Chapter I · (continued 3)

He felt absolutely sick with horror. His head seemed as though it were all at once too big for his skin. His whole being throbbed terribly in a sort 137of echo of the three throbs that had laid life by the heels.

Yock—Yollock—Yollock. A pounce, and then two shakes, like a terrier dealing with a rat. Why had one ever trusted oneself to such a risky crumb of creation as this world? The gardener lost himself in littleness. And presently found that he had insinuated himself into a sitting position, and was feeling very sick indeed.

“That was an earthquake,” remarked Zed, with the truly feminine trick of jumping to foregone conclusions. And she burst into tears, wailing still, “Mother, Mother.”

“It is funny we should both have thought of her,” observed the gardener, forgetting that there was room for more than one mother in this tiny world. His eyes were fixed on a thin and fearful stream of blood that was issuing from between two bricks in the mass of miscellany that had once been a house. “Blood—from a skull?” he thought, and fainted.

For centuries his mind skirted round some enormous joke. It was so big that he could not see its point, and then again it was so little that he lost it. At any rate it was round, and turned with a jovial hum.

Later on he was aware of the solution of a problem which he felt had been troubling him all his life. What colour was the face of a nigger pale with fright? It was several colours, chiefly the shade of 138a wooden horse he had once loved, but mottled. But the whites of the eyes were more blue than white, they shone like electric light. With an effort he fitted the various parts of his mind together.

“Hullo, constable,” he said in a voice he could not easily control. “This is a pretty business, isn’t it?” And he tried to rise, and to whistle a bar or two, in an effort to assume the pose of the hero who trifles in the face of death. But he could not rise. He was pinned to the pavement by a leg that seemed somehow to have lost its identity.

It is not in the least romantic to be hurt. There is something curiously dirty in the feeling of one’s own pain, and in the sight of one’s own blood, though wounds in others are rather dramatic.

Now Courtesy was a person who, without ever trying to be sensational, was often unexpected by mistake. Coincidence seemed to haunt her. Out of the hundred streets that lay shattered in Union Town that afternoon, she chose the one in which the gardener lay, and, accompanied by the priest, she bore down upon that unheroic hero, laden with brandy and bandages. The gardener saw her large face, frank as a sunflower, between him and the yellow sky.

The priest was quite obviously a saviour. You could see in his eye that he was succouring the wounded. You could hear in his voice as he addressed the terrified hotel porters who followed him that he was busy rising nobly to an emergency.

139“Why, gardener,” said Courtesy, in the tones of one greeting a friend at a garden party. “You here? I was wondering what had become of you. Now what’s the matter with you?”

She poured him out some brandy, as though it were the ordinary thing for a lady to offer to a friend in the street. And the gardener’s world regained its feet, he wondered why he had been so frightened.

“Poor little mites,” said Courtesy to Aitch and Zed. “They won’t forget this in a hurry, will they?”

There is something very comforting in the utterly banal. That is why the instinct is so strong in good women to make you a cup of tea, and poke the fire, when you are crossed in love.

“But if she had been the suffragette ...” thought the gardener. He knew quite well that the thing would not have been so well done, had it been the suffragette. He was fully aware that the operation of having his leg put into improvised splints, and of being lifted upon a door, would have been much more painful, had it been accomplished by the little nervous hands of the suffragette, instead of the large excellent hands of Courtesy.

It is discouraging to those of us who have spent much money on becoming fully efficient in first aid and hygiene and practical economy and all the luxuries of the modern female intellect, to find how perfect imperfection can seem.

140“Thank you—you little darling,” said the gardener with his eyes shut, when, after a few spasms of red pain, he was safe upon the door. White-clad hotel porters stood like tombstones at his head and feet.

“Lor’ bless you,” said Courtesy. “Take him to the St. Maurice, porter. It’s the only place left more or less standing, I should think.”

“It is not,” said the priest. “Excuse me, Miss Briggs, there are thousands in this stricken town in need of our help, and I should prefer that only the gentler and worthier of the sufferers should come under that roof. There are many excellent resting-places where our friend here would be far more suitably placed. You ought to know his character by now, and you must think of your own good name.”

“Rot,” said Courtesy. “What do his morals matter when he’s broken his leg?”

“Remember you are also succouring these innocent children,” persisted the priest. “Would you have them under the same roof?”

“Rot,” repeated Courtesy. “The roof’ll be all right.”

“Dose little children ...” said the policeman suddenly. “He covahed dem when dat house was fallin’. Verree brave gentleman. I chahnced to be runnin’ by....”

“Of course he did,” said Courtesy. “The St. Maurice, porter.” And seizing Aitch and Zed each by a hand, she started the procession.

141The High Street looked as if one side of it had charged the other with equally disastrous results to both. At different points in it, fire and heavy smoke were animating the scene. Distracted men and women panted and moaned and tore at the wreckage with bleeding hands. A little crying crowd was collected round a woman who lay nailed to the ground by a mountain of bricks, with her face fixed in a glare of terrible surprise. By the cathedral steps the dead lay in a row, shoulder to shoulder, with the horrid uniformity of sprats upon a plate. Courtesy lifted up Zed and called Aitch’s attention to the healthier distress of a little dog, which ran around looking for its past in the extraordinary mazes of the present.

The gardener, swinging along painfully upon his door, opened his eyes and saw the fires. To his surprise he recognised the house which could boast the highest flames. Its wall had fallen to disclose the shattered remains of the rooms in which the gardener had lately wrestled with despair. The bamboos and the gorgeous garden watched unmoved the pillar of fire that danced in their midst. There was no sign of the wire-haired woman.

But only one thought came to the gardener’s mind on the subject. “Why she will see that. It is a beacon from me to her.”

As a matter of fact she did not.

A pretty woman, crying in a curious laughing voice, ran into Courtesy’s arms. “My little babies ...” she quavered. “What a catastrophe. I don’t 142know where my husband is. There is a grand piano on my bed.”

“This is my mother,” said Aitch.

“Come along to the St. Maurice,” said Courtesy. “That’s where I am taking your babies to. Our piano there is still in its proper place.”

So they all followed the gardener.

“Somebody must go and find a doctor,” said Courtesy at the door of the St. Maurice. She looked suggestively at the priest.

But he replied, “I wash my hands of the matter, Miss Briggs. I consider this to be a judgment on that young man.”

“A judgment?” wept the mother of Aitch and Zed. “Why, what has he done?”

“He saved the lives of your babies,” replied Courtesy. “And anyway, a judgment needs a surgeon just as much as a simple fracture.”

“Yerce, yerce, only don’t ask me to help,” said the priest. “I prefer to succour those deserving of help.” And he went out into the street again. He seemed wedded to the word succour. It is a pose word, and fitted him exactly. Nothing but an earthquake could have made this worm turn. But the effect of the disaster on the priest was an obstinate certainty that there was a Jonah in the case, and that, as heaven was never to blame, the wicked were entirely responsible.

“Oh, Lor’,” said Courtesy. “I’ll have to go for a surgeon myself.”

143“I’ll go with you,” cried the mother of Aitch and Zed, whose name, for the sake of brevity, was Mrs. Tring. “I don’t know what has become of my Dally” (who was her husband).

“Somebody must sit with the gardener,” said Courtesy, when she came back from a successful search for an intact bed, into which, with the help of a housemaid, she had inserted the gardener.

“I will sit with him,” said the harsh voice of Mrs. Rust, as she rose from a seat where she had been sitting with an enormous paper bag held in a rigid hand. “I refuse to run about the streets with brandy. All the old cats are doing that.”

“Why, Mrs. Rust,” observed Courtesy, whose conventionality was not quite so striking after an earthquake as it had been upon the comparatively stable Atlantic. “I had clean forgotten that you existed.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “I was buying mangoes when the incident occurred. Perhaps the gardener would like a mango.”

“Perhaps he would. I am so glad to see that you don’t take the same view about the gardener as the——”

“I never take the same view,” barked Mrs. Rust. “Show me the boy’s room.”

So the gardener saw that poisonous hair advance along a shaft of sunlight that intruded through the broken shutter.

144“Your jug and basin are broken,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful.”

“Oh, there are several things broken in this town,” he said feverishly. “Windows and necks and a heart or two.”

Mrs. Rust sat deliberately on a chair and burst into tears.

“I was buying mangoes,” she sobbed stormily, “from a black man with bleached hair. And the whole of a shop-front fell out on him. One brick hit my toe. I looked at the man through a sort of cage of fallen things. It was as if—one had trodden on red currants.”

“What did you do?” panted the gardener. “How fine to live in a world where things happen.”

“I ran away,” said Mrs. Rust shakily. “I didn’t pay for the mangoes.”

“I would rather have had this happen,” said the gardener after a pause, “and have broken my leg, than have had an ordinary day to meet me on Trinity Island.”

After another pause, he added: “But I have lost the suffragette. And that is another matter.”

“Was she killed?” asked Mrs. Rust, steeling herself against the commonplace duty of condolence.

“Certainly not,” replied the gardener. “She is a militant suffragette.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

“How good the world is,” said the gardener, “to provide such excellent material. The sea, and the 145earthquake, and a fighting woman to love. Just think—an earthquake—on my first day. I am a man of luck.”

“You have broken your leg,” Mrs. Rust informed him.

“I have,” admitted the gardener rather fretfully. “But then everything has its price.”

“A good many other people have come off much worse,” said Mrs. Rust. “I’m not complaining, mind, but any other woman would say you were disgracefully selfish. A lot of people are dead, and a lot of other people’s people are dead....”

“The longer I live ...” said the gardener, from the summit of his twenty-three years, “the surer I am that we make a fuss which is almost funny over death. We run after it all over the world, and then we grumble at it when it catches us up from behind. It’s an adventure, of course, but then—so is—shaving every morning. Compare death with—love, for instance.”

He felt ashamed of this after he had said it, and tried to cover it with a little laugh which shook him, and changed into a yelp. After breathing hard for a little while he went on.

“We who have survived this ordeal have gained much more than we risked. I know that anything is worth a risk, the risk in itself is the gain, and to risk everything for nothing is a fine thing. Why otherwise do we climb Alps, or hunt the South Pole? In theory, I would run in front of an express train to 146save a mou. In theory I don’t mind what I pay for danger. That’s why I love the suffragette; she would risk her life for a little vote, and her honour for a bleak thing like independence.”

“Do you love the suffragette?” asked Mrs. Rust, who was at heart a woman, although she believed herself to be a neutral intelligence.

“I do, I do,” cried the gardener, suddenly and gloriously losing his pose of One Who Evolves a New Scale of Values—in other words, the pose of a Paradox. But his emotion awoke his nerves, and for a while, although the suffragette obsessed his imagination, pain obsessed the rest of the universe.

When Courtesy and the doctor came in, they found the gardener with a temperature well into three figures. So for some time Mrs. Rust was not allowed to see the patient.

By the time the gardener felt better, the earthquake, in the eyes of the townspeople of Union, had become not so much of a horror as a disaster, a thing possible to dilate upon and even to lie about. The homeless were beginning to look upon homelessness as a state to be passed through rather than the end of things, the bereaved were discovering little by little that life may arise from ashes, and that sackcloth may be cut quite becomingly. Those ghosts of dead hope who still searched among the ruins were looked upon as “poor things” rather than companions in sorrow. Young nigger ladies, dressed in 147pink and silver, flaunted their teeth and their petticoats around the firemen who worked desultorily at the little gaseous fires that broke out among the lamentable streets. The one church that remained standing was constantly full. (The picture palace had met the fate it perhaps deserved.) There is nothing in the world so saved as a saved nigger. And nothing so lost as a lost nigger. After an earthquake it always occurs to these light and child-like minds that it is safer to be saved. The horse has fled from the stable, but the door might as well be attended to, and the padlock of salvation is not expensive. Fervent men and women throng the pews, shouting hymns down the back of each other’s neck, and groaning away sins they do not realise, to the accompaniment of words they do not understand. Those who have lived together in innocent sin hurry to the altar for the ring, which, to these harmless transgressors, is as the fig-leaf apron of Eden, and heralds virtuous tragedy.

When the gardener became well enough to resent being ill, he was allowed visitors, among whom was one, by name Dallas Tring, Esquire. This was a very honest man who, in spite of having an excellent heart, believed that he always told the truth at all costs. The only lie he permitted himself, however, was constantly on his lips. It was: “I take your meaning.”

It was obviously unnatural to him to be enthusiastic. 148It is to most very honest people. He came into the gardener’s room like an actor emerging from stage fright on to the stage.

“You saved my children from being crushed to death,” he said, and seized the gardener’s hands. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Oh, not at all,” murmured the gardener. “I pretty nearly crushed them to death myself. Have a whisky and soda.”

This last is the Trinity Island retort to everything, its loophole, its conversational salvation. The average Englishman takes several weeks to acquire the habit in the real Island style, but the gardener was always more adaptable than most.

Privately he did feel unreasonably conceited about the rescue. He would have admitted that the impulse to gather Aitch and Zed beneath his prostrate form had been unconscious, but he considered that unconscious heroism proves heroism deeply ingrained. Nevertheless, the people who voice your conceit for you are only a little less trying than the people who relieve you of the duty of being humble. One must do these things for oneself.

Mr. Dallas Tring was glad to have accomplished his duty, which was not spontaneous, but had been impressed upon him by his wife. Left to himself he would have said: “Say, that was good of you. I’d have been cut up if anything had happened to the kids.”

His wife not having warned him how to proceed, 149he began now to talk about the banana crops. It was only towards the end of the interview that he risked himself once more upon the quicksands of emotion.

“Look here, you know, it’s altogether unspeakable—what I owe you. Those are the only children we have. Aitch is a fine boy, don’t you think?”

“Fine,” agreed the gardener, relieved to be allowed a loophole of escape from, “Not at all.”

“You’re a fine boy yourself,” added Mr. Tring. “When you get well, will you come and help me?”

“What to do?”

“To start again.”

“Oh, yes,” replied the gardener. “I love starting again. What I never can do is to go on.”

After this the gardener, considered to be stronger, was allowed to see Mrs. Rust again. She was now but little better than a fretful echo of Courtesy.

Some people seem born to walk alone, and others there are who are never seen without a group behind them. Courtesy was as far a leader of men as can be compatible with having no destination to lead them to. She never knew what it was to be without a “circle.” Acquaintances were as necessary to her as air, and she used them, as she used air, innocently for her own ends.

Mrs. Rust never attained to the dignity either of being alone or the leader of a group, though she worshipped independence. She believed she had bought precedence of Courtesy for £200 a year.

150And on the occasion of this visit to the gardener, she believed that she was about to shock and surprise that wise young man.

“Do you know what I have done?” she asked, when she had to some extent overcome the nervous cautiousness of behaviour impressed upon her by the absent Courtesy.

“I do not,” said the gardener, whose gently irreverent manner towards her was his salvation in her eyes. “It’s sure to be something that any one else would be ashamed of doing.”

Mrs. Rust bridled. “It was partly to annoy you that I did it,” she said. “Because you dared to advise me not to. I have sent my son Samuel a cheque, so as to launch his hotel.”

“Rash woman,” protested the gardener. “If you knew your son Samuel as well as I do——”

“I know he is my son, so he cannot be altogether a fool.”

The gardener bent his thick threatening eyebrows upon her.

“Do you know what else I have done?” she continued.

“I tremble to think,” replied the invalid.

“I have advertised for your suffragette in the Union Paper. Courtesy said what a mercy it would be if she should have got safely away and wouldn’t come back, so I advertised, just to show that I disagreed. I never knew her name, so I described her appearance....”

151“Her little size ...” he said eagerly. “Her small and hollow eyes. Her darling-coloured hair that always blew forward along her cheeks....”

“Well, I didn’t put it like that,” said Mrs. Rust.

“She had such wonderful little hands,” said the gardener, upon whom a sick-bed had a softening, not to say maudlin effect. “You could see everything she thought in her hands. They were not very white, but pale brown. You might have mentioned them. But she is obviously mine. Nobody could overlook that. Nobody could overlook her at all.”

“On the contrary,” said Mrs. Rust, “she is a perfectly insignificant-looking young woman. And I am sure that she would strongly resent your describing her as though she were a dog with your name on its collar. She had sensible views about women.”

You have been intended to suppose all this time that the suffragette had succumbed to the earthquake, but as she is the heroine—though an unworthy one—of this book, I am sure you have not been deceived. Loth as I am to admit that a friend of mine should have been so near to such an experience without reaping the benefit of it, I am obliged by tiresome truth to confess that she was never aware of the earthquake as an earthquake at all.

She was in the train when it happened, a little Christian the Pilgrim, making her way through many difficulties up to the Delectable Mountains. Far off they stood, defying the pale sea and the pale plains, 152shadowed mountains, each with its cool brow crowned by a halo of cloud.

The train service in Trinity Islands is not their chief attraction. First, second, and third class alike may watch the vivid country from the windows, otherwise there is no compensation for rich or poor. The price of a first-class fare is supposed to guarantee your fellow-passengers matching yourself as nearly as possible in complexion; it also entitles you to a deformed wicker chair in a compartment that a cow would appeal against in the Home Country. The wicker chair, unsettled by its migratory life, amuses itself by travelling drunkenly around the truck, unless you lash yourself to the door-handle with your pocket-handkerchief, or evolve some other ingenious device.

The suffragette was always without inspirations in the cause of comfort. She was a petty ascetic, and never thought personal well-being worth the acquiring. Her body was an unfortunate detail attached to her; she resented its demands, and took but little more care if it than she did of the mustard-coloured portmanteau, another troublesome but indispensable part of her equipment. She put her body and the portmanteau each into a wicker chair in the train, and promptly forgot how uncomfortable they both were.

(There is much fascination in the big world, but I think the most wonderful thing in it is the passing of the little bubble worlds that blow and burst in many 153colours around you and me every minute of our lives. In a ’bus or at a ball, in a crowd around a fallen horse, meeting for a moment as reader and writer of a book, or shoulder to shoulder in church singing to a God we all look at with different eyes, these things happen and will never happen exactly that way again. How I wondered at the cut of your moustache, O stranger, how I wondered at the colour of your tie.... But your little daughter with the thin straight legs and the thin straight hair pressed to your side, her glorying face filled with the light of novelty, and prayed that drive to heaven might never cease. And next to you was the girl who had just discovered the man by her side to be no saint, but a man. And he was trying by argument to recover his sanctitude. “But strite now, Mibel, I never dremp you’d tike it so ’ard. ’S only my bit of fun....” There was the man in khaki, next to me, born an idler, brought up a grocer’s assistant, and latterly shocked into becoming a hero.... There was the conductor, a man of twisted humour, chanting the words of his calling in various keys through the row of sixpences that he held between his lips, while the little bell at his belt tolled the knell of one ticket after another.... A little oblong world glazed in, ready to my hand. But I got out at the Bank, and the world went on to Hammersmith Broadway.... These things are, and never shall be again. The finest thing about life is its lack of repetition. I hate to hear that history repeats itself. My comfort is that 154history is never word-perfect in so doing. Fate has always some new joke up her sleeve. Sometimes the joke is not funny, but certainly it is always new.)

There were two Eves and an Adam in the world which evolved from chaos under the suffragette’s eyes, as the train moved out of Union station. Also a dog. We are never told about Adam’s dog, but I am sure that he had one, and that it wagged its tail at him as he awoke from being created, and snapped at the serpent, and did its best to propitiate the angel with the flaming sword.

Dogs seldom ignored the suffragette. As a race they have either more or less perspicacity than ourselves—you may look at it as you will—and they seldom concur with the public verdict of humanity on its own species. And in the suffragette a confiding dog was never disappointed, for she knew the exact spot where the starched buckram of one’s ear is sewn on to one’s skull, on which it is almost unbearably good to be scratched.

This dog was the sort whose name is always Scottie when he is owned by the unenterprising. He wore his forelegs so short and so bent that he looked as though he were continually posing as being thoroughbred. When he drew himself up to his full height, the under outline of his figure was about three inches from the ground. When at leisure he walked broadly and foursquare, as a table would walk, if endowed with life; when speeding up, he cantered diagonally—forefeet together—hindfeet together—no 155one foot moving independently of its twin.

The sort of conversation that this dog and the suffragette immediately began did not prevent the latter’s hearing the conversation that was woven by her fellow-passengers across the loom of the train’s roaring.

The fact that the dog’s name was really Scottie should give you a clue as to his mistress’s character. It was perhaps malicious of me to describe her as an Eve; that would have made her blush. For she was very fully clothed in blue serge. It is almost impossible for the average woman to conduct the business of life except in blue serge. We travel in blue serge (thin for the tropics, thick and satin-lined for our native climate), we sit at our desk in blue serge, we meet our Deity or our stockbroker in blue serge, in blue serge we raid the House of Commons. Perhaps the root of the feminist movement lies in blue serge. If I were defended by a crinoline, or rustled in satin or gingham or poplin, I might have been an exemplary spinster in my sphere to-day.

The other Eve, attired (for she was obviously cosmopolitan) in fawn tussore, occupied an undue fraction of the little universe. She was the sort of person whose bosom enters a room first, closely followed by her chin. Black eyes and a hooked Spanish nose led the rear not unworthily. She intended to be looked at, and she hoped to be recognised as a notorious novelist. For she was a momentary novelist with a contempt for yesterday and no concern at 156all for to-morrow. A public of a hundred thousand housemaids was all she asked.

One of the virtues of men is that they are not intended for fancy portrayal. Why should one ever describe the outward surface of a man, unless he is the hero of one’s book, or unless one is engaged to marry him? The particular Adam in this compartment comes under neither of these headings. He is copiously reproduced all over the world, but clusters thickest in Piccadilly. Possibly you see him at his best very far away from Piccadilly. There is something that transfigures the commonplace in the fact of having kissed the very hem of the Empire’s wide-flung robe.

“I say, Miss Brown, how’s Albert?” asked the young man.

For the other occupants of the little world seemed mutually familiar. It occurred to the suffragette that Fate always threw her with people who knew each other and did not know her.

Miss Brown, the Eve in blue serge, bridled. To all women so flawlessly brought up as Miss Brown, there exists a sort of electricity in the voice of man which sends a tremor across their manners, so to speak.

“Albert, Mr. Wise, is still very weakly. I sometimes wonder whether I shall rear him. His mental activities, I am told, have outgrown his physical strength.”

The young man fanned himself. And indeed 157mental activities sounded unsuited to the climate. The sun spilt square flames upon the floor through the window. The silhouette of the passing landscape scorched itself across the sky-line. Tattered bananas looked like crowds of creatures struck mad by a merciless sun.

The voice of the lady novelist seemed to reach the suffragette through a veil.

“That child will make his mark. He has the most marvellous mental grasp....”

Two hills to the northwest moved apart in the middle distance, like the curtains from a stage. And there was Union Town lying white beside her sea, white, but veiled by her green gardens. Port King George, on an attenuated isthmus, stretched its parallel form along to shield the mother coast from the Atlantic. Even from here you could see the white gleam of the ocean’s teeth, as they gnashed upon the reef. A spike of calm steel water lay between Union Town and her defending reef. The suffragette thought: “A skeleton in the grass with a sword beside it....” She also looked at the toy figure of the Caribbeania, so close to land as to be disguised as part of the island. Her two funnels mingled with the factory chimneys by the wharf.

“But he is sure to have landed by now,” thought the suffragette. She felt unsentimentally interested in the fact. It was too hot to feel more.

“I happened to mention the Book of Genesis,” said the lady novelist. “And Albert produced a 158most ingenious theory about the scientific explanation of the fable of creation. I wish I had such a nephew. What a marvellous link with the coming generation!”

“On the other hand,” said Mr. Wise, “I happened to mention Alice in Wonderland, and he said it was out of date, and, as a dream, most improbable.”

“I am sorry he criticised the Bible in your hearing,” apologised Miss Brown. “I am afraid he has a tendency towards irreverence.”

“I wish he had,” muttered Mr. Wise.

Acres of sugar filed past the window. High waved the proud crests of it, all innocent of its mean latter end as a common comestible. The suffragette’s mind laboured under a rocking confusion of green tufted miles,—and somewhere on the outskirts of her thoughts, a little sallow Albert entrenched behind an enormous pair of spectacles.

“A glorious child,” said the lady novelist, in her monopolising tones. “Simply glorious. Quite an experience to have met him.”

“Good copy, eh?” grinned Mr. Wise.

“Excellent. You know I collect copy.”

Now the suffragette collected copy, but she did it without self-consciousness. There are several kinds of copy-collectors. Some of us squeeze our copy into little six-shilling novels, or hack it into so many columns for the benefit of an unfeeling press. Some of us live three-score years and ten, and then wake suddenly to find our copy-coffers full. Upon which 159we become bores, and our relations hasten to engage a paid companion for us. But some of us carry our lives about with us sealed up in our holy of holies, and take pride in hiding the precious burden that we bear. Copy-collecting may become a religion; to the suffragette, who never put pen to paper for any one else’s benefit, and who never told an anecdote, this pursuit was the great consolation for a bleak life. At the gate of death, or on the step of Paradise, such a soul may be found filling its pockets with the gold of secret experience. I think the mania is most acute when no thought of eventual print intrudes. Its most encouraging characteristic to the lonely is the sense of irresponsibility it brings. After all I may go and turn cart-wheels down the Strand, I may murder you, or throw my last shilling into the Thames, I may go half-way to Hell, and if I miscalculate the distance and fall in—it’s all copy. To the lady novelist, however, copy was but a currency to spend. Every experience in her eyes formed a part of a printed page, surrounded by a halo of favourable reviews. She never wrote a letter without an eye on her posthumous biography, never met a notable individual without taking a mental note for the benefit of a future series of “Jottings about my Generation.” Both she and the suffragette kept diaries, but only the suffragette’s had a lock and key.

The engine was approaching the climax of its daily task. It faltered. Looking out of the window, Mr. Wise described its arrival at the foot of a pronounced 160hill. The engine gazed up the perspective of its duty, and panted prophetically, as pants an uncle before a game of stump-cricket.

“This hill is always a surprise to the engine,” said Mr. Wise. “Every day it has two or three tries, and yet it never learns the knack.”

The suffragette’s fingers tore at the arm of her chair. It was not only too hot to travel, it was also much too hot to cease to travel. She felt a crisis approaching.

Her window had stopped artistically opposite a little slice of distant world, carved out between the trunks of two great cotton trees. Union Town, perceptibly diminished since its last appearance, languished again around its bay. Against the white water you could see the cathedral and the factory chimneys, the spires of God and the spires of mammon.

The suffragette, as she looked, saw the cathedral spire cock suddenly awry and bend over, like a finger in three joints.

“The heat,” she thought. “I believe I’m dying.”

Almost at once after that the train suffered a great spasm, as though yearning for the top of the hill.

“She’s going to try again,” said Mr. Wise.

The suffragette’s head cocked suddenly awry, she bent over in three joints like a finger, and slid off her chair in a faint.

A prostrated suffragette is a contradiction in terms. 161This one became a child, lying in ungraceful angles, in need of its mother.

“By Jove!” said Mr. Wise. Miss Brown, after lifting up her skirt carefully, knelt upon her petticoat.

An ebony ticket-inspector rushed into the compartment.

“Ull right! Ull right!” he shouted. “Ull ovah! Nobuddy killed!”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Wise. “Why should they be? Only a faint.”

“Earthquake, sah, earthquake!” yelled the inspector. “Jes’ look at the steeple daown in taown!”

There was no steeple to look at.

“My—what an eventful journey!” said the lady novelist.

“Poor little thing,” said Miss Brown to the suffragette, in almost human tones. “Better now, better now?”

The suffragette began to struggle a little. Even had she been in her grave, I think pity would have aroused a spark of militant protest in her bones.

“Tell her to make an effort,” said the lady novelist, who had never in her forty years been guilty of physical weakness. “Pretend not to notice her. Probably hysteria.”

This well-worn accusation touches a familiar chord in the ear of any rebel. It opened one of the suffragette’s eyes. She had black eyebrows which suggested 162that she might have fine eyes, but she had not. When her eyes were shut you only saw the hopeful suggestion.

“Come, come,” said Miss Brown, handing Mr. Wise’s brandy flask back to him, and becoming aware that her petticoat was bare to the gaze of an unmarried gentleman and a negro inspector. “Might I trouble you to lift the young lady on to a chair?” she added, as she rose.

Seven stone of political agitator takes but little time to move.

“A most eventful journey,” said the lady novelist.

Miss Brown, now decently seated on a chair, stroked the suffragette’s hand. “Are you going to friends, my child?” she asked.

“No, enemies, I expect,” said the suffragette drearily.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know where you are going,” said the novelist severely.

“Booked to Greyville,” said the inspector, who had picked up her ticket, and was thoughtfully clipping it all over.

“Do you know any one in Greyville?” asked Miss Brown.

“No.”

“Were you going to an hotel?”

“I suppose so.”

163Some kind deeds are so obvious that they are impossible to escape.

“Albert can move into the back room,” said Miss Brown.

And the train, as if relieved to have this affair settled, moved on up the hill.

By the time the chapel bell, which Island engines always wear, had begun to sound its warning to the pigs upon the line at Greyville Junction, the suffragette’s independence was a thing dissolved. Her protests had no weight. Constitutionally she was unable to be politely firm. She must either be militant or acquiescent; she knew not the half measures of civilisation. And it was impossible to be militant in the face of Miss Brown’s impersonal sense of duty.

“If only she had been a more interesting person this might have been like the beginning of a novel,” murmured the lady novelist to Mr. Wise. That young man, who was wearing the sheepish look peculiar to the Englishman in the presence of matters which he considers to be feminine, shrugged his shoulders.

At Greyville station Miss Brown emerged like an empress from incognito. A black coachman, with so generous an expanse of teeth that you suspected them of being the only line of defence between you and the inner privacies of his brain, was on the platform. He seemed torn between acquired awe of Miss Brown, and an innate desire to conduct the welcome 164heartily. The station-master bowed. The porter chirruped to Scottie.

“New visitor, missis?” gasped the coachman, looking at the suffragette. He had taken some time to assimilate the visitorship of the lady novelist. His mind was being educated at too great a speed.

“Gorgeous fellow,” said the lady novelist, who considered all black people gorgeous because they were not white. The conversation of John the coachman had already filled two note-books, though he had never said anything original in his life.

There is so much superfluous sunshine in Trinity Islands that splashes of it have been lavished upon all sorts of unnecessary details, the lizards, and the birds, and the self-conscious orchids roosting in the trees. Some of it has even been rolled into the roads, making them white and merry and irresponsible. The buggy horses feel the tingle of it, for they seldom walk; although the Creator specialised in hills on Trinity Island.

Down from some lofty market came the peasant women; their children, their donkeys, their tawdry clothes, trappings and merchandise, soaked with sun. Fantastic in outline, fairies of a midsummer day’s dream, the little donkeys capered on spindle legs, bestridden by wide panniers, and by the peasant women, riding defiantly like brigands, with bandanas round their heads, and sun-coloured draperies.

It is curious that fashion has not yet decreed a 165mania for dyeing one’s complexion mahogany, that one might wear flame-colour with impunity.

The buggy scattered the marketers. The Island horse, a plebeian creature of humble stature, seldom meets with the luxury of feeling superior. But the Island donkey is nothing but a door-mat on four legs, clogged red with the hectic mud of its mother land. A cheap-jack’s pony would feel a prince beside it.

Mr. Wise, who had been met at the station by a very small brown boy with a very tall brown horse, had cantered away in another direction, with a message of greeting to Albert, the sincerity of which Miss Brown had possibly overrated.

A bungalow crouched behind a copper-coloured hedge upon the sky-line. Two cotton trees surveyed it, one on each side. A drive of the violently ambitious kind shot at an impossible angle up to its door-step.

“That is Park View, my home,” said Miss Brown.

“Of course, as your dog’s name is Scottie,” murmured the suffragette.

Miss Brown looked surprised. The poor suffragette’s attempts at polite interchange of fatuities never seemed to meet with the usual fate of such efforts. Her trivialities somehow always fell upon silence; if she ventured on the throwing of a light bridge over a gap in the conversation, it seemed to snap communication instead of furthering it. She was, of course, unlucky, but she was also, it must be 166admitted, too earnest in intention for petty intercourse. She tried too hard.

The buggy, commending its springs to the mercy of Providence, charged the drive of Park View.

On the door-step, carefully posed, Albert was reading a very large book. He started laboriously as the buggy approached, and placed the book under his arm, taking care that the title should be visible. An emaciated child, with manners too old, and clothes too young, for his years.

“I have dot bissed you at all, Ah-Bargaret,” said Miss Brown’s genial nephew. “I have been too idterested id by dew book od Chebistry. I ab quite sorry you have cob back.”

“Chemistry,” retailed Miss Brown to the lady novelist. “A child of ten. And—did you notice, he was so deep in his book, he got quite a start when we arrived.”

Albert, at Park View, met with that appreciation of his poses which we all hope to meet in heaven.

“Albert, you are to move into the back room,” said Miss Brown.

“Why?” asked Albert.

“To make room for this lady.”

“Priceless child,” said the lady novelist in brackets.

“Because she needs somewhere to rest,” said Miss Brown in a voice of tentative reproof.

“But so do I.”

“I had better move into the back room myself, then,” sighed his aunt.

167The suffragette began those hopeless protests which make the burden of an obligation so heavy. It is so very much easier as well as more blessed to give than to receive, that the wonder is that generosity should retain the name of a virtue. Up to a certain point we are all altruists, because it is too much trouble to be otherwise.

Albert, who, having gained his point, was once more comparatively genial, prepared to bring the suffragette to his feet.

“I expect you are wudderig what is the dabe of the book I ab readig,” he suggested to her as she stepped shakily from the buggy.

“No, I was not,” she replied gently. “I’m afraid science bores me.”

“Wha-t a lot you biss,” observed the child. “You probably spedd your precious time id dancig, ad dressig yourself up, ad bakig berry. How buch better——”

“Albert,” said his aunt, “this lady is tired and waiting to pass.”

“Yes, but I ab speaking to her.”

The suffragette smiled at him, and gave him her portmanteau to carry.

The earthquake at Union Town had shot the most lurid rumours into Greyville. All the Park View servants had suddenly gone to church. The whole village was enjoying an impromptu half-holiday. The triangular village green, which held Greyville together and formed the pedestal of the Court-house, 168echoed with news at every stage of exaggeration. One of the mildest rumours was that Union Town had fallen into the sea. It was said on the highest authority that the Devil had run along the streets, throwing flames right and left. No actual news arrived, the sources of news being wrecked, but towards evening all the Americans whose cars had survived the ordeal suddenly invaded the hills, suffering from nerves and a lack of luggage.

Miss Brown says she does not believe in doing a thing unless you do it thoroughly. She says this as if it had never been said before; she propounds it as one propounds a revolutionary theory. But unlike most theory makers, she always translates such boasts into action. She performed the feat of keeping a militant suffragette in bed for the rest of that day.

The suffragette lay and imagined the gardener and the earthquake at different stages of contact. She thought of him fighting to get out of a falling house, and her eyes shone. She thought of him with his head bound up, and wriggled where she lay. She thought of him unhurt, walking with his usual gait as though he were marching to a band, and this thought left her neutral. She never thought of him dead.

She never believed in death either as a punishment or a reward. She had either lost the art of faith, or else she had never found it. She pictured death as a blink of the eyes, as an altering of the facet turned 169towards life, never as a miracle. She was the only person I ever knew who honestly looked on death as unworthy of contemplation.

Of course if a friend steps round a corner, you lose sight of that friend. But you must get used to the windings of the road. If you are a suffragette, you have to be your own friend. You must not stretch out your hands to find the hands of another; you must keep them clenched by your side. On the other hand, even a suffragette is human—(I daresay you have doubted this)—and my suffragette was only a little less human than you or I. The fact must stand, therefore, that when she thought of the gardener in pain, she forgot to clench her fists.

It may still be a mystery to you why the suffragette should expend ingenuity in running away from her only friend.

If you are a rebel of thorough nature, you believe that your cause is such a good cause that no supporter can be worthy of it. And, in the effort to reach worth, you may possibly arrive, step by step, at the Theory of the Hair Shirt, to which my suffragette had attained. For in throwing her little weight on the side of the best cause she could see, she cowed: “All my life long to discard everything superfluously comfortable or easy. To despise peace, and to love loneliness....”

This is the texture of the Hair Shirt worn beneath the armour of a rebel. You may call it hysteria. 170And perhaps you are perfectly right. But perhaps there are even better things than being perfectly right.

The night on the Island falls as abruptly as though he who manages the curtain had let go the string by mistake.

With the night came a trayful of supper for the suffragette, and with the supper came Albert, not of course in the useful rôle of supper purveyor, but only as an ornament.

“This earthquake id Udiod Towd seebs to have beed quite a catastrophe.”

“Quite,” agreed the suffragette.

“I caddot picture ad earthquake,” continued Albert. “I suppose doboddy cad picture such ad urheard-of disaster.”

“I can,” said the suffragette. “I expect my picture is all wrong, but it’s certainly there. I see it red and grey, which is the most vicious discord I know.”

“Red ad grey?” repeated Albert. “Why red ad grey? What for idstadce is red, ad what grey?”

“Why,” said the suffragette rather lamely, “I suppose the quaking is red, and the pain grey.”

“You seeb to be talking dodsedse,” said Albert, with creditable toleration. “I expect the flabes are red, ad the sboke grey. However, go od with your picture.”

“I think the world would suddenly give a lurch to one side, and you would wonder what had happened, and why you felt so sick. Before you realised 171anything else you would notice a sort of dazzle of chalk-white faces all round you.”

“The people are dearly all degroes id Udiod Towd.”

“Then you would understand, but still you wouldn’t believe that this thing was really happening to you. You would see the houses curtsey sideways in a leaping dust, and a house front, with its windows, all complete, would shoot across the street with an unbearable roar, pricked by cracking noises....”

“Why would it dot fall od you?”

“Because things don’t. And there would be a great chord of screams. And men running a few yards this way or that, and then back again, yelping, with lighted pipes still in their mouths....”

“What ad ugly picture. How cad you see it all so clearly?”

“I have been thinking all day—of a friend of mine, who must have seen it. I don’t expect an earthquake is a pretty thing, although there is something beautiful about any curious happening.”

“I doad’t agree with you,” said Albert. “There are oadly a few beautiful thigs. Roses ... ad sudsets ... ad love....”

“Really, Albert,” protested the suffragette, “what do you know about love?”

“Well, if it cobs to that—what do you dow about earthquakes? I cad picture love, easily. A bad, kissing a girl, udder a cocoadut palb....”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed the suffragette, bounding 172so violently in her bed as to cause a serious storm in her soup. “Kissing’s not love. Everything that was ever said or written about kissing, I think, must have been said or written by a man. It’s only another of their tyrannies, to which, for the sake of love, women have had to submit.”

“You sowd like a suffragette whed you talk like that,” mocked Albert.

“No wonder,” she replied. “I am one.”

Albert looked shocked to find himself in the presence of such a monstrosity. He went at once to warn his aunt. And she replied: “It doesn’t matter, Albert dear, she’s only staying a few days, till she is well enough to make other plans.”

The suffragette, left to her cooling soup, reviewed her theories and her practice.

“What’s the good of being hard?” she asked herself, “if you are not hard enough? Either you are harder than the world and can bruise it, or the world is harder than you and bruises you. There is no point in just having a hard crust. As well be dough.”

In the middle of the night there was a loud wail from Albert’s room. The suffragette, whose room adjoined his, was the first on the spot.

“I seeb to have a bad paid,” cried Albert, who was always cautious in his statements, “id the heart. It feels like cadcer, I thigk.”

“I don’t think so,” said the suffragette. “Perhaps you are only in love.”

173She went and knocked on Miss Brown’s door.

“But I doad’t wadt Ah-Bargaret,” said Albert, as his aunt came in. “I should hate to die lookig at Ah-Bargaret. I ab sure I ab going to die.”

“We’ll see that you don’t,” said the suffragette, as she began to rub his side, his poor little ribs, furrowed like a ploughed field.

“But you are an invalid yourself,” objected Miss Brown jealously. “You had better go back to bed.”

“Doh, she is dot ad idvalid, she’s a suffragette,” whined Albert. “I doad’t wish her to go back to bed.”

Even Albert, with his wide range of scientific ways of being inconvenient, could scarcely have chosen a more impossible moment for an illness. Next day it became apparent that every doctor on the Island who had survived the disaster had plunged into the whirlpool of its after effects. Nursing on the Island is in a rudimentary stage at all times, but what nurses existed were not to be dragged now from Union Town.

The lady novelist said: “I know I must appear heartless, dear Margaret, not to be helping to nurse him, but the sight of suffering gives me such acute pain.... It’s not heartlessness, you see, it’s that my heart is too tender.”

“I wish she would go to an hotel then,” said the harassed Miss Brown to the suffragette. “She wants her meals so good and so regular, and I seem to hate the sight of food just now.”

It was against the suffragette’s principles to hope 174anything so desirable without translating her hope into action. It was also beyond her powers to be diplomatic.

“I think you had better go to the hotel,” she said militantly to the lady novelist. “You would be better fed there, and we should be more comfortable alone.”

“In that case perhaps I had better, not being welcome in my friend’s house,” replied the novelist. “I was going to suggest it myself, as the sound of that priceless child’s cries wrings my heart.”

The suffragette therefore gained her point at the expense of tact, which, as future historians will note, is a characteristic of suffragettes.

Albert’s temperament was not that of the Spartan. He never ceased to cry for a week. As for the pain, it was as if the god—whoever he may be—who likes little children to suffer, sat beside him, and with a blunt shears sliced off the top of each breath.

There is a sword, a fatal blade,

Unthwarted, subtle as the air,

And I could meet it unafraid

If I might only meet it fair.

But how I wonder why the smith

Who wrought that steel of subtle grain

Should also be contented with

So blunt and mean a thing as pain....

Albert clung to the suffragette, the straw in his sea of troubles. His constant wail rose an octave if she ventured from the room.

175The only holiday she had during that first week was half an hour on the second evening of the ordeal, half an hour spent in carrying the lady novelist’s majestic suit-case to the hotel.

John the coachman could not do it, as the road to the hotel was infested with “duppies” after dark. The probability of meeting a “rolling calf” with a human head and green eyes, or the duppy of some regrettable ancestor, robbed even a tip of its splendour.

The carrying of the suit-case was a physical impossibility to one of the suffragette’s lack of muscle. But to her impossibility was only an additional “Anti” to fight, a rather worthier enemy than the rest. She believed in the power of the thought over the deed, that was her religion, and one is tempted to wonder whether any more complex belief is needed. Has it ever been proved that the human will, if reverently approached, is not omnipotent?

At any rate the suit-case, borne by a thing that looked like the suffragette, but was in reality a super-suffragette created for the occasion, travelled to the hotel, unmolested by duppies, but followed by a literary lady poisoned by injured pride.

At the hotel were many Americans who said, “I guess” and “Bully” and “I should worry,” and all the things that make a second-rate copy collector swell with copy and feel exquisitely cosmopolitan. This collector’s diary began to overflow to three or four foolscap sheets a day, closely covered with dialogues 176on trivial subjects by very ordinary American husbands and fathers; all Americanisms underlined and spattered with liberal exclamation marks.

At the end of the second week of the lady novelist’s stay at the hotel arrived a millionaire, who immediately became the gem of the collection. He was exactly modelled on the stock millionaire to be met with in the pages of the comic papers. He was lean, self-made, and marvellously dressed; he wore eyeglasses and a little stitched-linen hat tilted over them. Also the beard of a goat. At the very outset he expressed himself, “Vurry happy to meet you, madam, always happy to meet any of our neighbours from across the duck-pond.” It was almost too good to be true. The novelist followed him about, so to speak, with fountain pen poised.

His conversation was almost entirely financial. Neither the lady novelist nor I understand such matters well enough to write them down, but only I am wise enough not to try.

“Do you mind if I say you are a treasure?” asked the lady novelist, after listening for an hour to a dissertation on Wall Street.

“Not at all, ma’am,” replied the millionaire politely, and drew breath to continue his discourse. But he rewarded her by descending to the level of her intelligence.

“Say, talking of money, I guess there’ve been more fine opportunities lorst in Union Town this last fortnight, than ever I missed since I commenced 177collecting the dollars. Would you believe me—there’s a fellow, by name Dallas Tring, who’s inherited the only flour dee-pot in Union Town. Uncle’s orfice crumpled in on Uncle during the quake, and left Tring his fill of dollars right there for the picking up, so to speak. Union Town wants flour at this crisis, and if it was mine I’d say that Union Town, or the British Government, had darn well got to pay for it. We don’t calc’late in hearts, this side of heaven, but in hard dollars. Philanthropy’s a fool-game.”

“You are simply priceless,” said the lady novelist. “Please go on.”

“I’m going right on, ma’am,” said the treasure. “Would you believe me, this Tring e-volves a system (save the mark) by which he gives away this flour—gives it away, mind you, gratis, free, for nothing, with a kiss thrown in if required, to any nigger cute enough to rub his little tummy and say he’s feeling empty. You may reckon I just couldn’t quit Union Town without a call to see if the man was an imbecile or what. I found a young cub with a curly smile playing around in the orfice. Say, what do you suppose he answered me when I told him ‘Good-morning, and what’s this sentimental money-chucking, anyway?’”

“I am dying to know,” said the lady novelist.

“Said it was the foyrst time he’d ever been led to think there might be something in sentiment after all. I was fair rattled.”

178The young cub with the curly smile, as you may, with your customary astuteness, have guessed, was the gardener. He had assumed the pose of philanthropist, which, when conducted at some one else’s expense, is one of the most delightful poses conceivable. The pleasure to be found in helping the dirty destitute seems to need an explanation beyond the plea of altruism. There is a real charm in domineering to good purpose. To say unto one man Go and he goeth, and to another Come and he cometh, is at all times pleasant, but when such a luxury as autocracy becomes a virtue, there are few who disregard its glamour.

The gardener’s broken leg recovered as quickly as any leg could have done. He had an enthusiastic and healthy attitude towards suffering and illness, an attitude which he took instinctively, and which mental scientists and faith-healers try to produce artificially. He was always serenely convinced that he would be better next day. He lived in a state of secret disappointment in to-day’s progress, and unforced confidence in to-morrow’s. He might be described as a discontented optimist; though often convinced that the worst had happened, he was always sure that the best was going to happen. Conversely, of course, you can be a contented pessimist, happy in to-day, but entirely distrustful of to-morrow.

To the gardener’s methods may perhaps be ascribed the fact that in a fortnight he was able with 179the help of a stick, and with the encouragement of Aitch and Zed, to walk about his room. His first excursion was to the window.

The houses opposite had fallen in on their own foundations. One complete wall was standing starkly amid the mass. Portraits of the King and Queen and a text or two still clung to their positions against the stained and florid wall-paper.

“Do you see that house that you just can’t see, the other side of that wall?” asked Aitch.

“Yes, I see,” said the gardener. “I mean I just can’t see.”

“That’s where dead Uncle Jonathan lives,” said Aitch. “He’s left Father the flour in his will.”

“How good of him. I hope it was a pretty one.”

“Father said, ‘There’s a fortune there.’ And Mother said, ‘Oh, Dally, it’s as if it was left in trust for poor Union Town.’”

When the gardener next met Mr. Tring, he discovered how entirely sufficient for two are the opinions of one.

“Of course I’m awfully lucky, in a way,” said Mr. Tring. “It’s a big inheritance, and hardly damaged at all by the earthquake. But at present, of course, it’s all responsibility and no returns. I feel as if it’s sort of left me in trust for Union Town.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Courtesy—surely the least witty comment ever invented.

“I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mrs. Rust, 180who now made this remark mechanically in any pause in the conversation.

“You consider that Mr. Tring should pile up a big bill against the British Government?” suggested the gardener.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I consider the niggers can eat—mangoes.”

“I sometimes wonder,” said the gardener, “whether one has a duty to oneself. One feels as if one has, but I always—in theory—distrust a duty that pays.”

“Certainly one has a duty to oneself,” said Courtesy. “Duty begins at home. That’s in the Bible, isn’t it?”

“Most of the texts tell you your only duty is to the man next door,” said Mr. Tring, blushing.

“I entirely disagree with you,” said Mrs. Rust.

Soon after this discussion Mr. Tring, inspired by his wife, produced a plan for the benefit of the gardener.

“When this business is over we shall—I mean I shall be a rich man and a busy man. I need somebody young around. I’d like fine to buy your youth (his wife’s words). What about being my secretary for the present? It might give you a start in Island business.”

“This is not a time for paid work,” said the gardener, “with half the money on the Island gone to dust.”

“I take your meaning,” said Mr. Tring. “But 181in my opinion the time’s all right. Good work’s good work, whether it’s honorary or not. I never liked the idea that there’s something heroic in refusing money, making out that there’s something mean in accepting it. If you help you help, and the help’s none the worse if it makes you self-supporting.”

The word “self-supporting” was a sharp and accusing word to the gardener. Most of us privately possess certain words that search out the tender parts in our spiritual anatomy. The words “absolute impossibility,” for instance, angered the suffragette to militant protest; the mention of “narrow-mindedness” ruffled the priest’s sensibilities; as for me, the expression “physical disability” hurts me like a knife. It may or may not be out of place to add that the effect on Courtesy—that practical girl—of an allusion to “banana fritters” was to make her feel sick. You may know people better by their weaknesses than by their strength.

The word self-supporting, therefore, goaded the gardener into accepting Mr. Tring’s offer.

His stock of poses, though very wide in range, had not as yet extended as far as practical business, in black and white, hours ten to five daily. He had—I report it with disgust—a contempt for the pen as a business implement. He was himself an artist without expression, a poet caged; a musician in desire, he suffered from a mute worship of all art. And he believed that the pen was as sacred an instrument 182as the violin, or the palette. To make money by the pen in business was equal to fiddling on a kerb-stone, or designing picture post cards. These theories are pose-theories, of course, and untenable by the practical man. But some of the gardener’s poses had crystallised into belief. He was, as you may have noticed, anything but a practical man.

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Tring, “you might be what my wife calls an ‘out-of-doors secretary.’ I have been officially asked to organise the distributing of the flour. Enquiries will have to be made. The niggers are awfully sly, you know; you’d have thought they’d be too silly to be sly.”

“I have noticed that the silly seem to be protected by Providence. Slyness seems to be given as a sort of compensation. Otherwise, of course, we should stamp out the silly, and a lot of valuable human curiosities would become extinct.”

“I take your meaning,” said Mr. Tring. “That being so, if we found you a horse to ride about on, would you undertake the notification and examination of the necessitous cases, the pruning away—as my wife would say—of the dishonest applicants.”

“I am a gardener,” said the gardener. “I love interfering with nature. Mr. Tring, you are a most excellent friend to me. Thank you seems too little a word.”

There are only a few people to be met with who can do justice to such a thankless task as the expression 183of thanks. Man under an obligation is always convinced that the conventional words are not enough, and tries to improve on them. This must always be a failure, however, as improving on convention is a work that only genius can undertake with success.

A horse was found for the gardener. He was what might be called an anxious rider, and Courtesy, after watching his first equestrian exhibition, went to some trouble to find him an elderly mare of sober propensities. Mounted upon this excellent creature, the gardener one morning threaded the little passes that had been made in and out of the crags of ruined Union Town. It was early. The Olympians had not yet begun to compound that horrible broth of sun and steam and dust which they brew daily upon the plains of the Island. The sun’s eyes had not yet opened even on the most ambitious of the hills, but the sky was awake, and so clear that you might have thought you were looking through crystal at a blue Zion. The dew was laughing in the crushed gardens. Grey lizards with a purple bloom on them jumped from ruin to ruin over chasms of ruin. A humming-bird, looking as though its tail and beak had been added hurriedly out of the wrong box, stood in the air glaring into the open eye of a passion flower. The air was shining cool. The songs of the birds were like little fountains of cold water.

There is always a pessimistic gloom about the woods of the Island. The cotton tree, with its ashen 184blasted trunk, looks as if it had known a bitter past. Logwood gives the impression of firewood left standing by mistake. And the cocoanut palms, which are unstable souls, lean this way and that, as though glancing over their shoulders for their enemy the wind, against whom they have no defence. Only the great creepers throw cables of hope from tree to tree, and the orchids nestle blood-red against the colourless hearts of the cotton trees.

The huts for the homeless had been built in a wide clearing in the woods, only divided from the sea by the road, a belt of palms, and a frill of sand so white that the word white sounded dirty as you looked at it. The rocks leant out of opal water into pearl air. A pensive pelican, resting its double chin upon its breast, stood waiting on a low rock.

The gardener dismounted with great care. A person of three summers or so came to watch him do it. The only thing she wore that nature had not from the first provided her with was a hair-ribbon. Her head looked like a phrenologist’s chart. It was mapped out in squares by multiplied partings at right angles to each other. From every square plot of wool sprang a rigid plait of perhaps one inch in length. On the highest plait was a scarlet hair-ribbon. The effect was not really beautiful, but suggested a beautiful maternal patience. The person thus decorated was gnawing a piece of bread.

“That bread,” thought the gardener, who in flashes posed as Sherlock Holmes, “must have been 185made with flour. That flour probably came from Tring’s. Where did you get that bit of bread, Miss?” he added.

The person, determined not to appear to overlook a joke for want of an effort, gave a high fat chuckle, and danced the opening steps of a natural tango. The gardener, unwilling to shatter the illusion of his own humour, did not repeat the question. He gave the elderly mare in charge of not more than a dozen little boys. It was an insult to the mare, a creature with a deep sense of responsibility, who could much more reasonably have taken charge of the little boys.

“Dat Mrs. Morra’s pickney,” said one of the older boys, with a polite desire to effect an introduction between the gardener and the dancing person. On hearing herself thus described, Mrs. Morra’s pickney at once led the way at great speed to Mrs. Morra. Now Mrs. Morra’s was the first name on the gardener’s list of applications.

She was discovered outside the door of her hut, submitting the head of an elder daughter to that process of which the coiffure of the younger was a finished example. The conversation was punctured by wails from the victim. Wool does not adapt itself to painless combing.

“Good morning, Mrs. Morra,” said the gardener, with his confiding smile. Mrs. Morra screamed with amusement.

“I hear the earthquake knocked down your home 186and didn’t leave you anything to live on. You asked for some of the free bread, didn’t you? The police gave us your name.”

“P’leece?” questioned Mrs. Morra, who seemed amused by the mention of her necessity. “Whe’ dat, please?”

“The police—the big man in blue,” said the gardener, before he remembered that on the Island the police was always a little man in white.

“P’leece?” persisted Mrs. Morra.

“The policeman—the law,” said the gardener desperately.

Every nigger is familiar with the law. Going to law is a vice that on the Island takes the place of drink. The nigger’s idea of heaven is a vast courthouse, with the Almighty sitting at a desk awarding him damages and costs.

“Oh, de law—de polizman, please sah,” said Mrs. Morra.

“Right. Now how did your little girl get this bread?”

“Beg a quattie from a lady, please,” said the mother.

“Yes, but where did she buy the bread when she had the quattie. Bread is free now, you can’t buy it.”

“Bought it fim Daddy Hamilton, please, old man who live alone by himself across opposite. But he ha’n’t got no more, please!”

“I’ll go and see Daddy Hamilton,” said the 187gardener. “How many children have you got, Mrs. Morra?”

“Please?”

“How many children?”

“Please?”

“How many pickneys?” said the gardener, inspired.

“Pickneys please thank you,” said Mrs. Morra. “I got Dacia Maree Blanche Rosabel Benjum Teodor Lionel.”

“Seven,” panted the gardener, who had kept careful count.

“Tree, please sah,” corrected the lady.

“Me Dacia Maree,” explained the victim of maternal pride.

“Have you a husband?” continued the gardener.

“O la, no please sah.”

“A widow?” he suggested.

Mrs. Morra shrieked with laughter.

“Nebber had no man mo’ dan tree monts,” she said. “Dacia Maree’s fader—he on’y stop a week. Benjum’s dad bin in gaol two yahs. Blanche Rosabel—her fader was a brown man, her grand-dad was a buckra.”

The gardener blushed into his notebook.

The police had certified that the family’s means of subsistence had been swept away by the earthquake, and the gardener, by one glance into an unsavoury hut, satisfied himself that no luxuries had been saved from the wreck. He therefore noted the 188case as needy, and asked his way to Daddy Hamilton.

This gentleman, seated upon an upturned bucket, was studying a hymn-book through a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

“God bless you, sah,” he said in the loud unmistakable voice of a joyous Christian.

The gardener thanked him.

“I see, Mr. Hamilton, that you told the police you had two married daughters whose husbands had been killed by the earthquake, and seven grandchildren dependent on you.”

“Yessah. De Lawd giveth, an’ de Lawd taketh away.”

“Certainly. And you had an emergency grant of several loaves of bread on Monday.”

“Praise be to God, sah, I did. De Lawd giveth——”

“On the contrary, in this case it was Mr. Tring that gave. Now, are either of your married daughters or any of your grandchildren at home?”

“No, sah. Dey all gone to chapel.”

“Really? Now there seems to be an idea among your neighbours that you live by yourself. How is it they have never noticed your two daughters and seven grandchildren?”

“Dunno, sah. Deir eyes dey hab closed, lest at any time dey should see wid deir eyes, and hear wid deir ears——”

“Do the whole ten of you sleep in that little hut?”

189“No, sah, I sleep on de graound aoutside. Foxes hab holes——”

“Now, Mr. Hamilton, can you look me in the face and tell me that the bread that was given you was really eaten by yourself, and two daughters, and seven grandchildren?”

“Yes, sah. To tell you de troot, sah, dey wasn’t ezackly blood-grandchildren. All men are brudders, we are told, sah, and derefore grandchildren, an’ daughters, an’ nieces too, sah. All de pickneys call me Daddy Hamilton. Suffer de little children to come unto me, saith de Lawd, so I suffer dem gladly.”

“Yes, but do you ever charge anything for suffering them? Have you ever sold any of the bread that was given you?”

“Well, sah, a man mus’ live.”

“Yes, but the bread was given you to live on.”

“Well, sah, money is better dan bread. You ask for bread and dey give you a stone.”

“Not in this case. The bread was excellent. Do you know, Mr. Hamilton, I believe you are liable to be prosecuted for obtaining Mr. Tring’s gift under false pretences.”

“No, sah, not false. I am a faitful sojer in de Lawd’s army, sah, faitful an’ joyful. Old Joybells dey call me.”

“Still, this time I’m afraid you stepped aside. I will ask Mr. Tring what he would like done about it. At any rate, you won’t get any more 190bread given you for the present. I’ll see to that.”

“God bless you, sah. De Lawd giveth, an’ de Lawd taketh away.”

All novelties are interesting to One Who is Seeing Life, but novelty is unfortunately an elusive phantom to pursue. After a fortnight spent in inquiry, the gardener began to feel his heart sink at the mention of flour. He suffered from the gift of enthusiasm, in place of the gift of interest, and enthusiasm is like the seed that fell upon stony ground, the suns of monotony scorch it quickly. To do the gardener justice, it must be admitted that there was very little left to do. Union Town was not very long in adjusting itself to the emergency. Nigger huts are quickly built, and even the villas of the coffee-coloured aristocracy, the most serious sufferers from the disaster, are not the work of ages. The Post Office continued to lie upon its face in the High Street, but the bare feet of the people soon trod a path around it. Government House remained huddled in a heap upon its own cellars, but Governors, after all, are not human, and it makes but little difference to the population to hear of its viceroy sleeping under canvas.

In the gardener’s mind, during the past fortnight, the suffragette had had Union Town as a serious rival. His vanity was a little hurt by her continued lack of appreciation of a great man. He would have liked, while still on crutches, to have met her searching among the ruins for him. So for a little 191while he posed as being in love with his work. But when Union Town began to retire into the background, the suffragette stepped forward into insistent prominence. She triumphed finally one night in the verandah of the St. Maurice Hotel, after dinner. It was a night without a flaw, every star spoke the right word, and the moon was a poem unspeakable. Fireflies starred the garden.

The stars and fireflies dance in rings,

The fireflies set my heart alight,

Like fingers, writing magic things

In flame upon the wall of night.

There is high meaning in the skies

(The stars and fireflies—high and low),

And all the spangled world is wise

With knowledge that I almost know ...

“I’ll have to return to the search,” said the gardener.

“What for?” asked Courtesy, who always liked everything explained.

“For the suffragette,” he replied. “I’m tired of being respectable and in doubt.”

Luckily the priest had changed his table since Courtesy had changed her company. He sat at the far end of the verandah, with his back to every one. His righteousness had subsided to some extent since the earthquake, but he still looked on the gardener as a hopelessly lost lamb. Such a shepherd as the priest may yearn towards the lost lamb, but would rather not sit at the same table with it.

“If you start that silly game again, gardener,” 192said Courtesy, “you’ll have to throw over Mr. Twing’s job. Why can’t you leave the girl alone? She can’t have been killed, because there are no white people left unidentified. Why can’t you stick to one thing?”

“I have no glue in me,” replied the gardener. “I’m glad of it; there could be nothing duller than sticking to one thing. Besides, there’s nothing left to stick to. There was only half an hour’s work to do yesterday, although I spent three hours over it.”

Mrs. Rust shot a fountain of tobacco smoke into the air as a sign that she intended to speak. The priest liked Mrs. Rust, because his own tolerance of her vagaries made him feel so broad-minded. He liked to smile at her roguishly when she took a small whisky and soda; he liked to hand her the matches when she smoked; he liked to write to his sister at home: “One comes in contact with a worldly set out here, but if one is careful to keep one’s mind open, one finds points of contact undreamt of at home in one’s own more thoughtful set.” If the gardener had been a drunkard instead of being in love, the priest would have liked him better. But the gardener posed as being a non-drinker and a non-smoker on principle. Really the taste of spirits or of tobacco smoke made him feel sick.

“I am going to leave Union Town myself,” said Mrs. Rust. “I know of a car I could hire to-morrow. I will help you in your search, gardener, although 193she strikes me as being a totally unattractive young woman.”

“We had arranged to go to the hotel in Spanish City next Wednesday by the nine train,” said Courtesy in a reproachful voice; “and from there to Alligator Bay, and then in a car round the Island. I daresay other plans might be made, but you should have let me know sooner.”

“No plans need be made,” said the gardener rebelliously. “We might just get the car, and start now in the cool.”

“Ass!” observed Courtesy simply. “Mrs. Rust’s lace scarf won’t be dry enough to iron till to-morrow. I will see whether we can start the next day.”

To disobey Courtesy was unthinkable. The gardener gritted his teeth at the stars, because he would have to see them again before he could start on his search. Now was the only time for the gardener; then hardly counted; and presently was a word he failed to acknowledge.

“Anyway, you don’t either of you know where to look for her,” said Courtesy, that practical girl.

“She’ll be at Alligator Bay,” said Mrs. Rust. “They’ve got a picture gallery there.”

“She’ll be somewhere in the hills,” said the gardener. “She would always go up.”

“I entirely disagree with you,” retorted Mrs. Rust.

“Anyway, it seems hot on sea-level,” said 194Courtesy. “We’d better go up to where it’s supposed to be cool. I’m told the Ridge Pension, High Valley, has a good cook, but the New Hotel, at Greyville, is also well spoken of.”

Fortunately thirty-six hours, though they may stretch half-way to eternity, never succeed in covering the whole distance. A moment arrived when the three, bristling with travellers’ trifles, met the waiting car at the nearest spot in the ruined High Street to which cars could penetrate. And then followed a long series of dancing moments. Little village ports strung like beads along the coast; thatched huts thrown together by a playful fate; waterfalls like torn shreds of gauze draped on the nakedness of the hills; logwood plantations, banana plantations, sugar plantations, yam plantations.... Then as the approaching hills began to usurp more and more of the sky, the road cut through a high and low land; hand in hand with a very blue river, it threaded a great grey crack in the island; high cliffs yearned towards each other on either side; a belt of pale sky followed the course from above. Then out into the sun and wild woods, with ferns and flowering trees beckoning beautifully from all sides. And then long hills, a road that doubled back at every hundred yards, with a great changing view, growing bigger, on the right hand or the left, as the course of the road decided. Little brown villages clung desperately to the hill-side; gardens of absurd size balanced themselves 195on almost perpendicular slopes; paths of red mud, disdaining the winding subterfuges of the road, sprang from angle to angle, like children playing at independence beside a plodding mother.

Towards the afternoon a blue-black cloud crept suddenly over a summit, and emptied itself with passion upon the travellers. In a minute the waterproof hood of the car was proved unworthy of its name; the screen in front became less transparent than a whirlpool; the road went mad and believed itself to be a mountain torrent. The wet wrath of heaven began to make itself felt even down Mrs. Rust’s neck.

“This is disgraceful,” said Mrs. Rust. “Courtesy, do something at once.”

No doubt Courtesy would have risen to the occasion, but for once Heaven was quicker. The sun suddenly shouldered its way round the intruding cloud, and made one great shining jewel of the world. Park View, that forward house, residence of the retiring Miss Brown, stood bold upon the sky-line.

The gardener’s heart did not leap within him when he saw Park View. Only in books does Fate disguised stir the heart to such activity. In real life, when I stumble on the little thing that is to change my life, I merely kick it aside, and hurry on.

In case you should think that by bringing my travellers to Greyville I make the long arm of coincidence unduly attenuated, I must add that there 196are only two tourist centres on the hills of the Island—Greyville and High Valley—and that almost everybody visits both.

The gardener was now posing as a Seeker, and instinctively his eyes took on the haggard look that belongs to the pose. As he mounted the steps of the New Hotel verandah, the lady novelist thought, “What an interesting young man!” When, however, she saw Mrs. Rust’s hair, her notebook trembled in her pocket. The Treasure had left, and as to the other Americans, she had practically drunk their cup of copy dry.

“Charles,” she said to the woolly black waiter when he brought her tea, “will you put those new people at my table?”

“No, please, missis,” replied Charles, who, being a head waiter at seventeen, was suffering from the glamour of power. “Shall sit dem wid Mistah Van Biene.”

A fraction of the proceeds of the lady novelist’s last novel, however, soon silenced the authority of Charles.

And after all it was Mrs. Rust who sought acquaintance first, at breakfast in the cool verandah next morning.

“There was a lizard in my bath,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful! Why can’t you exterminate your vermin?”

This was hard on the lady novelist, who screamed for Charles whenever she saw anything moving anywhere, 197but she bore the injustice with a beautiful patience.

“What do you think of the Island in general?” she asked. “I can tell by your face that your opinion would be worth having.”

She might have added that she could tell this, not so much by Mrs. Rust’s face as by her hair.

“I don’t think of the Island if I can help it,” retorted Mrs. Rust after some thought, during which she sought in vain for some adequately startling reply. “That earthquake—on my first day—a revolting exhibition.”

“Oh, were you in Union for the earthquake? I am collecting the reports of intelligent people who were there. I am sure your adventures must have been worth recording.”

“On the contrary,” replied Mrs. Rust, “the whole thing was absurdly overrated. My nerves remained perfectly steady throughout.”

The gardener, the only person who might have cast a doubt upon this statement, was not present. Still posing as the strenuous seeker, he had gone for a walk before breakfast.

There is a great glitter about morning in the hills which drags the optimist for long walks in the small hours upon an empty stomach, and causes even the pessimist to attack his grape fruit at breakfast with a jovial trill. The little tables on the verandah of the New Hotel have a glamour of heaped bright fruit upon white linen. In the garden the tangerines 198grow radiantly among their shining sober green, the butterflies blow across the pale young grass. There is a salmon-pink azalea, whose smile attracts the humming-birds, and a riotous clump of salvia. There is a benevolent John Crow, who strikes attitudes upon the roof of the annex, and stands for hours with his ragged wings spread open to the sun, as he surveys the diamond world. Really he is hoping that you will fall dead over your breakfast, but you lose this thought in the glitter of a hill morning. For the sake of your own peace of mind, never get close enough to a John Crow to see his gargoyle face. Content yourself with admiring his barbaric grace from a distance, and forget why he is there.

Courtesy was characteristically still in bed. She never was one to hear the call of a singing world.

The gardener came in with eyes crinkled by the sun, and his hair standing up in a spirited way all over the top of his head. Did you know that it is possible to be a specialist in posing without giving thought to the appearance?

“You look as if you had been fighting,” snapped Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful state of hair.”

“I wish I had,” replied the gardener. “I could fight beautifully at this moment. I never knew what it was to breathe until this morning.”

“Air is indeed a blessing” said the lady novelist. “I have a passion for air. I sometimes think I should die without it. How interesting to meet any one who loves fighting. You ought to be a soldier. 199I myself am a peace-loving woman, but I often have quarrels forced upon me.”

“Let me conduct them for you,” suggested the gardener, wrestling with his grape fruit. “Show me the enemy.”

“I wish I could. I think I will,” said the lady. “I came to Greyville to stay with a dear friend, and a young woman, of no standing whatever, picked up anyhow and anywhere, not only turned me out of my friend’s house, but now insists on my moving two of my trunks from the sick-room.”

“Oh, there is a sick-room, is there?”

“Yes, my friend’s little nephew is ill.”

“But didn’t your friend protest? Has the young woman a hypnotic power over her?”

“My friend is very weak. The young woman is only a sort of second-rate children’s nurse, apparently.”

“And do you want to go back there?”

“No, I prefer to be here. But it is so undignified not to be consulted.”

“That’s very true,” said the gardener, whose interest was beginning to wane.

“That road below is as crowded and as noisy as Piccadilly,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful.”

“Market day,” replied the novelist rapturously. “Such a blaze of colour. Such a babel of tongues....”

“And so smelly, I am sure,” said Mrs. Rust. “I am going to market.”

200“Let’s all go to market,” added the gardener.

An hour had to be allowed for Courtesy to have her breakfast, and for Mrs. Rust to don her panama. Mrs. Rust, though not averse to startling any one of her own colour, had a secret distaste for the naïve criticisms of the niggers on her strange hair. The Islanders were not aware that dyed hair was the apex of modern fashion; they looked upon it, poor things, as a deformity, and a most amusing one. Mrs. Rust had been obliged to invest in a perfect beehive of a hat for wear in such ignorant parts.

So four more units joined the stream of marketers along the red road. In spite of Mrs. Rust’s panama, the niggers laughed. Niggers always laugh unless they cry, and the lunatic ways of white women provide a source of amusement that never fails, although white women have been on the Island for three hundred years. Some of the marketers actually had to remove their baskets of fruit—crowned with boots—from their heads, to give free play to their sense of humour. Every nigger wears his boots upon his head. It is, I suppose, as much a disgrace not to own them as it is a discomfort to wear them.

The appearance of the market was like a maniac garden, and the sound of it was like a maniac rookery. By way of compensation to the niggers for their individual ugliness, Providence has granted to them an unconscious beauty in the matter of grouping themselves. A nigger by herself looks like a 201comic picture post card, a lot of niggers together look like the picture that many master-hands have tried to paint.

My senses tingle even now with the welter of sun and sound and smell and colour, that constitutes an Island market.

“You meet every one in Greyville here,” said the lady novelist to the gardener. “I will introduce you to the enemy.”

The gardener agreed absent-mindedly. He was helping Courtesy to buy baskets. The Island is the paradise of basket lovers. Those hearts are rare which do not thrill at the sight of a plaited basket in many colours, and I believe that nobody ever left the Island without succumbing to the charm. I suppose the reason why Island baskets never get on to the market at home is that everybody loves them so much, they never part with them. Courtesy, who always loved the popular thing, had been very busy buying baskets since the first moment of her arrival.

Mrs. Rust was busily occupied in refusing to buy anything. “Buy a pine? Why should I? I loathe pines. Lace? No, I won’t buy lace, my underclothes are already overcrowded with it. What’s that? A basket to keep my letters in. I keep my letters behind the fire. Why, gardener—look—here’s——”

“Mr. Gardener,” tittered the novelist, “here is the enemy behind you.”

202“You dream,” said the gardener, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

With an amiable smile the suffragette allowed her hand to be shaken an enormous number of times. She was looking plainer than the gardener had expected. With the pretty obtuseness of men, he had in his dreams forgotten that brown hat with the weary flowers in it. He had imagined her dressed in blue, he had thought her eyes were blue to match, he had created a little curl in her hair. Yet somehow he was not disappointed. For he had also forgotten in his dreams the comfort that lies in lack of ornament. It isn’t love that makes the world go round, it’s the optimism of men.

“Why, it’s quite nice to see you again,” said the suffragette in a voice of surprise.

“Courtesy,” shouted the gardener, “from this moment I’m not a fit companion for Mrs. Rust. Courtesy says I’m not respectable when I’m with you,” he added to the suffragette.

“I don’t see anything very disreputable in your behaviour with me,” she replied. “But it’s only for a little while, Courtesy.”

“Oh, Lor’, no,” said Courtesy. “He’s come to stop.”

“I haven’t,” said the suffragette.

The gardener would never have put into words the appeal that came into his eyes.

“Yes,” said the suffragette, “you are thinking 203that I am growing more and more militant every time you see me.”

“I was not,” he answered, “I was wondering how I could manage to see you apart from all this noise.”

“Quite easily. You can walk back to Park View with me now. I have got the oranges for Albert.”

So they squeezed out of the market-place, and side by side paced the avenue of donkeys which on market days lines the village street.

“What are you waiting for?” asked the gardener. “What’s wrong with me? When will you want me?”

“It isn’t you I don’t want. It’s what you stand for. Possibly I haven’t mentioned to you that I am a suffragette of a special kind. A cat that walks by itself.... Or rather perhaps it is presumptuous of me to lay claim to cathood. I have only walked such a little way. I am an elderly kitten, say, walking by itself.”

“But if all suffragettes were like you, it would certainly be an argument against the franchise. For what would become of England?”

“God forbid that all suffragettes should be like me. I am a fanatic, a rather silly thing to be.”

“I know what you are waiting for,” said the gardener. “Heaven! you want so much beside the Vote, and you’ll never get what you want this side of heaven.”

“God forbid that I should want heaven,” said the 204suffragette. “Heaven is not made for women. Why, the very archangels are men.”

“Why won’t you have me? We could get married to-morrow. Why not?”

“Because I am too busy. Because there is a superfluity of women, and as I am not a real woman—only an idea—I’d better sit out. Because I am conceited and couldn’t bear my pride to have a fall—at your expense. Because you don’t know me and I don’t know you. Because it’s better to live alone with an ideal than coupled with a fact. Now I’m sick of talking about myself, it makes me feel sugary, as though I’d been swallowing golden syrup neat.”

“But before you retire into your militancy, tell me,” said the gardener, “do you think you will ever recognise this bond between us?”

“There is no bond between us.”