Chapter I · (continued 2)

Theresa stopped in front of the gardener’s chair. Theresa’s surname had been blown away from her with the first Atlantic wind. So had the shining system in her yellow hair. So had most of her land conventions. She was not a thing of the ocean, but a thing of the ocean liner. She had immediately become Everybody’s Theresa. I could not say that everybody loved Theresa, but I know that everybody felt they ought to.

“Captain said no dance this evening,” said Theresa, in her telegraphic style. “Too much sea on. Doctor said broken legs. But I went and wheedled. Called the Captain Sweet William. Dance at nine.”

The dance was at nine. There were no limits to what Theresa could do—in her sphere.

A proud quartermaster was superintending the last touches of chalk upon the deck, when the gardener and the suffragette led the exodus from the dining-saloon.

In Paradise I hope I shall be allowed a furious walk around a windy rocking deck at frequent intervals throughout eternity. I know of nothing more poetic, and yet more brilliantly prosaic. At such 70moments you can feel the muscles of life trembling by reason of sheer strength.

The suffragette and the gardener walked so fast that the smoke from the suffragette’s cigarette lay out along the wind like the smoke behind a railway train. The strong swing of the sea threw their feet along. There was a moon in the sky and phosphorus in the sea.

But there are people who go down to the sea in ships, and yet confine their world to the promenade-deck. The heart of Theresa’s world, for instance, was the shining parallelogram, silvered with chalk, on the sheltered side of the deck. Theresa, looking extremely pretty, was superintending the over-filling of her already full programme.

“Mustn’t walk round like that,” she said in the polite tones that The Generation always used to the suffragette. “Must find partners, because the orchestra will soon begin to orch.”

“We are not dancing,” said the gardener. One always took for granted that the suffragette was not dancing.

“If you will dance,” said Theresa, “I will give you number eight.” She assumed with such confidence that this was an inducement, that somehow it became one.

“Thank you very much,” replied the gardener. “I’ll ask Courtesy Briggs for one, too.”

The suffragette sat down upon an isolated chair.

“May I have a dance?” asked the gardener of 71Courtesy. “I can’t dart or stagger, only revolve.”

“I was sea-sick only three hours ago,” retorted Courtesy with simplicity. “But I have a lot to talk to you about, so you can have number one. And we’ll begin it now.”

But the orchestra was still idling in the melancholy manner peculiar to orchestras. Why—by the way—is there something so unutterably sad in the expression of an orchestra about to play a jovial onestep?

“I do want to know about your marriage,” pursued Courtesy, whose curiosity was a daylight trait, like the rest of her characteristics. “When did it happen, and where did you meet her, and why did you have a wedding without me to help?”

“I met her—on the way to Paradise,” said the gardener, posing luxuriously as an enigma. “We got married on the way too. It was a no-flowers-by-request sort of wedding, otherwise we would have invited you.”

“But I can’t understand it,” said Courtesy. “Only a week ago you were snivelling over a broken boot-lace.”

The gardener’s pose had a fall. He might have expected that Courtesy would trip it up.

The violins, relieving their feelings by a preliminary concerted yell, settled down to a lamentation in ragtime.

The gardener danced rather well, as his mother had taught him to dance. Courtesy danced rather 72well, after the manner of The Generation. But the Caribbeania danced better than either. She reduced them to planting their four feet wide and sliding up and down. The ship’s officers, with their lucky partners, leaning to the undulations of the deck, like willows bending to the wind, showed to immense advantage. They evidently knew every wave of the Atlantic by heart. But among the remaining dancers there was much unrest. Captain Walters, who was accustomed to be one of the principal ornaments of a more stationary ballroom, at once knocked his partner down and sat upon her. Theresa and a subaltern slid helplessly at the mercy of the elements into a forest of chaperons. The gardener and Courtesy leaned together and clung, with a tense look on their faces.

I dare not say what angle the deck had reached when the orchestra, with an unpremeditated lapse into a Futurist style of melody, broke loose, and glided in a heaving phalanx to join the turmoil. The piano, being lashed to its post, remained a triumphant survivor, calmly surveying the fallen estate of the less stable instruments.

“I am not enjoying myself a bit,” said Courtesy, as she disentangled a violin from her hair, and strove to dislodge the ’celloist from his position on her lap. The gardener disliked agreeing with any one, but he seemed by no means anxious to continue dancing. The orchestra also seemed a little loth to 73risk its dignity again at once, and even Theresa, though still plastered with a pink smile, was retiring on the arm of her subaltern to a twilit deck-chair.

In the distance, among her rows of empty chairs, the suffragette was smiling. She had watched the dancing with that half-ashamed sort of amusement which some of us feel when we see others making fools of themselves. And because she smiled, the priest came and sat beside her. He considered himself a temporary shepherd in charge of this maritime flock, and you could see in his eye the craving for souls to save. He had hardly noticed the suffragette until her smile caught his eye, but directly he did notice her he saw that she was not among the saved. He therefore approached her with the smile he reserved for the wicked.

“Very amusing, is it not?” he said.

Now the suffragette liked to see the young busy with their youth, but because she was a snake she could not bear to say so. Especially in answer to “Very amusing, is it not?”

So she said, “Is it?” and immediately cursed herself for the inhuman remark. Some people’s humanity takes this tardy form of hidden self-reproach after expression, and then it strikes inward, like measles.

“Well, that’s as it may be, yerce, yerce,” said the priest, who was so tolerant that he had no opinions of his own, and had hardly ever been guilty of contradiction. 74“That is your husband, is it not?” he added, as the gardener extricated himself from the knot of fallen dancers.

The suffragette actually hesitated, and then she said, “Yes,” and narrowly escaped adding, “More or less.”

“A most interesting young man,” said the priest, who, with the keen eye of the saver of souls, had noticed the hesitation.

“Naturally he interests me,” said the suffragette.

“He is so original,” continued the priest. “Even his occupation strikes one as original. A gardener on an ocean liner. The march of science, yerce, yerce. Most quaint. I suppose you also are interested in Nature. I always think the care of flowers is an eminently suitable occupation for ladies.”

“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But I am not a lady. I am a militant suffragette.”

The priest’s smile changed from the saintly to the roguish. “Have you any bombs or hatchets concealed about you?” he asked.

“I wish I had,” she replied. I fully admit that her manners were not her strong point. But the priest persisted. He noted the absence of any answering roguishness, and recorded the fact that she had no sense of humour. True to his plastic nature, however, he said, “Of course I am only too well aware of the justice of many of women’s demands, yerce, yerce. But you, my dear young lady, you are as yet on the threshold of life; it is written plain upon 75your face that you have not yet come into contact with the realities of life.”

“In that case it’s a misprint,” said the suffragette. “I am twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six,” repeated the priest. “I wonder why you are bitter—at twenty-six?”

“Because I have taken some trouble not to be sweet,” she said. “Because I was not born blind.”

As a matter of fact she had been born morally short-sighted. She had never seen the distant delight of the world at all.

The priest did not believe in anything approaching metaphor. He considered himself to be too manly. So he deflected the course of the conversation. “And your husband. What are his views on the Great Question?” (A slight relapse into roguishness on the last two words.)

“I have never asked him. I know he does not believe in concrete arguments from women. Though he approves of them from men.” She fingered a bruise on her arm.

“The arguments about women’s lack of physical force are the most incontrovertible ones your cause has to contend with,” said the priest. “Say what you will, physical force is the basis of life.”

“I think it is a confession of weakness.”

“There is something in what you say,” said the priest. He did not really think there was, for he had taken no steps to investigate. He was busy thinking that this was an odd wife who did not know 76her husband’s views on a question that obsessed her own thoughts.

The gardener had by now extracted Courtesy from the tangle, and was steering her towards a chair.

“Your husband appears to know that young lady with the auburn hair,” said the priest. “He knew her before he came on board, did he not?”

“Apparently he did,” said the suffragette. “I didn’t.”

She was providing him with so many clues that he was fairly skimming along on the track of his prey. When he left her he felt like a collector who has found a promising specimen.

“Altogether on the wrong lines,” he told himself, and added, “Poor lost lamb, how much she needs a helping hand”; not because he felt sorry for her, but because word-pity was the chief part of his stock-in-trade.

Next morning the Caribbeania had flung the winds and waves behind her, and had settled down to a passionless career along a silver sea under a silver sky,—like man, slipping out of the turmoil of youth into the excellent anti-climax of middle life.

Similes apart, however, the Caribbeania was now so steady that an infant could have danced a jig upon her deck. Several infants tried. Amusements rushed upon her passengers from every side. A week passed like a wink. Hardly were you awake in the morning before you found yourself pursuing 77an egg round your own ankles with a teaspoon. Sports and rumours of sports followed you even unto your nightly bunk. Everybody developed talents hitherto successfully concealed in napkins. Courtesy found her life’s vocation in dropping potatoes into buckets. She brought this homely pursuit to a very subtle art, and felt that she had not lived in vain. Not that she ever suffered from morbid illusions as to her value. The gardener brought to light a latent gift for sitting astride upon a spar while other men tried with bolsters to remove him. The suffragette, when nobody was looking, acquired proficiency in the art of shuffling the board. When observed, she instinctively donned an appearance of contempt. Mrs. Paul Rust settled herself immovably in a chair and applauded solo at the moments when others were not applauding. The priest, looking in an opposite direction, clapped when he heard other hands being clapped, in order to show the kind interest he took in mundane affairs.

While occupied thus, one day, he found himself next to Courtesy. That determined lady had her back to a Whisky and Soda Race then in progress, and looked aggrieved. She had been beaten in the first heat, whereas she was convinced that victory had been her due. Courtesy suffered from all the faults that you and I—poetic souls—cannot love. She was greedy. She was fat. She could not even lose a race without suspecting the timekeeper of corruption. All the same, there was something so entirely 78healthy and human about her, that nobody had ever pointed out to her her lack of poetry, and of the more subtle virtues.

The priest, who had also never been able to lose a game without losing his temper too, sympathised with Courtesy, and employed laborious tact in trying to lead her thoughts elsewhere.

“Trinity Islands are your destination, are they not, yerce, yerce?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Courtesy. “And I wish this old tub would buck up and get there.”

“You have reasons of your own for being very anxious to arrive?” suggested the priest archly.

“Nothing special that I know of,” answered Courtesy. “I’m only an ordinary globe-trotter.”

Frankly, she was being sent out to get married. But this, of course, was among the things that are not said. Her father had become tired of supporting a daughter as determined to study art in London as she was incapable of succeeding at it. He had accepted for her a casual invitation from a cousin for a season in the Trinity Islands. The invitation was so very casual that Courtesy had appreciated the whole scheme as a matrimonial straw clutched at by an over-daughtered parent. But her feelings were not hurt. She had bluff, tough feelings.

“How curious that you should have found former friends on board!” said the priest. “How small the world is, is it not?”

“Yes, isn’t it?” assented Courtesy, whose heart 79always warmed towards familiar phrases. “And so odd, too, him being married within the week like this.”

The priest pricked up his ears so sharply that you could almost hear them click. “So quickly as that?” he encouraged her.

“Yes, when he left the private hotel where he and I were both staying just over a fortnight ago, he was not even engaged. He says such quaint things about it, too. He says he picked her up on the way to Paradise.”

The mention of Paradise confirmed the priest’s worst suspicions. But “Yerce, yerce....” was his only reply to Courtesy.

Late that night the priest walked round and round the deck trying to peer into the face of his god, professional duty. His conscience was as short-sighted as some people’s eyes, and he was often known to pursue a shadow under the impression that he was pursuing his duty.

“Of course I must warn the Captain,” he said. “And that bright young lady who unconsciously gave me the news. And Mrs. Rust, who encourages that misguided young man to talk. And Mrs. Cyrus Berry, who lets her children play with him. As for the woman—I always think that women are the most to blame in such cases.”

Although he was altogether narrow his limits were indefinite, except under great provocation. He had not strength enough to draw the line anywhere. 80“Wicked” was too big a word for him; and although he believed that the gardener and the suffragette were in immediate danger of hell-fire, he could only call them “misguided.” This applies to him only in his capacity as a priest. In his own interests he was very much more sensitive than he was in the interest of his God.

Sometimes I think that angels, grown old, turn into enemies to trap the unwary. The angel of tolerance was the great saviour of history, but now he saps the strength of every cause. Either I Am Right, or I May Possibly Be Right. If I may only possibly be right, why should I dream of burning at the stake for such a very illusory proposition? But if I am right, then my enemy is Wrong, and is in danger of hell-fire. That is my theory. My practice is to believe that belief is everything, and that I may worship a Jove or a stone with advantage to my soul. Belief is everything, and I believe. But if my enemy believes in nothing, then I will condemn him. Why should I be tolerant of what I am convinced is wrong?

The priest, in the dark, found some one clinging round his knees. A woman—a little woman—wrapped so tightly in a cloak that she looked like a mummy. Her face was grey, and her lips looked dark. Her hair lay dank and low upon her brow, and yet seemed as if it should have been wildly on end about her head. The whole of her looked horribly restrained—bound with chains—and her 81eyes, which should have given the key to the entreaty which she embodied, were tightly shut. For five seconds the priest tried to run away. But she held him round the knees and cried, “Save me, save me!”

Nobody had ever come to the priest with such a preposterous request before.

“Let me go, my good woman,” he said, audibly keeping his head. “Be calm, let me beg you to be calm.”

She let him go. But she was not calm.

It was very late, and the deck-chairs had been folded up and stacked. As the woman would not rise to the priest’s level, he saw nothing for it but to sink to hers. They sat upon the deck side by side. He felt that it was not dignified, but there was nobody looking. And otherwise, he began to feel in his element. Here was a soul literally shrieking to be saved.

“What is it? Tell me. You have sinned?” he asked.

“Certainly not,” replied the woman in a hard thin voice. “I have never deserved what I’ve got. It seems to me that it’s God who has sinned.”

“Hush, be calm,” the priest jerked out. “Be calm and tell me what has upset you so much.”

The woman began to laugh. Her laughter was absurdly impossible, like frozen fire. It lasted for some time, and the world seemed to wait on tiptoe for it to stop. It was too much for the priest’s nerves, and for his own sake he gripped her arm to 82make her stop. She was silent at once. The grip had been what she needed.

“Now tell me,” said the priest.

She paused a little while, and seemed trying to swallow her hysteria. When she spoke it was in a sane, though trembling voice. “I am not Church of England, sir, but you being a man of God, so to speak, I thought ... I am suffering—terribly. There’s something gnawing at my breast ... I’ve prayed to God, sir; I’ve prayed until I’ve fainted with the pain of kneeling upright. But he never took no notice. I think he’s mistaken me for a damned soul ... before my time. Why, I could see God smiling, I could, and the pain grew worse. I’ve been a good woman in my time; I’ve done my duty. But God smiled to see me hurt. So I prayed to the Devil—I’d never have believed it three months ago. I prayed for hell-fire rather than this. The pain grew worse....”

“Have you seen the doctor?”

“Oh, yes. And he said the sea-voyage would do me good. He couldn’t do nothing.”

“Poor soul!” said the priest, and found to his surprise that he was inadequate to the occasion. “Poor soul, what can I say? It is, alas, woman’s part to suffer in this world. Your reward is in heaven. You must pin your faith still to the efficacy of prayer. You cannot have prayed in the right spirit.”

“But what a God—what a God ...” shouted 83the woman with a wild cry. “To hide himself in a maze—and me too distracted to find out the way. Why, my tears ought to reach him, let alone my prayers. I’ve sacrificed so much for him—and he gives me over to this....”

“This is terrible, yerce terrible,” said the priest. “My poor creature, this is not the right spirit in which to meet adversity. Put yourself in God’s hands, like a little child....”

The woman dragged herself suddenly a yard or two from him. “Oh, you talker—you talker ...” she cried, and writhed upon the deck.

“Listen,” said the priest in a commanding voice. “Kneel with me now, and pray to God. When we have prayed, I will take you to the doctor, and he will give you something to make you sleep.”

“I won’t touch drugs,” said the woman. “And I don’t hold with that young doctor in brass buttons. If I pray now with you, will you promise that I shall be better in the morning?”

“Yes,” said the priest. It was spoken, not out of his faith, but because that seemed the only way to put an end to the scene. And when he prayed, in a musical clerical voice, he prayed not out of his heart, but out of his sense of what was fitting.

The stars bent their wise eyes upon the wise sea and bore witness that the priest’s prayer never reached heaven’s gate.

“Now you feel better, do you not?” he asked, when he had said all that had occurred to him, and 84intoned a loud Amen, as if to give the prayer an upward impetus.

“No,” sobbed the woman.

“Who are you? What is your name?”

“I am Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid,” she replied, and staggered in a lost way into the darkness of the companion-way.

“To-morrow it will be better,” the priest called after her. And wished that he could think so.

The world smiled next morning, when the sports began again. Elizabeth Hammer was invisible, probably concealed in some lowly place suitable to her position. The sea was silver, the sky blazed blue, the sun smiled from its height, like a father beaming upon his irresponsible family. Mrs. Paul Rust looked incredible in a pale dress, designed for peculiarity rather than grace; pink roses sprigged it so sparsely as to give the impression of birth-mark afflictions rather than decorations. I am not sure whether the feather in her hat was more like an explosion or a palm tree. The gardener rolled upon a deck-chair with three children using him as a switch-back railway. Theresa was smiling from her top curl down to her toes. Even the suffragette was talking about the transmigration of souls to the fourth officer. Everything on the surface was highly satisfactory, and, on board ship, nothing except the surface matters a bit.

The priest had a leaky mind. He never poured out all that was in it, but he could not help letting a 85certain proportion of its contents escape. He paused in his daily walk of thirty times round the deck, and found a seat beside Mrs. Paul Rust.

“Your maid seems to be in a shocking state of health,” he said.

“She suffers from indigestion,” replied Mrs. Rust. “Some fool of a doctor has told her that she has cancer. She has quite lost her head over it.”

“At any rate she appears to be in great pain,” said the priest, who considered that indigestion was rather too unclothed a word for ordinary use. “And pain is a terrible thing, is it not?”

“No,” said Mrs. Rust.

“You mean that you consider it salubrious for the soul?”

“No,” said Mrs. Rust.

“Then I wonder in what way you consider pain desirable?”

Mrs. Rust, who had meant nothing beyond contradiction, shut her eyes and looked immovably subtle. The priest changed the subject. He had a real gift for changing the subject.

“Have you made the acquaintance of that dark young man who acts as the ship’s gardener?” he asked.

“An excellent young man,” said Mrs. Rust, immediately divining that the priest did not approve of him.

“Yerce, yerce, no doubt an excellent young man,” agreed the priest mechanically. “But I have reason 86to believe that his morals are not satisfactory.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

“I do not think he is really married to that aggressive young woman he calls his wife.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. She did not approve of such irregularities any more than the priest did, but she disapproved of disapprobation.

The priest, being constitutionally incapable of argument, and yet unable to broaden his view, was left wordless. But an interruption mercifully rescued him from the necessity of attempting a reply.

Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid, appeared at the companion door. Her eyes were fixed hungrily upon the sea.

There was a race about to be run, and the starter stood ready to say the word. But Elizabeth Hammer brushed past him and walked across the empty strip of deck. She climbed the rail as though she were walking upstairs, and dropped into the sea.

“Hammer,” barked Mrs. Rust hoarsely, as she heard the splash. That word broke the spell. A woman shrieked, and Captain Walters shouted, “Man Overboard.”

The suffragette was not a heroine. What she did was undignified and unconscious. The heroine should remove her coat, hand her watch to a friend, send her love to a few relations, and bound gracefully into the water. The suffragette, fully clothed, tumbled upside down after Elizabeth Hammer. No 87noble impulse prompted her to do it. She did not know of her intention until she found herself in the water, and then she thought, “What a fool!” She could not swim. The Caribbeania looked as distant as heaven, and as high. She felt as if she had been dead a long time since she saw it last. She paddled with her feet and hands like a dog, her mouth was full of water and of hair. She had never felt so abased in her life, she seemed crushed like a wafer into the sinking surface of the nether pit. For centuries she wrestled with the sea, sometimes for years and years on end a wave tore at her breath. She never thought of Elizabeth Hammer.

“This is absurd,” she thought, when eternity came to an end, and she had time for consecutive thought. She felt sure her eyes were straining out of their sockets, and tried to remember whether she had ever heard of any one going blind through drowning. Then she cried, and remembered that her head must be above water, if she could cry. She knew then that there was some one on her side in the battle. The sea seemed to hold her loosely now, instead of clutching her throat. She had a moment to consider the matter from the Caribbeania’s point of view, and to realise what a pathetic accident had occurred. It dawned upon her that her own hand, wearing her mother’s wedding ring, was just in front of her, holding the cord of a neat white life-buoy. “Caribbeania” painted in black on the life-buoy seemed like a wide mad smile.

88“This is absurd,” bubbled the suffragette. “I shall wake up in a minute now. It’s the air makes one sleepy.” And then she thought of something else for ages and ages, and could not find out what she was thinking of, though she tried all the time.

On the promenade deck of the Caribbeania the gardener stood dumb with enormous astonishment. His soul was dumb, his limbs were numb, his mental circulation was stopped. He had a sort of impression that the Atlantic had been suddenly sprinkled with a shower of women, but he could only think of one drop in the shower.

“How red her face was as she went under—and what a dear she is!”

The Caribbeania had flung the two women behind her, and swept upon her way, only for a second had the red face of the suffragette floated like a cherry upon the water beside the black wall of the ship. The fourth officer had flung a life-buoy. Theresa had fainted. There was a black cork-like thing a thousand miles away which the fourth officer said was the head of one of the women. The Caribbeania, checked in her scornful attempt to proceed uncaring, was being brought round in a circle. A boat was being lowered.

There was a long silence on the promenade deck.

Presently—“Is it—her?” asked Courtesy in a husky voice by the gardener’s side.

“Of course,” answered the gardener.

89Elizabeth Hammer had found the sleep she sought without recourse to drugs.

Everybody watched the distant boat receive the thin small warrior out of the grasp of the sea, and then sweep in wide circles on its search for Elizabeth Hammer.

The dream ended. The boat drew alongside. The suffragette, who had to some extent collected herself, made a characteristic attempt to step unassisted from the boat. It failed. Everybody had come down to the main deck to gratify their curiosity. The suffragette was carried on deck, though she obviously supposed she was walking. She looked somehow out of proportion to the elements with which she had battled.

“You poor lamb,” said Courtesy, looking very dry and motherly beside her. “How do you feel? I’m coming to help you into bed.”

“I am perfectly well, thank you,” said the suffragette.

“Why did you jump overboard if you couldn’t swim?” asked the fourth officer, who was young and believed that there are always reasons for everything.

“It was a mistake,” said the suffragette testily, and was led below by Courtesy and a stewardess.

Tongues were loosened. Everybody reascended to the upper deck to vent their sympathy on Mrs. Paul Rust.

She had remained in her chair, because she felt 90that any other woman would have retired below after witnessing the suicide of an indispensable part of her travelling equipment. But she could not control her complexion. Her face was blue-white like chalk, beneath her incongruous hair. She would reply to no questions, and the priest, after making several attempts to create for himself a speaking part in the drama, was obliged to abandon his intention as far as she was concerned, for lack of support. He turned to the gardener, whose stunned mind was now regaining consciousness.

“I do indeed congratulate you on the rescue of your—your wife,” said the priest. “Yerce, yerce. As for that other poor soul, I was afraid she might make some attempt of the sort. She was suffering from some internal complaint, and had lost control of herself. Of course she had confided in me—yerce, yerce. I was so fortunate as to be able to say a few words of comfort. Perhaps it was a merciful release. But I hope she was prepared at the last. I hope that in that awful moment she thought upon her sins.”

“I hope so too,” said the gardener. “It is good to die with a happy memory in the heart.”

The general impression was that Elizabeth Hammer had made a mistake, poor thing. She was the subject of much conversation but little conjecture. The big problem of her little mind was not so much buried as never unearthed. She had made a mistake, poor thing. That was her epitaph.

91The suffragette was of course a heroine. She was a heroine for the same reason as Elizabeth Hammer was a poor thing—because nobody had analysed her motives. It would have been heresy to suggest that the heroine’s motive had been pure hysteria. She had done a very useless thing in a very clumsy way, but because it had been dangerous she was promoted to the rank of heroine.

“I have been a damn fool,” mourned the suffragette, writhing profanely on her bunk.

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy briskly. “You have been frightfully brave. It was only hard luck that you couldn’t save the woman.”

“But I didn’t try. I had forgotten all about her until this moment.”

“Nonsense,” repeated Courtesy, busy with a hot-water bottle. “You were splendid. We didn’t know you had it in you.”

The suffragette laughed her secret laugh, which she kept hidden beneath her militant exterior. The sort of laughter that flies, not unsuitably, in the very face of tragedy.

“This is a change,” she said.

“What is?”

“To be respected.”

“My dear gal, we all respected you all along. Personally I always told them: ‘Mark my words,’ I said, ‘that gal’s got brains.’”

“Yes, I expect they needed to be told.”

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy.

92“For the last five years,” said the suffragette, “I have followed my conscience over rough land. I have been suffragetting industriously all that time. And every one laughed behind their hands at me. Not that I care. But to-day I have been a fool, and they have promoted me to the rank of heroine.”

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re not a fool. And surely you never were a suffragette.”

“I am a militant suffragette,” said the suffragette proudly. “It takes a little courage and no hysteria to march through the city with drunk medical students waiting to knock you down at the next corner; and it takes hysteria and no courage to fall by mistake into the Atlantic.”

“You quaint dear,” said Courtesy, who had not been giving undivided attention to her patient’s remarks. “I do believe you’ve got something in you besides brains after all. There now, you must try and sleep. Pleasant dreams. And if you’re a good gal and wake up with some roses in your cheeks, you shall have your husband to come and have tea with you.”

“No,” said the suffragette. “Don’t call him that.”

Courtesy wrenched the stopper of the hot-water bottle tightly on, as though she were also corking up her curiosity.

As she went upstairs Courtesy discovered that she quite liked the suffragette—from a height. For a person suffering from brains, and from a mystery, 93and from political fervour, and from lack of physical stamina, the woman was quite surprisingly likeable.

On deck, Courtesy’s friendly feeling was immediately put to the test. Mrs. Paul Rust beckoned her to her side.

“That woman who jumped into the water after Hammer ... she is quite well again, of course?” It was rather difficult for Mrs. Rust to put this question, because the most obvious form was, “How is she?” and that would have been far too human.

“She’ll be all right,” said Courtesy. “And even if she wasn’t she wouldn’t say so. She keeps herself to herself. You’ve torn a button off your coat. Shall I sew it on for you? You’ll miss your maid.”

“I shall not,” said Mrs. Rust. “She was a fool to behave in that way. Nothing but indigestion.”

“You shouldn’t speak hardly of the dead,” said Courtesy, indomitably conventional.

“Stuff and nonsense,” retorted Mrs. Rust, and closed her eyes in order to close the subject. “That young woman...”

“I shall call her the suffragette,” said Courtesy. “She says she is one, and she looks like one.”

“At any rate, the priest tells me she is not married to the ship’s gardener. Is that so?”

“It’s not the priest’s business. Nor mine either.”

“You would drop her like a red-hot coal if she were not married.”

“Time enough to decide that later. I don’t approve 94of irregularity, of course. Marriage after all is an excellent idea.”

That turned the balance successfully in the suffragette’s favour. “You are wrong,” said Mrs. Rust. “Marriage is an idiotic institution. It must have been invented by a man, I feel sure. It is like using ropes where only a silken thread is necessary.”

“O Lor’,” said Courtesy.

Mrs. Paul Rust decided to reach the truth by interrogating the gardener. She always tried to approach a mystery by the high-road, rightly considering that the high-road is the most untrodden way in these tortuous days.

“Come here,” she called to the gardener, when Courtesy disappeared to see if her patient was asleep.

“Is that young woman who foolishly jumped into the sea—your wife?” she asked.

The gardener had resisted hours of siege on the subject. He was tired. Besides he instinctively understood Mrs. Rust.

“In some ways she is,” he replied, after rather a blank pause.

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

“Is that young man who owns a little red hotel in the woods in Hampshire your son?” asked the gardener, suddenly face to face with an opportunity.

“In some ways he is,” replied Mrs. Rust inevitably, without a smile.

The gardener became more and more inspired. 95“Because if you are his mother, I am his friend, and you may be interested to know that I put your point of view clearly before him when I met him last. He told me that you were unwilling to treat his hotel as an investment, and I said, ‘Why should she?’ I said, ‘You may take it from me that she won’t.’”

“Then you had no business to take my intentions for granted,” retorted Mrs. Rust. “What the dickens did you mean by it?”

“I told him ...” continued the gardener, almost suffocating in the grasp of his own cleverness, “that obviously you could take no notice of so vague a scheme. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred, I said, would do as you were doing.”

“You had better have minded your own business,” interrupted Mrs. Rust wrathfully. “And you had better mind it now. I shall do exactly what I like with my money, no matter what the other ninety-nine women would do.”

“I was afraid you would be annoyed by my speaking like this,” said the gardener humbly. “It is only natural.”

“Stuff and nonsense. Do you know that the priest is shocked by his suspicions about you and your suffragette?”

“I don’t mind,” said the gardener. “Being a priest, I suppose he is paid to be shocked sometimes. I don’t object to being his butt.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “Then you don’t continue to assert that she is your wife.”

96“I can’t be bothered to continue to assert it,” said the gardener.

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

The gardener felt that the reward of the successfully unscrupulous rogue was within his reach. Lying in a good cause is a lovely exercise. The warm feeling of duty begun surged over him. He had justified his presence on board the Caribbeania, he had been true to Samuel Rust. The suffragette was not drowned. The blue sea was all round him. There was little else to be desired.

“I shan’t be an unscrupulous rogue a moment longer than I can help,” thought the gardener. “I shall pose as being good next. We will be married on landing.”

Courtesy at that moment returned and said, “Your wife would like you to come and have tea with her.”

“Don’t leave us alone,” begged the gardener of Courtesy as they went below. “I don’t know how to behave to heroines.”

He was obviously at a loss when he reached the suffragette’s cabin. He had never seen her with her hair down, and that upset him from the start. He shook her gently but repeatedly by the hand, and smiled his well-meaning young smile. He did not know what to say, and this was usually a branch of knowledge at which he was proficient.

“Did you know that Captain Walters won the 97sweep yesterday on the Captain’s number?” he asked.

“Don’t be a donkey,” said Courtesy. There was a genial lack of sting about Courtesy’s discourtesies, which kept her charm intact through all vicissitudes. “She doesn’t want to hear about the sweep. Let her be just now. She’s busy pouring out your tea.”

For in the same spirit as the nurse allows a convalescent child to pour out tea from its own teapot, Courtesy had encouraged the suffragette to officiate. The headquarters of the meal, on a tray, were balanced upon the invalid’s bunk. It was not a treat to the suffragette, who loathed all the details of Woman’s Sphere, but for once she did not proclaim the ungracious truth.

“I’m sorry,” she said nervously. “It’s years since I did anything of this sort. But I don’t know whether you take milk and sugar.”

The gardener distrustfully eyed the hot water with vague aspirations towards tea-dom that dripped into his cup.

“I don’t take either milk or sugar, thank you,” he said, “I like my troubles singly.”

“Naughty boy,” said Courtesy, helping herself generously to cake. “You are beastly rude. And you’re a naughty gal, too, you suffragette. You ought to know how your husband likes his tea.”

“But he’s not my husband,” said the suffragette.

The gardener sat with a bun arrested half-way to 98his mouth. He had lived a self-contained existence, and had never before had a pose of his dismantled by an alien hand. The experience was most novel. He liked the suffragette more and more because she was unexpected.

“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re feverish. You’ll tell me what you’ll be sorry for, in a minute.”

“It’s true; and I’m far from sorry for it,” said the suffragette. “It’s almost too good to be true, but it is. I’m still alone. But because he thought I was a menace to England’s safety, he brought me away—by force.”

“Perfectly true,” corroborated the gardener.

“You babies,” said Courtesy. “It’s lucky for you it’s only me to hear you.”

“It’s not a secret,” said the gardener. “I’ve just been talking about it to Mrs. Rust.”

“And what did she say?” asked Courtesy and the suffragette together.

“She said, ‘Good.’”

At that moment the voice of Mrs. Rust was heard in the passage outside. “Miss Briggs.”

Courtesy ran clumsily from the cabin.

“That button,” said Mrs. Rust. “You said you would.... Myself I never can remember which finger I ought to wear my thimble on, or at what angle the needle should be held....”

Anybody else, arrived within three feet of the suffragette’s door, would have thrown a smile round the corner. But Mrs. Rust did not. She did possess 99a heart, I am told, but a heart is such a hackneyed thing that she concealed it.

“What do you intend to do when you get to Trinity Islands?” asked the suffragette.

“I don’t know what we shall do,” replied the gardener. “I hate knowing about the future. I am leaving it—not to fate, but to my future self.”

“Don’t you believe in fate?”

“No. I believe in myself. I believe I can do exactly what I like.”

“And what about me? Can’t I do exactly what I like? Do you think you can do exactly what you like with me?” asked the suffragette militantly.

“So far I seem to have succeeded even in that.”

She laughed.

After a pause he said suddenly, “I am a brute to you, you dear, unaccommodating little thing. Somehow my will and my deed have got disconnected in my dealings with you. It is curious that having such good intentions I should still remain the villain of the piece. Yet I meant—if ever I had a woman—to make up to her for all I have seen my mother go through.”

“When you have a woman—perhaps you will ...” said the suffragette. “You must wait and see.”

“Come up and see land,” shouted Courtesy, running in with a semi-buttoned coat in her hand.

The gardener shot up the companion-way, and, 100behold, the gods had touched the sea, and fairyland had uprisen.

A long vivid island, afire in the ardent sun. Its mountain was golden and eccentric in outline, its little town and fortresses had obviously been built by a neat-fingered baby-god out of its box of bricks. The tiny houses had green shutters and red roofs. There was no doubt that the whole thing had only been created a minute or two before, it was so neat and so unsullied. It was nonsense to call the place by the name of a common liqueur, as the quartermaster did, any one could see it was too sudden and too faery to have a name or to make a liqueur. There was something very exciting in the way it had leapt out of a perfectly empty sea, and in the way it sped over the horizon, as if shrinking from the gaze of the proud Caribbeania.

It passed. The gardener had looked at a dream. Courtesy had looked at good dry land. Captain Walters had looked at the monastery from which the liqueur emanated. Mrs. Rust had not looked at all. It is surprising that there should be so much difference in the material collected by such identical instruments as one pair of human eyes and another.

Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys. The Caribbeania, her appetite for speed checked, began to stalk them with bated breath.

“We’ll be going through the Hair’s Breadth to-morrow at seven,” said the Captain, in a fat, selfcongratulatory 101voice, as though he had himself created the channel he referred to. “You must all get up early to see her do it.”

There are few penances easier than early rising on board ship. There are no inducements to stay upon the implacable plane that is your bunk, in the hot square cube that is your cabin. Your ear is tickled by the sound of the activities of food in the saloon outside; you can hear the sea singing in a cheerful, beckoning way past your inadequate porthole. You emerge from your cabin and find men in pyjamas, and ladies in flowered dressing-gowns and (if possible) thick pig-tails, or (if impossible) pleasing head-erections of lace, sitting in rows at sparkling tables, and being fed by stewards with apples and sandwiches. There is scarcely ever any need to remind the voyager by sea about the tiresome superiority that distinguishes the ant.

The Captain, therefore, had a large audience ready for his sleight-of-nerve feat of threading the Hair’s Breadth. He looked very self-conscious on the bridge.

Land climbed slowly down the spangled sloped sea from the horizon. There seemed to be no gap in the quivering line of it. Presently, however, as if it had quivered itself to pieces, the line was shattered. Silver channels appeared beckoning on every side. The Caribbeania, blind except to her duty, headed towards the least likely-looking channel of all. The most ignorant passenger on the ship could 102have told the Captain that he was running into certain destruction. Many longed to take command, and to point out to the Captain his mistake. Like a camel advancing foolhardily upon the needle’s eye the Caribbeania approached. Her speed was slackened, she went on tiptoe, so to speak, as if not to awaken the gods of ill-chance, but there was nothing faltering about her. She thrust her shoulders into the opening.

(It would be waste of time to inform me that in nautical language a ship has no shoulders.)

You could have whispered a confidence to the palm trees on either side—except that you would have been afraid to draw enough breath to do so, for fear of deflecting the ship an inch from her course.

Courtesy was, as usual, bold. She spoke in quite an ordinary voice. “Why, look, there’s a man with hardly anything on, paddling! How killing! He’s the colour of brown paper!”

“You’ll soon be dead in Trinity Islands if you find that killing,” snapped Mrs. Rust. “The Captain evidently doesn’t know his business. We’re at least six feet nearer to this shore than the other.”

The first of Trinity Islands heaved before them quite abruptly when they had traversed the channel. The land seemed to have been petrified in the act of leaping up to meet them. I think the wind had changed upon it at a moment of grotesque contortion. My nurse used always to warn me that this 103climatic change might fatally occur when my anatomical experiments became more than usually daring.

Green woods had veiled the harsh shapes of the hills. Palms waved their spread hands upon the sky-line. A tangle of green things tumbled to the water’s edge. Far away to the right a faint blessing of pearl-coloured smoke and a few diamonds flung among the velvet slopes of the hills hinted at the watching windows of Port of the West. Shipping clustered confidentially together on either side of the Caribbeania, like gossips commenting jealously on the arrival of a princess of their kind. The entering liner shook out little waves like messages to alight on the calm shore.

The whole scene looked too heavy to be painted on the delicate sea. It was absurd to think that that pale opal floor should be trodden by the rusty tramp-steamers, the tall red-and-black sailing ships, the panting tugs, the blunt and bloated coal-tenders laden with compressed niggerhood. There were broadheaded catfish, and groping jellyfish in the water, and they alone looked fashioned from and throughout eternity for the tender element that framed them.

The suffragette, who had risen from her berth, contrary to the advice of Courtesy and of the doctor, looked at the first of Trinity Islands with her soul in her eyes and a compressed adoration in her breast. For there was a silver sea, silver mist enclosing the 104island, and a silver shore shining through the mist. Silver, of course, is idealised grey—grey with the memory of black and white refined away. Silver is the halo of a snake-soul.

The day was mapped out in so many ways by the different passengers of the Caribbeania, that, from their prophetic descriptions, you could hardly recognise it as the same slice out of eternity. There were globe-trotters, eager to trot this tiny section of the globe in hired motor-cars, others anxious to buy souvenirs in Port of the West all day, others nervously determined to call upon the Governor in search of a Vice-regal luncheon, others without imagination desirous of fishing for catfish from the poop, and a very few who dared to avow their intention of spending the day in absorbing cold drinks on the verandah of the King’s Garden Hotel.

In theory the gardener wished to lie upon a chair on the shady side of the deck, with a handkerchief over his face all day. Such a course would have been flattering to his dignity and to his worship of aloofness. In practice his unquenchable energy and that of the suffragette were too much for him. He was vividly stirred by the strange land. The clawlike hands of the palms beckoned him.

Following the suffragette, he bounded on to the first launch as eagerly as though he were not a man of theory. Behind him bounded Courtesy, and behind her Mrs. Paul Rust strove to bound. Courtesy, the gardener, and the suffragette sat squeezed in a 105row upon a dirty seat in the launch. Mrs. Rust, because sitting in a squeezed row was against her principles, stood. By these means she kept many men-passengers standing in wistful politeness during the whole journey of three miles to the shore.

The bay swept its wide arms farther and farther round them. The palm trees on the promontories on either side of the town looked no longer beckoning, but grasping.

“Oh, isn’t it good!” said the gardener, thrilling so that Courtesy and the suffragette, by reason of compressed propinquity, had to thrill too. He took the suffragette’s hand violently, and waggled it to and fro. “Isn’t it fine ...” and he jumped his feet upon the deck.

“You babies,” said Courtesy. For the suffragette, even though she did not jump her feet, was jumping her eyes, and obviously jumping the heart in her breast. Most unorthodox for a snake.

“We shall run head foremost into the wharf,” said Mrs. Rust in a final voice. “What a pity it is that sailors never know their work.”

“Yes, isn’t it,” agreed the gardener, as if he had been longing to say something of the sort. “Extraordinary. Fine. Won’t it be fine if we run head foremost into the wharf, and sink, to be sealed up in this blue jewel here!”

He tried to pat the bay with his hand.

“Closed in the heart of it,” said the suffragette, “like flies in amber.”

106“I shouldn’t like it at all,” sniffed Courtesy.

“Not like flies in amber,” said the gardener. “Because flies spoil the amber.”

“Well, you and I wouldn’t exactly decorate the sea,” remarked the suffragette.

“Look at those cannibals waiting for us,” said Courtesy. “My dears, I’m simply terrified.”

The cannibals received them from the launch with the proverbial eagerness of cannibals. In the first three minutes of their arrival on land the travellers could have bought enough goods to furnish several bazaars had they been so inclined. The suffragette, by tickling the chin of a superb blue and yellow bird, was considered to have tacitly concluded a bargain with the owner as to the possession of it, and there was much discussion before she was disembarrassed of her unwelcome protégé. The gardener bought two walking-sticks in the excitement of the moment, before he remembered that he was devoid of money. The owner of the walking-sticks, however, kindly reminded him of the one-sidedness of the purchase, and he was obliged to borrow from the suffragette.

The town, like a brazen beauty feigning modesty, was withdrawn a little from the wharves. There was a dry-looking grass space with goats as its only gardeners. This the party crossed, and the sensitive plant ducked and dived into its inner remoteness as they passed. The streets in front of them, hot and glaring, pointed to the hills, like fevered fingers pointing to peace which is unattainable.

107The main street received them fiercely. The heat was like the blaring of trumpets. The trams were intolerably noisy, clanking, and rattling like a devil’s cavalry charge. Black, shining women, with the faces of bull-dogs—only not so sincere—swung in a slow whirlwind of many petticoats up and down the street, with vivid burdens of fruit piled in ochre-coloured baskets on their heads. Little boys and girls, with their clothes precariously slung on thin brown shoulders, and well aired by an impromptu system of ventilation, ran by the gardener’s side, and reminded him of the necessity of quatties and half-pinnies, even in this paradise of the poor, where sustenance literally falls on your head from every tree in the forest.

“This is exhausting,” said Mrs. Paul Rust, forced by extreme heat into a confession of the obvious. “Policeman, where can we get a cab?”

“Yes, please, missis,” replied the policeman, who was tastefully dressed in white, by way of a contrast to his complexion.

“Nonsense, man,” said Mrs. Rust. “I repeat, where can a cab be found?”

“No, please, missis,” replied the policeman, acutely divining that his first answer had been found wanting.

“You fool,” said Mrs. Rust, another unoriginal comment wrung from her by the heat.

The policeman understood this, and giggled bashfully in a high falsetto.

108“Missis wanta buggy?” asked a tobacconist, with a slightly less dense complexion, from his shop door. “Policeman nevah understand missis, he only a niggah.”

The gardener, as ever prone to paint the lily, hurried into the breach. “Ah yes, of course, we white men, we always hang together, eh?”

It was The Moment of that tobacconist’s life. The gardener all unawares had crossed in one lucky stride those bitter channels that divide the brown man from the black, the yellow man from the brown, the white man from the yellow, and the buckra, the man from England, from all the world.

Three buggies suddenly materialised noisily out of Mrs. Rust’s desire. They were all first upon the scene, as far as one could judge from the turmoil of conversation that immediately arose on the subject. The gardener tried to look firm but unbiassed. The three women stood and waited in a state of trance.

The sun was working so hard at his daily task in the sky, that one could almost have pitied him for being called to such a flaming vocation in this flaming weather.

Finally, Mrs. Rust awoke and, entering the nearest buggy, shook it to its very core as she seated herself and said, “King’s Garden Hotel.”

She could hardly have been recognised as the Mrs. Rust of the Caribbeania. You could see her pride oozing out in large drops upon her brow. Her hat was on one side, and completely hid her sensational 109hair, but for one flat wisp, like an interrogation mark inverted, which reached damply to her eyebrow.

The buggy horse, which consisted of a few promiscuous bones, badly sewn up in a second-hand skin, was more than willing to pause until the rest of the party should be seated, and even then seemed desirous of waiting on the chance of picking up yet another fare. It was, however, reminded of its duty by its driver, and turned its drooping nose in the direction of the King’s Garden Hotel.

When they reached that heavenly verandah, they felt for a moment as though they were suffering from delusions. The Caribbeania seemed to have arrived on shore bodily. A long vista of familiar profiles rocked cheek by jowl, nose beyond nose, from end to end of the verandah. There was Theresa, who had made no secret of her intention of accompanying Captain Walters “for a lark” on a visit to a Trinity Island Picture Palace. There was the priest, who had expressed a determination (which nobody had tried to alter) to explore the famous botanical gardens all by himself all day. There was the fourth officer, who had left the Caribbeania inspired by a vision of a long walk to a sandy beach with a bathe at the end of it. There was the captain, who had set out to buy his wife a stuffed alligator as a silver-wedding present.

That cool strip of green rocking-chairs had acted on them all like a spider’s web, with the manager of 110the King’s Garden sitting in the middle of it, murmuring cool things concerning drinks in an iced voice. Exquisite white linen suits of clothes, the only blot on whose spotlessness was the nigger inside them, ambled up and down the line, like field-marshals reviewing the household cavalry, armed humanely with lemon squashes and whiskies and sodas.

The gardener, Mrs. Rust, the suffragette, and Courtesy enlisted in this force, and sat in a state of torpor only partially dispelled by luncheon, until Mrs. Rust began to look herself again. Her hat straightened and elevated itself to its normal position, and perched upon her hair like a nest of flowers on a ripe hay-field. The curls dried up like parsley after rain.

Little by little the other tourists regained consciousness, and with much show of energy set forth to the nearest buggy stand.

At about five, Courtesy, who was never happy unless she was moving with the crowd, became restless.

“Let’s take a buggy and go back to the wharf,” she suggested.

“We will hire a four-wheeler and return to the pier,” said Mrs. Rust in a contradictory voice.

Buggy or four-wheeler, there was only one sort of vehicle to be found in Port of the West. They manned the nearest conveyance and quibbled not over its title.

“It would be frightful if we missed the boat,” 111said Courtesy, who always said the thing that everybody else had already thought of saying, but rejected.

For the Caribbeania had begun raking the atmosphere with hoarse calls for its dispersed passengers.

But at the wharf the launch was still fussily collecting the mails.

There was a flame-coloured azalea leaning gorgeously out of the shade of the eaves of a customs house. It was Courtesy’s colour—so obviously hers that Courtesy herself unconsciously answered its call.

“Ou—I say, that colour,” she said, and ceased, because she could not voice the echo that streamed from her heart to the azalea’s. It bent towards her like a torch blown by the wind.

“It’s autumn,” said the gardener. “And that azalea is the only thing that knows it on the island.”

“Good,” commented Mrs. Rust. “All this green greenhouse rubbish has no sense ...” she waved her hands to the palm trees that plaited their fingers over the sky in the background.

“Autumn, I think ...” began the gardener, addressing the azalea, “autumn runs into the year, crying, ‘I’m on fire, I’m on fire ...’ and yet glories all the while; just as I might say, ‘This is passion, this is passion ...’ and so it is passion, and pain as well, but I love it....”

“What a funny thing to say!” said Courtesy. “Do you say that sort of thing by mistake, you 112quaint boy, or do you know what you’re talking about?”

“My lips say it by mistake,” said the gardener. “But my heart knows it, especially when I see—a thing like that. Otherwise, why should I have become a gardener?”

He looked round for the suffragette to see if she had caught this spark out of his heart, and whether the same torch had set her alight. She was not there.

“Come now, everybody,” said Courtesy. “The launch’ll be starting in a minute.”

“But the suffragette’s not here,” said the gardener.

There was an instant’s blank as heavy as lead.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I can’t wait here all day. If she wants to moon around and miss the boat, let her. I am going.”

She gave a hand each to two niggers, and sprang like a detachable earthquake into the launch.

“I think I ought to wait,” said Courtesy. “She’s a little shaky after yesterday, and you’re such an irresponsible boy, gardener. She may have fainted, while we were looking the other way. Or she may be in that crowd buying souvenirs.”

The gardener looked in the crowd for that well-known round hat with the faded flowers. But he knew that she would never buy a souvenir.

“You jump in, gardener. I’ll wait,” said Courtesy. “Perhaps there’ll be another launch.”

113“Lars’ launch, missis, please,” said one of the mariners of the vessel in question.

“Come at once, girl,” said Mrs. Rust’s harsh voice from the stern.

Courtesy wavered.

Mrs. Rust made a great effort. She became extremely red. “Don’t you understand, girl, you must come?” she shouted. “I can’t spare you.... I like you....” She cleared her throat and changed her voice. “Can’t sew ... buttons ... companion ... large salary....”

But the first part of the sentence reached Courtesy’s sympathy. She jumped into the launch.

The gardener stood on the hot wharf, and his heart turned upside down. His plans were stripped from him once more by this disgracefully militant creature who had broken into his life. He hovered on the brink of several thoughts at once.

“The little fool. The dear little thing. The little devil.”

He ran round the customs house. He felt convinced that it was interposing its broad person between him and his suffragette. He could almost see it dodging to hide her from his sight.

“I shall find her in a minute,” he thought. “I’m a lucky man.” He thought that his hopes were pinned to the probability of arriving on the Caribbeania in time.

On the brown grass space there were only the goats. The gardener was astonished not to see the 114fleeing form of a woman making for the town. Things can be done very quickly if they must. The gardener was at the corner of the main street before he had time to think another thought. He looked back, and saw in one fevered glance the launch only just parting from the shore.

“Have you seen a lady in white with a brown hat?” he asked of a policeman.

“Yes, please, sah.”

“Which way?”

The conversation was from beginning to end above the policeman’s head. But such a very hot buckra man must be humoured. At random the policeman pointed up the main street. The gardener was indeed a man of luck, for that was the right direction.

The main street on a fiery afternoon was as long as eternity, but in certain states of mind a man may bridge eternity in a breath, and not know what he has crossed.

He was on the race-course. He looked back and the launch was approaching the Caribbeania in the far-off bay, like a dwarf panting defiance at a giant.

When he was half-way across the race-course, he saw a white figure surmounted by a brown straw hat, in the Botanical Gardens, in the shade of a banyan tree.

The suffragette had lighted a cigarette in a laborious attempt to appear calm, but she pressed her hand to her breast as though she had been running. 115“I’m not coming,” she shouted, when he was within shouting distance.

He vaulted the railing of the race-course, and the railing of the garden. “What a bore!” he said. “Then I must stop too.”

“Why?” she asked.

Very far off, the launch was nestling at the side of the Caribbeania.

“For reasons I cannot be bothered to repeat to you.”

She veiled herself in a cloud of smoke.

“You know,” he added, “this is a repetition of the Elizabeth Hammer episode. Pure hysteria. Darling.”

There was an appreciable pause.

“Why, you’re right. So it is,” said the suffragette.

“Come on,” shouted the gardener. “We can catch it yet.”

“If I come,” she said, “it will be strong, not weak.”

“Of course,” said the gardener. “Come on.”

“It would be much easier to stay here.”

“Oh, much,” panted the gardener. “Come on, come on.”

So they ran, and on the way back they discovered how interminable the main street was, and how relentless is the sun of the West Atlantic. But when they reached the wharf, the launch was still clinging to the liner.

116“A guinea,” shouted the suffragette, who was experiencing the joys of very big-game hunting, “to the boatman who can get us up to the Caribbeania before she starts.”

She spoke in the voice of one accustomed to speaking in Trafalgar Square, and everybody understood her. A boat practically cut the feet from under them before she had finished speaking, and in it they splashed furiously out into the bay.

“We shall catch it,” said the gardener, rowing energetically with one finger. “I’m a man of luck.”

He was posing as one who would not utter a reproach. It was a convenient pose for all concerned. When they were about half-way, the suffragette said, “You know—it takes a little courage to admit hysteria.”

“Of course it does, my dear,” said the gardener. “I wouldn’t have done it for the world.”

Presently they were within bare shouting distance of the whale which had threatened to make Jonahs of them. A liner’s farewells are like those of a great many women I know, very elastic indeed.

“You’ll do it,” shouted a voice from the high boat-deck.

They did it. The Captain shook his finger at them from the bridge.

“What happened?” asked Courtesy, meeting them on the main deck with a shawl to put round the suffragette. Some women seem to think that a 117shawl, or a hot bath, or a little drop of sal-volatile are equal to any emergency under the sun.

“She didn’t know that was the last launch,” said the gardener, still posing as the magnanimous defender.

“Yes, I did,” said the suffragette.

“She was buying a souvenir round the corner,” persisted the gardener.

“No, I wasn’t,” contradicted the lady. “I made up my mind not to come back to the Caribbeania.”

“Ou, I say, how killing of you!” said Courtesy. “But he changed your mind?”

“No. I overcame it.”

“You quaint mite,” said Courtesy.

The gardener’s pose momentarily ended here, for he was stricken with whirling of the head and sickness, after running in the sun. Although there was a touch of martyrdom about it, it was not a dignified ending to a really effective pose. He had to seek the comfort of Hilda in his cabin.

Hilda had three flowers now, and they had cost her her independence, for she leaned upon a stick. But among her round green leaves she held up bravely her trinity of little gold suns.

The gardener being thus removed, Courtesy and the suffragette sat on the promenade-deck, and discussed the day. The suffragette was astonished to find herself in this position, being addressed as “my dear,” by a contemporary. “Just like a real girl,” 118she thought, for as she had never passed through the mutual hair-brushing stage with other girls, she always expected to be hated, and never to be loved. She found it rather delightful to have Courtesy’s hand passed through her arm, but she also found it awkward, and hardly knew how to adjust her own arm to the unaccustomed contact. The very small details of intercourse are very hard indeed to a snake, though pleasant by reason of novelty.

“So you didn’t want to come back, and he bullied you?” said Courtesy, frankly inquisitive. “After all, my dear, that’s what women are for.”

“It is NOT!” shouted the suffragette. “Women are not born with a curse on them like that. I chose to come back; I made a great effort, and came.”

“O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and tactfully changed the subject. Courtesy’s tact was always easily visible to the naked eye. “My dear, I must tell you what a killing interview I had with old Mrs. Rust. She clutched my arm when I got into the launch—think of that, my dear—and presently she said in a gruff sort of frightened voice, as if she was confessing a crime, ‘Miss Courtesy, I refuse to part with you; you are what I have been looking for; you are not to pay any attention to anybody else—do you hear? I forbid it.’ I screamed with laughter—on the quiet, you know. I said, ‘Do you want me to be a substitute for Hammer, Mrs. Rust?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Hammer was only a stopgap; I was keeping the position open for a person like you. I will 119give you two hundred a year if you will promise to stay by me as long as you can bear me’—and then she shouted as if she had made a mistake, and thought that noise could cover it—‘I mean as long as I can bear you.’”

“So what did you answer?” asked the suffragette.

“My dear, two hundred a year—what could I say?”

“But what were you originally going out to Trinity Island for?” asked the suffragette. “To visit relatives, weren’t you? What will they say?”

“Oh, they won’t say anything—to two hundred a year. I was really only coming out as a globe-trotter. I loathe colonial relations.”

The matrimonial motive was the skeleton in Courtesy’s cupboard.

“But wasn’t it killing, my dear?”

“Very killing,” agreed the suffragette gravely. She felt like one speaking a foreign tongue.

And then it occurred to Courtesy that she was squeezing the arm of one who, after all, had a criminal disregard of convention. She withdrew her arm, and proceeded to try and storm that house which she considered to be built on sand.

“I wish I could understand what you are up to, my dear?” she said. “Can’t I persuade you to leave that naughty gardener, or to marry him? You needn’t run away, or drown yourself or anything, just say to him, ‘This won’t do.’ I should be 120frightfully glad if I could feel you were all right. Why don’t you get married on landing?”

“We don’t want to,” said the suffragette, who was too inexperienced in the ways of The Generation to feel offended. “We neither of us ever pretended to want to.”

“Ou yes, of course I know the catchwords. I know you just came together as friends, and didn’t see any harm in it.”

“But we didn’t come as friends—we came as enemies.”

“Yes,” said Courtesy, with a furrowed brow. “But really, my dear, enemies don’t do these things.”

“They do. We do.”

“But, my good girl, you must know—you can’t be as innocent as all that.”

“Great Scott, no!” said the suffragette. “I’m not innocent!”

“Then am I to conclude,” said Courtesy, suddenly frigid, “that you fully realise the meaning of the life you are leading?”

“You are to conclude that,” said the suffragette, in a voice of growing militancy. “I realise its meaning much more fully than you do. I shall leave the gardener directly it becomes convenient to me to do so. For an utter stranger his behaviour has certainly been insufferable.”

“O Lor’!” exclaimed Courtesy, falling back upon her original line of defence. “An utter stranger 121... I must go and button Mrs. Rust into her evening gown.”

There is something very annoying to a woman in being accused of innocence. The suffragette was quite cross.

For the next two days the Caribbeania threaded her way cautiously between shore and shore. The horizon was frilled with palm-embroidered lands. Dry, terrible-looking beaches, backed by arid brown hills, marred the soft character of those calm seas. It was as if the Caribbeania saluted the coast of South America, and South America turned her back upon her visitor. At two or three ports in that forbidding land the boat touched. Drake had passed that way, and had left his ill-gotten halo upon the coast, but that was the only life of the land. The flat, dead towns seemed brooding over flat, dead tragedies.

It was almost a relief to the travellers when the last night fell, and the ship was enclosed in darkness and its trivial insularity. There was a great dance that night. Captain Walters called it the Veterans’ dance, because the chalked deck was thick with non-combatants, who had determined to cast care aside and join with youth, because after all it was the last night, and one would never meet any of these people again. As a matter of fact, there was no youth to be joined, for youth sat out and began its farewells. Half a dozen hours is not an over-large allowance 122of time for farewells between people who have known each other three throbbing ocean weeks.

The suffragette actually danced with the chief engineer. He always danced with ladies who could not find partners, being a conscientious young man of forty-two, with a brand-new bride at home. The suffragette knew well that by his courtesy she was branded as one undesired, and she laughed her invisible cynical laugh.

I think men are akin to sheep as well as to monkeys, and the theory only needs a Darwin to trace the connection. I have yet to meet the man who, where women are concerned, does not follow in the track of others of his kind. I think that very few men conceive an original preference for a woman unbiassed by the public tendency.

Directly the gardener saw the suffragette dancing with the chief engineer, he wondered why he was not dancing with her himself, although she danced rather badly. The gardener felt a mysterious call to go and monopolise her directly she was at liberty.

“I’m glad you have come to talk to me,” said the suffragette. “Because I shall go on shore early to-morrow, and should like to say good-bye to you.”

“Good-bye?” questioned the gardener.

“You didn’t really expect me to stay with you, did you?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the gardener, and thought how peaceful and how stupid life would be without her. “I shan’t dream of letting you go.” And even while 123he said it, he experienced the awful feeling of being powerless to make his words good. He realised for the first time how indispensable to a man’s sight are soft straight hair that has never committed itself to any real colour, and a small pointed face, and quick questioning eyes. But there was something indescribable, peculiar to the suffragette, that made it impossible to humble oneself before her. She was anything but a queen among women; no man had ever wished to be trodden under her feet, though they were small and pretty. Plain people often have pretty hands and feet, a mark of Nature’s tardy self-reproach.

To any other woman, the gardener might have said, “Please, my dear ...” with excellent results. He had a good voice with a tenor edge to it, and he could pose very nicely as a supplicator. But not to the suffragette.

“I have not brought you all this way just to let you return to your militant courses,” he said, with a sort of hollow firmness. “I owe a duty to Trinity Island, after all, now that I have imported you.”

The suffragette smiled and said she was tired and would go to bed—good-bye.

The gardener said Good-night.

The Caribbeania and the first ray of the sun reached the Island simultaneously next morning. When the gardener came on deck at half-past seven he found himself confronted by the town of Union, backed by its sudden hills. The Caribbeania, like a 124robber’s victim, ignominiously bound to the pier, was being relieved of its valuables. The air was thick with talk. On the pier the over-dressed representatives of British rule, in blue serge and gold braid, rubbed shoulders with the under-dressed results of their kind tyranny, in openwork shirts and three-quarters of a pair of trousers.

“Your wife went off early,” said the fourth officer to the gardener. “I asked her whether she were eloping all by herself, and she said you knew all about it.”

“Thanks,” said the gardener curtly.

You will hardly believe me when I tell you that his first conscious thought after this announcement was that he had no money to tip the steward with. The suffragette meant a good deal to him, and among the things she meant was temporary financial accommodation.

I hope that you have noticed by now that he was not a money-lover, but a steward was a steward, and this particular steward had been kind in improvising a crutch for Hilda. Any assistance from the suffragette was, of course, taken as temporary: independence was one of the gardener’s chronic poses. He meant to change it from a rather hollow dream into reality on arriving on the Island; he supposed that he would be able to turn his brains into money. He considered that no such brain could ever have landed at Union Town. Its price in coin, which had been rather at a discount in the stupid turmoil of London, 125would be instantly appreciable under this empty sky. His pose on the Island was to be The One Who Arrives, in capital letters.

He went down to his cabin to pack his little luggage. He had nothing beloved to pack now; men’s clothes seem to be inhuman things without a touch of the lovable, and they were all he had. For Hilda was dead. For the last week of her life she had been a little concrete exclamation of protest against her unnatural surroundings. One born to look simply at the sun, from the shelter of a whitewashed cottage wall, with others of her like jostling beautifully round her; a fantastic fate had willed that she should reach the flower of her life in a tipsy cabin, with a sea-wind singing outside the thick glass against which she leant. The gardener had given her a sailor’s grave somewhere near the spot in the Spanish Main to which I hope the spirit of Drake clings, for his mother-sea received him there. It was hardly a suitable ending for Hilda, but it was the best available.

The gardener set himself to put his scanty property together stealthily, and creep from the boat, that the stewards might not see him go. He had an unposed horror of ungenerosity. To him, as to most men, the tip was more of a duty than the discharge of a debt. He suffered keenly for a while from the discovery that there was no escaping from the stewards to-day, they were stationed with careful carelessness at every corner. Presently the siege was 126raised unexpectedly by the arrival of the boot-boy with a note.

“The lady left it, sir.”

It contained a five-pound note, and it was addressed in the suffragette’s small defiant handwriting.

Of course the hero of a novel should have thrown the whole missive into the sea. He should have struck an attitude and explained to the admiring boot-boy that such gifts from a woman could only be looked upon as an insult. But you must remember the gardener considered that the fortunes of the Island were at his feet. And he would not have gone so far as to pose at his own expense—not to speak of the steward’s. He put the note in his pocket, and went to the purser for change.

When his duties were discharged, he came on deck to collect any plans that might be in the air. It is a most annoying fact that theories will not take the place of plans. In theory you may be The One Who Arrives, but in practice you have to think about passing the customs and finding a cheap hotel and getting yourself a sun-helmet. I think the world has an antipathy to heroes; it certainly makes things very hard for them.

On deck Courtesy was sitting calm and ready. Her plans had been made for three days. She had only just stopped short of writing a time-table for the hourly career of herself and Mrs. Rust throughout their sojourn on the island. She had a genius for details.

127“The suffragette has disappeared,” said the gardener. A disarming frankness was one of his weapons.

“I’m jolly glad,” replied Courtesy. “I believe you owe that to me, you naughty boy. I gave her a bit of my mind about it the other day.”

The gardener uttered no reproaches. He felt none. For he had learnt by now that the suffragette would never be affected by a bit of anybody’s mind.

“What are you going to do?” asked Courtesy. “We are going to the St. Maurice Hotel for four days—Father Christopher told us of it—and at mid-day on Saturday we go up to the hills for a fortnight, and then we hire a car and tour round the Island, staying twenty-four hours at Alligator Bay.”

“I’m going to look for work,” said the gardener.

“Sugar or bananas?”

“Neither. Head-work.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “Nobody on the Island ever uses their head except to carry luggage on.”

“That’s why I shall find work. There’s no competition in my line.”

“You funny ...” giggled Courtesy. “Isn’t he quaint, Father Christopher?”

For the priest was passing on his twenty-second circuit of the deck.

“Very droll, no doubt,” said the priest in the voice of a refrigerator, and continued to pass. He 128was very much annoyed with the gardener’s soul.

The gardener waited till he came round again before saying to Courtesy, “Besides, I have to look for the suffragette.”

“I hope you won’t find her this time,” said Courtesy. “Will you come to tea with us one day, and tell us which of your searches seems most hopeful. You see, now the suffragette’s gone, you are respectable for the moment, and I needn’t be afraid for Mrs. Rust’s morals.”

When Courtesy giggled, her hair laughed in the most extraordinary way. Everything she did was transmuted into something wonderful by that halo of hers.

“I’ll come to-day, if I may,” said the gardener, who had never mastered the art of social diffidence. “You’d better have me to-day, for I hope I shan’t be respectable to-morrow.”

Courtesy did not want him to-day. In her code there was only one programme for the first day in a strange land. It was made up of a visit to the principal church, the principal shop, the principal public gardens, and to a few “old-world relics of the past.” It did not include ordinary five-o’clock tea with a familiar figure. But, on the other hand, her invincible conventionality made it impossible for her to evade the gardener’s suggestion. Courtesy was content to suffer for her convictions. At any rate, you will notice that Mrs. Rust was not consulted.

“You may come,” Courtesy said. “At five. 129We are due back from the cathedral at a quarter to.”

Probably the reason why Mrs. Rust submitted to Courtesy’s tyranny from the first was that no other woman in the world would have done so.

The land reeled under the gardener’s feet as he arrived. The only comfort in parting with the sea after a long intimacy is that for the first day or two the land follows the example of its sister element. The gardener found more difficulty in walking straight along Union High Street than he had experienced along the deck of the Caribbeania.

The morning was yet very young when he put his little luggage down at the bamboo-tree arch of a house that proclaimed itself ready to receive boarders at moderate terms. He relied much on impulse, and the little house, which was lightly built on its own first story, so to speak, beckoned to him. But only in theory, for when he mounted the flight of wooden steps, and, through the open door, saw the dirty living-room, seething with gaudy trifles, he knew that in practice it was better suited to his means than to his mind.

However, he had rung the bell. One has to pay penalties for acting on impulse. A woman with black wire hair, a face the colour of varnished deal, and a pale pink dressing-gown, appeared. Luckily she transpired to be the hostess before the gardener had voiced the fact that he mistook her for a drunken housemaid.

130“I want a room here,” began the gardener, who had never wanted anything less in his life. But the three pounds lay very light in his pocket.

“We can give you one,” said the lady, and took his portmanteau. She could have given him several, but not one worth having. She conducted him through one or two doors that led from the living-room. Each showed a less attractive bedroom than the one before, but the cheapest was barely within the range of prudence, as far as the gardener’s pocket was concerned. In a leaden voice, proceeding from a heart of lead, he concluded a bargain for the temporary possession of the least inviting. And when it was done, and the portmanteau deposited drearily in the middle of a dirty linoleum floor, he discovered that time had been standing still, and that it was hardly nearer five o’clock than before.

It was the first time he had realised the four thousand miles that lay between him and the kindly grey pavements of Penny Street. He remembered the look of the London lamps reflected in the slaty mirrors of London streets ... the smile of the ridiculous little griffin who sits on a pedestal at the top of Fleet Street, playing the ’cello with his shield ... the shrugging shoulders of St. Paul’s on tiptoe on the peak of Ludgate Hill ... the dead leaves blowing down the Broad Walk, in the rain....

There is no pose that saves you from that awful 131longing for the things that are no longer yours, and which you hated while you possessed.

“I said I was enough for myself. And I am not,” said the gardener, and hid his face in the mosquito net.

Strange things in barbaric colours made the garden outside a whirlpool. Sometimes these things say to you: “You are a very long way from home”; and you exult, and think This is Life. But sometimes they say again: “You are a very long way from home”; and you cry out, and think This is Worse than Death.

Now there are moral drawbacks about the posing habit. But there are also advantages, though possibly none deserved. For after three minutes of despair the gardener straightened himself, blinked, and began putting his spare shirt into a drawer that would not shut. He was posing as One Who was Seeing Life, and who was Making the Best of it. The vision that inspired this brave pose was the ghost of a pair of small haggard eyes, set in a short pointed face, eyes that cried easily and never surrendered. A thin unbeautiful ghost with clenched fists, and in the air, the ghost of a low and militant voice.

“I am not enough,” the gardener admitted. “But together, we are enough.”

He whistled a comic song tentatively. The Englishman never whistles or sings to suit his feelings. 132He dies to the tune of “Tipperary,” or goes to his wedding humming the “Dead March in Saul.”

There was no more life to be seen in that hot little room, even by one fixed in an optimistic pose. He emerged into the sitting-room, and through an opposite and open door he could see the pink dressing-gown, containing his landlady, heaving sleepily under a mosquito net. One of her bare feet was drooping under the net. At this he had to swallow down London again violently, and remember that he was Seeing Life, and that he was Luckier than Most.

Did you know that the surest way of ensuring luck is to be sure that you are lucky?

“Now I will find my suffragette,” he said, standing between the bamboos at the gate. And he expelled an entering misgiving that he was perhaps presuming on his luck.

It was curiously cool in the shade of the high cactus hedge that ran along one side of the way. A fresh breeze, like the unbidden guest at the wedding, conscious that it was not attired in character, crept guiltily in from the sea. The sun, which would have disclaimed even distant relationship with the cool copper halfpenny that inhabits English skies, fretted out the black shadows across and across the white street. The gardener thought painfully of many glasses of cold water that he had criminally wasted in England. He stiffened his long upper lip, and tried to look for new worlds instead of remembering the old.

133He went into the Botanical Gardens, and sat on a seat opposite the mad orchids. I think the Almighty was a little tired of His excellent system by the time He came to the orchids, so He allowed them to fashion themselves. For they are contrived, I think, and not spontaneously created like the rest.

On the other end of the seat were two children, so blessedly English that for a moment the gardener smelt Kensington Gardens. The girl wore very little between her soft neck and her long brown arms and legs, except a white frill or two, and a passion flower in her sash. The boy, more modest, was encased in a white sailor suit. Both were finished off at the feet with sandals.

Hardly had the gardener sat down when he was regretfully aware that he had sat by mistake on a pirate-ship in mid-ocean. The two commanders looked coldly at him from their end of the treasure-laden deck, and there was an awkward silence which somehow left the impression that much exciting talk had immediately preceded it on that vessel.

“I beg your pardon,” said the gardener. “I forgot to tell you that I am the prisoner you seized when you captured your last prize. There was a desperate resistance, but in spite of heavy odds, you overcame me.”

The boy, because he was a boy, looked for a second towards his mahogany-coloured Nana, who was staring an orchid out of countenance farther up the path. The girl, because she was a girl, looked 134neither right nor left, but straight at the gardener, and said: “All right then. But you mustn’t let your feet dangle into the sea. And you must be very frightened.”

The gardener restrained his feet, and became so frightened that the whole vessel shook. The boy continued to look doubtful, until his sister reminded him in a hoarse whisper: “It’s all right, Aitch, we were wanting somebody to walk the plank.”

In providing a willing villain, the gardener was supplying a long-felt want in pirate-ships. So thoroughly did he do his duty that when he was finally obliged as a matter of convention to walk the walking-stick blindfolded, and die a miserable death by drowning in the gravel-path, the pirate-ship seemed to have lost its point.

“Let’s betend,” said the lady-pirate, “that Aitch and me are fairies, and we touch you with our wand and you turn into a speckled pony.”

“Greatscod, no,” said Aitch; for there are limits to what a fellow of seven can betend in company. “Don’t let’s have any fairying, my good Zed. Let’s betend we’re just Aitch and Zed, and we’ll show the prisoner the Secret Tree.”

So they set off, and the Nana, who might as well have been a Nanning-machine for all the individuality she put into her work, trotted behind them.

The Secret Tree was one of those secrets that remain inviolate because it occurs to nobody to lay them bare. It was an everyday little palm tree, exquisitely 135bandaged by Nature in cocoanut matting; it was very fairy-like, and when you looked up at its fronds in their infinite intersections against the sky, you saw a thrill, like the thrill you see on a cornfield curtseying in the wind, or in the light moving across watered silk. In one of the folds of the palm tree’s garment a White Pawn, belonging to Aitch, had made his home. He lived there for days at a time—the gardener was told with bated breath—and the park-keeper never knew he was there. At night he saw the fireflies light their lamps, and heard the swift slither of the fearful scorpion; once he had reported an adventure with a centipede three times his own size. That pawn was the epitome of People Who Stay Up Late At Night, and Are Not Afraid of the Dark. A super-grown-up.

On their way to the garden gate, each child held a hand of the gardener, and the automatic Nana walked behind. As they came out into the main street, the gardener thought that the houses looked like skulls—so white they were, and so soulless, and their windows so black and empty.

“Greatscod,” said Aitch, “what is happening to the church steeple?”

For it was reeling in front of them, to the tune of a paralysing open roar from underground.

Behind them the automaton blossomed madly into life, Nana fled shrieking back into the garden.

Those two things happened, one by one, like sparks struck out of a flaming experience. Then everything 136happened at once, and yet lasted a lifetime. There seemed not a second to spare, and yet nothing to be done.

The gardener felt unspeakably terrified, his mother earth shot away from under him, truth was proved false. He discovered that he had seized Aitch and Zed, one under each arm; and later on—his memory having vaulted the blank—he found that he was lying on them in the gutter, and that Aitch was yapping like a dog. Zed was crying, “Mother, Mother.” And the gardener, with a quick vision of some one watering a cool English herbaceous border, also said, “Mother, Mother.”

After a while a green beetle ran past his eye, and he recalled the moment, and raised himself upon his hands and knees. A fire of pain burnt him suddenly, and he turned his head and saw a pyre of twisted iron posts heaped upon his legs.

The air was thick with strange sounds, muffled as if from a gramophone. Some one quite near, but unseen, was shouting, “Oh, Oh,” as regularly as a clock’s chime. There was a rending wheeze behind them, and the gardener looked round in time to see a palm tree sink with dignity into a trench that had been gashed at its feet. But that might have been a dream.