Front matter

BY

ARTHUR BEVERLEY BAXTER

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK 1920

Copyright, 1920, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

MY MOTHER

PREFACE

It was one of Dumas' characters, I believe, who said: "I do not apologize—I explain." The purpose of this brief preface is to explain the many imperfections which of necessity appear in this volume.

It was at a dance after Armistice, given by American officers in the Palace Hotel, London, that I met a young lady who had landed from New York two days previously.

"My goodness!" she said, "they don't have any furnaces in their houses here; and I've been trying all day to buy some rubbers, and no one knew what I meant. My goodness! but they're backward over here."

I looked at her face and recognized the joyful mania of the explorer. She was "discovering" England.

Before the war, England was "discovered" fairly often—but during the war it became the passion of hundreds of thousands, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, South Africans—we all brought our particular national viewpoint and centered it on the "tight little Island," nor were we backward about telling the English of their faults. Each one of us stated (or implied) that his own country was the special acreage of God, and that the Kaiser ought to be made to live in foggy London as a punishment.

And for more than four years the Old Country listened patiently as the throngs of adventurers poured in from the world's outskirts. The stately homes of England were opened in their stately, hospitable way; English taxicab drivers insulted and robbed us just as cheerfully as they did their own countrymen; English girls proved the best of comrades; and the Englishman proper continued to be the world's greatest enigma.

So, in claiming admittance to that vast throng that has already discovered England, I do so with a certain humility but a hope that, when my words are sifted, some little ore of truth may be discovered at the bottom.

In three of the five stories of this collection, I have usurped the power of the Wizard of Oz, and have looked through three pairs of glasses. In "The Blower of Bubbles" an Englishman subjects his own country to analysis; in "Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist," the glasses used are American and the medium is a New Yorker; in "The Airy Prince" (the last and favorite child) a girl of sixteen from Picardy is transplanted by aeroplane for one full day in wartime London.

In the remaining two stories I have endeavored to paint something of city life in Canada in the one, and in the other to do some little justice to that least understood type—the French Canadian.

During an interesting but undistinguished career of nearly four years with the Canadian Forces, I realized that, although the army gives one plenty of food for thought, it sometimes fails to supply facilities for assimilation. Par exemple: "Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist," was started in hospital at Abbéville, France, where my fellow-patients assumed me to be a lovelorn swain, writing a love-letter that never left off. Later, "Mr. Craighouse" developed a couple of thousand words in a charming home of Scotland. The last part of the story was finished at a table in the Turkish baths of the Royal Automobile Club, London, where the attendants were good enough to consider me eccentric, but apparently not violent.

Under the robust companionship of several normal and talkative subalterns, "The Blower of Bubbles" was written in a hut at Seaford Camp during the month of November, 1918. As my stove was a consistent performer, nearly every evening a few choice souls gathered for cocoa and refreshments from home; and if their host persisted in writing at his improvised table it did not disturb their good-fellowship in the least, providing the author did not threaten to read his "stuff" aloud.

It was in that hut in the mud of Seaford that, one November morning, a little before eleven o'clock, we heard the sound of ships' sirens in Newhaven Harbor some miles away; then a distant shouting, that grew in a great crescendo, as it rode across the downs on the throats of thousands of soldiers, and passed us in one great prolonged roar, "The Germans have signed!"

We missed Armistice Day in London, but I like to think of the thirty Canadian officers, most of them veterans of many battles, gathered in the mess of that bleakest of camps, while one chap at the piano played the national anthems of the nations who had fought … and in voices that were not too steady we echoed the toast: "To the Allies and America."

And so "I do not apologize—I explain."

In avoiding the "war-story" type, I have followed my own inclinations, and have taken rather the inconspicuous parts played by ordinary people who had never dreamed of being actors in the world's greatest drama. To avoid the background of war would be utterly impossible, for war has been a fever in our blood these last four years, and not in one or two generations will our veins be free of it.

If it seems in these stories that there is a recurrent note on the necessity of artistic expression for the Old Country, the reason for it is that we came from the Dominions to a land we all knew, because English literature had made England our Mother-Country in the real sense of the word. It is the hope of many of us that the artists of Britain—whether they be writers, painters, or composers—will yet realize that the Empire looks to them, as well as to the knights of the air, to bridge the seas, and by their art make us feel as great a kinship in peace as we did in war. Dickens and Burns were more than writers; they were literature's ambassadors, and played no inconsiderable part in empire-building.

Perhaps, as the study of ordinary people gripped by emotions which left no one ordinary, this volume of stories may be of some little interest. They filled many dull hours in the writing…. It would be a rich reward for the author if he could think that they do away with a few dull hours in the reading.

Arthur Beverley Baxter

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Blower of Bubbles 1

II. Petite Simunde 97

III. The Man who Scoffed 141

IV. The Airy Prince 191

V. Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist 287

The BLOWER of BUBBLES

I

Snow was falling in Sloane Square, quarreling with rain as it fell. Lamps were gleaming sulkily in Sloane Square, as though they resented being made to work on such a night, and had more than a notion to down tools and go out of business altogether. Motor-cars were passing through Sloane Square, with glaring lights, sliding and skidding like inebriated dragons; and the clattering hoofs of horses drawing vagabond cabs sounded annoyingly loud in the damp-charged air of Sloane Square.

It was Christmas Eve in Sloane Square, and the match-woman, the vender of newspapers, and the impossible road-sweeper were all exacting the largesse of passers-by, who felt that the six-penny generosity of a single night atoned for a year's indifference to their lot. People were wishing each other a merry Christmas in Sloane Square, as they struggled along under ungainly parcels. The muffin-man was doing an enormous trade.

And I looked from my window and prayed for Aladdin's Lamp or the Magic Carpet, that I might place a thousand miles between myself and Sloane Square.

There was a knock at the door.

"Enter the Slave of the Lamp," said I, and the door opened to admit—my landlady, Mrs. Mulvaney.

"Will you be dining in?" she said. Her Irish accent hardly helped the illusion of the all-potent slave.

"And why not?" I asked.

"Ach, nothing, sor. I only thought——"

"An unwomanly thing to do, Mrs. Mulvaney."

"You're afther being a strange one, dining alone on Christmas Eve."

"Then join me, Mrs. Mulvaney."

I swear she blushed, and I felt more than a little envious of the nature which could convert such a vinegary attempt at condescension into a gallantry.

"F'what would I be doing, taking dinner wid a child like you?"

I was twenty-five, but Mrs. Mulvaney looked on all men as equally immature.

"And have you not got no friends?" she went on, but I stopped her with a gesture.

"Thank Heaven—no!" I said. "I am one of intellectuality's hermits. An educated man in London is like the bell-cow of the herd—a thing apart."

"You're a great fool, I'm afther thinking."

"The foolish always damn the wise," I answered, with an attempt at epigrammatic misquotation.

Mrs. Mulvaney heaved a sigh. Its very forcefulness recalled the nautical meaning of the verb.

"You'd be a sight happier outside," she said. "Holy Mary knows I wouldn't be driving you into the streets, but I'm worried you'd get cross wid yourself at home."

To get rid of her, I put on my coat and went out. Perhaps she was right; things would have been intolerable at home. Home! Such a travesty of the word! The sickly lamplight of Sloane Square was preferable.

"Merry Christmas, guv'nor!" said the road-sweeper.

"Merry fiddlesticks!" I growled, and gave him sixpence. I tried to avoid the vender of newspapers, but he spotted my fur collar with the instinct of a mendicant, handing me a paper and his blessing.

"'Appy Christmas, milord!" said he.

I paid him a shilling for his diplomacy.

Thinking to escape the match-woman, I altered my course, but with the intuition of her sex she contrived to put herself directly in my path.

"It's a cauld nicht," she moaned in a rickety, quavering Scottish voice—"a cauld, wintry nicht. Ye'll be haein' a wee box o' matches, aw'm thinkin'!"

I gave her twopence for them, and she shivered with cold as her skinny fingers clutched the coins. I can think of no excuse for my parsimony except the fact that I didn't need the wretched box—matches were not yet a luxury of the very exclusive.

Yes—in all Sloane Square, on that damp and foggy Christmas Eve in the year 1913, I doubt if a more morose, self-satisfied, cynical human being plunged into the mists than I. I was unhappy, and reveled in my very unhappiness. If it had been in my power, I would have sent a cloud of gloom into every home and over every hearth in London. There was something splendid, something classical, in my melancholy; it was like Hamlet's, but greater than Hamlet's, for he knew the reason of his mood, while mine was born of an intangible superiority to my day!

It is not easy, even now, to write of those days. The figure that crosses the screen of memory reminds me of Chevy Slyme—a debt-paying, respectable Chevy Slyme, forsooth!—but just as sulkily swaggering, just as superior, and not quite so human; for Chevy, at least, inspired the friendship of Mr. Tigg.

II

Unconsciously following the bus route, I emerged eventually on Piccadilly, and was jostled and ogled and blessed and cursed with the greatest heartiness. Somewhere near Bond Street I collided heavily with a young man who was trying to negotiate the crowd and at the same time lose nothing of the shop windows' display.

"A thousand devils!" I muttered, recoiling from the impact.

"A thousand pardons!" he said, raising his hat. The graceful lilt of his voice was peculiarly reminiscent; his smooth brow and silky fair hair were both familiar and elusive.

"One moment——" He gazed into my face with a searching look, keeping his hat poised in the air as if the better to concentrate his thoughts. "Not the Pest?" he said.

I nodded, and, if the truth be told, felt not a little pleased at the sound of the old nom d'école earned when I was at Westminster.

"And how," I said, "is the Blower of Bubbles?"

For answer he replaced his hat at a rakish angle and shook my hand with both his for what seemed a full minute, the crowd parting good-naturedly like a wave encircling a rock.

"My dear old Pest," he said, "we shall dine together."

"I'm sorry, but——"

"There is a perfectly vile restaurant half-a-mile from here, that has the best violinist and the worst cook in London."

"My dear chap——"

"Of all the luck! Think of my running into you on Christmas Eve!"

And just then I noticed that we were no longer standing still, but proceeding up a side street, arm-in-arm, while his disengaged hand indicated the passing scene as if it were the most gorgeous bazaar of the Orient. He spoke with extraordinary rapidity, except in uttering certain words, when he would make a slurring pause, as a singer will let a note melt into a pianissimo, then race on again with renewed vigor. It was a fascinating trick of speech, and, added to the subtle inflections of his voice, never failed to startle one into the closest attention.

I turned to him once with some remark on my lips, and noticed that his eyes were dancing with merriment.

"What is it, Pest?" he cried. "Out with it!"

I smiled gloomily; but still it was a smile.

"Why," I said, "aren't the lamps in Sloane Square bright like these?"

He didn't answer. Probably he knew the truth would have hurt.

III

What a hole to dine in on Christmas Eve! Such waiters—such guests—such food—such wine!

I believe the proprietor owned three such establishments, each, in a triumph of irony, called "Arcadia." The very linen of the waiters drooped disconsolately, and the whole place reeked of cabbage and wet umbrellas. My spirits, which had risen momentarily from their classic depths, sank like the sands of an egg-timer.

"My dear fellow," I said, "you can't mean to dine here?"

An oily waiter ambled up to us and wrung his hands in a paroxysm of welcome.

"Your tabil, Meester Norman," he said in some nondescript foreign dialect, "iss ready."

Good heavens! The Blower of Bubbles had even ordered dinner in advance! With the feelings of an unwilling martyr, I followed my friend and his escort past tawdry millinery saleswomen, dining in state with their knights-errant of the haberdashery stores; by a table where a woman was gazing admiringly at a man with a face as expressionless as a pumpkin; through a lane of chattering, laughing, rasping denizens of the London that is neither West End nor East End—of people whose clothes, faces, and voices merged into a positive debauch of mediocrity.

When we were seated and had ordered something from the waiter, I turned to Basil Norman for an explanation.

"What is it?" I asked. "An affair with a seamstress, or are you just looking for 'copy'?"

He laughed and lit a cigarette.

"Pest," he said, "this is a caprice of mine, a tit-bit for my vanity. You would have chosen the 'Trocadero' or the 'Ritz,' with all the tyranny of Olympian and largessed waiters with whom it is impossible to attain the least pretence of equality. I prefer 'Arcadia,' where I am something of a patron saint, and am even consulted by the proprietor."

"You play to humble audiences."

"Quietly, Pest—the proprietor might hear you. He is a very Magog for dignity, I assure you, in spite of his asthma."

"I gather, then, that you are a regular diner here?"

"Hardly that. But I am a little more consistent than most of his patrons. To be candid"—he leaned towards me as if it were a secret of the first magnitude—"it's his cook."

"His what?"

"His cook. Really, I'm afraid he's hardly first class."

"I am certain of it."

"He would have made an admirable medieval Jesuit, but, as a matter of fact, I wonder Steinburg——"

"The proprietor?"

"Yes. I don't know why he keeps him on. He says the fellow has a couple of blind children, and if he were dismissed under a cloud he would have trouble in securing employment. But that's not business. The fellow's an ass, isn't he?"

Whereupon his face beamed with delight, and his gray eyes twinkled like diamonds. My comment on the matter was stifled by the arrival of hors-d'œuvre. I had no idea that one tray could hold such a variety of unpalatable things. At the table next to us a woman laughed boisterously, her shoulders, which were fat and formless, vibrating like blanc-mange.

"Ah!" said Basil Norman; "Klotz has arrived."

He indicated a low platform, where a dingy pianist, pimply of countenance and long of hair, was strumming the barbaric discords that always accompany the tuning of stringed instruments. A violinist, with his back towards us, was strangling his instrument into submission; while a cellist, possessed of enormous eyebrows and a superb immobility of pasty-facial expressionlessness, sat by his cello as though he had been lured there under false pretenses, and had no intention of taking any part in the proceedings—unless forced to do so by a writ of habeas-corpus. A fourth musician, who seemed all shirt and collar, blew fitfully into a flute, as if he realized it was an irrelevant thing, and was trying to rouse it to a sense of responsibility.

"Which," I asked, "is Klotz?"

As I spoke the violinist turned about and caught my host's eye. They both bowed—Norman cordially; the musician, I thought, with restraint. The fellow stood out as a man apart from his accomplices; his high forehead and dreamy eyes were those of an artist, though a receding chin robbed his face of strength. He was the type one sees so often—able to touch, but never grasp, the cup of success.

"Klotz," said Norman, "is superb. He has the touch of the artist about him. His tone is not always good, and sometimes he scratches; but when he is at his best he does big things. So many people can perform at music—just as so many write at words—but Klotz plays with color. His art has all the charm of a day in April. He will caress a phrase according to his mood, like a mother crooning to her child. To know how to hesitate before a note in a melody, as a worshiper hesitates at the entrance to a shrine, is Art, and an Art that cannot be taught.

"It is so with painters, writers, musicians—they must have that sense of color, that instinct that brings each subtle nuance of expression into being."

I began to feel bored.

Suddenly the orchestra became animated and burst into a waltz, one of those ageless, rhythmic compositions that might have been the very first or the very last waltz ever written. Supported by wailing strings and the irrelevant flute, the enjoyment of the diners took on fresh impetus. The lady with the shoulders became a vibrating obbligato. The pumpkin-faced man beamed fatuous delight, an electric light behind him giving the odd effect that he was illuminated inside like a Hallow-e'en figure. A girl, who might have been pretty if she hadn't rouged, took a puff from her toilet-case and powdered her nose. She felt that the evening was commencing. Over the whole scene my melancholy brooded as a ghostly presence. To me it seemed like the dominant seventh in a chord of surfeiting commonplaceness; once it was heard, the whole pitch of the evening would alter to another key.

Fortunately the dominant seventh remained unheard.

The waltz stopped, and we turned our undivided attention to dinner.

"Klotz," said my host, pouring me a glass of wine, "should have made a mark, but——"

"Damn Klotz!"

"That has been done, Pest. The Bricklayers' Union, or something equally esthetic, took exception to him for one reason or another, and prevailed upon its sister-cabal to debar him from the big orchestras. To offend your Union, dear boy, is to accomplish the total eclipse of your future. Even genius to-day is subject to regulations. Klotz is in a worse position than a clerk with a Board School education trying to secure employment in a London bank."

"Confound it!" I said, "there must be some spheres reserved for gentlemen."

His twinkling eyes steadied, and a dreamy look crept into them. "Pest," he murmured, "some day England is going to thank God for the gentlemen—who were educated at Board Schools. Listen!—the cellist is playing Saint-Saëns."

Dinner—or the mess of foodstuffs dignified by the name—was almost finished when Klotz, the violinist, started one of the rare melodies which Wagner permitted himself—the Song to the Evening Star.

It was being beautifully played—even I would have admitted that—but I could not account for the troubled look that crept into my companion's face, driving the gayety and the whimsicality from it as a cloud obscures the sunlight.

"Klotz," he said anxiously, "is in great sorrow."

"How the deuce," I muttered, with a feeling of creepiness stealing over me, "can you tell that? Do you read it in his face?"

He shook his head. "Listen!" he said; "can't you hear it? Can't you feel the tears in it?"

And in spite of myself I remained silent, held irresistibly by the double fascination of the German's artistry and the sense of mystery engendered by Norman. The last sob of the G string quivered to its finish. The crowd applauded perfunctorily, then applied themselves to the more essential things of life—food, wine and noise.

Rousing myself from the reverie into which I had fallen, I turned to Norman, and found his chair vacated. I started. He had reached the platform, and was talking earnestly to the violinist. Half-contemptuous and half-interested, I watched the pantomime as they talked. Norman's hands were emphasizing some point, and every gesture was a pleasure to the eye; the musician was protesting, but with steadily abating determination. Then the scene came to a climax, and the German disappeared.

Holding the violin in his arms, Basil Norman mounted the platform, the fingers of his left hand picking quiet, pizzicato notes from the strings.

"My friends——" His voice traveled like sound on the ocean at twilight; the room subsided into silence, and diners craned their necks to see him. The woman with the shoulders brought them to a standstill, like an electric fan that had lost its current.

"My friends"—what a charming voice the fellow had!—"I do not want to bring a note of sorrow into your happiness. You are here, like my companion and myself, for enjoyment; but Herr Klotz … his wife is very ill; she is perhaps dying; and, my friends, it is very hard that he should play while his wife is dying … on Christmas Eve … in a strange country. You are English, and I know you are kind. I have sent him home, and I promised that I would take his place, as well as I can take the place of such an artist. For you who work so hard, it is not fair to spoil your happiness on this of all nights—but you will forgive me? Good!"

And his face had a whimsical, tender look.

A murmur of sympathy rose from the crowd, but died away as he raised the violin in his hands and brought from it a tone that breathed over them like a benediction. It was Gounod's "Ave Maria," and the pianist's fingers were mothering the keys as they had not done since his ambition evaporated like a cloud on a summer day.

It was exquisite—haunting. It was a prayer to Mary, but a prayer sung in a field of daisies and violets. There was sorrow in it, but it was the grief of a girl over a shattered dream. It was mature artistry, yet was born of sunshine and throbbed with the primrose sweetness of youth. It touched one like the face of a beautiful child.

Still caressing the violin, he repeated the "Ave Maria," whistling a unison. With almost any one else it would have been commonplace; with him it was a sound more pleasing than any flute, and only accentuated his sense of emancipation from the thrall of years. He played "Still wie die Nacht," "Old King Wenceslaus," "Meditation" from Thaïs, "Intermezzo" of Mascagni; and whatever he did, or however hackneyed the piece, he surrounded it with a joyousness that trembled on the brink of tears.

I looked at my watch; it was nearly midnight, and the evening so dreaded was almost at a close. He had put down his violin with a gesture of finality, when the prolonged outburst of applause changed his decision, and, with another of those rare smiles, he took the instrument once more.

The violin seemed to speak the words; and I'll swear there wasn't a woman in the place who wasn't recalling the sweet innocence of her first love. He had hardly finished, when the man with the face like a pumpkin jumped to his feet, and I rubbed my eyes.

The fellow had changed. His face had expression. Confound it! there was something rather splendid about his features—a kindliness—a——

"Young feller, m'lad," he was saying, "I knows I speaks for hevery one when I says we ain't 'eard music like that there since we was knee-'igh to a grass'opper, and I knows you won't take it hamiss if we was to pass the 'at and——"

I held my breath. What would the Blower of Bubbles say?

"You're a brick, sir!" His voice was a mellow contrast to the other's. "My friends, this gentleman has suggested that we pass the hat for our poor friend Klotz."

"I didn't neither," protested the benefactor. "Leastways——"

But the woman of the shoulders cut him short by placing two shillings beside him. It was tactful of her, a kindly thing to do, and again I was amazed. There was a womanly, motherly look about her as she turned away, and her eyes were radiant like stars in a mist.

I think I gave ten bob—it must have been a considerable amount, for the girl who would have been pretty if she hadn't rouged looked straight into my eyes and said something that sounded like a blessing. I hope it was; she made me think of a little sister I once had.

And then we were walking together again in the street, and the crowds were thinner than before. I cannot remember what we talked of, but I know I said to him, "Where did you learn to play like that?"

And he answered, "My dear old boy, music must be loved, not learned."

Then we were in Sloane Square, at my flat, and I was thanking him, or he was thanking me—I forget which; and he promised to call at noon next day to take me to Klotz's home…. And the lamps in Sloane Square seemed duller than before.

Selfishness does not die in an hour, but the bachelor who looked from his window that night was a different man from the one who had spoken to Mrs. Mulvaney. He was thinking … and much is accomplished in itself when a man is made to think.

A distant clock struck one.

IV

I have never known any one to change so little with the cycle of years as Basil Norman. When he came to Westminster, at the age of twelve, he had an easy nonchalance, a delightful insouciance, that never left him. He went from form to form, trod the stone-flagged passages as others did; but the youth of seventeen that left Westminster bore the same smiling, detached personality as when he entered. The atmosphere of tradition interested but did not drug him; the Elizabethan pancake impressed him less than did a contemporary Edwardian soap-bubble.

Conscientious form-masters recognized his extraordinary abilities, and gave him the benefit of well-worded and impressive homilies on achievement. Sometimes for effect they quoted Latin. Norman would counter with a "Greek remark." He never studied, but more than one scholar owed success to the eleventh-hour coaching of Basil Norman. Learning, like everything else, came to him as a needle to a magnet.

With a curious air of detachment he watched the panorama of schoolboy life, noticing with a discerning eye the various strata upon which public-school morality is founded, assigning the relative importance of scholarship and cricket, and nodding knowingly as the process of standardization brought similarity of speech, accent, thought, and vocabulary to all his fellows.

He was like a Puck who had never been really young, but who refused to become a day older.

For a few weeks he played cricket, but without reverence. During a match he kept up (sotto voce, of course) a running commentary of philosophy which, according to our ethics, was vulgar. I shudder to think what he would have done if Westminster had adopted baseball.

On one occasion the captain of the eleven took upon himself to point out to Basil Norman the error of his ways. The worthy demigod deplored Norman's habit of lying on the grass during practice and inventing couplets on the various members of the team. The captain also said that, providing he would take the game seriously, there was a future for him as a cricketer. Whereupon Norman, from his recumbent position, misquoted most of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, unblushingly attributing Hamlet's indecision towards living to his doubts of himself as a cricketer. When he finished he rose to his feet, and our comments were frozen at the sight of his face.

His cheeks had a ghastly pallor and his eyes were brilliant, but with a fixed, glaring intensity. And as we looked his expression changed—the color returned with a glow of warmth to his skin, and his eyes were gray and humorous. Being boys, we forgot about it as quickly as it had happened.

The next Saturday we played Charterhouse, and though the score was heavily against us, Norman gave the finest exhibition of batting I have seen in public-school cricket, scoring a century and winning the match for us. He was frail but lithe, and with an air of aplomb batted the offerings of Charterhouse to all points of the compass. At the finish of the game we crowded around him, but he smiled a little wearily, and shook his head.

"I am finished with cricket," he said.

Bewilderment, then anathema, broke like a thunder-shower upon the head of Basil Norman. We pleaded; we argued; we threatened; then we used language which possessed the merit of forcefulness and frankness. We called him a swine, a rotter, a skunk, and an absolute cad. Some one ventured the opinion that he was a perfect stink, and we all stood about him like the Klu Klux Klan trying a negro malefactor.

"Gentlemen," he said—and there was a delightful touch of irony in the word—"you have come to bury, not to praise, me; yet, unlike Cæsar, I am not ambitious."

"Swine!" said Smith tertius (or was it quartus?).

"In spite of the witty comment of me learned friend," said Norman, after the manner of the leading counsel of the day, "I have always held the opinion that life is a thing to be sipped, not drunk. I have played cricket—veni, vidi, I scored a century! I would not spoil me appetite, milords, by overgorging."

"Your conduct," said Grubbs, the captain, "is rotten. It shows that you don't give a fig for the honor of the school. If you want to be a pig, you can wear the cap of one." (We all knew what he meant, and admired him frightfully for his venture into the quagmire of metaphor.) "We will send you to Coventry until you come to your senses."

The culprit bowed airily.

"You will lose much more by my silence than I by yours," he said—and it takes considerable courage to make such a statement to a tribunal of schoolboys.

If Norman suffered from our aloofness, he took it with the same nonchalance as he had taken our plaudits. Oddly enough, he had no intimate friends, and all of us, partly out of resentment against his pose of onlooker, and more from the love of torture which links the schoolboy to the savage, performed our duty of silent punishment with a zeal which deserved a better inspiration. We forgot how he had made friends with the misfits whose square personalities were being drawn through the round hole of public-school life. Little chaps he had taken in hand on arrival when they wanted to weep for loneliness turned from him as if he held contagion. All the sensitive, shrinking ones about whom he had thrown his cloak of vivacity, and who were now grown bold and self-reliant, let him pass from the Little Dean's Yard to his house and through the ancient passages, a lonely debonair figure that always smiled…. And no one spoke to him. I, whom he had named "The Pest," thus turning my naturally perverse sulkiness into a subject of jest and good-humor, took a special delight in watching the man who had been sentenced by his peers to solitude in the midst of a crowd.

His peers?… Was it Smith tertius (or quartus) who used the word "swine"?

Two weeks had passed, and we were to play Winchester a decisive match on our grounds, which, as land near the cathedral is rather difficult to obtain, are almost a mile from the school.

The stage was set. Youthful scholars of ten and twelve walked in their gowns, their brows knit with thought, their eyes blinking from over-study. Little chaps struggled under the responsibility of silk toppers, and conversed solemnly on the deterioration of the tuck-shop; and the Olympian creature who was the head-boy of the school lounged outside the scoring-booth as if he were "fed up" with nectar, and would like some brown October ale for a change—a pose much favored by the best people in England. There was an excellent audience of the secondary sex, composed of proud mothers and apologetic sisters, whose presence was necessitating a sort of Jekyll and Hyde attitude on the part of their schoolboy relatives, who were endeavoring to be polite to their "people" and at the same time give the impression to their confrères that the women were mere acquaintances—accidental dinner partners, as it were.

No schoolboy of twelve likes to admit to a mother.

Surrounding the field there is a high iron fence, through the railings of which, or on top, a motley collection of gamins cheer on their wealthier brethren of the silk hats. Naturally no notice is taken of these uninvited guests. It is quite all right for them to shout for Westminster if it gives them any pleasure, but what has a silk hat in common with a red kerchief and a slouch-cap?

On the day of the match they seemed in larger numbers than usual, and the top of the fence was covered with urchins, who retained their position of vantage as though the law of gravitation were no concern of theirs, keeping up a shrill chorus as Winchester went out for a moderate score.

With the odds all in our favor we went in to bat, Grubbs, the captain, and I leading off. The first ball was wide, but to feel the play of my muscles I took a perfunctory swing at it with my bat. The effect was extraordinary…. The crowd of Cockney youngsters raised a volume of sound as if my bat had been a baton and they a chorus.

"Gow it, Pest!" "That's the style, Gloomy!" "Troy t' other hend, Bluntnose!" "Gee, he's got odd socks on!" "Nah then, Spiderlegs!" (The blunt nose and the legs I admit to, but the accusation of odd socks was pure malice.)

The next ball, with no twist at all, bowled me clean, and I walked off the field to the tune of high-pitched shrieks of delight, and with a face that flushed a dark red. My place was taken by Smith tertius (or quartus), whose appearance caused an even greater furore than mine.

"'Ooray for Bones!" greeted the lanky youth as he emerged—"'im as his the loife of the school!" (He was the most morose of boys.) "'I, Bones, 'oo did you crib from this time, eh?" (A subtle allusion to an ancient offense which had almost earned him expulsion.)

The first ball came for Smith with an inviting hop. He watched it—went to strike at it—changed his mind—reconsidered his decision, and swung at the air as the ball passed over the bails by an inch, a feat which seemed to gratify our enemies on the fence immensely.

"Nah then, Bones, non o' that there contortionizing!" "'It the ball, Bones; don't miss it!"

And he did—a miserable little pop into the air; the chap in the slips didn't have to move a foot to gather it in.

Mr. Smith then added his proof that Shakespeare was right when he said in this world we have our exits and our entrances.

The next six batters went out for a score of eleven, bowled clean by the most intimate volume of abusive chaff ever endured by a cricket team. Skeletons were not only being taken from their closets, but paraded brazenly before the eyes of the world. The secret history of Westminster was screamed from the fence-tops.

It was after the loss of our eighth wicket that Grubbs and I, who had stolen round by the street, stalked and discovered their ringleader.

"That's him," said the captain hoarsely—the situation was too tense to permit of the niceties of grammar. I followed the line of his accusing finger—and gasped. There was no mistaking those gray twinkling eyes, although they were almost hidden behind a huge bandage, presumably for mumps. He was dressed in a rough coster suit, with a villainous cap on one side of his head and a bandit's red kerchief about his neck.

"It is him," I said dramatically.

"I thought so," said Grubbs, and cleared his throat. "Norman," he cried. "Kid—Norman."

The young rascal, who was sitting on top of a post, more like a Puck than ever, swiveled about and solemnly winked one eye. "Do I understand that the ban of silence is lifted?" he said from behind the mumps bandage.

Grubbs considered, and then made a tactful and instantaneous decision. (Small wonder that a few years later he was entrusted with a war mission to Washington, of the utmost delicacy.)

"You've had your revenge," he said, "and the joke is on us. Call your mob off, will you?"

"You're quite sure you wouldn't like us to encourage the remainder for a change?"

"Quite sure."

"So be it, my captain."

He blew a whistle through his fingers, and in a moment the fence was denuded of mortals like a tree smitten by an autumn gale. The Blower of Bubbles removed his bandage, and presented a stocky youth with three shillings.

"Buy sweets for the crowd," he said, "and mind—play fair."

"Right you har', guv'nor"; and the mob disappeared. And thus ended the riot of the slouch-cap against the silk hat. To-day, if you are passing the field during a match, you will see that the gamins are still there, but they shout only for Westminster.

We were just turning away, when Basil Norman laid his hand on Grubbs's forearm, as a girl might do, and his eyes had a wistful look.

"Before I change into more fitting garb," he said airily, then paused…. My breathing seemed to stop at the sight—his face had gone suddenly white, and his eyes were glazed.

"Grubbs!" he cried, and his voice sounded hollow. "Don't you understand?… Oh, you damned fool, can't you see it's my heart?"

V

After Westminster I went to Cambridge, and succeeded in cultivating the Oxford manner, by which all Cambridge men are known. When I emerged from there I offered myself to the highest bidder (a sudden bankruptcy of my father having made an occupation essential).

A London newspaper was the fortunate winner in the mad race for my services, though it would have been difficult for it to lose, as there was but one entry.

I became a writer of power—not quite so much so as the gentleman to-day who wields his pen as he would a bludgeon, and succeeds in writing a powerful article each week; but still I was a writer of strength. I damned the present, doubted the future, and deplored the past. I became an honored member of the group of London writers whose entire genius is exhausted in criticism. I secured a bowing acquaintance with Bernard Shaw, and always spoke of H. G. Wells as Mr. Wells. It was obvious to me that to achieve literary success in England one must abuse England—but especially any one who tried to change her.

Some of my confrères sided with Bernard Shaw and attacked middle-class morality and patriotism. Mr. Arnold Bennett had a certain following, though we agreed that his Five Towns stories were not really critical, but merely observant. We did not know at the time that he had it in him to write The Pretty Lady, which was to be neither. For myself, I was drawn towards Mr. Wells, and hit at everything like a blindfolded pugilist.

We agreed with Granville Barker that Irving had reduced the value of Shakespeare by over-staging; and we endorsed the opinion of a dramatic critic, known to the public as "Jingle," who said that Shakespeare's lines were often worthy of an Oxford undergraduate.

For pastime we abused Lord Roberts as a monomaniac, and Winston Churchill as a kleptomaniac with a passion for stealing the thunder of others. We even argued that the Church had lost its grip, and wrote eloquently on the value of doubt. With admirable esprit de corps we refrained from attacking the public-school system, though we realized that one could always get a hearing by so doing.

And every year those schools were turning out their thousands and the universities their hundreds; every year our number was strengthened by well-routined brains that took to destructive criticism like a German to barbarity.

Somebody was writing our puerile dramas; some one was producing the trash which flooded our book-stalls; some brain was conceiving the tawdry stuff which was educating the millions in the cinemas…. But we thanked Heaven that we were not as other men. We were England's educated class. For the education of England fails to teach one that a country's art and literature are as vital to the nation as speech to the individual.

I took a flat in Sloane Square and read Russian novels. Whenever I discovered a new Russian author, I quoted him as if I had known him all my life; it used to pain me to find how unrecognized he was by my fellows. I attended the opera only on Russian nights, and I became a devotee of the Russian dancers. I used to quote Russian in my paper, and brought down the curse of a hundred typesetters upon my head.

I think every writer has his Russian period.

Once or twice I heard of Basil Norman, though our paths did not cross. Some one claimed that Norman could have been a great violinist, if—— Another told me that Punch had published a delicate little sonnet of his that had the quality of tears about it. There was no question (he said), if—— An artist I met had painted one landscape that defied criticism—even ours—and I spoke of the exquisite coloring and detail of the foreground.

"I could not have done that," he said, "but for Basil Norman, who brooded over me like an inspiration. The work is mine, but the conception his. If——"

Yet the world did not know of his existence. He remained a detached personality, treading lightly where sorrow was, singing his song of the sunlight wherever ears had become dulled with discouragement. A fantastic, gentle, twinkling-eyed prince in a kingdom of butterflies and violets. Try as I would, I could not refrain from contrasting my life of literary vivisection with his primrose youth that seemed eternal, springing from a genuine joy in living, a youth that was as perfect as a melody of Chopin's.

"The happiest of Christmases, old Pest!"

The subject of my thoughts was standing before me, and the bells were clamoring exultantly on the frosty air.

I gripped his hand, and something in his eyes told me the truth…. He had come for me because I was lonely and needed him.

And the message of the bells took on a new meaning.

VI

We walked into the brisk, vibrating sunshine of a glorious Christmas morning. He had taken my arm, and was chatting gayly on everything from "cabbages to kings." Sometimes his nostrils dilated, and he would look up as if he were actually drinking in the ozone of the air; and he seemed younger than ever, with a joyousness born of sheer intoxication with life. We walked for a mile, and all the time his mood was as happy and stimulating as the sunshine sparkling in the December air.

Turning down a street, we passed a church from which the worshipers were emerging, and a mother with two sons on the brink of manhood held our attention for a moment. The lads had a gentleness of feature, an unconscious grace that sometimes is the attribute of adolescence, and their mother walked between them, proudly—they were her masterpieces. For some time Norman chatted amiably, but I could see that a pensive shadow was steadily creeping over the brilliancy of his spirits.

"They tell me," he said in subdued tones, breaking suddenly from the topic in hand, "that both my parents hoped for a girl when I was born. And sometimes I have thought that there is a little of the feminine in my nature. I love the pretty things of life, and there are times when I have an unmistakable sense of intuition."

I waited silently, but it was some moments before he resumed.

"Somewhere ahead," he said dreamily, "in months or years to come, I see a vision of a woman in black, coming from church alone, and her head is bowed with grief——" He passed his hand over his brow with a weary, querulous movement, and shadows appeared beneath his eyes. "Where—where are the two sons? Not dead?"

He smiled wistfully and replaced his hand in my arm.

"The picture we saw just now," he said, "is my conception of England—the real England of noble mothers and noble sons. But something tells me that the woman in black is England too, mourning for her sons who will never—come back."

With an effort he squared his shoulders and forced a laugh from his lips.

"Pest!" he cried, "I should be burned as a witch. Heigho! it's a pretty go when one has to turn lugubrious on a Christmas morning. Cheer us up, Pest. Tell me about yourself—whom you are in love with, and your dreams for the days to come. Let's blow bubbles—shall we?—and see what fresh beauties we can find in this charming adventure called life!"

And I laughed with him, exchanging philosophies light as air; but the chimes that rang out all about us had still another meaning. There was a warning in the pealing discords that broke on the quiet air; there was a requiem in the notes that lingered like an echo, then murmured ominously to silence.

I shivered as though I had a chill, for something of Norman's spirit had seized me, and I felt that both the warning and the requiem were—for England.

VII

At the head of a stairway which one reached by going through a tobacconist's, Herr Klotz greeted us with guttural cordiality. We asked after his wife, and were told that she was a little better, though very weak, and had insisted upon seeing her guests before they left, if they would be so kind as to visit the sickroom.

On the contents of an enormous hamper sent from "Arcadia" (and, I am certain, paid for by Norman) the German and the two of us lunched with all the bonhomie of bohemians. Basil Norman was in the best of spirits, so much so, in fact, that Klotz was constantly overcome with laughter, and on three occasions was forced to rush away to acquaint his wife "mit der amuzing veet of zee altogedderillustrious Herr Norman."

By no means least in importance, Klotz's little son of about four years of age sat in a high chair and chuckled knowingly whenever he deemed the humor had reached a necessary climax.

Though he was not unlike his father in the shape of his head, his chin did not recede, and one could only assume the mother had supplied the qualities lacking in the father. Never for a moment did the child lose interest in the proceedings; he followed throughout the facial expression and the play of conversation of his elders. His face interested me so intensely that I found myself glancing at him whenever his interest in the others gave me a chance; there was so much of promise and heredity about him.

"And what," I said, during a momentary lull in the merriment, "is Master Siegfried to become?" We had learned his name a moment before.

"Siegfried," said his father, "tell zee gentlemens vot you to be already intend."

The little chap smiled, but without self-consciousness. "A conducthtor," he lisped, "like Herr Nikith."

Klotz crossed his hands upon his ample waistcoat and beamed paternally.

"Your baton bring," he said, "und der score Tristan."

With profuse apologies for this display of juvenile precocity, the violinist hurried after the boy, and reëntered a moment later with his violin and a music-stand, which he proceeded to set up.

Siegfried followed close on his heels with the full orchestral score of the last act of Tristan and Isolde, which almost obscured him from sight. Placing it on the stand, he retired in a dignified manner; and Herr Klotz, taking a chair, seated himself at the left of the stand, and proceeded to tune his fiddle to pitch, varying the proceedings with imitations of French-horns, vagrant clarionets, and irresponsible trombones in the mélange of discord which always precedes the entrance of the conductor. Norman, who had been enjoying the scene to the full, suddenly rose to his feet.

"Herr Klotz," he said sternly, "I protest."

The tuning ceased, and the violinist looked anxiously at his guest. "You do not like dis, zumtimes?" he faltered.

"I object," cried Basil, "to being left out.—Herr Siegfried!" He raised his voice. "Herr Siegfried!"

The little chap walked solemnly in, a baton in his hand. "Yeth?" he said.

"Mein Herr, my friend and myself desire to join your orchestra."

The youthful conductor considered, ruminatingly. "You blay goot?" he said.

"Wonderfully. I was comb-and-tissue-paper-player in the Cascade Steam Laundry Orchestra, and my friend——"

"He ith goot alzo?"

"Pest, speak for yourself."

I shrugged my shoulders. "Far be it from me to brag," I said, rather lamely, "but I was first violinist to His Majesty the King of Diddle-doodledums."

"Ah, yes," cried Norman; "and you were dismissed because of your unfortunate habit of playing an octave flat." He leaned over and put his lips to Siegfried's ear. "Let him play the drums," he said in a stage whisper.

Amidst roars of delight from the older Klotz, the youngster left the room, and returned in a minute's time, carrying an immense tin dishpan and a broken broom-handle, which musical impedimenta he entrusted to my tender mercies, and then sedately stalked from the scene once more. With mixed emotions I carried my pan and stick over to the extreme right, and placed a chair beneath the spot where the stage-box would be, calmly surveying the assumed audience with that look of waggish melancholy one associates with gentlemen of the drums. Norman, whom Klotz had armed with the combined ingredients of his instrument, placed a chair halfway between the conductor's stand and myself, and together we joined Herr Klotz in a two-minutes' orgy of discordant preparation. With a desire to increase the variety of my percussion effects, I conscripted an extra chair into service, placed it back towards me, and prepared to use my cane as an auxiliary drumstick.

By common consent we achieved a moment's unanimity of silence, which was seized by Herr Siegfried as the auspicious moment for his entrance. Without the least loss of dignity he clambered onto his chair, as we applauded, perfunctorily, by hammering our alleged music-stands with non-existent bows; and, turning to the audience, he bowed with the restraint of genius—a feat of condescension which appeared to delight the throng hugely, for he was constrained to turn about and acknowledge their plaudits a second time before they would allow him to proceed.

As drummer I assumed an air of morose boredom.

The noise of the audience having subsided, the conductor opened his score and nodded to his Concertmeister, Herr Klotz, who carefully found the required place in the orchestration.

"Blay der 'Liebestod' music," said he in his most professional manner to us. We nodded knowingly, and found the required part in the last act of our scores, after turning over a vast number of visionary pages.

"Do we begin at the beginning?" asked Norman.

"Yes," I answered, "and leave off at the end." After which sally I laughed immoderately, and began to understand the instinct which causes a humorist to enjoy his own wit more than any other's.

A rap on the stand brought my mirth to a close. Both arms were extended in the air—a last look at both sides of the orchestra (there must have been a hundred of us)—the left hand slowly poised to indicate "piano"—the right hand gently raised—and then the strings were brought into action. I had intended, as another excellent jest, to give a tremendous crash on the pan at the start, so as to bring down the leader's wrath, but something in the little chap's attitude stopped me. This was not play to him—it was real; and, to my amazement, it seemed no less vivid to my fellow-burlesquers. Herr Klotz was playing the chromatic development of the opening as if it had been Covent Garden and the real Nikisch conducting. The Blower of Bubbles was giving one more proof of his amazing versatility. In some manner he was imitating a cello, and he knew the music. Where he had learned it one could only conjecture—but when did he learn anything?

Silently I watched the serio-comic development. The boy was conducting remarkably, with unerring artistry, sustaining the exact Wagnerian tempi, and, with little exaggeration, indicating the crescendo and diminuendo which colors all the great master's composition. How much of it he knew or whether he was following his father's violin I could not make out, but his earnestness fascinated me; and suddenly his eyes turned towards mine. I gripped the broom-handle—but no, it was merely a warning that my time was imminent. I think my breath came short as I waited. Then his eyes sought mine once more, and inclining towards me, his baton called for the drums. It was I he was conducting, and no one else! And I vibrated the broom-handle against the dish-pan, only to stop instantaneously as his baton moved to subtler instruments. He never failed to warn me with that preliminary glance, and when the magic wand followed I gave him all I had. The little beggar was a hypnotist.

Towards the climax I could have sworn the whole orchestra was there. Klotz was playing superbly, and Norman was roaming from one instrument to the other with a remarkable combination of accuracy and imitative versatility. As for me, I supplied dynamic effects that would have satisfied even the great Beethoven, who once asked for guns.

Then it was over.

Herr Siegfried bowed twice to the audience, indicated his entire orchestra with an all-embracing wave of the baton, and ended by solemnly shaking hands with his father, who stood up to accept the honor. After that, with a self-conscious wriggle, he became the boy once more, and removed his spell from us. With roars of delight we gathered about him, making a circle by joining hands, and dancing extempore, we sang a chorus consisting of constant repetitions of "Hilee-hilo! Hilee-hilo!" That may not be the correct spelling, but then we were singing, not writing it—which is one advantage music has over literature.

Before we went, Herr Klotz took us into the room where his wife lay ill, and by her eyes—for she was too weak to speak—she thanked us for our part in making the day a festival one for their lonely little household. With an instinctive gentleness that a woman might have shown, Norman spoke of the things she wanted to hear about: how her husband had been missed at the restaurant, of the desire of every one to make a little present to them, of the great future that lay before their son, and of the genius of Herr Klotz that would some day be recognized. With the cheeriest of good-byes, he lightly touched her shoulder with his hand and said he knew she would soon be well again.

He lied. In half of what he said he lied. He was blowing bubbles that the woman stricken with fever might see in them some little compensation for her life of drudgery.

With the guttural good wishes of Herr Klotz still in our ears (we had pledged eternal friendship in three foaming mugs of beer), we sought the street, to find that dusk was settling over the city. For some moments neither spoke, but feeling that perhaps I had descended too abruptly from my pedestal, I cleared my throat and ventured on a remark.

"A decent fellow," I said patronizingly, and felt my dignity reasserting myself; but Norman failed to hear me. He was lost in some memory. Now that I look back, I wonder was it the picture of the sick woman he saw or his vision of the mother with her two sons; or, with his gift of intuition, could he see, less than a year ahead, Klotz, in a German soldier's uniform, marching through Belgium with an army of lust and rapine, gorged like gluttonous, venomous beasts?

I wonder.

VIII

It was from an aunt of mine that I first heard of Norman's attachment to Lilias Oxley.

Whenever I received a letter from my relative, I had first to realize that its mission was to educate, not to entertain. She was a woman of strong ideas, and, as my mother died very early in my life, she seldom lost an opportunity of impressing a moral—like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland. In her correspondence, and to a large extent in her conversation, my aunt was given to dashes, underlines, and exclamation-marks. It is perhaps unnecessary to state that she was a single woman.

I received the letter two months after Christmas; it was dated from the Beacon at Hindhead.

"My dear Nephew,—You will find mentholated crystals—carried in a small bottle—a splendid preventive against the present epidemic of cold in the head! Sniff a little every night before going to bed.

"When are you going to marry? For goodness' sake, marry a dark girl when you do. Our family is growing positively colorless!

"Your friend, Mr. Norman, is visiting the Oxleys down here. It seems young Oxley is trying to write a play with some ideas in it, and Norman thinks he can help him! Who in the world wants to see a play with their ideas! It's a pity you couldn't teach him to do something useful—Norman, I mean.—Young Oxley is going into the Church! Why doesn't he go to Canada! I mean Norman.

"Do you remember little Lilias Oxley? She had pneumonia last year, though I warned her mother about flannel soaked in goose-oil and turpentine! She always looked like a hothouse flower, and now she is simply frail. Of course, she's pretty and has eyes that always makes fools of the men—not that that signifies! Everybody says she's artistic, but all I ever hear her play is by some newfangled foreigner named Debussy, and it's all discord. She's only nineteen and looks sixteen.

"Of course, young Norman comes along, and instead of picking out some healthy buxom girl, he falls in love with this bit of tinsel china! It's criminal, and should not be allowed. What kind of children will they have, if any! He calls her his Beatrice—Heaven knows why!

"They are together constantly. I would write to the Times about it if I thought that Lord Northfellow would publish it. We should have a Minister of Eugenics! Surely Winston Churchill would be better employed at that than trying to build up a huge navy we'll never need! By the way, I see he's taken to writing novels now!

"Do talk to young Norman! Tell him your uncle is doing very well with pigs in Canada; and why not induce your friend to go there, and get some common-sense, because every Canadian I meet has a head on his shoulders? It must be the climate!

"I am going to stay here for a month, and then visit my cousin in Scotland. She has six children. Whatever induced her to marry a minister? He has no money and no prospects—except more children, I suppose!

"Does that Mulvaney woman see that your room is kept aired? When you write you should have the window open and a cap on your head.

"I hope you will never write books! It is quite a distinction nowadays not to.

"Where did you go for Christmas?—Your loving aunt,

"Hannah.

"Feby. 8/1914."

The only way I can account for my aunt's love of exclamation-marks was her delight at seeing a sentence round to a good finish. I have known authors to be so overcome with the dramatic significance of their work that they put them in as a sort of public recognition thereof.

En passant…. I wonder why my aunt never wrote a serial story for one of the London dailies.

IX

War.

Our world of artificiality lay like a cracked eggshell. As drowning men, we clutched at everything that seemed stable … to find nothing that was not made of perishable stuff. Our pens that had criticized so long mocked us as we gazed at the pages which seemed to reject our thoughts before we gave them life. A few of us turned into special war writers and comforted the nation with statistics. We showed that Germany was beaten—it was a mathematical truth that could be proved. While we demonstrated our immense superiority to the enemy in figures, a little British Army was fighting against odds of six to one.

And the Fates stood by with poised shears, ready to cut the thread of Britain's destiny.

It is not pleasant to recall the arraignment of the year 1914. The Boer War had shown our weakness to every nation but ourselves; our educated men had graduated into the world using their abilities as obstructionists. We had discouraged everything that had the very odor of progress.

Yet—we muddled through. Men still use that word as if it were something creditable instead of hideous. We won, because, behind the Britain that muddled and obstructed, there was the Britain of noble mothers and noble sons.

And into the first winter our orgy of statistics went on, like an endless Babylonian feast … while the British fleet—which we should never need—strained and plunged in the icy gales of the North Sea, grimly, silently, saving the world for Civilization.

Great days. Fateful days. Terrible days.

One Friday night early in December I received a note from Norman, asking me to meet him for dinner at "Arcadia." I had not seen him for six months, but his debonair charm was as potent as ever, and we chatted of the past like friends who had not met for years. As if by mutual consent, we avoided the present until I noticed that the orchestra was different.

"Where is Klotz?" I asked suddenly.

"Gone."

"Where?"

"To the war. He was a German reservist and got away."

"And his wife?"

"She is confined to her bed all the time, but fortunately there is an excellent woman looking after her and young Siegfried. By the way, what a conductor he'll make some day!"

By the subterfuge I knew who was paying for the woman, though his income was always slender. Stimulated by a British-born orchestra that played with a respectability beyond question, we pursued bubbles of conversation for half-an-hour, saying many clever things and arriving at no conclusions; but both of us knew that, behind the badinage, there was the consciousness of war gripping our brains like a fever.

"What do you think," I said at last, "of the question of enlisting?" It would have been a mockery to deny the fever any longer.

"Why should I enlist?" His smile was so disarming that I regretted my move at once.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "You are not needed, and you never will be. Besides——" My voice trailed off into the insincere platitudes that always come to the lips when conscience is to be drugged.

He lit a cigarette. "Pest," he said, "most men are participants in life; a few, like myself, are onlookers. It was my choice when I was a mere youngster—wisely or not, I do not know—but the pose has become reality now. I am a jester at the court of the world, a wordy fellow with a touch of melancholy in his humor, watching and commenting on the real things of life. Before there was a war I blew bubbles, and now I am fit for nothing else. Have a cigarette?"

"Thanks."

He passed his hand across his brow with the same weariness I had noticed before.

"To gaze on life," he went on after a pause, "and not to live it, spares one many sorrows. Even love, which comes to most men as an overwhelming passion, stole into my life like a perfume of Cashmere. When I was twelve years of age and living on the south coast, I used to pass a little dream-girl of seven years or so. The purity of her face stayed with me like a melody a mother sings to her child. Then she was ill, and for three weeks I never saw her. Finally she came one day in a chair, and her beauty was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. It made me think that the God who gave us this beautiful world sometimes cherishes a soul as sweet as hers and keeps it in a body that is frail, so that through life He can watch it like a flower, tenderly, lovingly;… and when He wants it back again He has but to whisper, and, like a violet bending to a summer breeze, it hears and obeys…. I have sometimes thought that even tears shed for such a one have in them the quality of dew, and serve to keep the memory green and pleasant.

"The next day I brought her a rose. Though we had never spoken, she took it, and gave me her face to kiss…. I lost my mother when I was very young, but this dream-girl's kiss supplied that inspiration for the ideal that a child takes from its mother. I could not have been impure after that—I could not have been unkind. The next day she was gone, and I never saw her again until I went to Surrey to visit young Oxley. She was his sister."

"And you found?"

"That the dream-child had become a woman—the charm of Spring had softened to the witchery of Summer."

He shrugged his shoulders and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.

"That, my dear Pest, is how love came to me."

I frowned in an endeavor to pierce his apparently superficial dismissal of the subject.

"Don't you intend to marry her?" I said.

"Marry her?" He laughed, but there was little mirth in the sound. "Does a jester marry?" His eyes hardened, and there was a new ring to his voice. "Who am I to take a wife? A poseur, a flâneur, in a world of men, I stand discredited beside the poorest workman whose toil brings in a pittance for his wife and kiddies. England is calling for men—for men, I say." He brought his fist with a crash on the table. "What can I offer her—my parlor accomplishments? My minstrel's mummery that shudders at the sight of a sword? Can I blow bubbles in a world where hearts are breaking?"

There were tears in his voice, but his eyes were flashing furiously.

"Hexcuse me." A man had stepped up to us, wearing the armlet of a recruit. His face was oddly familiar, but I could not recall it until a light was switched on just behind him, and I recognized the pumpkin-faced man of Christmas Eve.

"I just thought of 'ow I'd like for to tell you as I've been took for the Army O.K."

We shook his hand and wished him the best of luck.

"Funny thing, sir, as 'ow the 'ole bloomin' time I was planning to sign hup I was a-thinkin' of you and that there fiddle. 'You wouldn't like to meet 'im,' I kind o' sez to myself, 'and you not in the harmy, you wouldn't,' I sez."

"Instead of which," smiled Norman, all trace of his intensity gone, "I am the one who is the slacker."

"But didn't I see you in the line the day we was going for to join hup?"

Norman laughed. "I was probably a hundred miles away," he said. "Pest, have I a double?"

The recruit scratched his head. "I could 'a sworn hit was you," he said, and launched into a graphic description of drill and the absurdities thereof, a recital which appeared to have no prospect of an ending until we were interrupted by the restaurant proprietor, who took Norman to one side for a consultation concerning the medieval cook.

I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see our friend of the pumpkin face making secret and terrifying signs for me to lend him my ear.

"'E's a-'iding something," he whispered hoarsely. "I ain't been a chandlery merchant hall my life, wot does most o' 'is business hon tick, without hit learning me to remember faces. Hit were 'im. 'E was turned down for a bad 'eart!"

Whereupon he made a semi-mystic sign with his thumb and forefinger to indicate that the whole affair was a secret between gentlemen.

That night, in bed, the sensitive, delicate features of Basil Norman remained in my memory. I had surprised his secret which he would admit to no one; not to the girl he loved; not to himself. It was the same spirit that had made him defy the whole of Westminster. We had called him Puck and the Blower of Bubbles, and he himself had said he was lighter than air…. But Basil Norman's life had been one endless battle with an indomitable soul that refused to yield to the body.

I could not sleep well that night.

X

I did not meet Basil Norman for nearly four years. I joined the Artists' Rifles early in 1915, fought for eleven months, and was given a commission. After a short time in England I went out in all the glory of a Sam Browne and one star, but in a few months I was wounded in the chest, which earned me Blighty and a surfeit of Aunt Hannah, who still contended that had we only concentrated on an army instead of a navy——

As I write, it all seems a blurred memory of colorless monotony, mud, fatigue, death, and grim humor. In January, 1918, after a term of duty as musketry instructor, I returned to France, and fought through the horrible spring battles until, with cruel coincidence, I was wounded again in the same place, and once more came to England with a bullet in my chest—a bullet they dared not extract. In September I was discharged.

One morning in November I sat by the fire in my den at Sloane Square. I had resumed the tenancy of the rooms, and Mrs. Mulvaney looked upon me as being even less mature than before, warning me about goloshes when it was wet, and umbrellas when it wasn't, but appeared likely to be.

How long I sat there I do not know, but memory began to weave its spell, driving my surroundings into a dim obscurity and bringing back incidents of the past with vivid clarity. I gripped my head with both hands, and, for the hundredth time, sought the truth that lay buried in the holocaust of the nations…. My wound hurt again, and a dizziness crept over me like a fog that rises from the sea and enshrouds the land.

Futile…. Futile….

Had some one spoken? The words sounded distinctly…. I could have sworn I heard them.

Was the whole war a dream, or was it real? Once more I was in Sloane Square; there was my desk with its litter of papers, my pipe-rack, my books…. Had I ever left them? Could it be true that I had led men against machine-gun fire—and that I had killed? Were those boys who died beside me, smiling like children in their sleep, really dead? Was it all some hideous fantasy of an unhealthy brain—a gigantic charade invented by the greatest buffoon of all time?

Futile…. Futile…. Futile.

I cursed, and pressed my brow with my hands. It was a fight for sanity, as so many men have fought in the solitude of their rooms since the hell of Flanders.

Like a panorama the events of the war crossed my mind, and yet those that stood out most clearly were the unimportant things that came as mere incidents during the unfolding of the world's destiny. The senior chaplain's dog, which was shot by an A.P.M. and mourned by a whole division … the new arrival who thought he was a special charge of the Lord's, and who persisted in looking over the top during the day—we buried him next morning … the night that the female impersonator from a divisional concert-party lured the colonel into amorous confession … the little chap who got no mail at Christmas, and said he hadn't received a letter for two years … one after the other these human trivialities coursed through my brain, forcing the vaster issues aside.

From no apparent cause, the strain of reminiscence turned toward Basil Norman. I had seen him somewhere, but whether in London or in the country my poor tired brain seemed unable to determine. And then, with no regard for relevancy, I was with my battalion once more, marching with the Australians to hold a strategical point that one of our brigades had saved from the disaster of March. Who was it said that the Australians lacked discipline? Look at them grinning like youngsters at a game, with the odds against any coming out alive! Discipline? Hell!

We rested at a cross-roads and smoked; one of our Tommies was singing the refrain of a song that urged the country to call up all his relations, even his father and his mother, but "for Gawd's sake" not to take him. The sublime incongruity of it was so thoroughly British that we laughed and called for a repetition. A few minutes later the Australians passed us, going forward, and there was a reckless air of bravado about them that boded ill for the Hun.

We waited an hour, two hours—perhaps more.

By Jove! Coming around the bend in the road was the brigade that had held the line. Good work, you chaps! Well done! Bravo! That's it, you fellows; give them a cheer! Beneath the mud and the dust and the beards, they were livid with fatigue; the skin beneath their eyes had dropped, and their jaws hung impotently, like those of idiots. There wasn't a sound from their ranks as, too weary to lift them, they dragged their feet through the dust of the road. They had held their position for fifty-six hours, attacked incessantly from three sides by overwhelming numbers. Damned good, you fellows; damned good!

Still buffeted by imagination, my memory of the scene seemed to fade; yet one impression lingered that was both livid and blurred. It was when that brigade, or what was left of it, had almost passed, and we were tightening up the straps of our kits, that I caught a glimpse of his face, or that of a man who could have passed as his twin. The soldier beside him was limping painfully and leaning on him heavily in an endeavor to keep up, and beneath the grimy pallor of that face I could see the old wistful, whimsical smile…. I tried to cry out, but something stuck in my throat, and next moment we were falling in.

It was Basil Norman, and the lame soldier beside him was the man with a face like a pumpkin. Either that or my brain had become the plaything of fancy.

Again my memory became a blank, and for a few minutes everything seemed obscured. Some one was shouting! It was taken up by another, then by many—the whole air was filled with noise…. I heard a woman's voice. Good God! Had the Germans broken through?… "Steady, men—get your aim first."… The shouting grew in intensity, and I pressed my brow with my hands until the marks stood out like wounds. With a cry as of an animal in pain, I rose to my feet and shook the shadows from my eyes. There was my room—the smoldering fire—my chair … but the shouting—it was louder than before.

Feeling my reason tottering, I crossed to the window and threw it open. People were running, and crying some word as they ran; one woman wept openly, and no one heeded her; a taxi passed crowded to the roof with hatless, gesticulating enthusiasts. Was the whole world mad? From every direction came the noise of deep-throated shouting, swelling into a vast Te Deum of sound. A soldier with one foot leaned against a lamp-post and rested his muscles from their labor with the crutches.

"Hello!" I cried. The khaki seemed to restore my grip on things. "I say—hello!"

He turned round and hobbled over to my window. "Wot's the trouble?" he said.

"This shouting," I cried; "these people running like rabbits. What does it all mean?"

"Wot! don't you know?" He smacked his lips in appreciation of the surprise he had in store for me. "Why, Fritz 'as took the count, 'e 'as."

"Then,——" Confound it; what made my lips quiver so? "Then—it's peace?… You mean … it's peace?"

He nodded half-a-dozen times. "The war," he said, feeling the importance of his declaration, "is napoo. Kaiser Bill 'as 'opped the twig, and the hold firm of 'im and Gott is for sale, with the goodwill thrown in, I don't think."

I leaned out of the window, and we grasped hands.

Futile…. Futile…. Futile.

No—by Heaven, no! Not while we remember our dead; not while the spirit of comradeship still lives in the breasts of those who went out there; never, if the Britain of the future is worthy of her knights of the greatest crusade of all, and of the mothers who gave that which had sprung from their very heart-beats.

"Out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain."

Half-mad with joy, I rushed into the street and urged my hospitality on the mutilated soldier, who came into my den and took a seat by the fire, while I fetched a decanter and cigars that we might make the occasion a jovial one. As I came into the room I noticed that he was examining me curiously.

"Hexcuse me," he said, "but if I may make so bold—wasn't you 'is pal?"

"Good heavens!" I cried, a light bursting upon me. "You're the man with a face like a—like a——" I suppose I blushed.

"Don't 'esitate," he grinned. "Many a time over there 'e told me you called me Pumpkin-Fice,' and, beggin' your pardon, sir, I likes it a sight better than 'Pest.'"

"Then—it was Norman I saw in March?"

"Ay." He sipped his glass meditatively. "'E lied about 'is 'eart, and was took O.K. late in 'fifteen. 'E was a ranker like the rest of us, but 'e was a proper gentleman, 'e was—that is, not just like we hunderstands the word in Hengland, but a real gentleman. 'E never preached and 'e never whined, but them two heyes just kept twinklin', and whenever hany of us was a bit windy, 'e 'd sort of buck us hup by that there smile 'e 'ad. I ain't much on langwidge, not 'avin' no eddication to speak of, or I'd hexplain better; but when little Sawyers got 'is from a sniper, and 'e knew 'is ticket was punched for to go West, the sergeant says, 'Fetch the padre,' but Sawyers 'e says, 'No, it's Bubbles I want.'… I ain't much on religion neither, and I've done a 'eap o' filthy swearin', which I guess is all down agin me in the book; but wherever Bubbles is goin' is good enough for me, whether it's brimstin and blazes or hangels playin' 'arps."

"Tell me"—I dreaded the answer to the question—"where is he now?"

"'E's took a cottage hover in the Hisle o' Wight," he said, clearing his throat and speaking slowly, "and 'e's married to the sweetest creetur I ever saw houtside a book. Blime! after I gets hout o' 'ospital, me not 'avin' any hold woman of my own, 'e finds me hout and sends a letter sayin' to go there for my convalessings, which likewise I did. That's 'is haddress on the top of that there letter."

I took the paper from his hand, but kept my eyes on his face; he was keeping something from me. "Tell me the truth about him," I said, and waited.

He shifted uneasily in his chair. "'E got a blighty near 'is 'eart," he said, making a supreme effort, "and 'e'll never get hup from 'is chair no more."

XI

The packet for the Isle of Wight threaded its way through the traffic of incoming vessels, and ran by a cruiser that had just come from the bloodless Trafalgar of German shame, where the second navy of the world surrendered without a fight.

A man next to me grunted. "It's all right for us to crow," he said; "but Germany was beaten, and she did the right thing."

I looked at him—he was quite sincere. His hair was unduly long, and he carried a manuscript case—probably one of the statistical writers still going strong.

"In your wildest flights of imagination," I said, "even if the combined fleets of the world were against him, could you picture Beatty leading the British Navy out to surrender?"

"Supposing he were ordered?"

As if in answer to his question, our course took us by the hull of the Victory, straining at her moorings in the November wind.

"In that case," I said, "Beatty would have had two blind eyes."

Which was the sum total of our conversation until we landed at Ryde, when our paths diverged, never, I hope, to meet again. Probably, over the week-end, he was polishing up some powerful articles on the absurdity of Reconstruction.

By the time the train had reached the little station of St. Louis, just beyond Ventnor, the wind had blown away any clouds, and the sun was shining radiantly. As I emerged from my carriage I felt a throb of exhilaration shoot through my veins, but depart as quickly as it had come, when I realized how near was the tragedy which I had soon to witness. I heard my name spoken, and, turning, saw a ruddy-faced, storm-blown fellow of fifty odd years, whose whole bearing smacked of nor'-westers and mizzen-tops. When I admitted to my name, he seized my bag without a word, and started down the road with the swaying motion peculiar to mariners.

We had hardly gone any distance, when he stopped at a gate which proved to be the back entrance to a garden, and following him through it, I was led along a path which was strewn with leaves in all the wealth of autumnal coloring, while through the trees there was the deep blue of the sea, flecked with crests of foam. We had gone about fifty yards when we came upon a cottage, in front of which, on a promontory, was a neatly trimmed lawn, guarded by six trees that stood like sentinels. The lower branches had been cut to give a better view, and their appearance lent a quaintly tropical look to the place, as if they were palms. In front of the house, fields sloped gradually to the edge of the cliff, which overlooked the sea beneath.

"My dear old Pest!"

Against the background of trees I had failed to notice him sitting in an invalid's chair. In three strides I was by his side, his hands in mine … but no words came to my faltering lips. For a moment the gray of his eyes softened to a look of understanding; then the old smile, just as charming as ever, irradiated his face.

"This is an event," he said, "to be entered in the log.—Sindbad!"

The ex-seaman who had acted as my guide pulled at his forelock.

"Ay, ay, cap'n!"

"Take this gentleman's things to the guestroom upstairs."

"The cabin to starboard? Werry good, cap'n."

Heavens! such a voice! There were fog, gale, piracy, rum, and combat in it.

"Sindbad," said Norman, in answer to my look, "is one of my indiscretions—like 'Arcadia.' He turned up here one day with such a tale of the sea as would have shamed Robert Louis Stevenson at his best. So far as I can discover, he has been in every naval fight since Aboukir Bay. He's a bit hazy on the Jutland scrap, but hints darkly at the possibility of an invasion by Spain. He is convinced that the Armada is only hiding and waiting its time."

In spite of myself, I laughed.

"As he refused to go, I decided to employ him as a man-of-all-work, and, as he appeared to have forgotten his own name, I gave him that of 'Sindbad,' which pleased him as much as me. As a result of my engaging him, the lawn you stand on is the quarter-deck which he never fails to salute. As nearly as I can discover, we are sailing a perpetual voyage—you see by this view that the illusion is possible—and we're living in the imminent danger and hope of an attack by the Spanish. By the way, old man, would you rather go upstairs and clean up? Are you cold sitting there? Sometimes, being so comfortable myself, I forget all about my guests."

I protested, sincerely, that I was quite contented where I was.

"Good!" he smiled. "Now tell me all about London…. I see you were hit twice. From more than a dozen sources I've heard how splendid you were in France."

His voice was so bright, with its old, happy mannerism of rapidity of words, with the occasional slurring rallentando, and his gaiety so infectious, that, under his influence, I felt the clouds about my brain lifting—not only those caused by grief for his helpless condition, but those born of my own black moods which drove sleep from my eyes for nights at a time. I had come determined to be cheerful and to bring encouragement to the invalid, but already I was drinking in the elixir of his spirit and feeling my arteries throb with a kind of ecstasy. His charm was more potent than before.

For a few minutes we chatted about France and the old Westminster boys who had won renown. We talked of many things, and laughed to find that we were still boys.

"By the way," he said, during a momentary lull in the stream of reminiscence, "I must apologize for my wife. She is doing some necessary shopping in Ventnor, but will be back by the next train."

"I heard you were married," I said, but got no further. Delicacy forbade my asking him how his dream of love had become a reality. He must have read the question in my eyes, however, for he offered me his cigarettes, which, with him, was always a prelude to a change in the tone of conversation.

"I did not write to her after I went to France," he said quietly, "because … well, I've spoken to you before of my sense of intuition—and I knew that mine would be a heavy price to pay. It was not fair to fasten her with a life none too robust at its best, because of a love-fantasy between two children. When I was hit, and they broke the news to me that—that this was to be my luck, the one thing that comforted me was the thought that she was free and would not have to share my captivity. By-the-by, Pest, isn't the sea fascinating? It is never the same for two days together."

He was still a Puck, lightening his moods whenever they threatened to hurt the listener with their intensity.

"Pest," he said, after a pause, "she came to me…. When everything was dark, and I was groping blindly for some hand that would start me just a—a little on my path, she came—out of the mists. I urged her to leave me. I argued that she was not fair—and for answer she kissed me…. Pest, it was a moment of such exquisite happiness, a happiness so poignant, that I wish I could have died then. I was never so fit for heaven."

The figure of Sindbad appeared from the house, tugged at its forelock, and disappeared into the garden to trim some shrubs.

"How did you happen to come here?" I asked.

"I had always looked on the island," he said, smiling, "as the only spot in England where a twentieth-century Robinson Crusoe could find a sanctuary from the world, and, by the courtesy of the gentleman who owned the place, I was able to purchase it at a ridiculously low price. As a matter of fact, he was offered twice the amount quoted to me, but refused because I was a disabled Tommy. We came here strangers, but really the kindness of every one is so great that the ordeal is turning into a privilege. You have no idea, Pest, how extraordinarily sympathetic and courteous these people are."

"I suppose, though," I said softly, "that it is rather—lonely."

"Lonely?" he laughed. "Bless your heart, old boy! talk about a French savant and his salon—this place is a positive Mecca for all the distinguished pilgrims on the island. For instance, there is the editor of the Tribune—a man who thinks editorially and talks colossally. He claims that any one who has read Boswell's Life of Johnson, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Carlyle's French Revolution is educated. He never reads anything else, but keeps on reading these three in an endless cycle. We have perfectly stupendous arguments that never get anywhere, but utterly exhaust both of us. Then there's the station-master. How many passengers boarded the train here when you were coming off?"

"Four, I think."

"Ah, yes; this is Saturday—a busy day. Some trains we don't get any, and others just one or two; but in anticipation of a rush at some future date, he's invented a scheme of getting tickets out of a drawer, stamped and all complete, by merely pressing a button. I assure you it's going to revolutionize the booking systems of the world—we've been working on it for weeks, but so far all we've got is the button. The plans are prodigious, though. And the Tommies! Gor blime, Pest! there's a convalescent home just down the road, and it's a queer day that at least two of the beggars don't come up for a 'jaw' about old times. You talk about your officers' messes and brass hats; why, it's real life in the ranks. I tell you, Pest, I would rather be the man that coined the word 'Cheerio' than the greatest general the world has seen."

A merchant-ship, still wearing its strange motley of camouflage, sailed past only a couple of miles from shore.

"Look!" whispered Norman, and pointed down the garden.

Sindbad was crouched behind some bushes, surveying the vessel through a dilapidated telescope. After a careful scrutiny, he resumed his labors, shaking his head and muttering darkly to himself.

Norman chuckled hilariously. "He's on the look-out for Spaniards," he said.

"What a villainous telescope!"

"Isn't it? He always has it by him, though. I'll swear you can't see half-a-mile with the blessed thing."

A huge black hound appeared from the direction of the conservatory, and, after the canine manner, expressed his wriggliest delight at the sight of Norman, ending by sitting solemnly beside the chair and laying one paw on the invalid's knee.

"Good-afternoon, Mr. Jones," said Norman.

The dog thumped the ground four times with his tail, and emitted a yawn like the sound of a train emerging from a tunnel.

"Mr. Jones," said I, "changes from cordiality to ennui with rather startling rapidity."

The hound acknowledged his name by a solitary thump, and then groaned with the air of a Stiggins contemplating the wickedness of a Weller.

"What breed is he?" I asked.

"Dog—just dog. He is, if I may say so, the battle-ground of his ancestors. Every breed but that of bull can be traced in him, and each has its moment of ascendancy. Mr. Jones possesses a most remarkable hereditary system."

The subject of our conversation became suddenly tense. A bird had hopped on to the quarter-deck, and was pecking at the ground in a manner that would infuriate any self-respecting dog.

Gathering up his loins, Mr. Jones stalked the intruder to within four yards, and then fell in a heap on the spot—where the bird had been. After surveying the landscape with a puzzled air, as if to indicate to us that foul work was afloat, he walked to the end of the lawn and gazed thoughtfully at the sea. Having thoroughly demonstrated his indifference as to whether he ever caught a bird or not, he yawned terrifically, and left the scene for the comfort of the kitchen.

XII

And so, partly with banter, but with many moments that were tense with feeling, we talked while the afternoon wore on. Norman was in the midst of some anecdote of either Sindbad or Mr. Jones, when he paused, and a look of delighted anticipation lit his countenance.

"That's the whistle," he said. "The train's right on time to-day." He sighed happily, as a lover about to meet his sweetheart after a long absence.

"Sindbad," he cried, "pipe all hands to tea. Tell Mrs. M'Gillicuddy we'll have it in the music-room."

Telescope under his arm, the worthy buccaneer—for I am convinced he sailed under Captain Kidd—shuffled into the house, and the noise of the train could be distinctly heard as it emptied its crowd of one or two at the little station.

"I shall go and open the gate," I said, but he stopped me.