If Winter Comes

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

CHAPTER II

I

Continued Hapgood:

"All right. That was two months ago. Last week I was down at Tidborough again. Felt I'd got rather friendly with old Sabre on my last visit so as soon as I could toddled off to the office to look him up. Felt quite sure he'd be back there again by now. But he wasn't. He wasn't, and when I began inquiring for him found there seemed to be some rummy mystery about his absence. Like this. Some sort of a clerk was in the shop as I went in. 'Mr. Sabre upstairs, eh?' I asked. 'No. No, Mr. Sabre's not—not here,' says my gentleman, with rather an odd look at me.

"'What, not still laid up, is he?'

"The chap gave me a decidedly odd look. 'Mr. Sabre's not attending the office at present, sir.'

"'Not attending the office? Not ill, is he?'

"'No, not ill, I think, sir. Not attending the office. Perhaps you'd like to see one of the partners?'

"I looked at him. He looked at me. What the devil did he mean? Just then I caught sight of an old bird I knew slightly coming down the stairs with a book under his arm. Old chap called Bright. Sort of foreman or something. Looked rather like Moses coming down the mountain with the Tables of Stone in his fist. I said in my cheery way, 'Hullo, Mr. Bright. Good morning. I was just inquiring for Mr. Sabre.'

"By Jove, I thought for a minute the old patriarch was going to heave the tables of stone at my head. He caught up the book in both his hands and gave a sort of choke and blazed at me out of his eyes—by gad, I might have been poor old Aaron caught jazzing round the golden calf.

"'Let me tell you, sir, this is no place to inquire after Mr. Sabre,' said he. 'Let me tell you—'

"Well, I'd ha' let him tell me any old thing. That was what I was there for. But he shut himself up with a kind of gasp and cannoned himself into his tabernacle under the stairs and left me there, wondering if I was where I thought I was, or had got into a moving-picture show by mistake. The clerk had fallen through the floor or something. I was alone. Friendless. Nobody wanted me. I thought to myself, 'Percival, old man, you're on the unpopular side of the argument. You're nonsuited, old man.' And I thought I wouldn't take any more chances in this Biblical film, not with old father Abraham Fortune or Friend Judas Iscariot Twyning; I thought I'd push out to Penny Green and see old Sabre for myself.

"So I did. I certainly did....

"You can imagine me, old man, in my natty little blue suit, tripping up the path of Sabre's house and guessing to myself that the mystery wasn't a mystery at all, but only the office perhaps rather fed up with Sabre for staying away nursing his game leg so long. By Jove, it wasn't that. House had rather a neglected appearance, I thought. Door knob not polished, or blinds still down somewhere or something. I don't know. Something. And what made me conscious of it was that I was kept a long time waiting after I'd rung the bell. In fact, I had to ring twice. Then I heard some one coming, and you know how your mind unconsciously expects things and so gives you quite a start when the thing isn't there; well, I suppose I'd been expecting to see one of Sabre's two servants, 'my couple of Jinkses' as he calls them, and 'pon my soul I was quite startled when the door opened and it wasn't one of them at all, but a very different pair of shoes.

"It was a young woman; ladylike, dressed just in some ordinary sort of clothes; I don't know; uncommonly pretty, or might have been if she hadn't looked so uncommonly sad; and—this was what knocked me carrying a baby. 'Pon my soul, I couldn't have been more astonished if the door had been opened by the Kaiser carrying the Crown Prince.

"I don't know why I should have imagined she was the kid's mother, but I did. I don't know why I should have looked at her hands, but I did. I don't know why I should have expected to see a wedding ring, but I did. And there wasn't one.

"Well, she was saying 'Yes?' in an inquiring, timid sort of way, me standing there like a fool, you understand, and I suddenly recovered from my flabbergasteration and guessed the obvious thing—that the Sabres had let their house to strangers and gone away. Still more obvious, you might say, that Mrs. Sabre had produced a baby, and that the girl was her sister or some one, but that never occurred to me. No, I guessed they'd gone away, and I said, 'I was calling to see Mr. Sabre. Has he gone away?'

"I'd thought her looking timid. She was looking at me now decidedly as if she were frightened of me. 'No, no, Mr. Sabre's not gone away. He's here. Are you a friend of his?'

"I smiled at her. 'Well, I used to be,' I said. She didn't smile. What the dickens was up? 'I used to be. I always thought I was. My name's Hapgood.'

"'Perhaps you'd better come in.'

"You know, it was perfectly extraordinary. Her voice was as sad as her face. I stepped in. What on earth was I going to hear? Sabre dying? Wife dying? Air-raid bomb fallen on the house and everybody dead? 'Pon my soul, I began to feel creepy. Scalp began to prick. Then suddenly there was old Sabre at the head of the stairs. 'What is it, Effie?' Then he saw me. 'Hullo, Hapgood!' His voice was devilish pleased. Then he said again, rather in a thoughtful voice, 'Hullo, Hapgood,' and he began to come down, slowly, with his stick.

"Well, he wasn't dead, anyway; that was something to go on with. I took his hand and said, 'Hullo, Sabre. How goes it, old man? Able to do the stairs now, I see. I was down to Tidborough and thought I'd come and look you up again.'

"'Fine,' he said, shaking my hand. 'Jolly nice of you.' Then he said, 'Did you go to the office for me, Hapgood?'

"'Just looked in,' I said offhandedly. 'Saw a clerk who said you weren't down to-day, so I came along up.'

"He was doing some thinking, I could see that. He said, 'Jolly good of you. I am glad. You'll stay a bit, of course.' The girl had faded away. He went a bit along the passage and called out, 'Effie, you can scratch up a bit of lunch for Mr. Hapgood?'

"I suppose she said Yes. 'Lunch'll be on in about two minutes,' he came back to me with. 'You're later than when you came up last time. Come along in here.'

"Led me into the morning room and we sat down and pretended to talk. Very poor pretence, I give you my word. Both of us manifestly straining to do the brisk and hearty, and the two of us producing about as much semblance of chatty interchange as a couple of victims waiting their turn in a dentist's parlour. The door was open and I could hear some one moving about laying the lunch. That was all I could hear (bar Sabre's spasmodic jerks of speech) and I don't mind telling you I was a deal more interested in what I could hear going on outside than in anything we could put up between us. Or rather in what I couldn't hear going on outside. No voices, none of those sounds, none of that sort of feeling that tells you people are about the place. No, there was some mystery knocking about the place somewhere, and it was on the other side of the door, and that was where my attention was.

"Presently I heard the girl's voice outside, 'Lunch is ready.'

"We jumped up like two schoolboys released from detention and went along in. More mystery. Lunch at Sabre's place was always a beautifully conducted rite, as I was accustomed to it. Announced by two gongs, warning and ready, to begin with, and here we'd been shuffled in by a girl's casual remark in the passage; and beautifully appointed and served when you got there and here was—Well, there were places laid for two only and a ramshackle kind of cold picnic scattered about the cloth. Everything there, help yourself kind of show. Bit of cold meat, half a cold tart, lump of cheese, loaf of bread, assortment of plates, and so on.

"Sabre said, 'Oh, by the way, my wife's not here. She's away.'

"I murmured the polite thing. He was staring at the two places, frowning a bit. 'Half a minute,' he said and hopped off on his old stick. Then I heard him talking to this mysterious girl. At least I heard her voice first. 'Oh, I can't! I can't!'

"Then Sabre: 'Nonsense, Effie. You must. You must. I insist. Don't be silly.'

"Then a door slammed.

"Well, I ask you! If I didn't say to myself, 'The plot thickens,' if I didn't say it, I can promise you I thought it. I did. And it proceeded to curdle. The door that had slammed opened and presently in comes Sabre with the girl. And the girl with the baby in her arms. Sabre said in his ordinary, easy voice—he's got a particularly nice voice, has old Sabre—'This is a very retiring young person, Hapgood. Had to be dragged in. Miss Bright. Her father's in the office. Perhaps you've met him, have you?'

"Well, I don't know what I said, old man. I know what I thought. I thought just precisely what you're thinking. Yes, I had a furiously vivid shot of a recollection of old Bright as I'd seen him a couple of hours before, of his blazing look, of his gesture of wanting to hurl the Tables of Stone at me, and of his extraordinary remark about Sabre,—I had that and I did what you're doing: I put two and two together and found the obvious answer (same as you) and I jolly near fell down dead, I did. Jolly near.

"But Sabre was going on, pleasant and natural as you please. 'Miss Bright was here as companion to my wife while I was in France. Now she's staying here a bit. Put the baby on the sofa, Effie, and let's get to work. I'd like you two to be friends. Hapgood and I were at school together, you know, about a thousand years ago. They used to call him Porker because he was so thin.'

"The girl smiled faintly, I put up an hysterical sort of squeak, and we sat down. The meal wasn't precisely a banquet. We helped ourselves and stacked up the soiled plates as we used them. No servants, d'you see? That was pretty clear by now. No wife, no servants, no wedding ring; nothing but old Bright's daughter and old Bright's daughter's baby—and—and—Sabre.

"I suppose I talked. I heard my voice sometimes. The easy flow Sabre had started with didn't last long. The girl hardly spoke. I watched her a lot. I liked the look of her. She must have been uncommonly pretty in a vivacious sort of way before she ran up against her trouble, whatever it was. I say Whatever it was. I'd no real reason to suppose I knew; though mind you, I was guessing pretty shrewdly it was lying there on the sofa wrapped up in what d'you call 'ems—swaddling clothes. Yes, uncommonly pretty, but now sad—sad as a young widow at the funeral, that sort of look. It was her eyes that especially showed it. Extraordinary eyes. Like two great pools in a shadow. If I may quote poetry, at you,

Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even.

And all the sorrow in them of all the women since Mary Magdalen. All the time but once. Once the baby whimpered, and she got up and went to it and stooped over it the other side of the sofa from me, so I could see her face. By gad, if you could have seen her eyes then! Motherhood! Lucky you weren't there, because if you've any idea of ever painting a picture called Motherhood, you'd ha' gone straight out and cut your throat on the mat in despair. You certainly would.

"Well, anyway, the banquet got more and more awkward to endure as it dragged on, and mighty glad I was when at last the girl got up—without a word—and picked up the baby and left us. Left us. We were no more chatty for being alone, I can promise you. I absolutely could not think of a word to say, and any infernal thing that old Sabre managed to rake up seemed complete and done to death the minute he'd said it.

"Then all of a sudden he began. He fished out some cigarettes and chucked me one and we smoked like a couple of exhaust valves for about two minutes and then he said, 'Hapgood, why on earth should I have to explain all this to you? Why should I?'

"I said, a tiny bit sharply—I was getting a bit on edge, you know—I said, 'Well, who's asked you to? I haven't asked any questions, have I?'

"Sabre said, 'No, I know you haven't asked any, and I'm infernally grateful to you. You're the first person across this threshold in months that hasn't. But I know you're thinking them—hard. And I know I've got to answer them. And I want to. I want to most frightfully. But what beats me is this infernal feeling that I must explain to you, to you and to everybody, whether I want to or not. Why should I? It's my own house. I can do what I like in it. I'm not, anyway, doing anything wrong. I'm doing something more right than I've ever done in my life, and yet everybody's got the right to question me and everybody's got the right to be answered and—Hapgood, it's the most bewildering state of affairs that can possibly be imagined. I'm up against a code of social conventions, and by Jove I'm absolutely down and out. I'm absolutely tied up hand and foot and chucked away. Do you know what I am, Hapgood—?'

"He gave a laugh. He wasn't talking a bit savagely, and he never did talk like that all through what he told me. He was just talking in a tone of sheer, hopeless, extremely interested puzzlement—bafflement—amazement; just as a man might talk to you of some absolutely baffling conjuring trick he'd seen. In fact, he used that very expression. 'Do you know what I am, Hapgood?' and he gave a laugh, as I've said. 'I'm what they call a social outcast. A social outcast. Beyond the pale. Unspeakable. Ostracized. Blackballed. Excommunicated.' He got up and began to stump about the room, hands in his pockets, chin on his collar, wrestling with it,—and wrestling, mind you, just in profoundly interested bafflement.

"'Unspeakable,' he said. 'Excommunicated. By Jove, it's astounding. It's amazing. It's like a stupendous conjuring trick. I've done something that isn't done—not something that's wrong, something that's incontestably right. But it isn't done. People don't do it, and I've done it and therefore hey, presto, I'm turned into a leper, a pariah, an outlaw. Amazing, astounding!'

"Then he settled down and told me. And this is what he told me."

II

"When he was out in France this girl I'd seen—this Effie, as he called her, Effie Bright—had come to live as companion to his wife. It appears he more or less got her the job. He'd seen her at the office with her father and he'd taken a tremendous fancy to her. 'A jolly kid,' that was the expression he used, and he said he was awfully fond of her just as he might be of a jolly little sister. He got her some other job previously with some friends or other, and then the old lady there died and the girl came to his place while he was away. Something like that. Anyway, she came. She came somewhere about October, '15, and she left early in March following, just over a year ago. His wife got fed up with her and got rid of her—that's what Sabre says—got fed up with her and got rid of her. And Sabre was at home at the time. Mark that, old man, because it's important. Sabre was at home at the time—about three weeks—on leave.

"Very well. The girl got the sack and he went back to France. She got another job somewhere as companion again. He doesn't quite know where. He thinks at Bournemouth. Anyway, that's nothing to do with it. Well, he got wounded and discharged from the Army, as you know, and in February he was living at home again with his wife in the conditions I described to you when I began. He said nothing to me about the conditions—about the terms they were on; but I've told you what I saw. It's important because it was exactly into the situation as I then saw it that came to pass the thing that came to pass. This:

"The very week after I'd been down there, his wife, reading a letter at breakfast one morning, gave a kind of a snort (as I can imagine it) and chucked the letter over to him and said, 'Ha! There's your wonderful Miss Bright for you! What did I tell you? What do you think of that? Ha!'

"Those were her very words and her very snorts and what they meant—what 'Your wonderful Miss Bright for you' meant—was, as he explained to me, that when he was home on leave, with the girl in the house, they were frequently having words about her, because he thought his wife was a bit sharp with her, and his wife, for her part, said he was forever sticking up for her.

"'What do you think of that? Ha!' and she chucked the letter over to him, and from what I know of her you can imagine her sitting bolt upright, bridling with virtuous prescience confirmed, watching him, while he read it.

"While he read it.... Sabre said the letter was the most frightfully pathetic document he could ever have imagined. Smudged, he said, and stained and badly expressed as if the writer—this girl—this Effie Bright—was crying and incoherent with distress when she wrote it. And she no doubt was. She said she'd got into terrible trouble. She'd got a little baby. Sabre said it was awful to him the way she kept on in every sentence calling it 'a little baby'—never a child, or just a baby, but always 'a little baby,' 'my little baby.' He said it was awful. She said it was born in December—you remember, old man, it was the previous March she'd got the sack from them—and that she'd been living in lodgings with it, and that now she was well enough to move, and had come to the absolute end of her money, she was being turned out and was at her wits' end with despair and nearly out of her mind to know what to do and all that kind of thing. She said her father wouldn't have anything to do with her, and no one would have anything to do with her—so long as she kept her little baby. That was her plight: no one would have anything to do with her while she had the baby. Her father was willing to take her home, and some kind people had offered to take her into service, and the clergyman where she was had said there were other places he could get her, but only, all of them, if she would give up the baby and put it out to nurse somewhere: and she said, and underlined it about fourteen times, Sabre said, and cried over it so you could hardly read it, she said: 'And, oh, Mrs. Sabre, I can't, I can't, I simply can not give up my little baby.... He's mine,' she said. 'He looks at me, and knows me, and stretches out his tiny little hands to me, and I can't give him up. I can't let my little baby go. Whatever I've done, I'm his mother and he's my little baby and I can't let him go.'

"Sabre said it was awful. I can believe it was. I'd seen the girl, and I'd seen her stooping over her baby (like I told you) and I can well believe awful was the word for it. Poor soul.

"And then she said—I can remember this bit—then she said, 'And so, in my terrible distress, dear Mrs. Sabre, I am throwing myself on your mercy, and begging you, imploring you, for the love of God to take in me and my little baby and let me work for you and do anything for you and bless you and ask God's blessing for ever upon you and teach my little baby to pray for you as—' something or other, I forget. And then she said a lot of hysterical things about working her fingers to the bone for Mrs. Sabre, and knowing she was a wicked girl and not fit to be spoken to by any one, and was willing, to sleep in a shed in the garden and never to open her mouth, and all that sort of thing; and all the way through 'my little baby,' 'my little baby.' Sabre said it was awful. Also she said,—I'm telling you just what Sabre told me, and he told me this bit deliberately, as you might say—also she said that she didn't want to pretend she was more sinned against than sinning, but that if Mrs. Sabre knew the truth she might judge her less harshly and be more willing to help her. Yes, Sabre told me that....

"All right. Well, there was the appeal, 'there was this piteous appeal', as Sabre said, and there was Sabre profoundly touched by it, and there was his wife bridling over it—one up against her husband who'd always stuck up for the girl, d'you see, and about two million up in justification of her own opinion of her. There they were; and then Sabre said, turning the letter over in his hands, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?'

"You can imagine his wife's tone. 'Do about it! Do about it! What on earth do you think I'm going to do about it?'

"And Sabre said, 'Well, I think we ought certainly to take the poor creature in.'

"That's what he said; and I can perfectly imagine his face as he said it—all twisted up with the intensity of the struggle he foresaw and with the intensity of his feelings on the subject; and I can perfectly well imagine his wife's face as she heard him, by Jove, I can. She was furious. Absolutely white and speechless with fury; but not speechless long, Sabre said, and I dare bet she wasn't. Sabre said she worked herself up in the most awful way and used language about the girl that cut him like a knife—language like speaking of the baby as 'that brat.' It made him wince. It would—the sort of chap he is. And he said that the more she railed, the more frightfully he realised the girl's position, up against that sort of thing everywhere she turned.

"He described all that to me and then, so to speak, he stated his case. He said to me, his face all twisted up with the strain of trying to make some one else see what was so perfectly clear to himself, he said, 'Well, what I say to you, Hapgood, is just precisely what I said to my wife. I felt that the girl had a claim on us. In the first place, she'd turned to us in her abject misery for help and that alone established a claim, even if it had come from an utter stranger. It established a claim because here was a human creature absolutely down and out come to us, picking us out from everybody, for succour. Damn it, you've got to respond. You're picked out. You! One human creature by another human creature. Breathing the same air. Sharing the same mortality. Responsible to the same God. You've got to! You can't help yourself. You're caught. If you hear some one appealing to any one else you can scuttle out of it. Get away. Pass by on the other side. Square it with your conscience any old how. But when that some one comes to you, you're done, you're fixed. You may hate it. You may loathe and detest the position that's been forced on you. But it's there. You can't get out of it. The same earth as your earth is there at your feet imploring you; and if you've got a grain, a jot of humanity, you must, you must, out of the very flesh and bones of you, respond to that cry of this your brother or your sister made as you yourself are made.

"'Well, Hapgood,' he went on, 'that's one claim the girl had on us, and to my way of thinking it was enough. But she had another, a personal claim. She'd been in our house, in our service; she was our friend; sat with us; eaten with us; talked with us; shared with us; and now, now, turned to us. Good God, man, was that to be refused? Was that to be denied? Were we going to repudiate that? Were we going to say, "Yes, it's true you were here. You were all very well when you were of use to us; that's all true and admitted; but now you're in trouble and you're no use to us; you're in trouble and no use, and you can get to hell out of it." Good God, were we to say that?'

"You should have seen his face; you should have heard his voice; you should have seen him squirming and twisting in his chair as though this was the very roots of him coming up out of him and hurting him. And I tell you, old man, it was the very roots of him. It was his creed, it was his religion, it was his composition; it was the whole nature and basis and foundation of the man as it had been storing up within him all his life, ever since he was the rummy, thoughtful sort of beggar he used to be as a kid at old Wickamote's thirty years ago. It got me, I can tell you. It made me feel funny. Yes, and the next thing he went on to was equally the blood and bones of him. In a way even more characteristic. He said, 'Mind you, Hapgood, I don't blame my wife that all this had no effect on her. I don't blame her in the least, and I never lost my temper or got angry over the business. I see her point of view absolutely. And I see absolutely the point of view of the girl's father and of every one else who's willing to take in the girl but insists she must give up the baby. I see their point of view and understand it as plain as I see and understand that calendar hanging on the wall. I see it perfectly,' and he laughed in a whimsical sort of way and said, 'That's the devil of it.'

"Characteristic, eh? Wasn't that just exactly old Sabre at school puzzling up his old nut and saying, 'Yes, but I see what he means'?

"Well, wait a bit. He came to that again afterwards. It seems that, if you please, the very next day the girl herself follows up her letter by walking into the house. Eh? Yes, you can well say 'By Jove.' In she walked, baby and all. She'd walked all the way from Tidborough, and God knows how far earlier in the day. Sabre said she was half dead. She'd been to her father's house, and her father, that terrific-looking old Moses coming down the mountain that I've described to you, had turned her out. He'd take her—he had cried over her, the poor crying creature said—if she'd send away her baby, also if she'd say who the father was, but she wouldn't. 'I can't let my little baby go,' she said. Sabre said it was awful, hearing her. And so he drove her out, the old Moses man did, and the poor soul tried around for a bit—no money—and then trailed out to them.

"Sabre wouldn't tell me all that happened between his wife and himself. I gather that, in his quiet way, perfectly seeing his wife's point of view and genuinely deeply distressed at the frightful pitch things were coming to, in that sort of way he nevertheless got his back up against his sense of what he ought to do and said the girl was not to be sent away, that she was to stop.

"His wife said, 'You're determined?'

"He said, 'Mabel' (that's her name) 'Mabel, I'm desperately, poignantly sorry, but I'm absolutely determined.'

"She said, 'Very well. If she's going to be in the house, I'm going out of it. I'm going to my father's. Now. You'll not expect the servants to stay in the house while you've got this—this woman living with you—' (Yes, she said that.) 'So I shall pay them up and send them off, now, before I go. Are you still determined?'

"The poor devil, standing there with his stick and his game leg, and his face working, said, 'Mabel, Mabel, believe me, it kills me to say it, but I am, absolutely. The girl's got no home. She only wants to keep her baby. She must stop.'

"His wife went off to the kitchen.

"Pretty fierce, eh?

"Sabre said he sat where she'd left him, in the morning room in a straight-backed chair, with his legs stuck out in front of him, wrestling with it—like hell. The girl was in the dining room. His wife and the servants were plunging about overhead.

"In about two hours his wife came back dressed to go. She said, 'I've packed my boxes. I shall send for them. The maids have packed theirs and they will send. I've sent them on to the station in front of me. There's only one more thing I want to say to you. You say this woman—' ('This woman, you know!' old Sabre said when he was telling me.) 'You say this woman has a claim on us?'

"He began, 'Mabel, I do. I—'

"She said, 'Do you want my answer to that? My answer is that perhaps she has a claim on you!'

"And she went."

III

"Well, there you are, old man. There it is. That's the story. That's the end. That's the end of my story, but what the end of the story as Sabre's living it is going to be, takes—well, it lets in some pretty wide guessing. There he is, and there's the girl, and there's the baby; and he's what he says he is—what I told you: a social outcast, beyond the pale, ostracized, excommunicated. No one will have anything to do with him. They've cleared him out of the office, or as good as done so. He says the man Twyning worked that. The man Twyning—that Judas Iscariot chap, you remember—is very thick with old Bright, the girl's father. Old Bright pretty naturally thinks his daughter has gone back to the man who is responsible for her ruin, and this Twyning person—who's a partner, by the way—wrote to Sabre and told him that, although he personally didn't believe it—'not for a moment, old man,' he wrote—still Sabre would appreciate the horrible scandal that had arisen, and would appreciate the fact that such a scandal could not be permitted in a firm like theirs with its high and holy Church connections. And so on. He said that he and Fortune had given the position their most earnest and sympathetic thought and prayers—and prayers, mark you—and that they'd come to the conclusion that the best thing to be done was for Sabre to resign.

"Sabre says he was knocked pretty well silly by this step. He says it was his first realisation of the attitude that everybody was going to take up against him. He went off down and saw them, and you can imagine there was a bit of a scene. He said he was dashed if he'd resign. Why on earth should he resign? Was he to resign because he was doing in common humanity what no one else had the common humanity to do? That sort of thing. You can imagine it didn't cut much ice with that crowd. The upshot of it was that Twyning, speaking for the firm, and calling him about a thousand old mans and that sort of slush, told him that the position would be reconsidered when he ceased to have the girl in his house and that, in the interests of the firm, until he did that he must cease to attend the office.

"And then old Sabre said he began to find himself in exactly the same position with every one. Every door closed to him. No one having anything to do with him. Even an old chap next door, a particular friend of his called Fungus or Fargus or some such name—even this old bird's house and his society is forbidden him. Sabre says old Fungus, or whatever his name is, is all right, but it appears he's ruled by about two dozen ramping great daughters, and they won't let their father have anything to do with Sabre. No, he's shut right out, everywhere.

"And Sabre, mind you—this is Sabre's extraordinary point of view: he's not a bit furious with all these people. He's feeling his position most frightfully; it's eating the very heart out of him, but he's working up not the least trace of bitterness over it. He says they're all supporting an absolutely right and just convention, and that it's not their fault if the convention is so hideously cruel in its application. He says the absolute justice and the frightful cruelty of conventions has always interested him, and that he remembers once putting up to a great friend of his as an example this very instance of society's attitude towards an unmarried girl who gets into trouble,—never dreaming that one day he was going to find himself up against the full force of it. He said, 'If this poor girl, if any girl, didn't find the world against her and every door closed to her, just look where you'd be, Hapgood. You'd have morality absolutely gone by the hoard. No, all these people are right, absolutely right—and all conventions are absolutely right—in their principle; it's their practice that's sometimes so terrible. And when it is, how can you turn round and rage? I can't.'

"Well, I said to him what I say to you, old man. I said, 'Yes, that's all right, Sabre. That's true, though there're precious few would take it as moderately as you; but look here, where's this going to end? Where's it going to land you? It's landed you pretty fiercely as it is. Have you thought what it may develop into? What are you doing about it?'

"He said he was writing round, writing to advertisers and to societies and places, to find a place where the girl would be taken in to work and allowed to have her baby with her. He said there must be hundreds of kind-hearted people about the place who would do it; it was only a question of finding them. Well, as to that, kind hearts are more than coronets and all that kind of thing, but it strikes me they're a jolly side harder than coronets to find when it comes to a question of an unmarried mother and her baby, and when the kind hearts, being found, come to make inquiries and find that the person making application on the girl's behalf is the man she's apparently living with, and the man with Sabre's extraordinary record in regard to the girl. I didn't say that to poor old Sabre. I hadn't the face to. But I say it to you. You're no doubt thinking it for yourself. All that chain of circumstances, eh? Went out of his way to get her her first job. Got her into his house. In a way responsible for her getting the sack. Child born just about when it must have been born after she'd been sacked. Girl coming to him for help. Writing to his wife, 'If only you knew the truth.' Wife leaving him. Eh? It's pretty fierce, isn't it? And I don't believe he's got an idea of it. I don't believe he realises for a moment what an extraordinary coil it all is. God help him if he ever does.... He'll want it.

"No, I didn't say a word like that to him. I couldn't. The nearest I got to it was I said, 'Well, but time's getting on, you know, old man. It's a—a funny position on the face of it. What do you suppose your wife's thinking all this time?'

"He said his wife would be absolutely all right once he'd found a home for the girl and sent her away. He said his wife was always a bit sharp in her views of things, but that she'd be all right when it was all over.

"I said, 'H'm. Heard from her?'

"He had—once. He showed me the letter. Well, you know, old man, every fox knows what foxes smell like; and I smelt a dear brother solicitor's smell in that letter. Smelt it strong. Asking him to make a home possible for her to return to so they might resume their life together. I recognised it. I've dictated dozens.

"I handed it back. I said, 'H'm' again. I said, 'H'm, you remember, old man, there was that remark of hers just as she was leaving you—that remark that perhaps the girl might have a claim on you. Remember that, don't you?'

"By Jove, I thought for a minute he was going to flare up and let me have it. But he laughed instead. Laughed as if I was a fool and said, 'Oh, good Lord, man, that's utterly ridiculous. That was only just my wife's way. My wife's got plenty of faults to find with me—but that kind of thing! Man alive, with all my faults, my wife knows me.'

"Perhaps—I say, my holy aunt, it's nearly two o'clock! Come on, I'm for bed. Perhaps his wife does know him. What I'm thinking is, does he know his wife? I'm a solicitor. I know what I'd say if she came to me."