so you
see what you both owe me. I let the creature off, but
I hold you to your debt. There s only one way for you
to meet it." And then as she but looked into the roar
ing Strand : " With worship." It made her, after a
minute, meet his eyes, but something just then occurred
367
THE BETTER SORT
that stayed any word on the lips of either. A sound
reached their ears, as yet unheeded, the sound of news
boys in the great thoroughfare shouting " extra-spe
cials " and mingling with the shout a catch that startled
them. The expression in their eyes quickened as they
heard, borne on the air, " Mysterious Disappearance
! " and then lost it in the hubbub. It was easy
to complete the cry, and Bight himself gasped. " Bea-
del-Muffet? Confound them ! "
" Already? " Maud had turned positively pale.
" They ve got it first be hanged to them ! "
Bight gave a laugh a tribute to their push but her
hand was on his arm for a sign to listen again. It was
there, in the raucous throats ; it was there, for a penny,
under the lamps and in the thick of the stream that
stared and passed and left it. They caught the whole
thing " Prominent Public Man ! " And there was
something brutal and sinister in the way it was given
to the flaring night, to the other competing sounds,
to the general hardness of hearing and sight which was
yet, on London pavements, compatible with an interest
sufficient for cynicism. He had been, poor Beadel,
public and prominent, but he had never affected Maud
Blandy at least as so marked with this character as
while thus loudly committed to extinction. It was
horrid it was tragic; yet her lament for him was dry.
" If he s gone I m dished."
" Oh, he s gone now," said Bight.
" I mean if he s dead."
" Well, perhaps he isn t. I see," Bight added, "what
you do mean. If he s dead you can t kill him."
" Oh, she wants him alive," said Maud.
" Otherwise she can t chuck him? "
To which the girl, however, anxious and wondering,
made no direct reply. " Good-bye to Mrs. Chorner.
And I owe it to you."
" Ah, my love ! " he vaguely appealed.
THE PAPERS
" Yes, it s you who have destroyed him, and it makes
up for what you ve done for me."
" I ve done it, you mean, against you ? I didn t
know," he said, " you d take it so hard."
Again, as he spoke, the cries sounded out : " Mys
terious Disappearance of Prominent Public Man ! " It
seemed to swell as they listened ; Maud started with im
patience. " I hate it too much," she said, and quitted
him to join the crowd.
He was quickly at her side, however, and before she
reached the Strand he had brought her again to a
pause. " Do you mean you hate it so much you won t
have me ? "
It had pulled her up short, and her answer was pro
portionately straight. " I won t have you if he s
dead."
" Then will you if he s not? "
At this she looked at him hard. " Do you know,
first?"
" No blessed if I do."
" On your honour ? "
" On my honour."
" Well," she said after an hesitation, " if she doesn t
drop me :
" It s an understood thing? " he pressed.
But again she hung fire. " Well, produce him first."
They stood there striking their bargain, and it was
made, by the long look they exchanged, a question of
good faith. " I ll produce him," said Howard Bight.
VI
IF it had not been a disaster, Beadel-Muffet s plunge
into the obscure, it would have been a huge success ; so
large a space did the prominent public man occupy, for
the next few days, in the Papers, so near did he come,
nearer certainly than ever before, to supplanting other
369
THE BETTER SORT
topics. The question of his whereabouts, of his ante
cedents, of his habits, of his possible motives, of his
probable, or improbable, embarrassments, fairly raged,
from day to day and from hour to hour, making the
Strand, for our two young friends, quite fiercely, quite
cruelly vociferous. They met again promptly, in the
thick of the uproar, and no other eyes could have
scanned the current rumours and remarks so eagerly as
Maud s unless it had been those of Maud s compan
ion. The rumours and remarks were mostly very
wonderful, and all of a nature to sharpen the excite
ment produced in the comrades by their being already,
as they felt, " in the know." Even for the girl this
sense existed, so that she could smile at wild surmises ;
she struck herself as knowing much more than she did,
especially as, with the alarm once given, she abstained,
delicately enough, from worrying, from catechising
Bight. She only looked at him as to say " See, while
the suspense lasts, how generously I spare you," and
her attitude was not affected by the interested promise
he had made her. She believed he knew more than he
said, though he had sworn as to what he didn t; she
saw him in short as holding some threads but having
lost others, and his state of mind, so far as she could
read it, represented in equal measure assurances unsup
ported and anxieties unconfessed. He would have
liked to pass for having, on cynical grounds, and for
the mere ironic beauty of it, believed that the hero of the
hour was only, as he had always been, " up to " some
thing from which he would emerge more than ever
glorious, or at least conspicuous; but, knowing the
gentleman was more than anything, more than all else,
asinine, he was not deprived of ground in which fear
could abundantly grow. If Beadel, in other words,
was ass enough, as was conceivable, to be working the
occasion, he was by the same token ass enough to have
lost control of it, to have committed some folly from
370
THE PAPERS
which even fools don t rebound. That was the spark
of suspicion lurking in the young man s ease, and that,
Maud knew, explained something else.
The family and friends had but too promptly been ap
proached, been besieged; yet Bight, in all the prompt
ness, had markedly withdrawn from the game had
had, one could easily judge, already too much to do
with it. Who but he, otherwise, would have been so
naturally let loose upon the forsaken home, the bewil
dered circle, the agitated club, the friend who had last
conversed with the eminent absentee, the waiter, in ex
clusive halls, who had served him with five o clock tea,
the porter, in august Pall Mall, who had called his last
cab, the cabman, supremely privileged, who had driven
him where ? " The Last Cab " would, as our young
woman reflected, have been a heading so after her
friend s own heart, and so consonant with his genius,
that it took all her discretion not to ask him how he had
resisted it. She didn t ask, she but herself noted the
title for future use she would have at least got that,
" The Last Cab," out of the business ; and, as the days
went by and the extra-specials swarmed, the situation
between them swelled with all the unspoken. Matters
that were grave depended on it for each and nothing
so much, for instance, as her seeing Mrs. Chorner again.
To see that lady as things had been had meant that the
poor woman might have been helped to believe in her.
Believing in her she would have paid her, and Maud,
disposed as she was, really had felt capable of earning
the pay. Whatever, as the case stood, was caused to
hang in the air, nothing dangled more free than the
profit derivable from muzzling the Press. With the
watchdog to whom Bight had compared it barking for
dear life, the moment was scarcely adapted for calling
afresh upon a person who had offered a reward for
silence. The only silence, as we say, was in the girl s
not mentioning to her friend how these embarrassments
THE BETTER SORT
affected her. Mrs. Chorner was a person she liked
a connection more to her taste than any she had pro
fessionally made, and the thought of her now on the
rack, tormented with suspense, might well have brought
to her lips a " See there what you ve done ! "
There was, for that matter, in Bight s face he
couldn t keep it out precisely the look of seeing it;
which was one of her reasons too for not insisting on
her wrong. If he couldn t conceal it this was a part
of the rest of the unspoken ; he didn t allude to the lady
lest it might be too sharply said to him that it was on
her account he should most blush. Last of all he was
hushed by the sense of what he had himself said when
the news first fell on their ears. His promise to " pro
duce " the fugitive was still in the air, but with every
day that passed the prospect turned less to redemption.
Therefore if her own promise, on a different head, de
pended on it, he was naturally not in a hurry to bring
the question to a test. So it was accordingly that they
but read the Papers and looked at each other. Maud
felt in truth that these organs had never been so worth
it, nor either she or her friend whatever the size of old
obligations so much beholden to them. They helped
them to wait, and the better, really, the longer the mys
tery lasted. It grew of course daily richer, adding to
its mass as it went and multiplying its features, loom
ing especially larger through the cloud of correspond
ence, communication, suggestion, supposition, specula
tion, with which it was presently suffused. Theories
and explanations sprouted at night and bloomed in the
morning, to be overtopped at noon by a still thicker crop
and to achieve by evening the density of a tropical for
est. These, again, were the green glades in which our
young friends wandered.
Under the impression of the first night s shock Maud
had written to Mortimer Marshal to excuse herself
from her engagement to luncheon a step of which
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THE PAPERS
she had promptly advised Bight as a sign of her playing
fair. He took it, she could see, for what it was worth,
but she could see also how little he now cared. He was
thinking of the man with whose strange agitation he
had so cleverly and recklessly played, and, in the face
of the catastrophe of which they were still so likely to
have news, the vanities of smaller fools, the conven
iences of first-class flats, the memory of Chippendale
teas, ceased to be actual or ceased at any rate to be im
portunate. Her old interview, furbished into fresh
ness, had appeared, on its Wednesday, in Brains, but
she had not received in person the renewed homage of
its author she had only, once more, had the vision of
his inordinate purchase and diffusion of the precious
number. It was a vision, however, at which neither
Bight nor she smiled; it was funny on so poor a
scale compared with their other show. But it be
fell that when this latter had, for ten days, kept being
funny to the tune that so lengthened their faces,
the poor gentleman glorified in Brains succeeded
in making it clear that he was not easily to be
dropped. He wanted now, evidently, as the girl
said to herself, to live at concert pitch, and she
gathered, from three or four notes, to which, at short
intervals, he treated her, that he was watching in
anxiety for reverberations not as yet perceptible. His
expectation of results from what our young couple had
done for him would, as always, have been a thing for
pity with a young couple less imbued with the comic
sense; though indeed it would also have been a comic
thing for a young couple less attentive to a different
drama. Disappointed of the girl s company at home,
the author of Corisanda had proposed fresh appoint
ments, which she had desired at the moment, and in
deed more each time, not to take up ; to the extent even
that, catching sight of him, unperceived, on one of these
occasions, in her inveterate Strand, she checked on the
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spot a first impulse to make herself apparent. He was
before her, in the crowd, and going the same way. He
had stopped a little to look at a shop, and it was then
that she swerved in time not to pass close to him. She
turned and reversed, conscious and convinced that he
was, as she mentally put it, on the prowl for her. She
herself, poor creature as she also mentally put it she
herself was shamelessly on the prowl, but it wasn t, for
her self-respect, to get herself puffed, it wasn t to pick
up a personal advantage. It was to pick up news of
Beadel-MufTet, to be near the extra-specials, and it was,
also as to this she was never blind to cultivate that
nearness by chances of Howard Bight. The blessing
of blindness, in truth, at this time, she scantily en
joyed being perfectly aware of the place occupied, in
her present attitude to that young man, by the simple
impossibility of not seeing him. She had done with
him, certainly, if he had killed Beadel, and nothing was
now growing so fast as the presumption in favour of
some catastrophe, yet shockingly to be revealed, en
acted somewhere in desperate darkness though prob
ably " on lines," as the Papers said, anticipated by none
of the theorists in their own columns, any more than
by clever people at the clubs, where the betting was so
heavy. She had done with him, indubitably, but she
had not it was equally unmistakeable done with let
ting him see how thoroughly she would have done ; or,
to feel about it otherwise, she was laying up treasure
in time as against the privations of the future. She
was affected moreover perhaps but half-consciously
by another consideration; her attitude to Mortimer
Marshal had turned a little to fright; she wondered,
uneasily, at impressions she might have given him;
and she had it, finally, on her mind that, whether or no
the vain man believed in them, there must be a limit to
the belief she had communicated to her friend. He
was her friend, after all whatever should happen ; and
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there were things that, even in that hampered charac
ter, she couldn t allow him to suppose. It was a queer
business now, in fact, for her to ask herself if she,
Maud Blandy, had produced on any sane human sense
an effect of flirtation.
She saw herself in this possibility as in some gro
tesque reflector, a full-length looking-glass of the in
ferior quality that deforms and discolours. It made
her, as a flirt, a figure for frank derision, and she en
tertained, honest girl, none of the self-pity that would
have spared her a shade of this sharpened conscious
ness, have taken an inch from facial proportion where
it would have been missed with advantage, or added
one in such other quarters as would have welcomed the
gift. She might have counted the hairs of her head, for
any wish she could have achieved to remain vague
about them, just as she might have rehearsed, disheart
ened, postures of grace, for any dream she could com
pass of having ever accidentally struck one. Void, in
short, of a personal illusion, exempt with an exemption
which left her not less helplessly aware of where her
hats and skirts and shoes failed, than of where her nose
and mouth and complexion, and, above all, where her
poor figure, without a scrap of drawing, did, she
blushed to bethink herself that she might have affected
her young man as really bragging of a conquest. Her
other young man s pursuit of her, what was it but rank
greed not in the least for her person, but for the con
nection of which he had formed so preposterous a
view? She was ready now to say to herself that she
had swaggered to Bight for the joke odd indeed
though the wish to undeceive him at the moment when
he would have been more welcome than ever to think
what he liked. The only thing she wished him not to
think, as she believed, was that she thought Mortimer
Marshal thought her or anyone on earth thought her
intrinsically charming. She didn t want to put to
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THE BETTER SORT
him " Do you suppose I suppose that if it came to the
point ? " her reasons for such avoidance being eas
ily conceivable. He was not to suppose that, in any
such quarter, she struck herself as either casting a spell
or submitting to one ; only, while their crisis lasted, rec
tifications were scarce in order. She couldn t remind
him even, without a mistake, that she had but wished
to worry him ; because in the first place that suggested
again a pretension in her (so at variance with the
image in the mirror) to put forth arts suggested
possibly even that she used similar ones when she
lunched, in bristling flats, with the pushing; and be
cause in the second it would have seemed a sort of chal
lenge to him to renew his appeal.
Then, further and most of all, she had a doubt which
by itself would have made her wary, as it distinctly, in
her present suspended state, made her uncomfortable;
she was haunted by the after-sense of having perhaps
been fatuous. A spice of conviction, in respect to
what was open to her, an element of elation, in her talk
to Bight about Marshal, had there not, after all, been ?
Hadn t she a little liked to think the wretched man
could cling to her ? and hadn t she also a little, for her
self, filled out the future, in fancy, with the picture of
the droll relation? She had seen it as droll, evidently;
but had she seen it as impossible, unthinkable ? It had
become unthinkable now, and she was not wholly un
conscious of how the change had worked. Such work
ings were queer but there they were ; the foolish man
had become odious to her precisely because she was
hardening her face for Bight. The latter was no fool
ish man, but this it was that made it the more a pity he
should have placed the impassable between them. That
was what, as the days went on, she felt herself take in.
It was there, the impassable she couldn t lucidly have
said why, couldn t have explained the thing on the real
scale of the wrong her comrade had done. It was a
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wrong, it was a wrong she couldn t somehow get out
of that; which was a proof, no doubt, that she con
fusedly tried. The author of Corisanda was sacrificed
in the effort for ourselves it may come to that. Great
to poor Maud Blandy as well, for that matter, great,
yet also attaching, were the obscurity and ambiguity in
which some impulses lived and moved the rich gloom
of their combinations, contradictions, inconsistencies,
surprises. It rested her verily a little from her straight-
ness the line of a character, she felt, markedly like the
line of the Edgware Road and of Maida Vale that she
could be queerly inconsistent, and inconsistent in the
hustling Strand, where, if anywhere, you had, under
pain of hoofs and wheels, to decide whether or no you
would cross. She had moments, before shop-windows,
into which she looked without seeing, when all the un-
uttered came over her. She had once told her friend
that she pitied everyone, and at these moments, in sharp
unrest, she pitied Bight for their tension, in which
nothing was relaxed.
It was all too mixed and too strange each of them
in a different corner with a different impossibility.
There was her own, in far Kilburnia; and there was
her friend s, everywhere for where didn t he go ? and
there was Mrs. Chorner s, on the very edge of Park
" Line," in spite of all petticoats and marble baths ;
and there was Beadel-Muffet s, the wretched man, God
only knew where which was what made the whole
show supremely incoherent : he ready to give his head,
if, as seemed so unlikely, he still had a head, to steal
into cover and keep under, out of the glare ; he having
scoured Europe, it might so well be guessed, for some
hole in which the Papers wouldn t find him out, and
then having what else was there by this time to pre
sume ? died, in the hole, as the only way not to see, to
hear, to know, let alone be known, heard, seen. Final
ly, while he lay there relieved by the only relief, here
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was poor Mortimer Marshal, undeterred, undismayed,
unperceiving, so hungry to be paragraphed in some
thing like the same fashion and published on something
like the same scale, that, for the very blindness of it,
he couldn t read the lesson that was in the air, and
scrambled, to his utmost, toward the boat itself that
ferried the warning ghost. Just that, beyond every
thing, was the incoherence that made for rather dismal
farce, and on which Bight had put his ringer in naming
the author of Corisanda as a candidate, in turn, for the
comic, the tragic vacancy. It was a wonderful mo
ment for such an ideal, and the sight was not really to
pass from her till she had seen the whole of the won
der. A fortnight had elapsed since the night of Bead-
el s disappearance, and the conditions attending the af
ternoon performances of the Finnish drama had in some
degree reproduced themselves to the extent, that is,
of the place, the time and several of the actors in
volved; the audience, for reasons traceable, being dif
ferently composed. A lady of " high social position,"
desirous still further to elevate that character by the ob
vious aid of the theatre, had engaged a playhouse for a
series of occasions on which she was to affront in per
son whatever volume of attention she might succeed
in collecting. Her success had not immediately been
great, and by the third or the fourth day the public con
sciousness was so markedly astray that the means taken
to recover it penetrated, in the shape of a complimentary
ticket, even to our young woman. Maud had com
municated with Bight, who could be sure of a ticket,
proposing to him that they should go together and of
fering to await him in the porch of the theatre. He
joined her there, but with so queer a face for her
subtlety that she paused before him, previous to their
going in, with a straight " You know something ! "
"About that rank idiot? " He shook his head, look
ing kind enough ; but it didn t make him, she felt, more
natural. " My dear, it s all beyond me."
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" I mean/ she said with a shade of uncertainty,
" about poor dear Beadel."
" So do I. So does everyone. No one now, at any
moment, means anything about anyone else. But I ve
lost intellectual control of the extraordinary case. I
flattered myself I still had a certain amount. But the
situation at last escapes me. I break down. Non
comprenny? I give it up."
She continued to look at him hard. " Then what s
the matter with you ? "
" Why, just that, probably that I feel like a clever
man done, and that your tone with me adds to the
feeling. Or, putting it otherwise, it s perhaps only
just one of the ways in which I m so interesting; that,
with the life we lead and the age we live in, there s
always something the matter with me there can t help
being : some rage, some disgust, some fresh amazement
against which one hasn t, for all one s experience, been
proof. That sense of having been sold again pro
duces emotions that may well, on occasion, be reflected
in the countenance. There you are."
Well, he might say that, " There you are," as often
as he liked without, at the pass they had come to, mak
ing her in the least see where she was. She was only
just where she stood, a little apart in the lobby, listen
ing to his words, which she found eminently character
istic of him, struck with an odd impression of his talk
ing against time, and, most of all, tormented to recog
nise that she could fairly do nothing better, at such a
moment, than feel he was awfully nice. The moment
that of his most blandly (she would have said in the
case of another most impudently) failing, all round, to
satisfy her was appropriate only to some emotion
consonant with her dignity. It was all crowded and
covered, hustled and interrupted now ; but what really
happened in this brief passage, and with her finding no
words to reply to him, was that dignity quite appeared
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THE BETTER SORT
to collapse and drop from her, to sink to the floor, under
the feet of people visibly bristling with " paper," where
the young man s extravagant offer of an arm, to put an
end and help her in, had the effect of an invitation to
leave it lying to be trampled on.
Within, once seated, they kept their places through
two intervals, but at the end of the third act there
were to be no less than five they fell in with a move
ment that carried half the audience to the outer air.
Howard Bight desired to smoke, and Maud offered to
accompany him, for the purpose, to the portico, where,
somehow, for both of them, the sense was immediately
strong that this, the squalid Strand, damp yet incandes
cent, ugly yet eloquent, familiar yet fresh, was life,
palpable, ponderable, possible, much more than the
stuff, neither scenic nor cosmic, they had quitted. The
difference came to them, from the street, in a moist mild
blast, which they simply took in, at first, in a long
draught, as more amusing than their play, and which,
for the moment, kept them conscious of the voices of
the air as of something mixed and vague. The next
thing, of course, however, was that they heard the
hoarse newsmen, though with the special sense of the
sound not standing out which, so far as it did come,
made them exchange a look. There was no hawker
just then within call.
"What are they crying? "
" Blessed if I care ! " Bight said while he got his
light which he had but just done when they saw
themselves closely approached. The Papers had come
into sight in the form of a small boy bawling the
" Winner " of something, and at the same moment they
recognised their reprieve they recognised also the pres
ence of Mortimer Marshal.
He had no shame about it. " I fully believed I should
find you."
" But you haven t been," Bight asked, " inside? "
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" Not at to-day s performance I only just thought
I d pass. But at each of the others," Mortimer Mar
shal confessed.
" Oh, you re a devotee," said Bight, whose reception
of the poor man contended, for Maud s attention, with
this extravagance of the poor man s own importunity.
Their friend had sat through the piece three times on
the chance of her being there for one or other of the
acts, and if he had given that up in discouragement he
still hovered and waited. Who now, moreover, was to
say he wasn t rewarded? To find her companion as
well as at last to find herself gave the reward a charac
ter that it took, somehow, for her eye, the whole of
this misguided person s curiously large and flat, but
distinctly bland, sweet, solicitous countenance to ex
press. It came over the girl with horror that here was
a material object the incandescence, on the edge of
the street, didn t spare it which she had had perverse
moments of seeing fixed before her for life. She asked
herself, in this agitation, what she would have likened
it to; more than anything perhaps to a large clean
china plate, with a neat " pattern," suspended, to the
exposure of hapless heads, from the centre of the do
mestic ceiling. Truly she was, as by the education of
the strain undergone, learning something every hour
it seemed so to be the case that a strain enlarged the
mind, formed the taste, enriched, even, the imagination.
Yet in spite of this last fact, it must be added, she con
tinued rather mystified by the actual pitch of her com
rade s manner, Bight really behaving as if he enjoyed
their visitor s " note." He treated him so decently, as
they said, that he might suddenly have taken to liking
his company; which was an odd appearance till Maud
understood it whereupon it became for her a slightly
sinister one. For the effect of the honest gentleman,
she by that time saw, was to make her friend nervous
and vicious, and the form taken by his irritation was
381
THE BETTER SORT
just this dangerous candour, which encouraged the
candour of the victim. She had for the latter a resid
uum of pity, whereas Bight, she felt, had none, and
she didn t want him, the poor man, absolutely to pay
with his life.
It was clear, however, within a few minutes, that
this was what he was bent on doing, and she found her
self helpless before his smug insistence. She had taken
his measure; he was made incorrigibly to try, irre
deemably to fail to be, in short, eternally defeated and
eternally unaware. He wouldn t rage he couldn t,
for the citadel might, in that case, have been carried by
his assault; he would only spend his life in walking
round and round it, asking everyone he met how in
the name of goodness one did get in. And everyone
would make a fool of him though no one so much as
her companion now and everything would fall from
him but the perfection of his temper, of his tailor, of
his manners, of his mediocrity. He evidently rejoiced
at the happy chance which had presented him again to
Bight, and he lost as little time as possible in proposing,
the play ended, an adjournment again to tea. The
spirit of malice in her comrade, now inordinately ex
cited, met this suggestion with an amendment that fair
ly made her anxious; Bight threw out, in a word, the
idea that he himself surely, this time, should entertain
Mr. Marshal.
" Only I m afraid I can take you but to a small pot
house that we poor journalists haunt."
" They re just the places I delight in it would be
of an extraordinary interest. I sometimes venture
into them feeling awfully strange and wondering, I
do assure you, who people are. But to go there with
you / " And he looked from Bight to Maud and
from Maud back again with such abysses of apprecia
tion that she knew him as lost indeed.
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VII
IT was demonic of Bight, who immediately answered
that he would tell him with pleasure who everyone was,
and she felt this the more when her friend, making light
of the rest of the entertainment they had quitted, ad
vised their sacrificing it and proceeding to the other
scene. He was really too eager for his victim she
wondered what he wanted to do with him. He could
only play him at the most a practical joke invent ap
petising identities, once they were at table, for the dull
consumers around. No one, at the place they most
frequented, had an identity in the least appetising, no
one was anyone or anything. It was apparently of the
essence of existence on such terms the terms, at any
rate, to which she was reduced that people comprised
in it couldn t even minister to each other s curiosity,
let alone to envy or awe. She would have wished
therefore, for their pursuer, to intervene a little, to warn
him against beguilement ; but they had moved together
along the Strand and then out of it, up a near cross
street, without her opening her mouth. Bight, as she
felt, was acting to prevent this; his easy talk re
doubled, and he led his lamb to the shambles. The talk
had jumped to poor Beadel her friend had startled her
by causing it, almost with violence, at a given moment,
to take that direction, and he thus quite sufficiently
stayed her speech. The people she lived with mightn t
make you curious, but there was of course always a
sharp exception for him. She kept still, in fine, with
the wonder of what he wanted; though indeed she
might, in the presence of their guest s response, have
felt he was already getting it. He was getting, that is
and she was, into the bargain the fullest illustration
of the ravage of a passion ; so sublimely Marshal rose
to the proposition, infernally thrown off, that, in what-
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THE BETTER SORT
ever queer box or tight place Beadel might have found
himself, it was something, after all, to have so power
fully interested the public. The insidious artless way
in which Bight made his point ! " I don t know that
I ve ever known the public (and I watch it, as in my
trade we have to, day and night) so consummately in
terested." They had that phenomenon the present
consummate interest well before them while they sat
at their homely meal, served with accessories so differ
ent from those of the sweet Chippendale (another
chord on which the young man played with just the
right effect!) and it would have been hard to say if the
guest were, for the first moments, more under the spell
of the marvellous " hold " on the town achieved by the
great absentee, or of that of the delicious coarse table
cloth, the extraordinary form of the saltcellars, and the
fact that he had within range of sight, at the other end
of the room, in the person of the little quiet man with
blue spectacles and an obvious wig, the greatest author
ity in London about the inner life of the criminal
classes. Beadel, none the less, came up again and
stayed up would clearly so have been kept up, had
there been need, by their host, that the girl couldn t at
last fail to see how much it was for herself that his in
tention worked. What was it, all the same since it
couldn t be anything so simple as to expose their hap
less visitor? What had she to learn about him?
especially at the hour of seeing what there was still to
learn about Bight. She ended by deciding for his
appearance bore her out that his explosion was but
the form taken by an inward fever. The fever, on this
theory, was the result of the final pang of responsibility.
The mystery of Beadel had grown too dark to be borne
which they would presently feel; and he was mean
while in the phase of bluffing it off, precisely because it
was to overwhelm him.
"And do you mean you too would pay with your
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life? " He put the question, agreeably, across the
table to his guest; agreeably of course in spite of his
eye s dry glitter.
His guest s expression, at this, fairly became beauti
ful. "Well, it s an awfully nice point. Certainly one
would like to feel the great murmur surrounding one s
name, to be there, more or less, so as not to lose the
sense of it, and as I really think, you know, the pleas
ure; the great city, the great empire, the world itself
for the moment, hanging literally on one s personality
and giving a start, in its suspense, whenever one is men
tioned. Big sensation, you know, that," Mr. Marshal
pleadingly smiled, "and of course if one were dead one
wouldn t enjoy it. One would have to come to life for
that."
"Naturally," Bight rejoined "only that s what
the dead don t do. You can t eat your cake and have
it. The question is," he goodnaturedly explained,
"whether you d be willing, for the certitude of the
great murmur you speak of, to part with your life
under circumstances of extraordinary mystery."
His guest earnestly fixed it. "Whether / would be
willing?"
"Mr. Marshall wonders," Maud said to Bight, "if
you are, as a person interested in his reputation, defi
nitely proposing to him some such possibility."
He looked at her, on this, with mild, round eyes,
and she felt, wonderfully, that he didn t quite see her
as joking. He smiled he always smiled, but his
anxiety showed, and he turned it again to their com
panion. "You mean a the knowing how it might
be going to be felt?"
"Well, yes call it that. The consciousness of what
one s unexplained extinction given, to start with,
one s high position would mean, wouldn t be able to
help meaning, for millions and millions of people. The
point is and I admit it s, as you call it, a nice one
385
THE BETTER SORT
if you can think of the impression so made as worth
the purchase. Naturally, naturally, there s but the im
pression you make. You don t receive any. You
can t. You ve only your confidence so far as that s
an impression. Oh, it is indeed a nice point; and I
only put it to you," Bight wound up, "because, you
know, you do like to be recognised."
Mr. Marshal was bewildered, but he was not so be
wildered as not to be able, a trifle coyly, but still quite
bravely, to confess to that. Maud, with her eyes on her
friend, found herself thinking of him as of some plump,
innocent animal, more or less of the pink-eyed rabbit
or sleek guinea-pig order, involved in the slow spell of
a serpent of shining scales. Bight s scales, truly, had
never so shone as this evening, and he used to admira
tion which was just a part of the lustre the right
shade of gravity. He was neither so light as to fail
of the air of an attractive offer, nor yet so earnest as to
betray a jibe. He might conceivably have been, as an
undertaker of improvements in defective notorieties,
placing before his guest a practical scheme. It was
really quite as if he were ready to guarantee the " mur
mur " if Mr. Marshal was ready to pay the price. And
the price wouldn t of course be only Mr. Marshal s ex
istence. All this, at least, if Mr. Marshal felt moved
to take it so. The prodigious thing, next, was that
Mr. Marshal was so moved though, clearly, as was to
be expected, with important qualifications. " Do you
really mean," he asked, " that one would excite this
delightful interest? "
" You allude to the charged state of the air on the
subject of Beadel? " Bight considered, looking vol
umes. " It would depend a good deal upon who one
."
He turned, Mr. Marshal, again to Maud Blandy,
and his eyes seemed to suggest to her that she should
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THE PAPERS
put his question for him. They forgave her, she
judged, for having so oddly forsaken him, but they ap
pealed to her now not to leave him to struggle alone.
Her own difficulty was, however, meanwhile, that she
feared to serve him as he suggested without too much,
by way of return, turning his case to the comic;
whereby she only looked at him hard and let him re
vert to their friend. " Oh," he said, with a rich wistful-
ness from which the comic was not absent, " of course
everyone can t pretend to be Beadel."
" Perfectly. But we re speaking, after all, of those
who do count."
There was quite a hush, for the minute, while the
poor man faltered. " Should you say that / in any
appreciable way count? "
Howard Bight distilled honey. " Isn t it a little a
question of how much we should find you did, or, for
that matter, might, as it were, be made to, in the event
of a real catastrophe? "
Mr. Marshal turned pale, yet he met it too with
sweetness. " I like the way " and he had a glance for
Maud " you talk of catastrophes ! "
His host did the comment justice. " Oh, it s only
because, you see, we re so peculiarly in the presence
of one. Beadel shows so tremendously what a catas
trophe does for the right person. His absence, you
may say, doubles, quintuples, his presence."
" I see, I see ! " Mr. Marshal was all there. "It s
awfully interesting to be so present. And yet it s
rather dreadful to be so absent." It had set him fairly
musing; for couldn t the opposites be reconciled?
" If he w," he threw out, " absent ! "
" Why, he s absent, of course," said Bight, " if he s
dead."
" And really dead is what you believe him to be? "
He breathed it with a strange break, as from a mind
387
THE BETTER SORT
too full. It was on the one hand a grim vision for his
own case, but was on the other a kind of clearance of
the field. With Beadel out of the way his own case
could live, and he was obviously thinking what it might
be to be as dead as that and yet as much alive. What
his demand first did, at any rate, was to make Howard
Bight look straight at Maud. Her own look met
him, but she asked nothing now. She felt him some
how fathomless, and his practice with their infatuated
guest created a new suspense. He might indeed have
been looking at her to learn how to reply, but even
were this the case she had still nothing to answer. So
in a moment he had spoken without her. " I ve quite
given him up."
It sank into Marshal, after which it produced some
thing. " He ought then to come back. I mean," he
explained, " to see for himself to have the impres
sion."
"Of the noise he has made? Yes "Bight
weighed it " that would be the ideal."
" And it would, if one must call it noise, " Marshal
limpidly pursued, " make a more."
" Oh, but if you can t! "
" Can t, you mean, through having already made
so much, add to the quantity? "
" Can t " Bight was a wee bit sharp " come
back, confound it, at all. Can t return from the dead ! "
Poor Marshal had to take it. " No not if you
are dead."
" Well, that s what we re talking about."
Maud, at this, for pity, held out a perch. " Mr.
Marshal, I think, is talking a little on the basis of the
possibility of your not being ! " He threw her an in
stant glance of gratitude, and it gave her a push. "So
long as you re not quite too utterly, you can come
back."
" Oh," said Bight, " in time for the fuss? "
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" Before "Marshal met it" the interest has sub
sided. It naturally then wouldn t would it? sub
side ! "
" No," Bight granted; " not if it hadn t, through
wearing out I mean your being lost too long al
ready died out."
" Oh, of course," his guest agreed, " you mustn t
be lost too long." A vista had plainly opened to him,
and the subject led him on. He had, before its extent,
another pause. "About how long, do you think ? "
Well, Bight had to think. " I should say Beadel
had rather overdone it."
The poor gentleman stared. " But if he can t help
himself ? "
Bight gave a laugh. " Yes; but in case he could."
Maud again intervened, and, as her question was for
their host, Marshal was all attention. "Do you con
sider Beadel has overdone it? "
Well, once more, it took consideration. The issue
of Bight s, however, was not of the clearest. " I don t
think we can tell unless he were to. I don t think that,
without seeing it, and judging by the special case, one
can quite know how it would be taken. He might,
on the one side, have spoiled, so to speak, his market;
and he might, on the other, have scored as never be
fore."
" It might be," Maud threw in, " just the making
of him."
" Surely " Marshal glowed " there s just that
chance."
" What a pity then," Bight laughed, " that there
isn t some one to take it ! For the light it would throw,
I mean, on the laws so mysterious, so curious, so in
teresting that govern the great currents of public at
tention. They re not wholly whimsical wayward and
wild; they have their strange logic, their obscure rea
son if one could only get at it ! The man who does,
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THE BETTER SORT
you see and who can keep his discovery to himself !
will make his everlasting fortune, as well, no doubt, as
that of a few others. It s our branch, our preoccupa
tion, in fact, Miss Blandy s and mine this pursuit of
the incalculable, this study, to that end, of the great
forces of publicity. Only, of course, it must be re
membered," Bight went on, " that in the case we re
speaking of the man disappearing as Beadel has now
disappeared, and supplanting for the time every other
topic must have someone on the spot for him, to
keep the pot boiling, someone acting, with real intelli
gence, in his interest. I mean if he s to get the good
of it when he does turn up. It would never do, you
see, that that should be flat !"
" Oh no, not Hat, never ! " Marshal quailed at the
thought. Held as in a vise by his host s high lucidity,
he exhaled his interest at every pore. " It wouldn t
be flat for Beadel, would it? I mean if he were to
come."
" Not much ! It wouldn t be flat for Beadel I
think I can undertake." And Bight undertook so well
that he threw himself back in his chair with his thumbs
in the armholes of his waistcoat and his head very much
up. "The only thing is that for poor Beadel it s a
luxury, so to speak, wasted and so dreadfully, upon
my word, that one quite regrets there s no one to step
in."
" To step in? " His visitor hung upon his lips.
" To do the thing better, so to speak to do it right:
to having raised the whirlwind really ride the storm.
To seize the psychological hour."
Marshal met it, yet he wondered. " You speak of
the reappearance? I see. But the man of the reap
pearance would have, wouldn t he? or perhaps I don t
follow? to be the same as the man of the cfoyappear-
ance. It wouldn t do as well would it? for some
body else to turn up? "
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Bight considered him with attention as if there
were fine possibilities. " No; unless such a person
should turn up, say well, with news of him."
" But what news?"
" With lights the more lurid the better on the
darkness. With the facts, don t you see, of the disap
pearance."
Marshal, on his side, threw himself back. " But
he d have to know them ! "
" Oh," said Bight, with prompt portentousness,
" that could be managed."
It was too much, by this time, for his victim, who
simply turned on Maud a dilated eye and a flushed
cheek. " Mr. Marshal," it made her say " Mr. Mar
shal would like to turn up."
Her hand was on the table, and the effect of her
words, combined with this, was to cause him, before re
sponsive speech could come, to cover it respectfully
but expressively with his own. " Do you mean," he
panted to Bight, " that you have, amid the general col
lapse of speculation, facts to give? "
" I ve always facts to give."
It begot in the poor man a large hot smile. " But
how shall I say? authentic, or as I believe you
clever people say, inspired ones? "
"If I should undertake such a case as we re sup
posing, I would of course by that circumstance under
take that my facts should be well, worthy of it. I
would take," Bight on his own part modestly smiled,
" pains with them."
It finished the business. "Would you take pains for
me? "
Bight looked at him now hard. " Would you like
to appear? "
" Oh, appear ! " Marshal weakly murmured.
" Is it, Mr. Marshal, a real proposal? I mean are
you prepared ? "
THE BETTER SORT
Wonderment sat in his eyes an anguish of doubt
and desire. " But wouldn t you prepare me ? "
" Would you prepare me that s the point," Bight
laughed " to prepare you? "
There was a minute s mutual gaze, but Marshal took
it in. " I don t know what you re making me say; I
1 don t know what you re making me feel. When one is
with people so up in these things " and he turned
to his companions, alternately, a look as of conscious
doom lighted with suspicion, a look that was like a cry
for mercy " one feels a little as if one ought to be
saved from one s self. For I dare say one s foolish
enough with one s poor little wish "
" The little wish, my dear sir " Bight took him
up " to stand out in the world ! Your wish is the
wish of all high spirits."
" It s dear of you to say it." Mr. Marshal was all re
sponse. " I shouldn t want, even if it were weak or
vain, to have lived wholly unknown. And if what you
ask is whether I understand you to speak, as it were,
professionally "
You do understand me? " Bight pushed back his
chair.
" Oh, but so well ! when I ve already seen what
you can do. I need scarcely say, that having seen it,
I sha n t bargain."
"Ah, then, / shall," Bight smiled. " I mean with
the Papers. It must be half profits."
" Profits ? " His guest was vague.
" Our friend," Maud explained to Bight, " simply
wants the position."
Bight threw her a look. " Ah, he must take what I
give him."
"But what you give me," their friend handsomely
contended, "is the position."
" Yes; but the terms that I shall get! I don t pro
duce you, of course," Bight went on, " till I ve pre-
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pared you. But when I do produce you it will be as a
value/
" You ll get so much for me? " the poor gentleman
quavered.
" I shall be able to get, I think, anything I ask. So
we divide." And Bight jumped up.
Marshal did the same, and, while, with his hands on
the back of his chair, he steadied himself from the ver
tiginous view, they faced each other across the table.
" Oh, it s too wonderful ! "
"You re not afraid?"
He looked at a card on the wall, framed, suspended
and marked with the word " Soups." He looked at
Maud, who had not moved. " I don t know; I may
be; I must feel. What I should fear," he added, " would
be his coming back."
"Beadel s? Yes, that would dish you. But since
he can t !"
" I place myself," said Mortimer Marshal, " in your
hands."
Maud Blandy still hadn t moved; she stared before
her at the cloth. A small sharp sound, unheard, she
saw, by the others, had reached her from the street,
and with her mind instinctively catching at it, she
waited, dissimulating a little, for its repetition or its
effect. It was the howl of the Strand, it was news of
the absent, and it would have a bearing. She had a
hesitation, for she winced even now with the sense of
Marshal s intensest look at her. He couldn t be saved
from himself, but he might be, still, from Bight;
though it hung of course, her chance to warn him, on
what the news would be. She thought with con
centration, while her friends unhooked their overcoats,
and by the time these garments were donned she was
on her feet. Then she spoke. " I don t want you to
be dished.
He allowed for her alarm. " But how can I be? "
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THE BETTER SORT
" Something has come."
" Something ? " The men had both spoken.
They had stopped where they stood; she again
caught the sound. " Listen ! They re crying."
They waited then, and it came came, of a sudden,
with a burst and as if passing the place. A hawker,
outside, with his " extra," called by some one and
hurrying, bawled it as he moved. " Death of Beadel-
Muffet Extraordinary News ! "
They all gasped, and Maud, with her eyes on Bight,
saw him, to her satisfaction at first, turn pale. But his
guest drank it in. " If it s true then " Marshal tri
umphed at her "I m not dished."
But she only looked hard at Bight, who struck her
as having, at the sound, fallen to pieces, and as having
above all, on the instant, turned cold for his worried
game. " Is it true? " she austerely asked.
His white face answ r ered. " It s true."
VIII
THE first thing, on the part of our friends after each
interlocutor, producing a penny, had plunged into
the unfolded " Latest " was this very evidence of
their dispensing with their companion s further attend
ance on their agitated state, and all the more that Bight
was to have still, in spite of agitation, his function with
him to accomplish: a result much assisted by the in
sufflation of wind into Mr. Marshal s sails constituted
by the fact before them. With Beadel publicly dead
this gentleman s opportunity, on the terms just ar
ranged, opened out; it was quite as if they had seen
him, then and there, step, with a kind of spiritual
splash, into the empty seat of the boat so launched,
scarcely even taking time to master the essentials be
fore he gave himself to the breeze. The essentials in
deed he was, by their understanding, to receive in full
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from Bight at their earliest leisure; but nothing could
so vividly have marked his confidence in the young
man as the promptness with which he appeared now
ready to leave him to his inspiration. The news, more
over, as yet, was the rich, grim fact a sharp flare from
an Agency, lighting into blood-colour the locked
room, finally, with the police present, forced open, of
the first hotel at Frankfort-on-the-Oder; but there was
enough of it, clearly, to bear scrutiny, the scrutiny
represented in our young couple by the act of perusal
prolonged, intensified, repeated, so repeated that it was
exactly perhaps with this suggestion of doubt that
poor Mr. Marshal had even also a little lost patience.
He vanished, at any rate, while his supporters, still
planted in the side-street into which they had lately
issued, stood extinguished, as to any facial com
munion, behind the array of printed columns. It was
only after he had gone that, whether aware or not, the
others lowered, on either side, the absorbing page and
knew that their eyes had met. A remarkable thing,
for Maud Blandy, then happened, a thing quite as re
markable at least as poor Beadel s suicide, which we re
call her having so considerably discounted.
Present as they thus were at the tragedy, present in
far Frankfort just where they stood, by the door of
their stale pothouse and in the thick of London air,
the logic of her situation, she was sharply conscious,
would have been an immediate rupture with Bight.
He was scared at what he had done he looked his
scare so straight out at her that she might almost have
seen in it the dismay of his question of how far his re
sponsibility, given the facts, might, if pried into, be
held and not only at the judgment-seat of mere mor
als to reach. The dismay was to that degree il
luminating that she had had from him no such avowal
of responsibility as this amounted to, and the limit to
any laxity on her own side had therefore not been set
395
THE BETTER SORT
for her with any such sharpness. It put her at last in
the right, his scare quite richly in the right; and as
that was naturally but where she had waited to find
herself everything that now silently passed between
them had the merit, if it had none other, of simplifying.
Their hour had struck, the hour after which she was
definitely not to have forgiven him. Yet what oc
curred, as I say, was that, if, at the end of five minutes,
she had moved much further, it proved to be, in spite
of logic, not in the sense away from him, but in the
sense nearer. He showed to her, at these strange mo
ments, as blood-stained and literally hunted; the yell
of the hawkers, repeated and echoing round them, was
like a cry for his life; and there was in particular a
minute during which, gazing down into the roused
Strand, all equipped both with mob and with con
stables, she asked herself whether she had best get off
with him through the crowd, where they would be least
noticed, or get him away through quiet Covent Gar
den, empty at that hour, but with policemen to watch
a furtive couple, and with the news, more bawled at
their heels in the stillness, acquiring the sound of the
very voice of justice. It was this last sudden terror
that presently determined her, and determined with
it an impulse of protection that had somehow to do
with pity without having to do with tenderness. It
settled, at all events, the question of leaving him; she
couldn t leave him there and so; she must see at least
what would have come of his own sense of the shock.
The way he took it, the shock, gave her afresh the
measure of how perversely he had played with Marshal
of how he had tried so, on the very edge of his pre
dicament, to cheat his fears and beguile his want of
ease. He had insisted to his victim on the truth he
had now to reckon with, but had insisted only because
he didn t believe it. Beadel, by that attitude, was but
lying low; so that he would have no promise really tq
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redeem. At present he had one, indeed, and Maud
could ask herself if the redemption of it, with the lead
ing of their wretched friend a further fantastic dance,
would be what he depended on to drug the pain of re
morse. By the time she had covered as much ground
as this, however, she had also, standing before him,
taken his special out of his hand and, folding it up
carefully with her own and smoothing it down, packed
the two together into such a small tight ball as she
might toss to a distance without the air, which she
dreaded, of having, by any looser proceeding, dis
owned or evaded the news. Howard Bight, help-less
and passive, putting on the matter no governed face,
let her do with him as she liked, let her, for the first
time in their acquaintance, draw his hand into her arm
as if he were an invalid or as if she were a snare. She
took with him, thus guided and sustained, their second
plunge; led him, with decision, straight to where their
shock was shared and amplified, pushed her way,
guarding him, across the dense thoroughfare and
through the great westward current which fairly
seemed to meet and challenge them, and then, by
reaching Waterloo Bridge with him and descending
the granite steps, set him down at last on the Embank
ment. It was a fact, none the less, that she had in her
eyes, all the while, and too strangely for speech, the
vision of the scene in the little German city: the
smashed door, the exposed horror, the wondering, in
sensible group, the English gentleman, in the dis
ordered room, driven to bay among the scattered per
sonal objects that only too floridly announced and em
blazoned him, and several of which the Papers were al
ready naming the poor English gentleman, hunted
and hiding, done to death by the thing he yet, for so
long, always would have, and stretched on the floor
with his beautiful little revolver still in his hand and
the effusion of his blood, from a wound taken, with
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THE BETTER SORT
rare resolution, full in the face, extraordinary and
dreadful.
She went on with her friend, eastward and beside the
river, and it was as if they both, for that matter, had, in
their silence, the dire material vision. Maud Blandy,
however, presently stopped short one of the connec
tions of the picture so brought her to a stand. It
had come over her, with a force she couldn t check,
that the catastrophe itself would have been, with all
the unfathomed that yet clung to it, just the thing for
her companion s professional hand; so that, queerly but
absolutely, while she looked at him again in reproba
tion and pity, it was as much as she could do not to feel
it for him as something missed, not to wish he might
have been there to snatch his chance, and not, above
all, to betray to him this reflection. It had really risen
to her lips "Why aren t you, old man, on the spot? "
and indeed the question, had it broken forth, might
well have sounded as a provocation to him to start
without delay. Such was the effect, in poor Maud,
for the moment, of the habit, so confirmed in her, of
seeing time marked only by the dial of the Papers.
She had admired in Bight the true journalist that she
herself was so clearly not though it was also not what
she had most admired in him; and she might have felt,
at this instant, the charm of putting true journalism to
the proof. She might have been on the point of say
ing : " Real business, you know, would be for you to
start now, just as you are, before anyone else, sure as
you can so easily be of having the pull"; and she
might, after a moment, while they paused, have been
looking back, through the river-mist, for a sign of the
hour, at the blurred face of Big Ben. That she grazed
this danger yet avoided it was partly the result in truth
of her seeing for herself quickly enough that the last
thing Bight could just then have thought of, even un
der provocation of the most positive order, was the
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chance thus failing him, or the train, the boat, the ad
vantage, that the true journalist wouldn t have missed.
He quite, under her eyes, while they stood together,
ceased to be the true journalist; she saw him, as she
felt, put off the character as definitely as she might
have seen him remove his coat, his hat, or the con
tents of his pockets, in order to lay them on the para
pet before jumping into the river. Wonderful was
the difference that this transformation, marked by no
word and supported by no sign, made in the man she
had hitherto known. Nothing, again, could have so
expressed for her his continued inward dismay. It
was as if, for that matter, she couldn t have asked him
a question without adding to it; and she didn t wish to
add to it, since she was by this time more fully aware
that she wished to be generous. When she at last
uttered other words it was precisely so that she
mightn t press him.
" I think of her poor thing : that s what it makes
me do. I think of her there at this moment just out
of the Line with this stuff shrieked at her win
dows." With which, having so at once contained and
relieved herself, she caused him to walk on.
" Are you talking of Mrs. Chorner? " he after a
moment asked. And then, when he had had her quick
" Of course of who else? " he said what she didn t
expect. " Naturally one thinks of her. But she has
herself to blame. I mean she drove him " What
he meant, however, Bight suddenly dropped, taken as
he was with another idea, which had brought them the
next minute to a halt. " Mightn t you, by the way,
see her?"
"See her now ?"
" Now or never for the good of it. Now s just
your time."
" But how can it be hers, in the very midst ? "
" Because it s in the very midst. She ll tell you
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THE BETTER SORT
things to-night that she ll never tell again. To-night
she ll be great."
Maud gaped almost wildly. " You want me, at
such an hour, to call ? "
" And send up your card with the word oh, of
course the right one ! on it."
" What do you suggest," Maud asked, " as the right
one?"
" Well, The world wants you that usually does.
I ve seldom known it, even in deeper distress than is,
after all, here supposable, to fail. Try it, at any rate."
The girl, strangely touched, intensely wondered.
" Demand of her, you mean, to let me explain for
her? "
"There you are. You catch on. Write that if you
like Let me explain. She ll want to explain."
Maud wondered at him more he had somehow so
turned the tables on her. " But she doesn t. It s ex
actly what she doesn t; she never has. And that he,
poor wretch, was always wanting to "
" Was precisely what made her hold off? I grant
it." He had waked up. " But that was before she
had killed him. Trust me, she ll chatter now."
This, for his companion, simply forced it out. " It
wasn t she who killed him. That, my dear, you
know."
" You mean it was I who did? Well then, my child,
interview m-e" And, with his hands in his pockets and
his idea apparently genuine, he smiled at her, by the
grey river and under the high lamps, with an effect
strange and suggestive. " Thai would be a go ! "
" You mean " she jumped at it " you ll tell me
what you know? "
" Yes, and even what I ve done ! But if you ll
take it so for the Papers. Oh, for the Papers only ! "
She stared. " You mean you want me to get it
in ? "
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THE PAPERS
" I don t want you to do anything, but I m ready
to help you, ready to get it in for you, like a shot, my
self, if it s a thing you yourself want."
" A thing I want to give you away? "
" Oh," he laughed, " I m just now worth giving !
You d really do it, you know. And, to help you, here
I am. It would be for you only judge ! a leg up."
It would indeed, she really saw; somehow, on the
spot, she believed it. But his surrender made her
tremble. It wasn t a joke she could give him away;
or rather she could sell him for money. Money, thus,
was what he offered her, or the value of money, which
was the same; it was what he wanted her to have. She
was conscious already, however, that she could have it
only as he offered it, and she said therefore, but half
heartedly, " I ll keep your secret."
He looked at her more gravely. "Ah, as a secret I
can t give it." Then he hesitated. "I ll get you a
hundred pounds for it."
" Why don t you," she asked, " get them for your
self? "
" Because I don t care for myself. I care only for
you."
She waited again. " You mean for my taking you? "
And then as he but looked at her : " How should I
take you if I had dealt with you that way? "
" What do I lose by it," he said, " if, by our under
standing of the other day, since things have so turned
out, you re not to take me at all? So, at least, on my
proposal, you get something else."
"And what," Maud returned, " do you get? "
"I don t get ; I lose. I have lost. So I don t
matter." The eyes with which she covered him at
this might have signified either that he didn t satisfy
her or that his last word as his word rather imposed
itself. Whether or no, at all events, she decided that
he still did matter. She presently moved again, and
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THE BETTER SORT
they walked some minutes more. He had made her
tremble, and she continued to tremble. So unlike
anything that had ever come to her was, if seriously
viewed, his proposal. The quality of it, while she
walked, grew intenser with each step. It struck her
as, when one came to look at it, unlike any offer any
man could ever have made or any woman ever have re
ceived; and it began accordingly, on the instant, to
affect her as almost inconceivably romantic, absolutely,
in a manner, and quite out of the blue, dramatic; im
measurably more so, for example, than the sort of
thing she had come out to hear in the afternoon the
sort of thing that was already so far away. If he was
joking it was poor, but if he was serious it was,
properly, sublime. And he wasn t joking. He was,
however, after an interval, talking again, though,
trembling still, she had not been attentive; so that she
was unconscious of what he had said until she heard
him once more sound Mrs. Chorner s name. " If you
don t, you know, someone else will, and someone much
worse. You told me she likes you." She had at first
no answer for him, but it presently made her stop
again. It was beautiful, if she would, but it was odd
this pressure for her to push at the very hour he him
self had renounced pushing. A part of the whole sub
limity of his attitude, so far as she was concerned, it
clearly was; since, obviously, he was not now to profit
by anything she might do. She seemed to see that, as
the last service he could render, he wished to launch
her and leave her. And that came out the more as he
kept it up. " If she likes you, you know, she really
wants you. Go to her as a friend."
"And bruit her abroad as one?" Maud Blandy
asked.
" Oh, as a friend from the Papers from them and
for them, and with just your half-hour to give her be
fore you rush back to them. Take it even oh, you
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can safely " the young man developed " a little
high with her. That s the way the real way." And
he spoke the next moment as if almost losing his pa
tience. You ought by this time, you know, to un
derstand."
There was something in her mind that it still
charmed his mastery of the horrid art. He could
see, always, the superior way, and it was as if, in spite
of herself, she were getting the truth from him. Only
she didn t want the truth at least not that one. "And
if she simply, for my impudence, chucks me out of
window? A short way is easy for them, you know,
when one doesn t scream or kick, or hang on to the
furniture or the banisters. And I usually, you see "
she said it pensively " don t. I ve always, from
the first, had my retreat prepared for any occasion, and
flattered myself that, whatever hand I might, or
mightn t, become at getting in, no one would ever be
able so beautifully to get out. Like a flash, simply.
And if she does, as I say, chuck me, it s you who fall to
the ground."
He listened to her without expression, only saying
" If you feel for her, as you insist, it s your duty." And
then later, as if he had made an impression, " Your
duty, I mean, to try. I admit^if you will, that there s
a risk, though I don t, with my experience, feel it.
Nothing venture, at any rate, nothing have; and it s
all, isn t it? at the worst, in the day s work. There s
but one thing you can go on, but it s enough. The
greatest probability."
She resisted, but she was taking it in. " The proba
bility that she will throw herself on my neck? "
" It will be either one thing or the other," he went
on as if he had not heard her. " She ll not receive her,
or she will. But if she does your fortune s made, and
you ll be able to look higher than the mere common
form of donkey." She recognised the reference to
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THE BETTER SORT
Marshal, but that was a thing she needn t mind now,
and he had already continued. " She ll keep nothing
back. And you mustn t either."
" Oh, won t I? " Maud murmured.
" Then you ll break faith with her."
And, as if to emphasise it, he went on, though with
out leaving her an infinite time to decide, for he looked
at his watch as they proceeded, and when they came, in
their spacious walk, abreast of another issue, where
the breadth of the avenue, the expanses of stone, the
stretch of the river, the dimness of the distance, seemed
to isolate them, he appeared, by renewing their halt
and looking up afresh toward the town, to desire to
speed her on her way. Many things meanwhile had
worked within her, but it was not till she had kept him
on past the Temple Station of the Underground that
she fairly faced her opportunity. Even then too there
were still other things, under the assault of which she
dropped, for the moment, Mrs. Chorner. " Did you
really," she asked, " believe he d turn up alive? "
With his hands in his pockets he continued to gloom
at her. " Up there, just now, with Marshal what did
you take me as believing? "
" I gave you up. And I do give you. You re be
yond me. Only," she added, " I seem to have made
you out since then as really staggered. Though I
don t say it," she ended, " to bear hard upon you."
" Don t bear hard," said Howard Bight very simply.
It moved her, for all she could have said; so that she
had for a moment to wonder if it were bearing hard
to mention some of features of the rest of her
thought. If she was to have him, certainly, it couldn t
be without knowing, as she said to herself, something
something she might perhaps mitigate a little the
solitude of his penance by possessing. " There were
moments when I even imagined that, up to a certain
point, you were still in communication with him. Then
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I seemed to see that you lost touch though you
braved it out for me; that you had begun to be really
uneasy and were giving him up. I seemed to see,"
she pursued after an hesitation, " that it was coming
home to you that you had worked him up too high
that you were feeling, if I may say it, that you had bet
ter have stopped short. I mean short of this."
" You may say it," Bight answered. " I had bet-
ten"
She had looked at him a moment. " There was
more of him than you believed."
" There was more of him. And now," Bight added,
looking across the river, " here s all of him."
" Which you feel you have on your heart? "
" I don t know where I have it." He turned his
eyes to her. " I must wait."
" For more facts? "
" Well," he returned after a pause, " hardly perhaps
for i more if with what we have this is all. But
I ve things to think out. I must wait to see how I
feel. I did nothing but what he wanted. But we
were behind a bolting horse whom neither of us could
have stopped."
" And he," said Maud, " is the one dashed to
pieces."
He had his grave eyes on her. " Would you like
it to have been me? "
" Of course not. But you enjoyed it the bolt;
everything up to the smash. Then, with that ahead,
you were nervous."
" I m nervous still," said Howard Bight.
Even in his unexpected softness there was some
thing that escaped her, and it made in her, just a little,
for irritation. " What I mean is that you enjoyed his
terror. That was what led you on."
" No doubt it was so grand a case. But do you
call charging me with it," the young man asked, " not
bearing hard ? "
405
THE BETTER SORT
" No " she pulled herself up " it is. I don t
charge you. Only I feel how little about what has
been, all the while, behind you tell me. Nothing ex
plains."
" Explains what?"
" Why, his act."
He gave a sign of impatience. " Isn t the explana
tion what I offered a moment ago to give you? "
It came, in effect, back to her. " For use? "
" For use."
"Only?"
" Only." It was sharp.
They stood a little, on this, face to face; at the end of
which she turned away. " I ll go to Mrs. Chorner."
And she was off while he called after her to take a cab.
It was quite as if she were to come upon him, in his
strange insistence, for the fare.
IX
IF she kept to herself, from the morrow on, for three
days, her adoption of that course was helped, as she
thankfully felt, by the great other circumstance and the
great public commotion under cover of which it so
little mattered what became of private persons. It
was not simply that she had her reasons, but she
couldn t during this time have descended again to
Fleet Street even had she wished, though she said to
herself often enough that her behaviour was rank
cowardice. She left her friend alone with what he had
to face, since, as she found, she could in absence from
him a little recover herself. In his presence, the night
of the news, she knew she had gone to pieces, had
yielded, all too vulgarly, to a weakness proscribed by
her original view. Her original view had been that
if poor Beadel, worked up, as she inveterately kept
seeing him, should embrace the tragic remedy, How-
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ard Bight wouldn t be able not to show as practically
compromised. He wouldn t be able not to smell of
the wretched man s blood, morally speaking, too
strongly for condonations or complacencies. There
were other things, truly, that, during their minutes on
the Embankment, he had been able to do, but they
constituted just the sinister subtlety to which it was
well that she should not again, yet awhile, be exposed.
They were of the order from the safe summit of
Maida Hill she could make it out that had proved
corrosive to the muddled mind of the Frankfort fugi
tive, deprived, in the midst of them, of any honest
issue. Bight, of course, rare youth, had meant no
harm; but what was precisely queerer, what, when you
came to judge, less human, than to be formed for
offence, for injury, by the mere inherent play of the
spirit of observation, of criticism, by the inextinguish
able flame, in fine, of the ironic passion? The ironic
passion, in such a world as surrounded one, might as
sert itself as half the dignity, the decency, of life; yet,
none the less, in cases where one had seen it prove
gruesomely fatal (and not to one s self, which was
nothing, but to others, even the stupid and the vul
gar) one was plainly admonished to well, stand off a
little and think.
This was what Maud Blandy, while the Papers roared
and resounded more than ever with the new meat
flung to them, tried to consider that she was doing;
so that the attitude held her fast during the freshness of
the event. The event grew, as she had felt it would,
with every further fact from Frankfort and with every
extra-special, and reached its maximum, inevitably, in
the light of comment and correspondence. These
features, before the catastrophe, had indubitably, at the
last, flagged a little, but they revived so prodigiously,
under the well-timed shock, that, for the period we
speak of, the poor gentleman seemed, with a con-
407
THE BETTER SORT
tinuance, with indeed an enhancement, of his fine old
knack, to have the successive editions all to himself.
They had been always of course, the Papers, very
largely about him, but it was not too much to say
that at this crisis they were about nothing else worth
speaking of; so that our young woman could but
groan in spirit at the direful example set to the
emulous. She spared an occasional moment to the
vision of Mortimer Marshal, saw him drunk, as she
might have said, with the mere fragrance of the wine
of glory, and asked herself what art Bight would now
use to furnish him forth as he had promised. The
mystery of BeadeFs course loomed, each hour, so
much larger and darker that the plan would have to
be consummate, or the private knowledge alike be
yond cavil and beyond calculation, which should at
tempt either to sound or to mask the appearances.
Strangely enough, none the less, she even now found
herself thinking of her rash colleague as attached, for
the benefit of his surviving victim, to this idea; she
went in fact so far as to imagine him half-upheld, while
the public wonder spent itself, by the prospect of the
fun he might still have with Marshal. This implied,
she was not unconscious, that his notion of fun was in
fernal, and would of course be especially so were his
knowledge as real as she supposed it. He would in
flate their foolish friend with knowledge that was false
and so start him as a balloon for the further gape of
the world. This was the image, in turn, that would
yield the last sport the droll career of the wretched
man as wandering forever through space under the ap
prehension, in time duly gained, that the least touch
of earth would involve the smash of his car. Afraid,
thus, to drop, but at the same time equally out of con
ceit of the chill air of the upper and increasing soli
tudes to which he had soared, he would become such a
diminishing speck, though traceably a prey to wild hu-
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THE PAPERS
man gyrations, as she might conceive Bight to keep in
view for future recreation.
It wasn t however the future that was actually so
much in question for them all as the immediately near
present, offered to her as the latter was in the haunt
ing light of the inevitably unlimited character of any
real inquiry. The inquiry of the Papers, immense and
ingenious, had yet for her the saving quality that she
didn t take it as real. It abounded, truly, in hy
potheses, most of them lurid enough, but a certain
ease of mind as to what these might lead to was per
haps one of the advantages she owed to her constant
breathing of Fleet Street air. She couldn t quite have
said why, but she felt it wouldn t be the Papers that,
proceeding from link to link, would arrive vindictively
at Bight s connection with his late client. The enjoy
ment of that consummation would rest in another
quarter, and if the young man were as uneasy now as
she thought he ought to be even while she hoped he
wasn t, it would be from the fear in his eyes of such
justice as was shared with the vulgar. The Papers
held an inquiry, but the Authorities, as they vaguely
figured to her, would hold an inquest; which was a
matter even when international, complicated and ar-
rangeable, between Frankfort and London, only on
some system unknown to her more in tune with pos
sibilities of exposure. It was not, as need scarce be
said, from the exposure of Beadel that she averted her
self; it was from the exposure of the person who had
made of Beadel s danger, Beadel s dread whatever
these really represented the use that the occurrence
at Frankfort might be shown to certify. It was well
before her, at all events, that if Howard Bight s reflec
tions, so stimulated, kept pace at all with her own, he
would at the worst, or even at the best, have been
glad to meet her again. It was her knowing that and
yet lying low that she privately qualified as cowardice;
409
THE BETTER SORT
it was the instinct of watching and waiting till she
should see how great the danger might become. And
she had moreover another reason, which we shall pres
ently learn. The extra-specials meanwhile were to be
had in Kilburnia almost as soon as in the Strand; the
little ponied and painted carts, tipped at an extra
ordinary angle, by which they were disseminated, had
for that matter, she observed, never rattled up the
Edgware Road at so furious a rate. Each evening,
it was true, when the flare of Fleet Street would have
begun really to smoke, she had, in resistance to old
habit, a little to hold herself; but for three successive
days she tided over that crisis. It was not till the
fourth night that her reaction suddenly declared itself,
determined as it partly was by the latest poster that
dangled free at the door of a small shop just out of her
own street. The establishment dealt in buttons, pins,
tape, and silver bracelets, but the branch of its in
dustry she patronised was that of telegrams, stamps,
stationery, and the "Edinburgh rock " offered to the
appetite of the several small children of her next-door
neighbour but one. " The Beadel-Muffet Mystery,
Startling Disclosures, Action of the Treasury " at
these words she anxiously gazed; after which she de
cided. It was as if from her hilltop, from her very
house-top, to which the window of her little room was
contiguous, she had seen the red light in the east. It
had, this time, its colour. She went on, she went far,
till she met a cab, which she hailed, " regardless," she
felt, as she had hailed one after leaving Bight by the
river. " To Fleet Street " she simply said, and it took
her that she felt too back into life.
Yes, it was life again, bitter, doubtless, but with a
taste, when, having stopped her cab, short of her in
dication, in Covent Garden, she walked across south
ward and to the top of the street in which she and her
friend had last parted with Mortimer Marshal. She
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came down to their favoured pothouse, the scene of
Bight s high compact with that worthy, and here,
hesitating, she paused, uncertain as to where she had
best look out. Her conviction, on her way, had but
grown; Howard Bight would be looking out that
to a certainty; something more, something portentous,
had happened (by her evening paper, scanned in the
light of her little shop window, she had taken instant
possession of it), and this would have made him know
that she couldn t keep up what he would naturally call
her "game." There were places where they often
met, and the diversity of these not too far apart, how
ever, would be his only difficulty. He was on the
prowl, in fine, with his hat over his eyes; and she
hadn t known, till this vision of him came, what seeds
of romance were in her soul. Romance, the other
night, by the river, had brushed them with a wing that
was like the blind bump of a bat, but that had been
something on his part, whereas this thought of bring
ing him succour as to a Russian anarchist, to some
victim of society or subject of extradition, was all her
own, and was of this special moment. She saw him
with his hat over his eyes; she saw him with his over
coat collar turned up; she saw him as a hunted hero
cleverly drawn in one of the serialising weeklies or,
as they said, in some popular " ply," and the effect of
it was to open to her on the spot a sort of happy sense
of all her possible immorality. That was the ro
mantic sense, and everything vanished but the richness
of her thrill. She knew little enough what she might
have to do for him, but her hope, as sharp as a pang,
was that, if anything, it would put her in danger too.
The hope, as it happened then, was crowned on the
very spot; she had never so felt in danger as when,
just now, turning to the glazed door of their cookshop,
she saw a man, within, close behind the glass, still,
stiff and ominous, looking at her hard. The light of
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THE BETTER SORT
the place was behind him, so that his face, in the dusk
of the side-street, was dark, but it was visible that
she showed for him as an object of interest. The next
thing, of course, she had seen more seen she could be
such an object, in such a degree, only to her friend
himself, and that Bight had been thus sure of her; and
the next thing after that had passed straight in and
been met by him, as he stepped aside to admit her, in
silence. He had his hat pulled down and, quite for
getfully, in spite of the warmth within, the collar of
his mackintosh up.
It was his silence that completed the perfection of
these things the perfection that came out most of all,
oddly, after he had corrected them by removal and
was seated with her, in their common corner, at tea,
with the room almost to themselves and no one to con
sider but Marshal s little man in the obvious wig and
the blue spectacles, the great authority on the inner
life of the criminal classes. Strangest of all, nearly, was
it, that, though now essentially belonging, as Maud
felt, to this order, they were not conscious of the
danger of his presence. What she had wanted most
immediately to learn was how Bight had known; but
he made, and scarce to her surprise, short work of that.
"I ve known every evening known, that is, that
you ve wanted to come; and I ve been here every
evening, waiting just there till I should see you. It
was but a question of time. To-night, however, I was
sure for there s, after all, something of me left. Be
sides, besides ! " He had, in short, another certi
tude. You ve been ashamed I knew, when I saw
nothing come, that you would be. But also that that
would pass."
Maud found him, as she would have said, all there.
" I ve been ashamed, you mean, of being afraid? "
" You ve been ashamed about Mrs. Chorner; that is,
about me. For that you did go to her I know,"
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" Have you been then yourself? "
" For what do you take me?" He seemed to won
der. " What had I to do with her except for you? "
And then before she could say : " Didn t she receive
you?"
Yes, as you said, she wanted me."
" She jumped at you? "
" Jumped at me. She gave me an hour."
He flushed with an interest that, the next moment,
had flared in spite of everything into amusement. " So
that I was right, in my perfect wisdom, up to the
hilt?"
" Up to the hilt. She took it from me."
" That the public wants her? "
" That it won t take a refusal. So she opened up."
"Overflowed?"
" Prattled."
"Gushed?"
"Well, recognised and embraced her opportunity.
Kept me there till midnight. Told me, as she called
it, everything about everything."
They looked at each other long on it, and it deter
mined in Bight at last a brave clatter of his crockery.
" They re stupendous ! "
" It s you that are," Maud replied, " to have found
it out so. You know them down to the ground."
" Oh, what I ve found out ! " But it was more
than he could talk of then. " If I hadn t really felt
sure, I wouldn t so have urged you. Only now, if
you please, I don t understand your having apparently
but kept her in your pocket."
" Of course you don t," said Maud Blandy. To
which she added, " And I don t quite myself. I only
know that now that I have her there nothing will in
duce me to take her out."
" Then you potted her, permit me to say," he an
swered, " on absolutely false pretences."
413
THE BETTER SORT
"Absolutely; which is precisely why I ve been
ashamed. I made for home with the whole thing,"
she explained, " and there, that night, in the hours
till morning, when, turning it over, I saw all it really
was, I knew that I couldn t that I would rather choose
that shame, that of not doing for her what I had
offered, than the hideous honesty of bringing it out.
Because, you see," Maud declared, " it was well, it
was too much."
Bight followed her with a sharpness ! " It was so
good?"
" Quite beautiful ! Awful ! "
He wondered. " Really charming? "
" Charming, interesting, horrible. It was true
and it was the whole thing. It was herself and it
was him, all of him too. Not a bit made up, but just
the poor woman melted and overflowing, yet at the
same time raging like the hot-water tap when it
boils. I never saw anything like it; everything, as you
guaranteed, came out; it has made me know things.
So, to have come down here with it, to have begun to
hawk it, either through you, as you kindly proposed,
or in my own brazen person, to the highest bidder
well, I felt that I didn t have to, after all, if I didn t want
to, and that if it s the only way I can get money I
would much rather starve."
" I see." Howard Bight saw all. " And that s why
you re ashamed? "
She hesitated she was both so remiss and so firm.
"I knew that by my not coming back to you, you
would have guessed, have found me wanting; just, for
that matter, as she has found me. And I couldn t ex
plain. I can t I can t to lier. So that," the girl went
on, " I shall have done, so far as her attitude to me
was to be concerned, something more indelicate, some
thing more indecent, than if I had passed her on. I
shall have wormed it all out of her, and then, by not
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THE PAPERS
having carried it to market, disappointed and cheated
her. She was to have heard it cried like fresh her-
ring."
Bight was immensely taken. " Oh, beyond all
doubt. You re in a fix. You ve played, you see, a
most unusual game. The code allows everything but
that."
" Precisely. So I must take the consequences.
I m dishonoured, but I shall have to bear it. And I
shall bear it by getting out. Out, I mean, of the whole
thing. I shall chuck them."
" Chuck the Papers? " he asked in his simplicity.
But his wonder, she saw, was overdone their eyes
too frankly met. " Damn the Papers ! " said Maud
Blandy.
It produced in his sadness and weariness the sweetest
smile that had yet broken through. " We shall, be
tween us, if we keep it up, ruin them ! And you make
nothing," he went on, " of one s having at last so
beautifully started you? Your complaint," he de
veloped, " was that you couldn t get in. Then sud
denly, with a splendid jump, you are in. Only, how
ever, to look round you and say with disgust * Oh,
here? 1 Where the devil do you want to be?"
" Ah, that s another question. At least," she said,
" I can scrub floors. I can take it out perhaps my
swindle of Mrs. Chorner," she pursued "in scrubbing
hers."
He only, after this, looked at her a little. " She has
written to you? "
" Oh, in high dudgeon. I was to have attended to
the press-cutting people as well, and she was to
have seen herself, at the furthest, by the second morn
ing (that was day-before-yesterday) all over the place.
She wants to know what I mean."
" And what do you answer? "
" That it s hard, of course, to make her understand,
415
THE BETTER SORT
but that I ve felt her, since parting with her, simply to
be too good."
" Signifying by it, naturally," Bight amended, " that
you ve felt yourself to be so."
" Well, that too if you like. But she was exquisite."
He considered. " Would she do for a ply? "
" Oh God, no ! "
"Then for a tile?"
" Perhaps," said Maud Blandy at last.
He understood, visibly, the shade, as well as the
pause; which, together, held him a moment. But it
was of something else he spoke. " And you who had
found they would never bite ! "
" Oh, I was wrong," she simply answered. " Once
they ve tasted blood ! "
" They want to devour," her friend laughed, " not
only the bait and the hook, but the line and the rod
and the poor fisherman himself? Except," he con
tinued, " that poor Mrs. Chorner hasn t yet even
* tasted. However," he added, " she obviously will."
Maud s assent was full. " She ll find others. She ll
appear."
He waited a moment his eye had turned to the
door of the street. " Then she must be quick. These
are things of the hour."
" You hear something? " she asked, his expression
having struck her.
He listened again, but it was nothing. " k No but
it s somehow in the air."
"What is?"
" Well, that she must hurry. She must get in.
She must get out." He had his arms on the table, and,
locking his hands and inclining a little, he brought his
face nearer to her. " My sense to-night s of an open
ness ! I don t know what s the matter. Except,
that is, that you re great."
She looked at him, not drawing back. " You know
416
THE PAPERS
everything so immeasurably more than you admit or
than you tell me. You mortally perplex and worry
me."
It made him smile. " You re great, you re great,"
he only repeated. " You know it s quite awfully
swagger, what you ve done."
" What I haven t, you mean; what I never shall.
Yes," she added, but now sinking back "of course
you see that too. What don t you see, and what, with
such ways, is to be the end of you?"
"You re great, you re great" he kept it up. " And
I like you. That s to be the end of me."
So, for a minute, they left it, while she came to the
thing that, for the last half-hour, had most been with
her. " What is the action/ announced to-night, of
the Treasury? "
" Oh, they ve sent somebody out, partly, it would
seem, at the request of the German authorities, to take
possession."
" Possession, you mean, of his effects? "
Yes, and legally, administratively, of the whole
matter."
" Seeing, you mean, that there s still more in
i t p "
" Than meets the eye," said Bight, " precisely. But
it won t be till the case is transferred, as it presently
will be, to this country, that they will see. Then it will
be funny."
" Funny? " Maud Blandy asked.
" Oh, lovely."
" Lovely for you? "
" Why not? The bigger the whole thing grows, the
lovelier."
" You ve odd notions," she said, " of loveliness.
Do you expect his situation won t be traced to you?
Don t you suppose you ll be forced to speak? "
" To speak ? "
417
THE BETTER SORT
" Why, if it is traced. What do you make, other
wise, of the facts to-night? "
" Do you call them facts? " the young man asked.
" I mean the Astounding Disclosures/
" Well, do you only read your headlines? The
most astounding disclosures are expected that s the
valuable text. Is it," he went on, " what fetched
you?"
His answer was so little of one that she made her
own scant. " What fetched me is that I can t rest."
" No more can I," he returned. " But in what
danger do you think me? "
" In any in which you think yourself. Why not, if
I don t mean in danger of hanging? "
He looked at her so that she presently took him for
serious at last which was different from his having
been either worried or perverse. " Of public discredit,
you mean for having so unmercifully baited him?
Yes," he conceded with a straightness that now sur
prised her, " I ve thought of that. But how can the
baiting be proved? "
" If they take possession of his effects won t his
effects be partly his papers, and won t they, among
them, find letters from you, and won t your letters
show it?"
"Well, show what?"
" Why, the frenzy to which you worked him and
thereby your connection."
" They won t show it to dunderheads."
" And are they all dunderheads? "
" Every mother s son of them where anything so
beautiful is concerned."
" Beautiful? " Maud murmured.
" Beautiful, my letters are gems of the purest ray.
I m covered."
She let herself go she looked at him long.
: You re a wonder. But all the same," she added,
"you don t like it."
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" Well, I m not sure." Which clearly meant, how
ever, that he almost was, from the way in which, the
next moment, he had exchanged the question for an
other. You haven t anything to tell me of Mrs.
Chorner s explanation? "
Oh, as to this, she had already considered and
chosen. " What do you want of it when you know
so much more? So much more, I mean, than even
she has known."
" Then she hasn t known ? "
"There you are ! What," asked Maud, " are you
talking about? "
She had made him smile, even though his smile was
perceptibly pale; and he continued. " Of what was
behind. Behind any game of mine. Behind every
thing."
" So am I then talking of that. No," said Maud,
" she hasn t known, and she doesn t know, I judge,
to this hour. Her explanation therefore doesn t bear
upon that. It bears upon something else."
"Well, my dear, on what?"
He was not, however, to find out by simply calling
her his dear; for she had not sacrificed the reward of
her interview in order to present the fine flower of it,
unbridled, even to him. " You know how little you ve
ever told me, and you see how, at this instant, even
while you press me to gratify you, you give me noth
ing. I give," she smiled yet not a little flushed
" nothing for nothing."
He showed her he felt baffled, but also that she was
perverse. " What you want of me is what, originally,
you wouldn t hear of : anything so dreadful, that is, as
his predicament must be. You saw that to make him
want to keep quiet he must have something to be
ashamed of, and that was just what, in pity, you posi
tively objected to learning. You ve grown," Bight
smiled, " more interested since."
419
THE BETTER SORT
" If I have/ said Maud, " it s because you have.
Now, at any rate, I m not afraid."
He waited a moment. " Are you very sure? "
Yes, for my mystification is greater at last than my
delicacy. I don t know till I do know " and she ex
pressed this even with difficulty " what it has been,
all the while, that it was a question of, and what, conse
quently, all the while, we ve been talking about."
" Ah, but why should you know? " the young man
inquired. " I can understand your needing to, or
somebody s needing to, if we were in a ply, or even,
though in a less degree, if we were in a tile. But since,
my poor child, we re only in the delicious muddle of
life itself !"
" You may have all the plum of the pudding, and I
nothing but a mouthful of cold suet? " Maud pushed
back her chair; she had taken up her old gloves; but
while she put them on she kept in view both her friend
and her grievance. " I don t believe," she at last
brought out, " that there is, or that there ever was,
anything."
" Oh, oh, oh ! " Bight laughed.
" There s nothing," she continued, " behind.
There s no horror."
" You hold, by that," said Bight, " that the poor
man s deed is all me? That does make it, you see, bad
for me."
She got up and, there before him, finished smooth
ing her creased gloves. " Then we are if there s such
richness in a ply."
" Well, we are not, at all events so far as we our
selves are concerned the spectators." And he also
got up. " The spectators must look out for them
selves."
" Evidently, poor things ! " Maud sighed. And as
he still stood as if there might be something for him
to come from her, she made her attitude clear which
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was quite the attitude now of tormenting him a little.
" If you know something about him which she doesn t,
and also which / don t, she knows something about
him as I do too which you don t."
" Surely : when it s exactly what I m trying to get
out of you. Are you afraid / // sell it? "
But even this taunt, which she took. moreover at its
worth, didn t move her. " You definitely then won t
tell me?"
" You mean that if I will you ll tell me?
She thought again. " Well yes. But on that con
dition alone."
" Then you re safe," said Howard Bight. " I can t,
really, my dear, tell you. Besides, if it s to come
out !"
" I ll wait in that case till it does. But I must warn
you," she added, " that my facts wont come out."
He considered. " Why not, since the rush at her is
probably even now being made? Why not, if she re
ceives others? "
Well, Maud could think too. " She ll receive them,
but they won t receive her. Others are like your
people dunderheads. Others won t understand,
won t count, won t exist." And she moved to the
door. " There are no others." Opening the door,
she had reached the street with it, even while he re
plied, overtaking her, that there were certainly none
such as herself; but they had scarce passed out before
her last remark was, to their somewhat disconcerted
sense, sharply enough refuted. There was still the
other they had forgotten, and that neglected quantity,
plainly in search of them and happy in his instinct of
the chase, now stayed their steps in the form of Morti
mer Marshal.
THE BETTER SORT
X
HE was coming in as they came out; and his " I hoped
I might find you," an exhalation of cool candour that
they took full in the face, had the effect, the next mo
ment, of a great soft carpet, all flowers and figures,
suddenly unrolled for them to walk upon and before
which they felt a scruple. Their ejaculation, Maud
was conscious, couldn t have passed for a welcome,
and it wasn t till she saw the poor gentleman checked
a little, in turn, by their blankness, that she fully per
ceived how interesting they had just become to them
selves. His face, however, while, in their arrest, they
neither proposed to re-enter the shop with him nor
invited him to proceed with them anywhere else his
face, gaping there, for Bight s promised instructions,
like a fair receptacle, shallow but with all the capacity
of its flatness, brought back so to our young woman
the fond fancy her companion had last excited in him
that he profited just a little and for sympathy in spite
of his folly by her sense that with her too the latter
had somehow amused himself. This placed her, for
the brief instant, in a strange fellowship with their vis
itor s plea, under the impulse of which, without more
thought, she had turned to Bight. "Your eager claim
ant," she, however, simply said, " for the opportunity
now so beautifully created."
"I ve ventured," Mr. Marshal glowed back, " to
come and remind you that the hours are fleeting."
Bight had surveyed him with eyes perhaps equivocal.
" You re afraid someone else will step in? "
" Well, with the place so tempting and so emp-
ty -I"
Maud made herself again his voice. " Mr Marshal
sees it empty itself perhaps too fast."
He acknowledged, in his large, bright way, the help
422
THE PAPERS
afforded him by her easy lightness. " I do want to get
in, you know, before anything happens."
" And what," Bight inquired, " are you afraid may
happen? "
" Well, to make sure," he smiled, " I want myself,
don t you see, to happen first."
Our young woman, at this, fairly fell, for her friend,
into his sweetness. " Do let him happen ! "
" Do let me happen !" Mr. Marshal followed it up.
They stood there together, where they had paused,
in their strange council of three, and their extraordi
nary tone, in connection with their number, might
have marked them, for some passer catching it, as per
sons not only discussing questions supposedly reserved
for the Fates, but absolutely enacting some encounter
of these portentous forces. " Let you let you? "
Bight gravely echoed, while on the sound, for the mo
ment, immensities might have hung. It was as far,
however, as he was to have time to speak, for even
while his voice was in the air another, at first remote
and vague, joined it there on an ominous note and
hushed all else to stillness. It came, through the roar
of thoroughfares, from the direction of Fleet Street,
and it made our interlocutors exchange an altered
look. They recognized it, the next thing, as the howl,
again, of the Strand, and then but an instant elapsed
before it flared into the night. " Return of Beadel-
Muffet! Tremenjous Sensation! "
Tremenjous indeed, so tremenjous that, each really
turning as pale with it as they had turned, on the same
spot, the other time and with the other news, they
stood long enough stricken and still for the cry, multi
plied in a flash, again to reach them. They couldn t
have said afterwards who first took it up. " Re
turn ? "
" From the Dead I say! " poor Marshal piercingly
quavered.
423
THE BETTER SORT
"Then he hasn t been ?" Maud gasped it with
him at Bight.
But that genius, clearly, was not less deeply affected.
" He s alive? " he breathed in a long, soft wail in which
admiration appeared at first to contend with amaze
ment and then the sense of the comic to triumph over
both. Howard Bight uncontrollably it might have
struck them as almost hysterically laughed.
The others could indeed but stare. " Then who s
dead? " piped Mortimer Marshal.
" I m afraid, Mr. Marshal, that you are," the young
man returned, more gravely, after a minute. He
spoke as if he saw how dead.
Poor Marshal was lost. "But someone was
killed !"
" Someone undoubtedly was, but Beadel somehow
has survived it."
" Has he, then, been playing the game ? " It
baffled comprehension.
Yet it wasn t even that what Maud most wondered.
" Have you all the while really known? " she asked of
Howard Bight.
He met it with a look that puzzled her for the in
stant, but that she then saw to mean, half with amuse
ment, half with sadness, that his genius was, after all,
simpler. " I wish I had. I really believed."
" All along? "
" No; but after Frankfort."
She remembered things. " You haven t had a no
tion this evening? "
" Only from the state of my nerves."
" Yes^jour nerves must be in a state ! " And some
how now she had no pity for him. It was almost as if
she were, frankly, disappointed. " /," she then boldly
said, " didn t believe."
" If you had mentioned that then," Marshal ob
served to her, " you would have saved me an awkward
ness."
424
THE PAPERS
But Bight took him up. " She did believe so that
she might punish me."
" Punish you ? "
Maud raised her hand at her friend. " He doesn t
understand."
He was indeed, Mr. Marshal, fully pathetic now.
" No, I don t understand. Not a wee bit."
" Well," said Bight kindly, " we none of us do. We
must give it up."
" You think / really must ? "
" You, sir," Bight smiled, " most of all. The places
seem so taken."
His client, however, clung. " He won t die
again ? "
" If he does he ll again come to life. He ll never
die. Only we shall die. He s immortal."
He looked up and down, this inquirer; he listened to
the howl of the Strand, not yet, as happened, brought
nearer to them by one of the hawkers. And yet it
was as if, overwhelmed by his lost chance, he knew
himself too w r eak even for their fond aid. He still
therefore appealed. " Will this be a boom for him? "
" His return? Colossal. For fancy! it was ex
actly what we talked of, you remember, the other
day, as the ideal. I mean," Bight smiled, " for a man
to be lost, and yet at the same time "
To be found? " poor Marshal too hungrily mused.
" To be boomed," Bight continued, " by his smash
and yet never to have been too smashed to know how
he was booming."
It was wonderful for Maud too. " To have given it
all up, and yet to have it all."
"Oh, better than that," said her friend : " to have
more than all, and more than you gave up. Beadel,"
he was careful to explain to their companion, " will
have more."
Mr. Marshal struggled with it. " More than if he
were dead? "
425
THE BETTER SORT
" More," Bight laughed, " than if he weren t ! It s
what you would have liked, as I understand you, isn t
it? and what you would have got, It s what / would
have helped you to."
" But who then," wailed Marshal, " helps him? "
" Nobody. His star. His genius."
Mortimer Marshal glared about him as for some
sign of such aids in his own sphere. It embraced, his
own sphere too, the roaring Strand, yet mystification
and madness ! it was with Beadel the Strand was roar
ing. A hawker, from afar, at sight of the group,
was already scaling the slope. " Ah, but how the
devil ? "
Bight pointed to this resource. " Go and see."
"But don t you want them? " poor Marshal asked as
the others retreated.
" The Papers? " They stopped to answer. " No,
never again. We ve done with them. We give it up."
" I mayn t again see you? "
Dismay and a last clutch were in Marshal s face, but
Maud, who had taken her friend s meaning in a flash,
found the word to meet them. " We retire from busi
ness."
With which they turned again to move in the other
sense, presenting their backs to Fleet Street. They
moved together up the rest of the hill, going on in
silence, not arrested by another little shrieking boy,
not diverted by another extra-special, not pausing
again till, at the end of a few minutes, they found
themselves in the comparative solitude of Covent Gar
den, encumbered with the traces of its traffic, but now
given over to peace. The howl of the Strand had
ceased, their client had vanished forever, and from the
centre of the empty space they could look up and see
stars. One of these was of course Beadel-Muffet s,
and the consciousness of that, for the moment, kept-
down any arrogance of triumph. He still hung above
426
THE PAPERS
them, he ruled, immortal, the night; they were far
beneath, and he now transcended their world; but a
sense of relief, of escape, of the light, still unquenched,
of their old irony, made them stand there face to face.
There was more between them now than there had
ever been, but it had ceased to separate them, it sus
tained them in fact like a deep water on which they
floated closer. Still, however, there was something
Maud needed. " It had been all the while worked? "
" Ah, not, before God since I lost sight of him
by me."
" Then by himself? "
" I dare say. But there are plenty for him. He s
beyond me."
" But you thought," she said, "it would be so. You
thought," she declared, " something."
Bight hesitated. " I thought it would be great if he
could. And as he could why, it is great. But all the
same I too was sold. I am sold. That s why I give
up."
" Then it s why 7 do. We must do something," she
smiled at him, " that requires less cleverness."
" We must love each other," said Howard Bight.
" But can we live by that? "
He thought again; then he decided. "Yes."
"Ah," Maud amended, " we must be littery.
We ve now got stuff."
" For the dear old ply, for the rattling good tile? Ah,
they take better stuff than this though this too is
good."
" Yes," she granted on reflection, " this is good, but
it has bad holes. Who was the dead man in -the locked
hotel room?"
" Oh, I don t mean that. That" said Bight, " he ll
splendidly explain."
" But how? "
" Why, in the Papers. To-morrow."
427
THE BETTER SORT
Maud wondered. " So soon? "
" If he returned to-night, and it s not yet ten o clock,
there s plenty of time. It will be in all of them while
the universe waits. He ll hold us in the hollow of his
hand. His chance is just there. And there," said the
young man, " will be his greatness."
" Greater than ever then? "
" Quadrupled."
She followed; then it made her seize his arm. " Go
to him!"
Bight frowned. " Go -? "
" This instant. You explain ! "
He understood, but only to shake his head.
" Never again. I bow to him."
Well, she after a little understood; but she thought
again.
" You mean that the great hole is that he really had
no reason, no funk ? "
" I ve wondered," said Howard Bight.
" Whether he had done anything to make publicity
embarrassing? "
" I ve wondered," the young man repeated.
" But I thought you knew ! "
" So did I. But I thought also I knew he was
dead. However," Bight added, " he ll explain that
too."
" To-morrow? "
" No as a different branch. Say day after."
" Ah, then," said Maud, " if he explains ! "
" There s no hole? I don t know! " and it forced
from him at last a sigh. He was impatient of it, for
he had done with it; it would soon bore him. So fast
they lived. " It will take," he only dropped, " much
explaining."
His detachment was logical, but she looked a mo
ment at his sudden weariness. " There s always, re
member, Mrs. Chorner."
428
THE PAPERS
" Oh, yes, Mrs. Chorner; we luckily invented her. 9
" Well, if she drove him to his death ? "
Bight, with a laugh, caught at it. " Is that it? Did
she drive him? "
It pulled her up, and, though she smiled, they stood
again, a little, as on their guard. " Now, at any rate,
Maud simply said at last, " she ll marry him. So you
see how right I was."
With a preoccupation that had grown in him,
however, he had already lost the thread. " How
right ? "
" Not to sell my Talk."
" Oh yes," he remembered. " Quite right." But
it all came to something else. " Whom will you
marry? "
She only, at first, for answer, kept her eyes on him.
Then she turned them about the place and saw no
hindrance, and then, further, bending with a tender
ness in which she felt so transformed, so won to some
thing she had never been before, that she might even,
to other eyes, well have looked so, she gravely kissed
him. After which, as he took her arm, they walked on
together. " That, at least," she said, " we ll put in the
Papers."
THE END
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