The pretender: A story of the Latin Quarter

by Robert W. Service

BOOK I—THE CHALLENGE

CHAPTER I
THE HAPPIEST YOUNG MAN IN MANHATTAN

To have omnibus tastes and an automobile income—how ironic?

With this reflexion I let myself collapse into a padded chair of transcendent comfort, lit a cigarette and inspected once more the amazing bank-book. Since I had seen it last several credit entries had been made—over twenty thousand dollars; and in the meantime, dawdling and dreaming in the woods of Maine, all I had managed to squander was a paltry thousand. Being a man of imagination I sought for a simile. As I sat there by the favourite window of my favourite club I could see great snowflakes falling in the quiet square, and at that moment it seemed to me that I too was standing under a snowfall, a snowfall of dollars steadily banking me about.

For a moment I revelled in the charming vision, then like a flash it changed. Now I could see two figures locked in Homeric combat. Like a serene over-soul I watched them, I, philosopher, life-critic; for was not one of them James H. Madden, a man of affairs, the other, J. Horace Madden, dilettante and dreamer.... Look! from that clutter of stale snow a form springs triumphant. Hurrah! It is the near-poet, the man on the side of the angels.— And so rejoiced was I at this issue that I regarded the little bank-book almost resentfully.

“Figures, figures,” I sighed, “what do you mean to me? Crabbed symbols on a smudgy page! can you buy for me that fresh Spring-morning feeling in the brain, that rapture of a fine thing finely done? Ah no! the luxury you spell means care and worry. In comfort is contentment. And am I not content? Nay! in all Manhattan is there man more happy? Young, famous, free—could life possibly be more charming? And so in my tower of tranquillity let me work and dream; and every now and then, little book, your totals will grow absurd, and I will look at you and say: ‘Figures, figures, what do you mean to me?’

“But, after all,” I went on to reflect, “Money is not so utterly a nuisance. Pleasant indeed to think that when most are pondering over the problem of the permanent meal-ticket, you are yourself well settled on the sunny side of Easy Street. Poets have piped of Arcady, have chorused of Bohemia, have expressed their enthusiasm for Elysian fields, but who has come to chant the praise of Easy Street? Yet surely it is the kindliest of all? Behind its smiling windows are no maddening constraints, no irking servitudes, no tyranny of time. Just sunshine, laughter, mockery of masters— Oh, a thousand times blessed, golden, glorious Easy Street!”

Here I lighted a fresh cigarette and settled more snugly in that chair of kingly comfort.

“Behold in me,” I continued lazily, “a being specially favoured of the gods. Born if not with a silver spoon in my mouth at least with one of a genteel quality of nickel, blest with a boyhood notably cheering and serene, granted while still in my teens success that others fight for to the grave’s edge, untouched by a single sorrow, unthwarted by a solitary defeat—does it not seem as if my path in life had been ever preceded by an Olympian steam roller macadamising the way?

“True, as to appearance, the gods have failed to flatter me. If you, gentle reader, who are as perfect as the Apollo Belvedere, gaze, at your chiselled features in the silver side of your morning tea-pot, you will get a good idea of mine. But there—I refer you to a copy of Wisdom for Women, the well-known feminist Weekly. It contains an illustrated interview, one of that celebrated series, Lions in their Dens. Harken unto this:

“A tall, tight-lipped young man, eager, yet abstracted; eyes quizzical, mouth a straight line, brow of a dreamer, chin of a flirtatious stockbroker. His gleaming glasses suggest the journalist, his prominent nose the tank-town tragedian. Add to that that he has a complexion unæsthetically sanguine, and that his flaxen hair, receding from his forehead, gives him a fictitious look of intellectuality, and you have a combination easier to describe than to imagine....”

“What a blessing it is we cannot see ourselves as others see us! How it would fill life with intolerable veracities! Dear lady who wrote the above, I can forgive you for the Roman nose, for the flirtatious chin, nay, even for the fictitious intellectuality of my noble brow, but for one thing I can never think of you with joy. You wrote of me that I was ‘a mould of fashion and a glass of form.’ Since then, alas! I have been compelled to live up to your description. Bohemian to the backbone, lover of the flannel suit of freedom and the silken shirt of ease, how I have suffered in such clutch of comme-il-faut no tongue can tell. Yet thanks to a Fifth Avenue tailor even a little sartorial success has fallen to my lot.”

Success! some men seem to have a magic power of attracting it, and I think I must be one. Sitting there in the window of the club, as I watched the shadows steal into the square, and the snow thicken to a fluttering curtain I positively purred with satisfaction. Behind me the silent library was lit only by a fire of glowing coals. The jocund light gleamed on the carved oak of the book-cases, and each diamond pane winked jovially. Yet cheerful though it was my thoughts were far more rosy.

But now my reverie was being broken. Two men were approaching, and by their voices I knew them to be Quince the critic and Vaine the poet. The first was a representative of the School of Suds, the second an exponent of the School of Sediment; but as neither were included in the number of my more intimate enemies I did not turn to greet them.

Goring Quince is a stall-fed man with a purple face, cotton-coloured hair and supercilious eyebrows. He is an incubator of epigrams. His articles are riots of rhetoric, and it is marvellous how completely he can drown a poor little idea in a vat of verbiage.

Herrick Vaine is a puffy, pimply person, with a mincing manner and an emasculated voice. He might have been a poet of note but for two things: while reading his work you always have a feeling that you have seen something oddly like it before; and after you have read it all you retain is a certain dark-brown taste on the mental palate. Otherwise he is all right.

And now, having described the principals, let me record the little dialogue to which I was the unseen listener.

Vaine (with elaborate carelessness): By the way, you haven’t read my latest book, I suppose?

Quince (cooingly): Why yes, my boy. I lost no time in reading it. I positively wallowed—I mean revelled in it. Reminds me of Baudelaire in spots. Without you and a chosen few what would literature be?

Vaine (enraptured): How lovely of you to say so. You know I value your opinion more than any in the world.

Quince (waving his gold-rimmed eyeglasses): Not at all. Merely my duty as a watchdog of letters. Yes, I thought your Songs Saturnalian in a class by itself; but now I can say without being accused of a lapse of literary judgment that your Poems Plutonian marks a distinct epoch in modern poetry. There is an undefinable something in your work, a je ne sais quoi ... you know.

Vaine: Yes; thank you, thank you.

Quince: Is it selling, by the way?

Vaine: Thank heaven, no! How banal! Popular success would imply artistic failure. To the public true art must always be inaccessible. If ever I find my work becoming bourgeois, it will be because I have committed artistic suicide. On my bended knees I pray to be delivered from popularity.

Quince: I see. You prefer the award of posterity to the reward of prosperity. Well, no doubt time will bring you your meed of recognition. In the meantime give me a copy of the poems, and I will review it in next week’s Compass.

Vaine: Will you indeed. That honour alone will repay me for writing it. By the way, I imagine I saw a copy in the library. Let me look.
(As Vaine had put it there himself his doubt seemed a little superfluous. He switched on a light, and from the ranked preciosity of a certain shelf he selected a slim, gilt volume.)

Vaine: Poems Plutonian.

Quince (taking it in his fat, soft hands): How utterly exquisite! What charming generosity of margin!

Vaine: Yes; you know the great fault of books, to my mind, is that they contain printed matter. Some day I dream of writing a book that shall be nearly all margin, a book from which the crudely obvious shall be eliminated, a book of exquisite intrusion, of supreme suggestion, where magic words like rosaries of pearls shall glimmer down the pages. I really think that books are the curse of literature. If every writer were compelled to grave his works on brass and copper from how much that is vain and vapid would we not be delivered?

Quince: Ah, yes! Still books have their advantages. Here, for example, am I going to burn the incense of a cigar before the putrescent—I mean the iridescent altar of art. Now if Poems Plutonian were inscribed on brass or stone I confess I should hesitate. What are those things?
(He pointed to a separate shelf, on which stood nine volumes with somewhat aggressive covers.)

Vaine: Well may you ask. Brazen strumpets who have stumbled into the temple of Apollo. These, my dear sir, are the so-called novels of Norman Dane. You see, as a member of the club, he is supposed to give the library a copy of his books. We all hoped he wouldn’t, but he came egregiously forward. Of course we couldn’t refuse the monstrous things.

Quince: No, I understand. What’s this? The Yellow Streak: Two hundred thousand! The Dipsomaniac: Sixth Edition!! Rattlesnake Ranch: Tenth Impression!!! Why, what a disgusting lot of money the man must be making!

Vaine: Yes, the Indiana Idol, the Boy Bestsellermonger. A perfect bounder as regards Art. But he knows how to truckle to the mob. His books sell by the ton. They’re so bad, they’re almost good.

Quince (with surprising feeling): There! I don’t agree with you. He doesn’t even know how to please the public. It takes a clever man to do that, and Norman Dane is only a dry-goods clerk spoiled. No, the point is—he is the public, the apotheosis of the vulgar intelligence. Don’t think for a moment he is writing down to the level of the mob. He charms the great half-educated because he himself belongs to them. He can’t help it.

Vaine: Yes, but there are so many plebeian novelists. How do you account for Dane’s spectacular success?

Quince: A fool’s luck! He happened to hit the psychological moment. When he leaped into the lists with The Haunted Taxicab taxis had just come out, and at the same moment there was a mania for mystery stories. Take two popular motifs, mix recklessly, spice with sentiment and sauce with sensation—there you have the recipé of a best-seller. His book fluked into favour. His publishers put their weight behind it. In a month he found himself famous from Maine to Mexico. But he couldn’t do it again; no, not in a thousand years. What has he done since? Live on his name. Step cunningly in his tracks. Bah! I tell you Norman Dane’s an upstart, a faker; to the very heart of him a shallow, ignorant pretender....

Whatever else the poor chap might be was lost in the distance as the two men moved away. For a long time after they had gone I did not stir. The fluttering snow-butterflies seemed to have become great moths, that hovered in the radiance of the nearest arc-light and dashed to a watery doom. Pensively I gazed into that greenish glamour, pulling at a burnt-out cigarette.

At last I rose, and going to the book-case regarded the nine volumes of flamboyant isolation.

“An upstart,” I sighed softly; “a faker, a pretender....”

And to tell the truth I was sorely taken aback; for you see in my hours of industry I am a maker of books and my pen name is Norman Dane.

CHAPTER II
THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS

Whether or not a sense of humour is an attribute of the Divine, I am too ignorant of theology to conjecture; but I am sure that as a sustaining power amid the tribulations of life it is one of the blessedest of dispensations.

For a moment, I must confess, the words of Quince and Vaine stung me to resentment. Being one of these people who think in moving pictures, I had a gratifying vision in which I was clutching them savagely and knocking their heads together. Then the whole thing struck me on the funny side, and a little page boy, entering to turn on the lights, must have been amazed to hear me burst into sudden laughter.

So that presently, as Mr. Quince, having spilt some cigar ash over the still uncut leaves of Poems Plutonian, was arising to daintily dust the volume, I approached him with a bright and happy smile.

“Hullo, Quince,” I began, cheerily.

He looked up. His eyes gleamed frosty interrogation, and his clipped grey moustache seemed to bristle in his purple face.

“What is it?” he grunted.

“It’s about that matter we spoke of this morning. You know I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve decided to go on that note of yours.”

Quince was astonished. He was also overjoyed; but his manner was elaborately off-hand.

“Ah! Thanks awfully, Madden. Only a matter of renewal, you know. Old endorser went off to Europe, and the bank got after me. Well, you’ll go on the note, then?”

“Yes, on one condition.”

“Hum! Condition! What?” he demanded anxiously.

“Well,” I said. “I believe one good turn deserves another. Now I was down at the bank this morning, and I know you’re in rather a hole about that renewal. Backers for thousand dollar notes aren’t picked up so easily. However, I’m willing to go on it if you’ll”—here I paused deliberately, “give my last book a good write up in your next Compass causerie.”

His face fell. “I’m afraid—you see, I’ve promised Vaine—”

“Oh, hang Vaine! Sidetrack him.”

“But—there’s the policy of the paper—”

“Oh, well, I’ll buy a controlling interest, and alter your policy. But, as a matter of fact, you know they’ll print anything over your name.”

“Yes—well, there are my own standards, the ideals I have fought for—”

“Rot! Look here, Quince, let’s be honest. We’re both in the writing game for what we can get out of it. We may strut and brag; but we know in our hearts there’s none of us of much account. Why, man, show me half a dozen writers of to-day who’ll be remembered twenty years after they’re dead?”

“I protest—”

“You know it’s true. We’re bagmen in a negligible day. Now, I don’t want you to alter your standards; all I want of you is to adjust them. You know that as soon as you see a book of mine coming along you get your knife out. You’ve flayed me from the start. You do it on principle. You’ve got regular formulas of abuse. My characters are sticks, my plots chaotic, my incidents melodramatic. You judge my work by your academic standards. Don’t do that. Don’t judge it as art—judge it as entertainment. Does it entertain?”

“Possibly it does—the average, unthinking man.”

“Precisely. He’s my audience. My business is to amuse him, to take him outside of himself for an hour or two.”

“It’s our duty to elevate his taste.”

“Fiddlesticks! my dear chap. I don’t take myself so seriously as that. And, anyway, it’s hopeless. If you don’t give him the stuff he wants, he won’t take any. You’ll never educate the masses to anything higher than the satisfaction of their appetites. They want frenzied fiction, plot, action. The men want a good yarn, the women sentiment, and we writers want—the money.”

“It’s a sad state of affairs, I admit.”

“Well, then, admit that my books fill the bill. They’re good yarns, they’re exciting, they’re healthy. Surely they don’t deserve wholesale condemnation. So go home, my dear Quince, and begin a little screed like this:

“In the past we have frequently found occasion to deal severely with the novels of Norman Dane, and to regret that he refuses to use those high gifts he undoubtedly possesses; but on opening his latest novel, The House of a Hundred Scandals, we are agreeably surprised to note a decided awakening of artistic conscience. And so on. No one knows how to do it better than you. Bring to the bank to-morrow a proof of the article, and I’ll put my name on the back of your note.”

“I—I don’t know. I’ll think it over. Perhaps I’ve been a little too dogmatic. Let me see—Literary Criticism and the Point of View—yes, I’ll see what I can do.”

As I left him ruefully brooding over the idea I felt suddenly ashamed of myself.

“Poor old chap!” I thought; “I’ve certainly taken a mean advantage of him. Perhaps, after all, he may be right and I wrong. I begin to wonder: Have I earned success, or only achieved it? It seems to me this literary camp is divided into two bands, the sheep and the goats, and, sooner or later, a man must ask himself which he belongs to. Am I a sheep or am I a goat?”

But I quickly steeled myself. Why should I have compunction? Was I not in a land where money was the standard of success? Here then was the virtue of my bloated bank-book—Power. Let them sneer at me, these æsthetic apes, these flabby degenerates. There by the door was a group of them, and I ventured to bet that they were all in debt to their tailors. Yet they regarded me as an outsider, a barbarian. Looking around for some object to soothe my ruffled feelings, I espied the red, beefsteak-and-beer face of Porkinson, the broker. Here was a philistine, an unabashed disciple of the money god. I hailed him.

Over our second whiskey I told Porkinson of the affair in the library. He laughed a ruddy, rolling laugh.

“What do you care?” he roared raucously. “You put the stuff over and grab the coin—that’s the game, isn’t it? Let those highbrow freaks knock you all they want—you’ve got away with the goods. And, anyway, they’ve got the wrong dope. Why, I guess I’m just as level-headed as the next man, and I wouldn’t give a cent for the piffle they turn out. When I’m running to catch a train I grab one of your books every time. I know if there’s none of the boys on board to have a card game with I’ve got something to keep me from being tired between drinks. What I like about your yarns, old man, is that they keep me guessing all the time, and the fellow never gets the girl till the last page. I always skip a whole lot, I get so darned interested. I once read a book of yours clean through between breakfast and lunch.”

Thanking Porkinson for his enthusiasm, which somehow failed to elate me, I took the elevator up to my apartment on the tenth story of the club. Travers, the artist, had a studio adjoining me, and, seeing a light under his door, I knocked.

“Enter,” called Travers.

He was a little frail old man, with a peaked, grey face framed in a plenitude of iron-grey hair, and ending in a white Vandyke beard. A nervous trouble made him twitch his right eye continually, sometimes emphasising his statements with curious effect. He believed he was one of the greatest painters in the world; yet that very day three of his best pictures had been refused by the Academy.

“I knew it,” he cried excitedly; “I knew when I sent them they’d come back. It’s happened for the last ten years. They know if they hung me I’d kill every one else in the room. They’re afraid of my mountains.” (A wink.) “Their little souls can’t conceive of any scenery beyond Connecticut. But it’s the last time I’ll send.” (A wink.) “I’ll get recognition elsewhere, London, Paris; then when they want my pictures for their walls they’ll have to come and beg, yes, beg for them.” (A portentous wink.)

Every year he vowed the same thing; every year he canvassed the members of the hanging committee; every year his pictures came cruelly back; yet his faith in himself was invincible.

“I tell you what,” I said; “you might be one of the popular painters of the day if you only looked at it right. Here you go painting straight scenery as it was in the days before Adam. You object to the least hint of humanity—a hut, a bridge, a boat. My dear sir, what the General Public wants is the human, the dramatic. There’s that River Rapids picture you did two years ago, and it’s still on your hands. Now that’s good. That water’s alive, it boils; as I look at it I can hear it roar, and feel the sting of the spray. But—it’s straight water, and the G.P. won’t take its water straight. Now just paint two men in a birch-bark canoe going down these rapids. Paint in a big rock, call it A Close Shave, and you’ll sell that picture like winking.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. You’re talking like a tradesman.”

“There’s that sunset,” I went on. “It’s splendid. That colour seems to burn a hole in the canvas. But just you paint in a black cross against that smouldering sky, and see how it gives significance, aye, and poetry to the picture. Call it The Lone Grave.”

“But don’t you see,” said Travers, with some irritation, “I’m trying to express a mood of Nature. Surely there’s enough poetry in Nature without trying to drag in lone graves?”

“Not for the G.P. You’ve got to give it sentiment. Did that millionaire brewer buy anything?”

Travers sighed rather wofully.

“No, he kept on asking me where my pictures were, and I kept on telling him they weren’t anywhere, they were everywhere; they were in his own heart if he only looked deep enough. They were just moods of nature. He couldn’t see it. I believe he bought an eight by ten canvas at Rosenheimer’s Department Store: Moses Smiting the Rock.”

“There you are. He was getting more for his money. He wanted action, interest. Daresay he had the gush of water coloured to look like beer. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll give you five hundred for that thing you call Morning Mist in the Valley.”

“Sorry,” said Travers, with a look of miserable hesitation; “I don’t want to sell that. It’s the best thing I’ve done. I want to leave it to the nation.”

“All right. You know best. Good-night.”

I knew I had offered more than the market value of the picture; I knew that Travers had not sold a canvas for months; I knew that he often ate only one meal a day, and that if he chose, he could paint commercial pictures; so I could not but admire the little man who, in the face of scorn, neglect, starvation even, clung to his ideals and refused to prostitute his art. But this knowledge did not tend to restore my self-esteem, and it was in a mood of singular self-criticism I entered my room.

As I switched on the light the first thing I saw was my reflection in a large mirror. Long and grimly I gazed, hands in pockets, legs widespread, head drooping. I have often thought of that moment. It seemed as if the reflection I saw was other than myself, was, indeed, almost a stranger to me.

“Ha!” I cried, grimacing at the man in the mirror; “you’re getting found out, are you? Tell me, now, beneath your wrappings of selfishness and sham is there anything honest and essential? Is there a real You, such as might stand naked in the wind-swept spaces of eternity? Or are you, down to your very soul’s depths a player of parts?”

Then my mood changed, and I savagely paced the room.

“Oh, the fools! The hypocrites! Can’t they see that I am cleverer than they? Can’t they see that I could write their futile sonnets, their fatuous odes? But if I did, wouldn’t I starve? Am I to be blamed if I refuse? It’s all right to starve if one’s doing immortal work; but not six men in the world to-day are doing that. We’re ephemera. Our stuff serves the moment. Then take the cash, and let the credit go.”

I took off my boots, and threw them viciously into a corner.

“How Quince upset me to-night! So I made a chance hit with my first book? Well, it’s true the public were up on their toes for it. But then I would have succeeded anyway. As to catering to the mass—I admit it. I’m between the devil and the deep sea. The publishers keep rushing me for the sort of thing that will sell, and the million Porkinsons keep clamouring for the sort of thing they can read without having to think. For the sake of his theoretical wife and six children, what can a poor devil do but commercialise his ideals?”

Here I paused thoughtfully, with one arm out of my coat.

“After all, is a book of fiction not entertainment just as much as a play? There’s your audience, the public. You’ve got to try and please them, to be entertaining from cover to cover. Better be immoral than be dull. And when it comes to audiences, give me a big one of just plain ‘folks,’ to a small one of highbrows.”

With knitted brows and lips pursed doubtfully, I proceeded to wind up my watch.

“Anyway, I haven’t written for money; I’ve written for popularity. It’s nice to think you can get on a train and find some one reading your books—even if it’s only the nigger porter. True, my popularity has meant about twenty-five thousand a year to me; but it’s not my fault if my publishers insist on paying me such big royalties. And I’ve not spent the money. I’ve gone on living on my private income. Then the writing itself has been such a distraction. Lord! how I have enjoyed it! Granted that my notion of Hades would be to be condemned to read my own books, yet, such as they are, I’ve done my best with them. I’ve lived them as I wrote. I’ve laughed with joy at their humour. I’ve shed real tears (with just as much joy) at their pathos.”

I gave a wrench at my collar, expressive of savage perplexity; on which the stud shot out, and cheerfully proceeded to roll under the wardrobe.

“Perhaps I’ve done things I shouldn’t? I’ve made coincidence work overtime; I’ve grafted on love scenes so that the artist could get in one or two ‘clinch pictures.’ On my last page you’ll find the heroine clutched to the hero’s waistcoat; but—they all do it. One’s got to, or get out of the game.”

Here I disappeared for a moment; and when I re-entered, clad in pale-blue pyjamas, I was calm and cheerful again.

“So old Quince said I’d succeeded by a fluke. Well, I’d just like to bet my year’s income against his that I could make a fresh start and do the same thing all over again. By Jove! What an idea! Why not? Go away to London, cut adrift from friends and funds, fight my way up the ladder from the very bottom. After all, I’ve had the devil’s own luck, everything in my favour. It’s hardly been a fair test. Perhaps I really am a four-flusher. Even now I begin to doubt myself. It seems like a challenge.”

Switching off the light I jumped into bed.

“Life’s too appallingly prosy. Here for seven years I’ve been imagining romance; it’s time I tried to live it a little. Yes, I’ll go to-morrow.... London ... garret ... poverty ... struggle ... triumph....”

And at this point, any one caring to listen at my door might have heard issuing from those soft blankets a sound resembling the intermittent harshness of a buzz-saw going through cordwood.

CHAPTER III
GRILLED KIDNEY AND BACON

I was awakened at eight o’clock by the alarm in my watch, and lay a few minutes debating whether or not I should rise. I have always rebelled against the convention that makes us go to bed at night and get up in the morning. How much less primitive to go to bed in the morning and get up at night! But in either case we should abhor crude and violent awakenings. We should awake rhythmically, on pulsing ripples of consciousness. Personally, I should like to be awakened by gentle music, viols and harps playing soft strains of half-forgotten melodies. I should like to be roused by the breath of violets, to open my eyes to a vista of still lake on which float swans whiter than ivory.

What I did open my eyes to was a vista of shivery sunshine, steely blue sky, and snow on the roofs of the neighbouring sky-scrapers. I was indeed comfortable. Outside the heat-zone of my body the sheets were of a delectable coolness, and from head to heel I felt as if I were dissolving in some exquisite oil of ease.

Lying there enjoying that ineffable tranquillity, I subjected myself to my morning diagnosis. My soul is, I consider, a dark continent which it is my life’s business to explore. This morning, then, in my capacity of explorer, I started even as Crusoe must have done when he saw the naked footprint in the sand. Extraordinary phenomenon! I had actually awakened of the same mind as that in which I fell asleep.

Propping myself up I lit a cigarette.

“Well, young fellow,” I greeted my face in the mirror, “so we’re still doubtful of ourself? Want to make fresh start, go to London and starve in garret as per romantic formula? What foolishness! But let’s be thankful for folly. Some day we’ll be wise, and life will seem so worn and stale and grey. So here’s for London.”

With that I sprang up and disappeared into the bath-room from which you might have heard a series of grunts and groans as of some one violently dumb-belling; then a series of snorts and splutters as of some one splashing in icy water; then the hissing noise one usually associates with the rubbing down of horses. After all of which, in a pink glow and a Turkish bath-robe, appeared a radiant young man.

Taking down the receiver of my telephone I listened for a moment.

“Yes, it’s me, Miss Devereux. Give me the dining-room, please.... Dining-room?... Yes, it’s Mr. Madden speaking. I want to order breakfast.... No, not grape-fruit, I said breakfast—Grilled kidney and bacon, toast and Ceylon tea. That’s all, thank you.”

In parenthesis I may say I do my best work on kidney and bacon. There is, I find, a remarkable affinity between what I eat and what I write. Before tackling a scene of blood I indulge in a slab of beefsteak, extra rare; for tender sentiment I find there is nothing like a previous debauch on angel cake and orange pekoe; while if I have to kill any one I usually prime myself with coffee and caviare sandwiches. But as far as ordinary narrative is concerned I find kidney and bacon an excellent stimulus.

“How extremely agreeable this life is,” I reflected as I resumed dressing. “No care, no responsibility, neither jolt nor jar in the machinery. It’s almost too pleasant to be natural. Now, if I had a house, servants, a wife, the trouble would just be beginning at this time. As it is everything conspires to save me from friction. But it’ll soon be all over. I never quite realised that. My last day of gilded ease. To-day a young man of fashion in a New York club, to-morrow a skulking tramp in the steerage of an ocean liner. Yes, I’ll go in the steerage.”

Perhaps it was to heighten the contrast that I dressed with unusual care. From a score of lounging suits I selected a soft one of slatey grey; shirt, tie and socks to match; cuff-links of antique silver, and a scarf-pin of a pearl clutched in a silver claw; a hat of grey velour, and shoes with grey cloth uppers. Thus panoplied I sallied forth, a very symphony in grey.

At this early hour the dining-room was empty, and three girls flew to wait on me. For the first time it struck me as being odd. Surely, I thought, if things were as they should be, woman would not be waiting on man. Here am I, a strong, healthy brute of a male, lolling back like a lord, while these frail females fly like slaves to fulfil my desires. Yet I work three hours a day, they ten. I am rich, they painfully poor. There’s something all wrong with the world; but we’re so used to looking at wrong we’ve come to think it right.

A strange spirit of dissatisfaction was stirring in me, of desire to see life from the other side. As I took my breakfast I studied the girls, trying to imagine what they thought, how they lived. Although there were no other members in the dining-room at that moment, each waitress was obliged to remain at her post. How deadly monotonous, standing there at attention! How tired they must be by the end of the day! Then I noticed that one of them, under cover of her apron, was taking surreptitious peeps at a yellow-covered book. At that moment the lynx-eyed lady superintendent entered, caught her in the act, and proceeded to rate her soundly. I hate scenes of any kind, and this particularly pained me, for I saw that the all-too-tempting volume was a cheap edition of The Haunted Taxicab.

Then that moving picture imagination of mine began to flicker. The girl had gone from the room with tears in her eyes. Surely, thought I, she has been dismissed. A blur came between me and my plate and the film unreeled....

Ah! I see her trying to get other employment, failing again and again, sinking deeper into the mire of misery and despair. Then at last the time comes when the brave, proud heart is broken; the proud, sweet eyes flinch at another day of bitterness and failure. They recognise, they accent the end.

It is a freezing night of mid-winter, and I am walking down Broadway. Suddenly I am accosted by a girl with a hard, painted face, a girl who smiles the forced smile of fallen womanhood.

“Silvia!” I gasp.

She shrinks from me. “You!” she cries. “The author of my ruin; you, whose book I was dismissed for reading, unable to resist peering into the pages you had invested with such fatally fascinating charm....”

As the scene came up before me tears filled my eyes, and fearful that they might drop on my kidney and bacon I averted my head. At the same moment the waitress came back with a saucy giggle and resumed her post. I was somewhat dashed, nevertheless I decided it would do for a short story, and taking out my idea book I noted it down.

“Now,” I said, “let’s see the morning paper.... How lucky! The Garguantuan sails to-morrow. I’ll just catch her. Splendid!”

That histrionic temperament of mine began to thrill. Had not my whole life been dominated by my dramatic conception of myself? Student, actor, cowboy, I had played half a dozen parts, and into each I had put my whole heart. Here, then, was a new one: let me realise it quickly. So taken was I with the idea that I, who had never in my life known what it was to want a hundred dollars, retired to the reading-room, and, inspired by the kidney and bacon, took out a little gold pencil, and with it dinted in my idea book the following sonnet:

TO LITERATURE

“I, a poor, passion-goaded garreteer,

A pensive enervate of book and pen,

Who, in the bannered triumph-march of men

Lag like a sorry starveling in the rear—

Shall I not curse thee, mistress mine? I peer

Up from life’s saturnalia, and then

Shrink back a-shudder to my garret den,

Seeing no prospect of a glass of beer.

“What have I suffered, Siren, for thy sake!

What scorn endured, what happiness foregone!

What weariness and woe! What cruel ache

Of failure ’mid a thousand vigils wan!

Yet do I shrine thee as each day I wake.

Wishing I had another shirt to pawn.”

I smoked two large cigars over my sonnet before I finally got it straight. This in spite of the fact that I had a hundred and one other things to do. If the house had been burning I believe the firemen would have dragged me out muttering and puzzling over my sonnet. My rhymes bucked on me; and, though I had rounded up a likely bunch of words, I just couldn’t get them into the corral. Finally, with more of perspiration than inspiration, the thing was done.

“Hullo, Madden!” said some one as I wrote the last line, and looking up I saw young Hadsley, a breezy cotillion leader, who had recently been admitted into his father’s law firm.

“Rotten nuisance, this early snow,” went on Hadsley. “Mucks things up so. ’Fraid it’ll spoil the game on Saturday.”

“I hope not,” I replied fervently. The game was the Yale-Princeton football match, and I was terribly eager to see my old college win.

“By the way,” suggested Hadsley, “if you care to go I’ll run you down on my car.”

“Of course, I’d like it,” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’ll be simply delighted.” Then like a flash I remembered.

“Oh, no! After all, I’m sorry, I can’t. I expect to be in mid-ocean by Saturday.”

“Ah, indeed! That sounds interesting. Going to Europe! Wish I was. When do you start?”

“To-morrow on the Garguantuan.”

“You don’t say! Why, the Chumley Graces are going on her. Of course, you remember the three girls—awfully jolly, play golf divinely, used to be called the Three Graces? They’re so peeved they’re missing the game, but the old man won’t stay for it. They’re taking their car and going to tour Europe. How nice for you! You’ll have no end of a good time going over.”

Malediction! Could I never out-pace prosperity? Could I never throw off the yoke of fortune?

“Oh, well, it’s not settled yet,” I went on quickly. “I may not be able to make it for to-morrow. I may have to take a later boat. So don’t say anything about it, there’s a good fellow.”

“Oh, all right. The surprise will be all the jollier when they see you. Well, good-bye, old man, and good luck. You’ll get the news of the game by wireless. Gee! I wish I was in your shoes.”

Hadsley was off, leaving me gnawing at an imaginary moustache. “The Chumley Graces going on the Garguantuan. That means I can never go steerage, and I have set my heart on going steerage. Let’s see the paper again. Hurrah! There’s an Italian steamer sailing to-morrow morning. Well, that’ll do.”

I was now in a whirlwind of energy, packing and making final arrangements. At the steamship office, when I asked for a ticket, the clerk beamed on me.

“Yes, sir, we can give you a nice suite on the main deck, the best we have on the boat. Lucky it’s not taken.”

My moral courage almost failed me. “No, no!” I said hastily. “It’s not for me. It’s for one of my servants whose way I’m paying back to Italy. Give me a steerage ticket.”

“Coward! Coward!” hissed Conscience in my ear. “You’re making a bad beginning.”

Just before lunch I remembered my business with Quince, and, jumping into a taxi, whisked down to the Bank. The manager received me effusively. The note was prepared—only wanted a satisfactory endorser. I scratched my name on the back of it, then, speaking into the telephone on the manager’s desk, I got Quince on the line.

“Hullo! This is Madden speaking. I say, Quince, I have fixed up that note for you.”

(A confused murmur that might be construed as thanks.)

“And about that article, never mind. I find I won’t need it.”

(Another confused murmur that might be construed as relief.)

“No, I’ve come to the conclusion you’re right. The book’s not the right stuff. If you praised it you’d probably have a hard time getting square with your conscience. So we’ll let it go at that. Good-bye.”

Then I slammed the receiver on the hook, feeling that I had gained more than I had lost.

By three o’clock everything had been done that could be done. I was on the point of giving a sigh of relief, when all at once I remembered two farewell calls I really ought to make.

“I’d almost forgotten them,” I said. “I must say good-bye to Mrs. Fitz and Miss Tevandale.”

CHAPTER IV
AN UNINTENTIONAL PHILANDERER

To believe a woman who tells you her age is twenty-nine is to show a naïve confidence in her veracity. Twenty-nine is an almost impossible age. No woman is twenty-nine for more than one year, yet by a process of elasticity it is often made to extend over half a dozen. True, the following years are insolent, unworthy of acknowledgment, best punished by being haughtily ignored. For to rest on twenty-nine as long as she dare is every woman’s right.

Mrs. Fitzbarrington had been twenty-nine for four or five years, but if she had said thirty-nine, no one would have expressed particular surprise. However, there were reasons. Captain Fitzbarrington, who was in receipt of a monthly allowance, had been engaged for some years in a book entitled The Beers of America, the experimental investigations for which absorbed the greater part of his income. Mrs. Fitz, then, had a hard time of it, and it was wonderful how she managed to dress so well and keep on smiling.

She received me in the rather faded drawing-room of the house in Harlem. She herself was rather faded, with pale, sentimental eyes, and a complex complexion. How pathetic is the woman of thirty, who, feeling youth with all that it means slipping away from her, makes a last frantic fight to retain it! Mrs. Fitz, on this occasion, was just a little more faded, a little more restored, a little more thirty-ninish than usual; and she welcomed me with a little more than her usual warmth.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said, giving me both hands. “You know, I was just thinking of you.”

This clearly called for a gallant reply, so I answered, “Ah! that must be telepathy, for you know I’m always thinking of you.”

Yet I could have bitten my tongue as soon as I heard the last phrase slip from my mouth. There was a sudden catch in her breath; a soft light beaconed in her eyes. Confound the thing! why do the women we don’t want to always take us seriously, and those we are serious with always persist in regarding us as a joke? I hastened to change the subject.

“Ah, how are the kiddies?”

The kiddies were Ronnie and Lonnie, two twin boys, very sticky and strenuous, whom in my heart I detested.

“The darlings! They’re always so well. Heaven knows what I should do without them.”

“And he?”

“Oh, he! I haven’t seen him for three days, not since the remittance arrived, and then you can guess the state he was in.”

“My poor friend! I’m so sorry.” (How I hated my voice for vibrating as I said this, but for the life of me I could not help it. At such a moment tricks I had learnt in my short stage career came to me almost unconsciously.)

“Oh, don’t pity me,” she said; “you know a woman hates any one who pities her.”

“Then I mustn’t make you hate me.” (Again that infernal fighting-with-repressed feeling note.) “Well, you know you have my deepest sympathy,” I added hastily.

She certainly had. My Irish heart melts at a tale of woe, or is roused to fiery wrath at the recital of a wrong. I feel far more keenly than the person concerned. Yet, alas! the moment after I am ready to laugh heartily with the next one.

“Yes, indeed, I know it,” she spoke quickly. “It almost makes it worth while to suffer for that. You know how much it means to me, how much it helps, don’t you?”

There was an awkward pause. She was waiting for me to take my cue, and I was staring at a mental sign-board, “Dangerous Ground.” I tried to say, “Well, I’m glad,” in a friendly way, but, to my infinite disgust, my voice broke. She caught the note, as of suppressed emotion. With wide eyes she looked at me as if she would read my soul: her flat bosom heaved, then suddenly she leaned forward and her voice was tense.

“Horace,” she breathed, “do you love me?”

Now, when a female asks an unprotected male if he loves her there can be only two answers: Yes or No. If No, a scene follows in which he feels like a brute. If Yes, he saves her feelings and gives Time a chance to straighten things out. The situation is embarrassing and calls for delicate handling. I am sadly lacking in moral courage, and kindness of heart has always been my weakness. To say “No” would be to deal a deathblow to this woman’s hope, to leave her crushed and broken, to drive her to despair, perhaps even to suicide. Besides—it would be awfully impolite.

“Perhaps I’d better humour her,” I thought. So I too leaned forward, and in the same husky voice I answered, “Stella, how can you ask?”

“Cora,” she corrected gently. I was rather taken aback. Yet I am not the first man who has called the lady of the moment by the name of her predecessor. It is one of life’s embarrassing situations. However, I went on:

“Cora, how could you guess?”

“How does a woman know these things?” she answered passionately. “Could I not read it in your eyes alone?”

“Ah! my eyes—yes, my eyes....” Inwardly I added, “Damn my eyes!” Then, after a pause in which I was conscious of her wide, bright, expectant regard I repeated lamely, “Ye—es, my eyes.”

But she was evidently waiting for me to rise to the occasion. She leaned still further forward; then suddenly she laid her hands on mine.

“You mustn’t kiss me,” she said.

“Oh, no, I mustn’t,” I agreed hastily. I hadn’t the slightest intention of doing it.

“No, no, that would ruin us. We must control ourselves. If Charley were to discover our secret he would kill me. Oh, I’ve known for long, so long that you loved me; but you were too fine, too honourable to show it. Now, what are we going to do? The situation is full of danger.”

“Do!” I said glumly, “I don’t know. It’s beastly awkward.” Then with an effort I cheered up. I tried to look at her with sad, stern eyes. I let my voice go down an octave.

“There’s only one thing to do, Nora—I mean, Cora, only one thing: I—must—go—away.”

“No, no, not that,” she cried.

“Yes, yes, I must; I must put the world between us. We must never meet again.”

I could feel fresh courage in my heart, also the steerage ticket in my pocket. In a near-by mirror I had a glimpse of my face, and was pleased to see how it was stern and set. I was pleased to see also that she was looking at me as if I were a hero.

“Brave! Noble!” she whispered. “I knew it. Oh, I understand so well! It’s for me you’re doing this. How proud I am of you!”

Then, with my returning sense of safety, the dramatic instinct began to seethe in me. Apparently I had got out of the difficulty easily enough. Now to end things gracefully.

“Oh, what an irony life is!” I breathed. “How happy we could have been, just we two in some garden of roses. Oh, if we were only free, free to fly to the ends of the earth together, to the heart of the desert, to the shadow of the pole—only together! Why did we meet like this, too late, too late?”

“Is it too late?” she panted, catching fire at my words. “Why should we let life cheat us of our joy? Take me away, darling, to some far, far land where no one will know us, where we can live, love, dream. What does it matter? There will be a ten days’ scandal; he will get a divorce; all will soon be forgotten. Oh, take me away, sweetheart; take me away!”

By this time I was quite under the spell of my histrionic imagination. Here was a dramatic situation, and, though the heavens fall, I must work it out artistically. I threw caution to the winds and my arms around the lady.

“Yes,” I cried. “Come with me. Come now, let us fly together. I want you; I need you; I cannot live without you. Make me the happiest man in the world. Let me live for you, just to adore you, to make your life one long, sweet dream of bliss.”

These were phrases from one of my novels, and they slipped out almost unconsciously. Again in that convenient mirror I saw myself with parted lips and eyes agleam. “How well I’m doing this!” the artist in me applauded. “Ass! Ass!” hissed the critical overself. My attitude was a picture of passionate supplication, yet my whole heart was a prayer to the guardian that watches over fools.

“Oh, don’t tempt me,” she cried; “it’s terrible. Yes, yes, I’ll go now. Let’s lose no time in case I weaken ... at once.... I’ll just get my hat and cloak. Wait a moment—”

She was gone. Horror of horrors! What had I done? Here I was eloping with a woman for whom I did not care two pins. What mad folly had got into me? As I stared blankly at the door through which she had passed it seemed to be suddenly invested with all the properties of tragedy. Soon she would emerge from it clad for the flight, and—I must accompany her. Could I not escape? The window? But no, it was six stories high. By heaven, I must go through with it! Let my life be ruined, I must play the game. As I sat there, waiting for her to reappear, never in the history of eloping humanity was there man more miserable.

Then at last she came— Oh, merciful gods, without her hat!

“How can I tell you,” she moaned. “My courage failed me. I couldn’t bear to leave my children. There were their little photographs staring at me so reproachfully from the dressing-table. For their sakes I must stay and bear with him. After all, he is their father.”

“Is he? I mean, of course he is.” How my brain was reeling with joy! At that moment I loved the terrible twins with a great and lasting love.

“Forgive you, Flora,” I said nobly. “There is nothing to forgive. I can only love you the more. You are right. Never must they think of their mother with the blush of shame. No, for their dear sakes we must each do our duty, though our hearts may break. I will go away, never to return. Yet, my dearest, I will always think of you as the noblest woman in the world.”

“And I you too, dearest. You shall be my hero, and I shall adore you to the last day of my life. Now go, go quickly lest I weaken; and don’t” (here she leaned closely to me), “don’t kiss me—not even once....”

“No, I won’t. It’s hard, hard—but I won’t. And listen, darling—if ever anything should happen to him, if at any time we should both find ourselves free, promise, promise me you’ll write to me. I’ll come to you though the whole world lies between us. By my life, by my honour I swear it.”

“I promise,” she said fervently. She looked as if she was going to weaken again, and I thought I had better get away quickly. A phrase from one of my novels came into my mind: “Here the brave voice broke.”

“Good-bye,” I cried. “Good-bye for ever. I shall never blame you, darling. Perhaps in another land I’ll find my happiness again. Then some day, when we both are bent and grey, and sentiment lies buried under the frosts of time, we’ll meet again, and, clasping hands, confess that all was for the best. And now, God bless you, Dora ... for the last, last time, good-bye.”

Here “the brave voice broke” beautifully; then slowly and with drooping head I made my exit from the room. Once in the street I drew a deep breath.

“To be over-sympathetic is to be misunderstood,” I sighed. “Well, I’ve given her a precious memory. Poor Mrs. Fitz!”

And, come to think of it, I had never kissed her, not even once.

---

Fifteen minutes later I had reached Riverside Drive, and was being shown into the luxurious apartment of Miss Boadicia Tevandale.

She was an orphan and an heiress, only child of Tevandale the big corporation lawyer, himself an author, whose Tevandale on Torts had almost as big a circulation as my Haunted Taxicab. Socially she moved in a more exalted sphere than I, but we had met at some of the less exclusive functions, and she had majestically annexed me.

Though her dearest enemy could not have called her “fat,” there was just a suggestion of a suggestion that at some time in the future she might possibly develop what might be described as an adipose approximation. At present she was merely “big.”

I rather resent bigness in a woman. A female’s first duty is to be feminine—to be small, dainty, helpless. I genuinely dislike holding a hand if it is larger than my own, and I can understand the feelings of Wainwright who poisoned his sister-in-law because her thick ankles annoyed him. However, Boadicia had really been very nice to me. It would have been terribly rude on my part to have ignored her overtures of friendship. Consequently we had been seen much together, and had drifted into what the world regarded as a sentimental attachment. With my faculty, then, for entering into such situations, I was sometimes convinced that my feelings for her were those of real warmth. Indeed, once or twice, in moments of great enthusiasm, I almost suspected myself of being mildly in love with her.

She received me radiantly, and she, too, gave me both hands. On the third finger of the left one I noted the sparkle of a new diamond.

“Hello, stranger,” she said, gaily. “Just in time for tea. It seems ages since I’ve seen you. Why haven’t you been near me for a whole fortnight?”

I was going to make the usual excuses, when suddenly that devil of sentiment entered into me. So, trying to give my face a pinched look, I answered in a hollow voice:

“Can you ask that?”

She looked at me in surprise. “Why, Horace, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, you women, you women!” I groaned bitterly.

“What do you mean?” she demanded, with some amazement.

“What do I mean? Are you blind? Have you no eyes as well as no heart? Can you not see how I have loved you this long, long while; loved you with a passion no tongue can tell? And now—”

I pointed dramatically to the new ring.

“Oh, that! Why, you don’t mean to say—”

“I mean to say that after I read of your engagement in this morning’s Town Tattle I went straight off and took a passage for Europe. I leave to-morrow. I’ve just come to say good-bye.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, so sorry you feel that way about it. I never dreamed—”

“No, I have uttered no word, given no sign. How could I, knowing the difference in our social positions? Break, break my heart, but I must hold my tongue. So it seems I have kept my secret better even than I knew. But it does not matter now. I have no word of reproach. To-morrow I go, never to return. I pray you may be happy, very happy. And so, good-bye....”

“Wait a moment! Good gracious!”

She laid a detaining hand on my arm, but I shook it off quite roughly, and strode to the window. My face was stern and set; my shoulders heaved with emotion. I had seen the leading man in our Cruel Chicago Company (in which I doubled the parts of the waiter and the policeman) use the same gesture with great effect.

“Why did I ever meet you?” I said harshly to a passing taxicab.

And strange as it may seem, at that moment I had really worked myself into the spirit of the scene. I actually felt a blighted being, the victim of a woman’s wiles. Then she was there at my side, pale, agitated.

“I’m so grieved. Why didn’t you speak? If I’d only known you cared. But then, you know, nobody takes you seriously. Perhaps, though, it’s not too late. If you really, really care so much I’ll try to break off my engagement with Bunny.”

(Bunny was Mr. Jarraway Tope, an elderly Pittsburg manufacturer of suspenders—Tope’s “Never-tear Ever-wear Suspenders.”)

“No, no, it’s too late now,” I interrupted eagerly. “Things could never be the same. Besides, he loves you. He’s a good old fellow. He will make you happy, far happier than I could. He is rich; I am poor. It is better so.”

“Riches are not everything,” she pouted miserably.

“No, but they’re the best imitation of it I know. Oh, you hothouse flowers! You creatures of lace and luxury! You don’t know what it is to be poor, to live from hand to mouth. How could you be happy in a cottage—I mean a Brooklyn flat? No, no, Boadicia, we must not let sentiment blind us. Never will I drag you down.”

“But there’s no question of poverty. You make lots of money?”

“A mere pittance,” I cried bitterly. “It’s my publishers who make the money. I’m no man of business. On a few beggarly royalties how can I hold up my end? No, I must put the world between us. Oh, it will be all right. Some day when we are both old and grey, and sentiment lies buried under the frost of time, we will perhaps meet again, and, clasping hands, confess that all was for the best.”

“Oh, I hate to let you go away like that. If you have no money, I have.”

“As if I could ever touch a penny of yours,” I interrupted her sternly.

“Horace,” she pleaded, “you cut me to the heart. Don’t go.”

“Yes, yes. Believe me it’s best. Why prolong this painful scene? I’ll pray for your happiness, for both of your happinesses, yours and Bunny’s. Perhaps my heart’s not so badly broken after all.” (I smiled a brave, twisted smile.) “For the last time, good-bye, good-bye.”

With that I rushed blindly from the room. When I reached the street, I wiped away a few beads of perspiration.

“Oh, you everlasting, sentimental humbug!” I cried. “One of these days you’ll get nicely nailed to the cross of your folly.”

CHAPTER V
A SEASICK SENTIMENTALIST

If ever I should come to write my autobiography (as I fondly hope in the fulness of time my recognition as the American Dumas will justify me in doing) it will fall easily into chapters. For, so far, my life has consisted of distinct periods, each inspired by a dramatic conception of myself. Let me then try to forecast its probable divisions.

Chapter I.—Boyhood. Violently imaginative period.—Devouring ambition to become pirate chief.—Organised the “Band of Blood.”—Antipathy to study.—Favourite literature: Jack Harkaway.

Chapter II.—Youth. Violently athletic period.—Devouring ambition to become great first baseman.—Organised the Angoras. Continued antipathy to study.—Favourite literature: The sporting rags.

Chapter III.—Cubhood. Violently red blood period.—Devouring ambition to become champion broncho buster.—Went to Wyoming, and became the most cowboyish cowboy in seven counties.—Favourite literature: The yellow rags.

Chapter IV.—Undergraduate days. Violently intellectual period.—Devouring ambition to become literary mandarin.—Gave up games and became a bookworm.—Commenced to write, but disdained anything less than an epic.—Favourite literature: The French decadents.

Chapter V.—Adolescence. Violently histrionic period.—Devouring ambition to become a second Mansfield.—Joined the Cruel Chicago Company as general utility.—Chief literature: The theatrical rags.

Chapter VI.—Manhood. At age of twenty-one wrote The Haunted Taxicab, and scored immediate success.—Devouring ambition to write the Great American Novel.—Published nine more books in next five years, and managed to hold my own.

There you are—down to the time of which the present record tells. And now, in accordance with the plot, let me continue.

On a certain muggy morning of late November, a young man of conspicuously furtive bearing might have been seen climbing aboard the steamer bound for Naples. He wore the brim of his velour hat turned down, with the air of one who entirely wishes to avoid observation.

Over one arm hung a mackintosh, and at the end of the other dangled an alligator-skin suitcase. An inventory of its contents would have resulted as follows: A silk-lined, blue serge suit; three silk négligé shirts; three suits silk pyjamas; three suits silk underwear; three pairs silk socks; several silk ties, and sundry toilet articles.

If, in the above list, an insistence on the princely fabric is to be remarked, I must confess that I shrink from the contact of baser material. It was then with some dismay that I descended into the bowels of the ship, and was piloted to my berth by a squinting steward in shirt-sleeves. I gazed with distaste at the threadbare cotton blanket that was to replace the cambric sheets of the mighty. Then I looked at the oblique-eyed one, and observed that nonchalantly over his arm was hung another blanket of more sympathetic texture, and that his palm protruded in a mercenary curve. So into that venial hollow I dropped half a dollar, and took the extra blanket. Then throwing my suitcase on the berth, I went on deck.

Shades of Cæsar! Garibaldi! Carusa! What had I “gone up against”? One and all my fellow passengers seemed to be of the race of garlic eaters. Not a stodgy Saxon face among them. Verily I was marooned in a sea of dagos. Here we were, caged like cattle; above us, a tier of curious faces, the superior second class; still higher, looking down with disdain, the fastidious firsts. And here, herded with these degenerate Latins, under these derisive eyes, must I remain many days. What a wretched prospect! What rotten luck! And all the fault of these gad-about Chumley Graces, confound them!

But I did not lament for long. If ever there is an opening for the sentimentalist it is on leaving for the first time his native land. Could it be expected, then, that I, a professional purveyor of sentiment, would be silent? Nay! as I watched the Statue of Liberty diminish to an interrogation mark, I delivered myself somewhat as follows:

“Grey sea, grey sky, and grey, so grey

The ragged roof-line of my home;

Yet greyer far my mood than they,

As here amid this spawn of Rome

With tenderness undreamt before

I sigh: ‘Adieu, my native shore!’

“To thee my wistful eyes I strain;

To thee, brave burg, I wave my hand;

Good-bye, oh giddy Tungsten Lane!

Good-bye, oh great Skyscraper Land!

Good-bye, Fifth Avenue so splendid...!!”

And here my doggerel I ended.... Horrors on horrors! Could I believe my eyes? There, looking down from the promenade deck, in long ulsters and jaunty velour hats, were the three Misses Chumley Grace. They were laughing happily, and looking right at me. Could anything, I wonder, have equalled the rapidity of my retreat? As rabbit dives into its burrow, as otter into its pool, so dived I, down, down to the dark hole they called my cabin, where I collapsed disgustedly on my bunk.

And there for five days I remained.

It may be assumed (so much are we the creatures of an artificial environment) that it is only in the more acute phases of life we realise our truer selves. As a woman in the dental chair, as a fat man coaxing a bed down a narrow stairway, as both sexes in the clutches of mal-de-mer, are for the moment stripped of all paltering pretence, so in the days that followed I had many illuminating glimpses of my inner nature. Never was a man more rent, racked, ravaged by the torments of sea-sickness. But let me read you an extract from my diary:

“Eight hundred Italians on board, and we are packed like sardines in a keg. Our wedge-shaped cabin is innocent of ventilation. The bunks are three tiers high and three abreast; so that, as I have an outer one, a hulky Dago ascends and descends me a hundred times a day. Also I am on the lower row, and as both the men above me are violently sick, my situation may be imagined. The sourly stinking floors are swilled out every morning. My only comfort is that I am too calloused with misery to care about anything.

“It’s the awful, brutal sinking that fixes me; as if I were suddenly being let down the elevator shaft of the Singer Building at full speed, ten thousand times a day, then as suddenly yanked up again. By the dim light I can see hundreds of cockroaches crawling everywhere around me, elongated, coffee-coloured cockroaches, big ones, middle-sized ones, tiny baby ones. They wander to and fro, fearless and apparently aimless. But perhaps I am wrong about this. Perhaps they are moved by a purpose; perhaps they are even in the midst of a celebration—following the mazes of a cockroach cotillion. As I lie watching them I speculate on this. What they live on may be guessed at. And as if to mock me on my bed of woe all the rollicking, frolicking sea-songs I have ever heard keep up a devilish concert in my head, singing the praises of this fiendish and insatiable sea.”

For nine-tenths of his time the artist lives the lives of other men more vividly than his own; for the other tenth, his own ten times more vividly than other men. Of such transcendent tenths creation comes. It was then from the very poignancy of my sufferings that I began to evolve a paper on the pangs of mal-de-mer. It was to be the final expression of the psychology of sea-sickness. Even as I lay squirming in that sour, viscid gloom I rejoiced in the rapture of creation. It seemed, I thought, the best thing I had ever done. Though I had not put pen to paper, there it was, clearly written in my brain, every word sure of its election, every sentence ringing true. I longed to see it staring me from the printed page.

And on the morning of the sixth day I arose and regarded my shaving mirror. My face had peaked and paled, and was covered with fluffy hair, so that I looked like a pre-Raphaelite Christ. Indeed, so æsthetic was my appearance I had to restrain myself from speaking in blank verse.

How glorious was the clear, sweet air again! | With every breath of it I felt new life. | The sea was very amiable now, | and playing children paved the sunlit deck. | A score of babies punctuated the picturesque confusion. On the decks above the plebeian seconds and the patrician firsts presented two tiers of amused faces. They were like curious spectators looking down into a bear pit.

Then suddenly did I realise my severance from my class, and, strange to say, it aroused in me a kind of defiant rage. For the first time democracy inspired me. For five days I had starved and suffered—or was it five years? Anyway, the life of luxury and ease seemed far away. Goaded by the gay shouts of the shuffle-boarders on the upper deck, I felt to the full the resentment of the under-dog; yea, ready to raise the red flag of revolt behind blood-boltered barricades of hate.

But all at once I became conscious of another sensation equally exorbitant. It was the first pang of a hunger such as never in my life had I endured. In imagination I saw myself at Sherry’s, conning the bill of fare. With what an undreamt-of gusto I made a selection! How I revelled in a dazzling vision of delicate dishes served with sympathy! It was a gourmet’s dream, the exquisite conception of a modern Lucullus. I almost drooled as I dictated it to a reverent head-waiter. Yea, I was half hunger-mad. When, oh when, would lunch-time come?

It came. It was the first meal I had seen served in the steerage, and it was served in buckets. You dipped into one, spiked a slab of beef floating in greasy swill, shovelled a wad of macaroni from a tin wash-basin to your tin plate, grabbed a chunk of stale bread from a clothes basket: there you were, set up for another five hours.

Too ravenous to demur, I seized my tin plate and rushed the ration-slingers. The messy meat I could not stomach, but I pryed loose a little mountain of macaroni. I was busy wolfing it when on looking up I saw the youngest Miss Chumley Grace regarding me curiously. With many others she had come to see the animals fed.

“It’s dollars to doughnuts,” I thought, “she’ll never know me in this beard. But all the same I’ll keep my face concealed.”

I had finished feeding, and was washing my plate at a running tap, when all at once I dropped it as if it had been red-hot. Brushing every one aside I made a leap for my cabin, and reached it, I will swear, in record time. Frantically I felt under the pillow of my bunk. Too late! Too late! The wallet in which I kept my money was gone.

“Alas!” I sighed. “My faith in Roman honesty has received a nasty knock.”

I did not report my loss. I was afraid the inevitable fuss would betray me to the Chumley Graces. I seemed to spend my whole time dodging them now. Once or twice I found the spectacled gaze of poppa fixed upon me. Many times I sneaked away under the scrutiny of the girls. All this added to my other miseries, which in themselves might have served Dante for another canto of his Inferno.

But at last it was over. There was the blue bay of Naples. Now we were manœuvring into the seething harbour. Now we were keeping off with streams of water boatmen who retaliated by hurling billets of wood. Now we were throwing dimes to the diving boys. Now there ran through the ship the thrill of first contact with the dock. Hurrah! In a few more moments I should be free, free to follow the Trail of Beautiful Adventure. True, I was broke; but what a fine, clean feeling that was!

Clutching my alligator-skin suitcase I reconnoitered, with conspiratorial wariness. Cautiously I crept out. Softly I sneaked over to the nearest gangway. My foot was on it; in another moment I would have made my escape. I could have laughed with joy when—a little hand was laid on my arm, and turning quickly I found myself face to face with the youngest Miss Chumley Grace.

“Oh, Mr. Madden,” she chirped, “we knew you all along, but it’s been such fun watching you. Do tell me, now, aren’t you just doing it for a bet?”

CHAPTER VI
AN INVOLUNTARY FIANCÉ

Alas and alas! I am engaged—an engagement according to Hoyle, sanctioned by poppa and sealed with a solitaire—irrevocably, overwhelmingly, engaged.

Who would have dreamed it? But in the great round-up of matrimony, isn’t it always the unexpected that happens? I was run down, roped, thrown, before I knew what was happening to me. And the brand on me is “Guinivere Chumley Grace.”

She is the youngest, the open-airiest, the most super-strenuous of the sporting sisters. She slays foxes, slaughters pheasants, has even made an air-flight. I have no doubt she despises poor, ordinary women who cook steaks, darn socks and take an intelligent interest in babies.

And this is the girl I am going to marry, I who hate horse-flesh, would not slay a blue-bottle promenading on my nose, admire the domestic virtues, and hope that a woman will never cease to scream at the sight of a mouse. Can it be wondered at that I am in the depths of despair?

And it is all the fault of Italy?

Naples sprang at me, and, as we say, “put it all over me.” Such welters of colourful life! Such visions of joy and dirt! Such hot-beds of rank-growing humanity! Diving boys and piratical longshoremen; plumed guardians of the police and ragged lazzaroni; whooping donkey drivers and pestiferous guides; clamour, colour, confusion, all to bewilder my prim Manhattan mind.

What a disappointment that had been; to stand there one exultant moment with the Trail of Beautiful Adventure glimmering before; the next, to be hemmed in by the jubilant Chumley Graces, and hurried to the haughtiest of hotels, where poppa insisted on cashing my cheque for five hundred dollars.

But resignation to one’s fate is comparatively easy in Naples. There, where villa and vineyard dream by an amethystine sea where purple Capri and violet Vesuvius shimmer and change with every mood of sun and breeze, the line of least resistance seems alluringly appropriate.

There were days in which (accompanied by Miss Guinivere Chumley Grace) I roamed the Via Roma, stimulated by the vivid life that seethed around me; when I watched the bronze fishermen pull in their long, sea-curving nets; when the laziness of the lazzaroni fell upon me.

There were evenings in which (accompanied by Guinivere Chumley Grace) I sat on the terrace of the hotel, caressed by the balmy breeze, listening to the far-borne melody of mandolins, and gazing at the topaz lights that fringed the throbbing vast of foam and starlight.

There were nights when (accompanied by Guinivere) I watched the dull reflection of fiery-bowled Vesuvius, dreaming of the richly storied past, and feeling my heart stir with a thousand sweet wonderings of romance.

Can it be wondered, then, that some of this rapture and romance found an echo in my heart? Here was the time, the place, and—Guinivere. Only by a violent effort could I have saved myself, and violent efforts in Naples are unpopular. No; everything seemed to happen with relentless logic; and so one afternoon, looking down on the sweeping glory of the bay the following conversation took place:

She: Isn’t it ripping?

I: Yes, it’s too lovely for words. Why cannot we make our lives a harvest of such golden memories?

She: Yes, it would be awfully jolly, wouldn’t it?

I: If we cannot make the moment eternal, let us at least live eternal in the moment.

She: But how can we?

I wasn’t sure how we could, nor was I sure what I meant; but the freckled face was looking up at me so inquiringly, and the crisp-lipped mouth was pouted so invitingly that I sought the solution there. She, on her part, evidently found it so satisfactory that I laid considerable emphasis on it, and I was still further accentuating the emphasis when on looking up I found myself confronted by the stony, spectacled stare of poppa.

Anathema! Miseracordia! After that there was nothing to do but ask for his blessing. I could not plead poverty, for he is a director in most of the railways in which I hold shares. The god of fools, who had so often moved to save me, had this time left me on the lurch. So it came about that I spent three hundred dollars out of my five in the purchase of a diamond ring; and there matters stand.

Well, I shall have to go through with it. If there is one idea more than another I hold up to myself it is that of The Man who Makes Good. I have never been untrue to my promises; and now I have promised Guinivere a cottage at Newport and a flat in town. Life looms before me a grey vista of conventional monotony and Riverside Drive.

If only she cared for any of the things I do! But no! She is one of the useless daughters of the rich, who expect to be petted, pampered and provided for in the way they have been accustomed, forgetting that the old man struggled a lifetime to give them that limousine and the house on Fifth Avenue. She is one of the great army of women who think men should sweat that women may spend. I have always maintained that it was a woman’s place to do her share of the work; and here I was, marrying a pleasure-seeker, an idler.

Better, I thought, some daughter of democracy; yea, even such a one as but a little ago tidied my apartment, that dark-haired damsel with the melancholy mouth and the eyes of an odalisque.

As I pretended to work I had often watched my charming chambermaid; but my interest was purely professional, till one day it was stimulated by an unusual incident. There was a villainous-looking valet-de-chambre who brought me my coffee and rolls in the morning, and who presided over a little pantry from which they seemed to emanate. Passing this pantry, I witnessed a brisk scuffle between the chambermaid and the valet. He made an effort to kiss her, and she repulsed him with evident disgust. From then on I could see the two were at daggers drawn, and that the man only waited a chance to take his revenge.

After that, it may not be deemed strange that I should have taken a more personal interest in my hand-maid; that I should have practised my Italian on her on every opportunity; that I should have found her name to be Lucrezia Poppolini, and that of her tormentor, Victor. A spirit of protection glowed in me; I half hoped for dramatic developments, pitied her in her evident unhappiness, and vowed that if she were persecuted any more I would take a hand in the game.

In a rhapsodic vein I had begun an article on Naples, and ranged far and wide in search of impressions. It was one evening I had pleaded work to escape from Guinivere (who was getting on my nerves), and I had sought the quarter of the town down by the fish-market. Frequently had I been moved to remark that in Naples there seemed to be no danger of depopulation, and the appearance of a good woman approaching strengthened my conviction. Then as she came close I saw that she was only a girl, very poor, and intensely miserable. But something else made me start and stare: she was the exact counterpart of my interesting chambermaid.

“Perhaps they are twin sisters,” thought I. “This girl’s trouble would account for the worry and sadness on the face of Lucrezia. Here is material for drama.”

So taken was I by my twin-sister theory, that I ended by half-convincing myself I was right. Then, by a little play of fancy, I allowed for the following dramatis personæ:

“Victor, the Villainous Valet.

Lucrezia, the Chaste Chambermaid.

Twin Sister in trouble.

False Lover of Twin Sister.

Aged Parent.”

Thus you will see how my little drama was interesting me. On her daily visits to my room, I watched my poor heroine with sympathetic heart. What was going to happen? Probably Aged Parent would stab False Lover, and Villainous Valet, who happened to witness the deed, would demand as the price of his silence the honour of Chaste Chambermaid. How I began to hate the man as he roused me at eight o’clock with my steaming Mocha! How I began to pity the girl as dreary and distraught she changed my towels! Surely the dénouement was close at hand.

Poppa and I shared a parlour from which opened out respective bedrooms. It had outlook on the bay, and often the girls would sit there with their father instead of in their own salon. I was not surprised, then, on my return from a copy-hunting expedition to hear the sound of many voices coming from within.

But I was decidedly surprised, on opening the door, to find quite a dramatic scene being enacted. The backs of the actors were to me, and they did not see me enter. In the centre of the stage, as it were, were Victor and Lucrezia. Behind them the fat little manager of the hotel. To the right poppa and Guinivere. To the left Edythe and Gladys, the elder sisters.

Lucrezia looked pale as death, and cowered as if some one had struck her. Facing her, with flashing eyes and accusive digit was the vengeful Victor. The little manager was trying to control the situation, while poppa and offspring, staring blankly, were endeavouring to follow the Italian of it.

“Baggage! Thief!” Victor was crying. “I saw her. I stole after her! I watched her enter the signor’s room. There on the dressing-table it was, the little purse he had so carelessly left. She draws near, she examines it ... quick! She pushes it into her blouse—so. Oh, I saw it all through the chink of the door.”

“No, no,” the girl protested, in accents of terror and distress; “I took nothing, I swear by the Virgin, nothing. He lies. He would make for me trouble. I am innocent, innocent.”

“I am no liar,” snarled the man. “If you do not believe me, see—she has it now. Search her. Look in the bosom of her dress. Ah! I will....”

He caught her roughly. There was a scuffle in which she screamed, and from her corsage he tore forth a small flat object.

“What did I tell you!” he cried vindictively. “Who is the liar now? Oh, thief! thief! I, Victor, have unmasked thee—”

Here he turned round and suddenly beheld me. His manner grew more exultant. “Ha! It is the signor himself.”

Then I saw that what he held out so triumphantly was my little gold purse, and in the breathless pause that followed, cinema pictures were flashing and flickering in my brain. How vivid they were! Twin sister imploring aid—girl distracted—no money to give her—What’s to be done?—Suddenly sees gold purse—Temptation: “I’ll just borrow one little piece. The signor will never miss it. Some day I’ll pay it back.”

How she struggles, gazes at it like one fascinated, puts out a hand, shrinks back, looks round fearfully! Then at last she takes it in her hand;—a sudden noise,—impulsively she pushes it in the bosom of her dress. Then Victor’s high pitched voice of denunciation, bringing every one on the scene.

All this I saw in a luminous moment, but—where did I come in? My heart bled for the poor girl so tried, so tempted. A quixotic flame leapt in me. There was the vindictive valet; there was the frail Lucrezia; there was the centre of the stage waiting for what?—me. Ah! could I ever resist the centre of the stage?

So I stepped quietly forward, and, to complete the artistic effect, the girl, who had been gazing at me with growing terror, swayed as if to faint. Deftly I caught her over my left arm; then with the other hand I snatched the purse from the astonished Victor, and deliberately pushed it back into the blouse of Lucrezia.

“The girl is innocent,” I said calmly; “the money is her own. I, myself, gave it to her,—this morning.”

---

Of the scene that followed I have no vivid recollection. I was conscious that poppa herded his flock hurriedly from the room; that Lucrezia disappeared with surprising suddenness; that the dumbfounded Victor was ordered to “begone” by an indignant maître d’hôtel, who, while extremely polite, seemed to regard me with something of reproach.

I was, in fact, rather dazed by my sudden action, so hastily packing the alligator-skin suitcase I paid my bill and ordered a carriage. Telling the man to drive in the direction of Possillipo, I there selected a hotel of a more diffident type, and, in view of my reduced finances, engaged a single room.

The day following was memorable for two interviews. The first, in the forenoon, was with poppa. He had no doubt found my address from the coachman, and had come to have it out with me. In his most puritanical manner he wanted to know why I gave the girl the money.

“I refuse to explain,” I said sourly.

“Then, sir, I must refuse to consider you worthy of my daughter’s hand.”

My heart leapt. Escape from Guinivere! It seemed too good to be true. Lucrezia, I thank thee! Nor do I grudge thee twice the gold thy purse contains. Concealing my joy I answered:

“It shall be as you please, sir.”

His church-deacon face relaxed a little. He had evidently expected more trouble.

“And I must ask you, sir, not to communicate with her in any way.”

I summoned a look of sadness worthy of a lover whose heart is broken.

“As her father,” I observed submissively, “your wishes must be respected.”

He laid a small box on the table. “Guinivere returns you your ring.” Then he hesitated a little. “Have you nothing at all to say for yourself? I too have been young; I can make some allowance, but there are limits. I don’t like to think that you are an absolute scoundrel.”

“If I were to tell you,” I said, “that I gave the girl the money out of pure philanthropy, gave it to help a wretched twin sister with an unborn babe,—what would you say?”

“I would say you were trying to bolster up your intrigue with a fiction. Bah! Young men don’t give purses of gold to pretty girls out of philanthropy. Besides, we have discovered that your precious friend is nothing more or less than a hotel thief. A detective arrived just after you left and identified her.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said indignantly. “These Italian women all look alike. Where’s the poor girl now?”

He grinned sarcastically. “Probably it is I who should ask you that.”

His meaning was so obvious I rose and smilingly opened the door. Off he went with a snort, and that was the last I ever saw of poppa.

But my second interview! It took place at ten in the evening. I was reading the Italian paper in bed when there came a soft knock at my door.

“Come in,” I said, thinking it was the valet with my nightcap. Then, as if moved by a spring I sat bolt upright. With one hand I tried to fasten the neck button of my pyjamas, with the other to smooth down my disordered locks. I verily believe I blushed all over, for who should my late visitor be but—Lucrezia.

She was dressed astonishingly well, and looked altogether different from the slim, trim domestic I had known. Indeed, being all in black, she might have well passed for a charming young widow. Of course I was embarrassed beyond all words, but if she shared my feeling she did not show it.

“Oh, signor, how can I thank you?” she cried, advancing swiftly.

“Not at all,” I stammered; “pray calm yourself. Excuse me receiving you in this deshabille. Please take a seat.”

I indicated a chair some distance away, but to my confusion she seated herself near me. I reached for my jacket and wriggled into it; after which I felt more at ease.

“I have just found out where you were,” she began. “I could not wait until to-morrow to thank you. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

Really she spoke remarkably well. Really she looked remarkably stunning. Her complexion had the tone of old ivory, and her eyes of an odalisque seemed to refract all the light of the room. I could feel them fixed on me in a distracting, magnetising way.

“Don’t mention it,” I answered; “there’s nothing to forgive. It’s very good of you to think of thanking me.”

She begun to fumble with a glove button. “Tell me,” she almost whispered, “tell me, why did you do it?”

“Oh, I—I don’t quite know?”

She threw out her hands with an impulsive gesture. Her black eyes glowed fiercely, then grew soft.

“Was it because you—you loved me?”

I stared. This was too much. Was the girl mad? I replied with some asperity:

“No, it was because I thought you must be in some desperate trouble. I was sorry for you. I wanted to save you.”

“Ah! you were right. I was in great trouble, and you alone understood. You are noble, signor, noble; but you are cold. We women of the South, we are so different. When we love, we love with all the heart. We do not conceal it; we do not deny it. Know, then, signor, from the moment you came so bravely to my aid like some hero of romance I loved you, loved you with a passion that makes me forget all else. And you, you do not care. It is nothing to you. Oh, unhappy me! Tell me, signor, do you not think you can love me?”

I shrank back to the furthest limit of the bed-post. Again I thought: “Surely the girl is mad, perhaps dangerous as well. I’ve heard that these Neapolitan girls all carry daggers. I hope this young lady doesn’t follow the fashion. I think I’d better humour her.”

Aloud I said: “I don’t know. This is so sudden I haven’t had time to analyse my feelings yet. Perhaps I do. Give me to-night to think of it. Come to-morrow. But anyway, why should I let myself love you? I am a bird of passage. I have business. I must go away in a few days.”

“Where is the signor going?”

“To Paris,” I said cautiously.

Her strange eyes gleamed with tragic fire. “If you go to Paris without me,” she cried passionately, “I will follow you.”

“Well, well,” I said soothingly, “we’ll see. But now please leave me to think of all this. Don’t you see I’m agitated? You’ve taken me by surprise. Please give me till to-morrow.”

Her brows knit with jealous suspicion. I half thought she was going to reach for that dagger, but instead she rose abruptly.

“Oh, you are cold, you men of the North. I shall leave you at once.”

“Yes,” I answered eagerly; “go quickly, before any one finds you here.”

“Bah!” she exploded with fierce contempt; “what does it matter? But, signor, will you let me kiss you?”

“Certainly, if you wish.” I extended one cheek.

She gave me a quick, smothering embrace from which I had difficulty in detaching myself. “To-morrow, then, without fail. But where and when?”

“I’ll meet you at the Aquarium at eleven o’clock,” I said.

“At the Aquarium, then. And you’ll think of me? And you’ll try to love me?”

“Yes, yes, I will. Please go out very quietly. Au revoir till eleven to-morrow.”

But by eleven o’clock next morning I was exultantly on my way to London.

CHAPTER VII
A BOTTLE OF INK

The disadvantage of persistent globe-trotting is that it makes the world so deplorably provincial. With familiarity the glamour of the far and strange is swept away, till at last there is nothing left to startle and delight. Better, indeed, to leave shrines unvisited and shores unsought; then may we still hold them fondly under the domination of dream.

Much had I read of the lure of London, of its hold upon the heart; but to the end I entirely failed to realise its charm. To me in those grim December days it always remained the City of Grime and Gloom, so that I ultimately left it the poorer by a score of lost illusions.

Drawing near the Great Grey City—how I had looked forward to this moment as, alert to every impression, I stared from the window of the train! Yet at its very threshold I shrank appalled. Could I believe my eyes? There confronting me was street after street of tiny houses all built in the same way. Nay, I do not exaggerate. They were as alike as ninepins, dirty, drab cubes, each with the same oblong of sordid back-yard, the same fringe of abortive front garden. Oh what a welter of architectural crime! Could it be wondered at that the bricks of which they were composed seemed to blush with shame?

Then the roofs closed in till they formed a veritable plain, on which regiments of chimneys seemed to stand at attention amid saffron fog. Then great, gloomy corrugations, down which I could see ant-like armies moving hither and thither: then an arrest in a place of steam and smoke and skurrying and shouting: Charing Cross Station.

How it was spitefully cold! Autos squattered through the tar-black mud. A fine drizzle of rain was falling, yet save myself no one seemed to mind it—so cheery and comfortable seemed those red-faced Islanders in their City of Soot. Soot, at that moment, was to me all-dominant. Eagerly it overlaid the buildings of brick; joyfully it grimed those of stone. It swathed the monuments, and it achieved on the churches daring effects in black and grey. After all, it had undoubted artistic value. Then a smudge of it settled on my nose, and with every breath I seemed to inhale it. Finally a skittish motor bus bespattered me with that tar-like mud and I felt dirtier than ever.

But what amount of drizzle could damp my romantic ardour as suitcase in hand I stood in Trafalgar Square? Here was another occasion for that sentimental reverie which was my specialty, so I began:

“Alone in London, in the seething centre of its canorous immensity. Around me swirl the swift, incurious crowds. Oh, City of a million sorrows! here do I come to thee poor, friendless, unknown, yet oh! so rich in hope. Shall I then knock at thy countless doors in vain? Shall I then—”

A sneeze interrupted me at this point. It is hard to sneeze and be sentimental; besides, I recognised in the words I had just spoken those I had put into the mouth of Harold Cleaveshaw, hero of my novel, The Handicap. But then Harold had posed in the centre of Madison Square and addressed his remarks to the Flatiron Building, while I was addressing the Nelson Monument and a fountain whose water seemed saturated with soot.

Do not think the moment was wasted, however. Far from it. The likeness suggested an article comparing the two cities. For instance: New York, a concretion; London, an accretion; New York, an uplift; London, an outspread; New York, blatant; London, smug; New York, a city on tiptoe, raw, bright, wind-besomed; London, the nightmare of a dyspeptic chimney-sweep; New York, a city born, organic, spontaneous; London, an accident, a patchwork, a piecing on; and so on.

Pondering these and other points of contrast, I wandered up Charing Cross Road into Oxford Street. In a bookshop I saw, with a curious feeling of detachment, a sixpenny edition of my novel, The Red Corpuscle. Somehow at that moment I could scarcely associate myself with it. So absorbed was I becoming in my new part that the previous one was already unreal to me. I took up the book with positive dislike, and was turning it over when an officious shop-boy suggested:

“Don’t you want to read it, mister?”

“Heaven forbid!” I replied; “I wrote it.”

He sniffed, as much as to say, “Think you’re smart, don’t you?”

Up Southampton Row I chanced, and in a little street off Tavistock Square I found a temporary home. A cat sleeping on a window-sill suggested Peace, and a donkey-cart piled high with cabbages pointed to Plenty. But as cabbages do not find favour in the tyrannical laboratory of my digestion, I vetoed Mrs. Switcher’s proposal that I take dinner in the house. However, I ordered ham and eggs every morning, with an alternative of haddock or sausage and bacon.

These matters settled, I found myself the tenant of a fourth-floor front in a flat brick building of triumphant ugliness. I could see a melancholy angle of the square, some soot-smeared trees stretching in inky tentacles to a sullen sky, a soggy garden that seemed steeped in despairing contemplation of its own unworthiness.

For Mrs. Switcher, my landlady, I conceived an enthusiastic dislike. A sour, grinding woman who reminded me of a meat-axe, I christened her Rain-in-the-Face in further resemblance of a celebrated Indian Chief. But if I found in her no source of a sympathetic inspiration, in the near-by Reading-room of the British Museum there certainly was. In that studious calm, under battalions of books secure in their circles of immortality, I was profoundly happy. Often I would pause to study those about me, the spectacled men, the literary hack with the shiny coat-sleeve of the Reading-room habitué, the women whose bilious complexions and poky skirts suggested the league of desperate spinsterhood.

A thousand ghosts haunted that great dome. It was a mosaic of faces of dead and gone authors, wistfully watching to see if you would read their books. And if you did, how they hovered down from the greyness and smiled sweetly on you; other ghosts there were too, ghosts of the famous ones who had bent over these very benches, who had delved into that mine of thought just as I was delving. Here they had toiled and triumphed, even as I would toil and triumph. Spurred and exalted, under that great dome where the only sound seemed to be the whirr of busy brains, I spent hours of rarest rapture.

To the solitary the spirits whisper. Ideas came to me at this time in a bewildering swarm, and often I regretted some fancy lost, some subtlety unset to words. So by book-browsing, by curious roaming, by brooding thought, my mental life extended its horizons. Yet knowing no one, speaking to no one, living so much within myself, each day became more dreamlike and unreal. There were times when I almost doubted my own identity, times when, if you had assured me I was John Smith, I would have been inclined to agree with you.

With positive joy I watched my money filter away. “Good!” I reflected. “I shall soon be penniless, reduced to eating stale crusts and sleeping on the iron benches of the Embankment. Who can divine the dazzling possibilities of vicissitude? All my life I have battled with prosperity; now, at last, I shall achieve adversity. I will descend the ladder of success. I will rub shoulders with Destitution. I may even be introduced to Brother Despair.”

Enthusiasm glowed in me at the thought, and absorbed in those ambitious dreams I cried: “Thank God for life’s depths, that we may have the glory of outclimbing them.”

And here be it said, we make a mistake when we pity the poor. It is the rich we should pity, those who have never known the joy of poverty, the ecstasy of squeezing the dollar to the last cent. How good the plain fare looks to our hunger! How sweet the rest after toil! How exciting the uncertainty of the next day’s supper! How glorious the unexpected windfall of a few coppers! Was ever nectar so exquisite as that cup of coffee quaffed at the stall on the Embankment after a night spent on those excruciating benches? Never to have been desperately poor—ah! that is never to have lived.

My shibboleth at this time was a large bottle of ink which I bought and placed on my mantelpiece. Through a haze of cigarette smoke I would address it whimsically:

“Oh, exquisite fluid, what magic words are hidden in thine ebon heart! What lover’s raptures and what gems of thought! Let others turn to dusty ledgers your celestial stream, to bills of lading and to dull notorial deeds; to me you are the poet’s dream, the freaksome fancy of the essayist, the stuff that shapes itself in precious prose. In you, oh most divine elixir, fame and fortune are dissolved. In you, enchanted liquid, strange stories simmer, and bright humour bubbles up. Oh, magical bottle, of whom I will make life and light, gold and jewels, laughter and tears, thrill to your dusky heart with the sense of immortality!”

It was while surveying the garbage heap in the rear of Mrs. Switcher’s premises that there came to me the idea of a short story, to be called The Microbe.

Through reading an article in a magazine Mr. Perkins, a middle-aged clerk in a dry-salter’s warehouse, becomes interested in the Germ Theory. Half-contemptuous at first, he begins to make a study of it, and soon is quite fascinated. Being of a high-strung, imaginative nature, the thing gets on his nerves, and he begins to think germs, to dream germs, to dread germs every moment of his life. He fears them in the air he breathes, in the food he eats, even on the library books that tell him all about them.

Mr. Perkins becomes obsessed. He refuses to kiss the somewhat overblown rose of his affections, to enter a train, an omnibus, a theatre. He analyses his food, sterilises his water, disinfects his room daily, till his landlady gives him notice. Finally he can no longer breathe the air of a microbe-infected office, and he resigns the situation he has held for twenty years to become a tramp. Yet even here, in the wind on the heath, on the hill’s top, by the yeasty sea, there is no peace for him. He broods, he fasts, he becomes a monomaniac. Then he thinks of the germs in his own body, of the good microbes and the naughty microbes fighting their vendetta from birth to death, his very blood their battleground.

No longer can he bear it. He realises the impossibility of escape. He himself is a little world, a civil war of microbes. How he hates them! Yet there remains to him his revenge. Ha! Ha! He has the power to destroy that world. So beggared, broken, desperate, he returns to London, and with a wild shriek of joy he throws himself from the Tower Bridge.

Yea, even in the end he has been destroyed by a microbe, the most deadly of all, the terrible Microbe called Fear.

One morning, dreamily incubating my story, I happened to glance out of my window. I was gazing absently on my corner of the lugubrious square when a little figure of a girl came into view. She wore a grey mantle, and her face was like a splash of white. Walking with a quick, determined step, in a moment she had disappeared.

In about five minutes I happened to look up again. There was the same slim figure rounding the corner, to again disappear.

“Something automatic about this,” I said; “it’s getting interesting.” So, taking out my watch, I judged the time, and in another five minutes I looked up. Yes, there was my girl in grey walking with the same purposeful stride.

“This is getting monotonous,” I observed, after I had seen her appear and disappear a few more times. “Such persistent pedestrianism destroys my powers of concentration. Let me then sally forth and see what this mysterious young female is celebrating. Perhaps if I stare at her hard enough she will choose either Russell or Bloomsbury Square for her constitutional, and not distract a poor, hard-working story-grinder at his labours.”

But when I got outside I found she had gone, so I decided to seek my beloved Reading-Room and look up some articles on microbes.

CHAPTER VIII
THE GIRL WHO LOOKED INTERESTING

After a hard skirmish with the catalogue of the Reading-Room, which, with reference and counter-reference, defied me stubbornly, yet finally yielded to my assault, I found myself, three hours later, seated in an A.B.C. restaurant in Southampton Row.

From motives of economy I had given up eating dinners. Breakfast and a meat lunch were now my sole fortifying occasions, and of the latter this A.B.C. was oftenest the scene. I liked its friendly fires, its red plush chairs, its air of thrift and cheer. Behold me, then, a studiously shabby young man, eating a shilling lunch and wearing as a symbol of my servitude a celluloid collar. Little would you have dreamed that but two short months before I had been toying with terrapin in the gold room of Delmonico’s.

But such dramatic contrasts charm me, and I was placidly engaged in the excavation of a Melton Mowbray pie, when a girl in grey took a place at the next table. Her long mantle was rather the worse for wear, her hat a cheap straw. Her small hands were encased in cotton gloves, and her feet in foreign-looking shoes.

“Painfully poor,” I thought, “yet evidently a worshipper of the goddess Comme-il-faut.” Then—“Why, surely I know her? Surely it is my mysterious female of the matutinal Marathon.”

With timid hesitation she ordered a bun and milk. How interesting her voice was! It had a bell-like quality the more marked because she spoke with a strong inflection, and an odd precision of accent. A voice with colour, I thought; violet; yes, she had a violet voice.

But I had not seen her face, only beneath her low straw hat her hair of a gleamy brown, very fine of texture and so thick as to seem almost black. It was brought round in a coiled braid over each ear, and, where it parted at the back, showed a neck of ivory whiteness. Somewhat curiously I wished she would turn her head.

Then, as if to please me, she did so, and what I saw was almost the face of a child, so small and delicate of feature was it. It was almost colourless, of a pure pallor that contrasted with the rich darkness of her hair. The mouth was small and wistfully sweet, the chin rather long and fine, the cheeks faintly hollowed. Her brow, I noted, was broad and full, her eyebrows frank and well-defined. But it was the eyes themselves that arrested me. They were set far apart and of a rare and faultless sea-blue. Such eyes in a woman of real beauty would have been pools of love for many a fool to drown in, and even in this fragile, shrinking girl they were haunting, thrilling eyes. For the rest, she was small, slender, sad-looking, and tired, yes, tired, as if she wanted to rest and rest and rest.

“A consumptive type,” I thought irritably. “Seems quite worn out. Why does she persist in that pedestrian foolishness—that’s what I want to know?”

I watched her as she ate her bun, and when she rose I rose too. She payed out of a worn little purse, a plethoric purse, but, alas! its fulness was of copper. Down Woburn Street she disappeared, and I looked after her with some concern. A gentle, shrinking creature, pathetically afraid of life.

“God help her,” I said, “in this ruthless city, if she has neither friends nor money.” I decided I would write a story around her, a story of struggle and temptation. Yes, I would call it The Girl Who Looked Interesting.

That night I thought a good deal about my girl and my story, but next morning a distraction occurred. London revealed itself in the glory of a fog. At last I was exultant. Here was the city I had come so far to see. For the squat buildings seemed to take on dignity and height. Through the mellow haze they loomed as vaguely as the domiciles of a dream. The streets were corridors of mystery, and alone, abysmally alone, I seemed to be in some city of fantasy and fear.

But the river—there the fog achieved its ghostliest effects. As I wandered down the clammy embankment, cloud-built bridges emerged ethereally, and the flat barges were masses of mysterious shadow. St. Stephen’s was a spectral suggestion, and Whitehall a delicate silver-point etching. I thanked the gods for this evasive and intangible London, half-hidden, half-revealed in its vesture of all-mystifying fog.

Well, I was tired at last, and I turned to go home. But I must have missed my way, for I found myself in a long dim street, which I judged by its furniture-fringed pavement to be Tottenham Court Road. Filled with a pleasant sense of adventure, I kept on till I came to what must have been Hampstead Road. There my eyes were drawn to a large flamboyant painting above the window of a shop in a side-street. Drawing near, I read in flaring letters the following:

EXHIBITION
Amazing! Amusing! Unique!
O’FLATHER’S EDUCATED FLEAS
As performed with tremendous success before
all the Crowned Heads of Europe and the
Potentates of Asia. For a limited
time Professor O’Flather will
give the people of London
the opportunity of seeing
this extraordinary
exhibition.
Entertaining!
Instructive!
Original!
Come
and
See
THE SCIENTIFIC MARVEL OF THE CENTURY!
The marvellous insects that have all the
intelligence of human beings.
Admission, Sixpence. Children Half-price.

A large canvas showed a number of insects, vivaciously engaged in duelling, dancing, drawing water from wells, and so on. Watching them with beaming rapture was a distinguished audience, including the Czar of Russia, the Emperor William, Li Hung Chang, the Shah of Persia, and Mr. Roosevelt.

I was turning away when a big, ugly individual appeared in the doorway. He was a heavy-breathing man with a mouth like a codfish, and bloodshot eyes that peered through pouchy slits. He had a blotched, greasy face that hung down in dewlaps. From under a Stetson hat his stringy, brindled hair streamed over the collar of his fur-lined coat. On his grubby hand an off-colour diamond, big as a pea, tried to outsparkle another in the dirty bosom of his shirt. He reeked of pomatum, and his teeth looked as if they had been cleaned with a towel. No mistaking the born showman of the Bowery breed. Moved by a sudden idea, I gracefully addressed him:

“Professor O’Flather, I presume?”

The impresario looked at me with lack-lustre eye. He transferred a chew of tobacco from one cheek to the other; then he spat with marvellous precision on a passing dog. Finally he admitted reluctantly:

“Yep! That’s me.”

“Pardon me, Professor, but I’m a newspaper man. I represent the Daily Dredger, with which, of course, you are familiar. I have been specially commissioned by my journal to write up your exhibition. Can you favour me with a brief interview?”

At the magic word “newspaper” his manner changed. He extended a hand like a small ham.

“Right you are, mister. Always glad to see the noospaper boys.”

He ushered me into the shop, and, switching on a light, bellowed in a voice of brass, “Jinny!” From behind a crimson curtain appeared a little Jap girl in a green kimono.

“Faithful little devil!” said the Professor. “Met ’er in a Yokerhammer joint, and fetched ’er along for the sake of the show. Jinny, uncover the stock. This gen’lman’s a hintervooer.”

With eager pride the girl obeyed. From a glass case in the centre of the room she removed a covering. The case was divided into sections, in which were a number of suggestive shapes, supinely quiescent.

“We turn ’em over,” O’Flather explained, “when they ain’t working, so’s they won’t use up all their force. We need it in the business.”

Then Jinny, with the delicacy of a lover, proceeded to put each through its performance.

“That there’s Barthsheeber at the well,” said the Professor, pointing with a fat forefinger to a black speck that was frantically raising and lowering a string of buckets on an endless chain.

“Them’s the dooelists,” he went on, indicating two who, rearing on their hind legs, clashed tiny swords with all the fire and fury of Macbeth and Macduff.

“Here we have the original Tango Team,” he continued, showing a pair who went through the motions of the dance in time to a tiny musical box.

Then, with pardonable pride, he drew my attention to a separate case containing a well-made model of a little farm. “There!” he said, extending his grubby hand, “all run by the little critters.” And, sure enough, there were active little insects drawing ploughs up and down green furrows; others were hoeing with tremendous energy; others mowing with equal enthusiasm. Here, too, was a miniature threshing machine, turned by four black specks lying on their backs, with other frantic black specks feeding it, and an extra strenuous one forking away the straw.

As I expressed my admiration of their industry, the Professor, with growing gusto, dilated on the cleverness of his pets, and put them through their paces. There was a funeral, a chariot race, a merry-go-round, and some other contrivances no less ingenious. Lastly he showed me a glass case containing many black specks.

“Raw material. Them’s the wild ones I keep to take the place of the tame ones that dies. At first I have to put ’em in a bit of a glass box like a pill box, and turning on an axis same’s a little treadmill. That’s to break ’em of the jumping habit. Every time they jump—bing! they hit the glass hard, so by and by they quit. But they have to keep a-moving, because the box keeps going round. In a few days they’re broke into walk all right.”

“Most ingenious!”

“All my own notion. Since I started in the business, many’s the hundred I’ve broke in. I guess I know more about the little critters than any man living.”

It was with a view to tap a little of this knowledge that I invited the Professor to a near-by pub, and there, under the influence of sympathetic admiration and hot gin, he expanded confidentially.

“All of them insects you saw,” he informed me, “comes from Japan. They grow bigger over there, and more intelligent. I’ve experimented with nigh every kind, but them Jap ones is the best. And here I want to say that it’s only the females is any good. The males is mulish. Besides they’re smaller and weaker, and not so intelligent. Funny that, ain’t it. That’s an argyment for Woman’s Suffrage. No, the males is no good.”

“And how do you train them, Professor?” I queried.

“Well, first of all you’ve got to hitch ’em up, got to get a silk thread round their waists. That’s a mighty ticklish oppyration, but Jinny’s good at it. You see, they’re so slick cement won’t stick to ’em, and if you was to use wax it kills ’em in a day or two. So we’ve got to get a silk loop round their middle, and cement a fine bristle to it. Once we have ’em harnessed up we begin to train ’em. That’s just a matter of patience. Some’s apter than others. Barthsheeber there was very quick. In a few days she was on to her job.”

“And how long do they live?”

“Oh, about a year, but I’ve had ’em for nigh two. They got mighty weak towards the last though. You know, a female in prime condition can draw twelve hundred times her own weight.”

“Wonderful! And what do they eat?”

“Well,” said O’Flather, thoughtfully, “a performer can go about four days without eating, but we feed ’em every day. Jinny used to do it. She loves ’em. But it’s hard on a person. I’ve got a young woman engaged just now.”

“A young woman!”

“Yep, but she’s a poor weak bit of a thing. I don’t think as she’ll stick it much longer. You see, there’s lots of folks the little devils won’t take to—me, for instance. Blood’s too bitter, I guess. They seem to prefer the women, too. Then again, they feed better if the body’s hot, specially if the skin’s perspiring.”

“How very interesting!” I said absently. Then suddenly the reason of it came to me. The insects had no intelligence, no consciously directed power. The motive that inspired them was—Fear. Their extraordinary demonstrations were caused by their desperate efforts to escape. It was fear that drew the coaches and the gun-carriages: fear that made those kicking on their backs turn the threshing mills; fear in the fight to free themselves from the stakes to which they were chained that made the duellists clash their sabres, and the Bathshebas work at their wells. It was even fear that made those two lashed side by side, and head to tail, run round in opposite directions to get away from each other, till they gave the illusion of a waltz. Fear as a motive power! This exhibition, outwardly so amusing, was really all suffering and despair, struggle born of fear, pleasure gained at the cost of pain. Exquisitely ludicrous; yet how like life, how like life!

“Professor O’Flather,” I said gravely, “you have taught me a lesson I will never forget.”

“Naw,” said the Professor modestly, “it ain’t nuthin’. Hope you get a few dollars out of it. Mind you give the show a boost.”

We were standing by the doorway of the exhibition when a slim figure in grey brushed past us and entered. I started, I could not be mistaken—it was the heroine of my story The Girl Who Looked Interesting.

“Who’s that, Professor—the girl who’s just gone in?”

“That,” said O’Flather, with a shrug, “why, that’s the young woman wot feeds the fleas.”

CHAPTER IX
THE CHEWING GUM OF DESTINY

Allured by a sign: “A Cut off the Joint for Sixpence,” I lunched in a little eating-house off Tottenham Court Road. I was at the tapioca pudding stage of the repast, and in a mood of singular complacency.

“Six weeks have gone,” I pondered. “I have spent nearly a third of the sum I realised from the sale of Guinivere’s engagement ring. In my ambition to fail in the world, already I have accomplished much. Behold! my boots are cracked across the uppers. Regard! the suggestive glossiness of my coat-sleeves. Observe! the bluey brilliancy of my celluloid collar. Oh, mighty Mammon, chain me to thine oar! Grind me, Oppression, ’neath thy ruthless heel! Minions of Monopoly, hound me to despair!—not all your powers combined in fell intent can so inspire me with the spirit of Democracy as can the sticky feel of this celluloid collar around my neck!”

With which sentiment I lit a cigarette, and took from my pocket a copy of the Gotham Gazette. I had seen it looking very foreign and forlorn in a news-agents, and had bought it out of pity for its loneliness. I was glancing through it when a name seemed to leap at me, and I felt my heart stand still. I read:

“Yesterday afternoon patrician Fifth Avenue was the scene of a saddening incident. It was almost opposite Tiffany’s, and the autos were passing in a continuous stream. At this time and this place it is almost as difficult to cross the Rubicon as to cross the Avenue; yet, taking advantage of a lull in the traffic, a well-dressed man—who has since been identified as Charles Fitzbarrington, an ex-army officer resident in Harlem—was observed to make the daring attempt. Half way over he was seen to stumble, and come to the ground. Those who saw the rash act held their breaths, and when the nearest spectators could reach him to rescue him from his perilous position, they found to their surprise that the man was dead....”

I dropped the paper with a groan. Captain Fitzbarrington dead! Mrs. Fitz free! My promise to marry her! The terrible twins! Oh, God....

“Alas!” I cried, “I am undone!—betrayed by an incurably romantic disposition; asphyxiated in the effervescence of my own folly; ignominiously undone!”

As if it were yesterday, I remembered the faded apartment in Harlem, my protests of undying devotion, the words that now seemed written in remorseless flame:

“If anything should happen to him, if by any chance we should find ourselves free, send for me, and I’ll come to you, even though the world lie between us. By my life, by my honour, I swear it.”

Had I really uttered that awful rot? Oh, what a fool I’d been! But it was too late now. I must make the best of it. Never yet have I gone back on my word (though I have put some very poetic constructions on it). But here there was no chance of evasion. She would certainly expect me to marry her. Farewell, ambitious dreams of struggle and privation! Farewell, O glorious independent poverty! Farewell, my schemes and dreams! Bohemia, adventure, all!—and for what? For an elderly woman for whom I did not care a rap, a faded woman with a ready-made family to boot. Truly life is one confounded scrape after another.

That night I dreamed of the terrible twins. I was a pirate ship, Ronnie, the captain, stood on my chest, while Lonnie, a naval lieutenant, tried to board me. Then they invented a new game, based on the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It was tremendously exciting. They both got quite worked up over it. So did I—only more so. I was the horse. I awoke, bathed in perspiration, and hissing through my clenched teeth: “Never! Never!”

But really it seemed as if I must do something; so next day I began three different letters to Mrs. Fitz. I was sorely distracted. My work was suffering. There was the unfinished manuscript of The Microbe staring reproachfully at me. Then to crown all, just as I was sitting down in the early evening with grim determination to finish the letter, suddenly I was assailed by a Craving.

Indulgent Reader, up till now I have concealed it, but I must confess at last. I have one besetting weakness, a weakness that amounts to a vice. I am ashamed of it. Often I have tried to wean myself of it; often cursed the heredity that imposed it on me. Opium? Morphine? Cocaine? Nothing so fashionable. Absinthe? Brandy? Gin? Nothing so normal. Alas! let me whisper it in your ear: I am a Chewing Gum Fiend!

So feeling in my pocket for the stuff, and finding none, I straightway began to crave it as never before. Then, knowing there would be no peace for me, I left my letter and started desperately forth into that fog stifled city.

And that fog was now a FOG. It irked the lungs, and made the eye-balls tingle. Each street lamp was a sulphurous blur, each radiant shop-window a furtive blotch of light. It seemed something solid, something you could cut into slices, and serve between bread—a very Camembert cheese of a fog.

So into this woolly obscurity I plunged, and like a Mackinaw blanket it entangled me about. Bleary boxes of light the tramways crawled along. There were tootings of taxis, curses of cabbies, clanging of bells. The streets were lanes of mystery, the passers weird shadows; the shop-windows seemed to be made of horn instead of glass. Then the green and red lights of a chemist’s semaphored me, seemingly from a great distance, but really from just a few feet away. So there I bought six packets of chewing gum, and started home.

But at this point I found the fog fuzzier than ever. I stumbled and fumbled, and wondered and blundered, till presently I found myself standing before the great doors of a theatre. For the moment I was too discouraged to go further, and the performance was about to begin. Ha! that was an idea! I would enter. Then I groaned in spirit, for I saw that the theatre was Drury Lane. Sensational melodrama! Ah, no! Better the cold and cruel street. But the fog was inexorable. Three times did I try to break through it; three times did it hurl me back on the melodramatic mercies of Drury Lane.

Hanging over the front of the gallery, I asked myself: “Who are these hundreds of well-dressed people who fill this great playhouse? To all appearance they are intelligent beings, yet I cannot imagine intelligent beings taking this kind of thing seriously. As burlesque it’s funny, and the more thrilling it gets the funnier it is. Yet, except myself, no one seems to laugh. How the author must have chuckled over his fabrication! However, let me credit him with one haunting line, one memorable sentiment, delivered by the heroine to a roar of applause:

“A woman’s most precious jewel is her good name,

And her brightest crown the love of her husband!”

Then suddenly a light flashed on me. It was these people who bought my books; it was this sort of thing I had been peddling to them so long. And they liked it. How they howled for more! “O ye gods of High Endeavour!” I groaned, “heap not my sins of melodrama on my head.”

Conscience-stricken I did not wait for the climax where two airships grapple in the sky, under the guns of a “Dreadnought,” while at a crossing an auto dashes into a night express. I sneaked out between the acts, and sought the solitude of the Thames Embankment.

The fog had cleared now, and the clock of St. Stephen’s pealed till I counted the stroke of midnight. The wall of the Embankment was a barrier of grime, the river a thing of mystery and mud. It was a gruesome night. Even the huge electrically-limned Highlandman on the opposite shore, who drinks whiskey with such enviable capacity, had ceased for the nonce his luminous libations.

A few human waifs shuffled past me, middle-aged men with faces pale as dough, and discouraged moustaches drooping over negligible chins. Their clothes, green with age and corroded with mud, seemed to flap emptily on their meagre frames. A woman separated herself from a mass of shadow, a miry-skirted scarecrow crowned with a broken bonnet. With one red claw she clutched a precious box of matches.

“For Gord’s syke buy it orf me, mister. I ain’t myde tupp’nce oipney orl dye.”

I left her staring at a silver coin and testing it with her teeth.

Yes, it was a bad night to be out in, a bad night to cower on these bitter benches waiting for the dawn. Yet I myself was conscious of the chauffage central of peripatetic philanthropy. Greedily I panted for other opportunities to enjoy the glow of giving. Then, as I was passing Cleopatra’s Needle, I heard the sound of a woman’s sob.

It came from the gloomy gruesomeness between the Needle and the Thames. I peered and listened. Below me the hideous river chuckled, and the lamplight fell lividly on the whiteness of a lifebuoy bound to the wall. Again I was sure I heard that sound of piteous sobbing.

Bravery is often a lack of imagination: I have imagination plus, so I hesitated. I had heard of men being lured into traps. Vividly enough I saw myself a cadaver drifting on the tide, and I liked not the picture. Yet after all it takes tremendous courage to be a coward, so I drew nearer. Strange! the sobbing, so low, so pitiful, had ceased. It was followed by a silence far more sinister. There was a vibrating agony in that silence, a horrible, heart-clutching suspense. What if I were to go down there and find—no one? Yet some one had been, I would swear; some one had sobbed, and now—silence.

Slowly, slowly I descended the steps. There in the black shadow of the Needle I made little noise, yet—suddenly I began to wonder if all the world could not hear the beating of my heart....

Heart be still! hand be steady! foot be swift! There, crouching on the top of the wall, gazing downward, ready for the leap, I see the figure of a woman. Will she jump before I can reach her? I hold my breath. Nearer I steal, nearer, nearer. Then—one swift rush—ah! I have her.

Even as I clutched I felt her weight sag towards the river. Another moment and I had dragged her back into safety. Tense and panting, I stared at her; then, as the lamplight fell on her ghastly face I uttered a cry of amazement. Heavens above! it was the girl of the entomological meal-ticket, the persistent pedestrian of Tavistock Square.

There she cowered, looking at me with great, terror dilated eyes. There I glowered, regarding her grimly enough. At last I broke the silence.

“Child! Child! why did you do it? You’ve gone and spoilt my story. I should never have met you like this. It’s coincidence. Coincidence, you know, can’t happen in fiction, only in real life. You can’t be fiction now. You’ll have to be real life.”

She gazed at me blankly. Against the green of the wall her face was a vague splash of white.

“But that is a matter with which I can scarcely reproach you. What I would like to know is why were you on the top of that wall? Having severely strained my right arm, I conceive I am entitled to an explanation.”

She did not make an effort to supply one, so after a pause I continued:

“No doubt you will say it was because you were tired, hungry, homeless. Because you thought the river kinder than the cruel world. Because you said: ‘Death is better than dishonour!’”

The girl nodded vaguely.

“Ah no!” I said sadly; “you must not say these things, for if you do you will be quoting word for word the heroine of my novel A Shirtmaker’s Romance. You will be guilty of plagiarism, my child; and what’s worse, a thousand times worse, you will be guilty of melodrama.”

She looked at me as if she thought me mad, then a shudder convulsed her, and breaking away, she dashed down the steps to that black water. Just in time I caught her and dragged her back. She shrank against the wall, hiding her face, sobbing violently.

“Please don’t,” I entreated. “If you want to give me a chance of doing the rescuing hero business choose a less repellent evening, and water not so like an animated cesspool. Now, listen to me.”

Her sobbing ceased. She was a silent huddle of black against the wall.

“I am,” I said, “a waif like yourself, homeless, hungry, desperate. I came to this city to win fame and fortune. Poor dreaming fool! Little did I know that where one wins a thousand fail. Well, I’ve struggled, starved even as you’ve done; but I’ve made up my mind to suffer no more. And so to-night I’ve come down here, even as you’ve done, to end it all.”

I had her listening now. From the white mask of her face her big eyes devoured me.

“Yes, my poor girl,” I went on wearily, “you’re right. Life for such as us is better ended. Defeated, desperate, what is there left for us but death? Let us then die together; but not your way—no, that’s too primitive. I have another, more fascinating, more original. Ah! even in self-destruction, behold in me the artist. And I am going to allow you to share my doom. Nay! do not trouble to express your gratitude. I understand; it’s too deep for words. And now, just excuse me one moment: I will prepare.”

With that I went over to the base of the Needle and taking from my pocket the five remaining packets of chewing gum, I tore the paper from them. Then with the large piece I had been masticating, I welded them into a solid stick about six inches long. Eagerly I returned to her.

“There!” I cried triumphantly. “Do you know what this grey stick is? But why should you? Well, let me tell you. This dull, sugary-looking stuff is dynamite, dynamite in its most concentrated form. This is a stick of the terrific Pepsinite. It has moved more than any explosive known. Now do you understand?”

Her eyes were rivetted on the little grey stick.

“Ah, well may you shudder, girl! There’s enough in this tiny piece to blow a score of us to atoms, to bring this mighty monument careening down, to make the embankment look like an excavation for the underground railway. Oh, is it not glorious? Pepsinite!”

Still looking at it as if fascinated, she made a movement of utter alarm.

“Just think of it,” I whispered gloatingly; “in two more minutes we shall be launched into eternity. Does that not thrill you with rapture? And think of our revenge! Here with our death we will destroy their monument, hard as their hearts, black as their selfishness, sharp as their scorn. It, too, will be blown to pieces.”

She looked up at the black column almost as if she were sorry for it. I laughed harshly.

“Yes, I know. You do not hate the Needle, but just think of the people who are so proud of it, the devils who have goaded us to this. At first I thought that with my death I would destroy their Albert Memorial, and so break their philistine hearts. But that would have taken so much pepsinite, and I have only this pitiful piece. So it had to be the Needle.”

Again she seemed almost to regret its impending doom.

“And now,” I cried, “the time has come. Oh, curse you, curse you, vast vain-glorious city! Under the Upas window of your smoke what dreams have withered, what idols turned to clay! How many hearts of splendid pride have failed and fallen! How many poets cursed thy publishers and died! Oh heedless, heartless London!”

With a gesture full of noble scorn I shook my fist in the direction of the Savoy Hotel. Then I changed to another key.

“But no, let me not curse you, great city! Here at the gateway of death let me envisage you again, and from the depths of the heart you have broken say to you sadly: ‘London, ruthless, splendid London, I forgive!’”

My hand quivered as I laid the grey stick at the base of the monument; my hand trembled as I planted a large wax match in it; my hand positively shook as I struck another match and applied a light to the upright one. With eyes dilated I stared at the tiny flickering flame, and at that moment, so worked up was I, I will swear I thought I was looking at the very flame of death.

“Come closer, closer girl,” I gasped. “See it burning down, down. Soon it will reach the end and we will know nothing. Oh is it not glorious—nothing! Good-bye world, good-bye life ... see! it is nearly half way. Oh gracious flame, burn faster, faster yet! And now, girl, standing here in the shadow of death do not refuse my last request; let me kiss you once, just once upon your brow.”

For answer she stooped swiftly and blew out the match.

CHAPTER X
THE YOUNG MAN WHO MAKES GOOD

“Why did you do it?” I demanded angrily. “Why couldn’t we have gone through with it?”

Then for the first time the girl seemed to find her voice, and it was a very faint voice indeed.

“No, no, I could not. For myself it does not mattaire; but you, monsieur—that’s different.”

Again I was struck with her foreign intonation, her pretty precision with which Frenchwomen speak English, the deliberate utterance due to an effort, not wholly successful, to avoid zeeing and zizzing.

“Why is it so different?” I asked sulkily.

“Because—because me, I am nossing. If I die no persons will care; but you, monsieur, you are artist, you are poet. You have many beautiful sings to do in the life. Ah, monsieur! have courage, courage. Promise me you nevaire do it some more.”

“All right,” I said gloomily; “I promise.”

She seemed reassured. Her child’s face as she looked at me was full of pity and sympathy.

“And now,” I said, “what’s to be done?”

“I do not know.”

She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. All at once a look of terror came into her face. Fearfully she peered over my shoulder, then she cowered back in the shadow of the wall.

“Oh, I’m ’fraid, I’m ’fraid.”

Involuntarily I turned in the direction of her stare, but saw no one.

“What are you afraid of?” I asked. “What’s the trouble?”

“It’s Monsieur O’Flazzaire! Oh, I am bad, bad girls! Why you not let me die? I have keel, I have keel.”

“Good Heavens! you haven’t killed Professor O’Flather?”

“No, no, but I have keel ze troupe; Batsheba, all, all; dead, keel by my hand, keel in revenge. Oh I am so wicked! I hate myself.”

I stared at her. “In the name of Heaven, what have you done?”

For answer she pulled from the pocket of her mantle a tin canister of fair size and handed it to me. By the lamplight I could just make out the label:

SKEETER’S INSECT POWDER.

A light dawned on me. “You don’t mean to say you’ve fed ’em on this?”

“Yes, yes, all of eet. I have spare nossing. I was mad. Oh I ’ate heem so! And now I’m ’fraid. If he finds me he will keel me, certainly. He’s bad man. Oh don’t let heem find me!”

She clutched my arm in her terror.

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “But first, let’s destroy the evidence of your crime.”

I flung the canister into the river, where we heard a faint splash.

“Now,” I went on, “you’re no doubt cold and hungry. Let me take you to the coffee-stall on the Embankment and give you some supper. Then, according to the custom of the situation, you may tell me the sad story of your life. In the meantime, as we walk there, let’s hear how you fixed O’Flather.”

“It is true, what I tell you, Monsieur; he’s very, very bad man. He ’ave said the things disgusting to me, and he try to make me have dinner wiz heem many hevenings, but I say: No! No! Because, truly, I have ’orror for such mans. Den last night he tell me if I don’ come wiz heem, he don’ want me some more. He refuse pay me my money, and the lady where I rest tell me: ‘You don’t come back some more wiz no money.’ So what I must do? I have no ’ome, and just one sheeling of money. Ah, no! It was not interesting for me, truly.”

She shook her head with all the painful resignation of the poor.

“Well, I am desperate. I sink it is all finish for me, I must drink of the gran’ cup at last. That make me sad, because I have fight so long. But there! it is the life, is it not? Then I sink I have one gran’ revenge. I buy wiz my sheeling dat powdaire, and I go to the exposition. There was only the Japonaise girl, and she leave me wiz the troupe. They lie on their backs and they wait for dejeuner. Well, I geeve them such as I don’ sink they want eat ever again. Oh, I ’ate them so, and I ’ate heem so, and so I keel them every one wiz that powdaire, till zere legs don’ wave some more. Even ze wild ones, they don’ jump some more now.”

“Poor Bathsheba!”

“Then when I finish keel the last one the Japonaise girl come and scream for the patron, and I run like wind. But I know he fetch everywhere for me, and when he find me he keel me too. Anyway, I was tire, and I dispair, so I sink I throw myself in the water. There!”

“Well, you must swear you won’t do it again.”

“Yes, I swear on the head of my fazzaire, I won’t do it again.”

“And now for that coffee, coffee and sandwiches—ham sandwiches.”

She ate and drank eagerly, yet always with that furtive, hunted look, as if she expected to see the huge bull-dog face of O’Flather with its mane of brindled hair come snarling out of the gloom. I saw, too, that she was regarding me with great interest and curiosity, indeed with a certain maternal and protecting air, odd in one so childish and clinging herself. Once, seeing that I shivered a little, she turned up the collar of my coat and buttoned it. In spite of the mothering gentleness of the act I might have thought it a little “forward,” had I not remembered that in her eyes we were comrades in misfortune.

Her eyes! How blue and bright they were now, as they regarded me over her coffee! And how long, I wondered, had that wistful mouth been a stranger to smiles?

“Let me see you smile,” I begged.

I thought so. A flash of teeth that made me think of an advertising poster for a popular dentifrice. Again I noted the darkness of her hair, setting off the porcelain whiteness of her skin. Again I approved of the full forehead, and the frank eyebrows. Again the girl stirred me strangely. And to think that she might have been at the bottom of that hideous river by now! I felt a sudden pity for her, and a wish to shield her from further ill.

“And now for the story,” I said, as she finished. “I have told you mine, you know.”

“Ah, mine! It is not so interesting. There is not much to tell. My fazzaire die when I was leetle girl, and I go to the convent. There I learn to do the hem-broderie, and when I leave the Sisters I work in atalier in Paris. It was so hard. We work from eight by the morning till seven at night. There was t’irty girl all in one leetle room, and some girls was poitrinaire.”

“What’s that?”

“Ah ... what you call it—yes, consumption. Well, I begin to become that no more can I stand it, so I come to Londres and try to get work. Every day I try so ’ard for one month, for I can speak English not much. Then just as I have no money left I get work in atalier at the hem-broderie. It was not so ’ard as in Paris, and I was very ’appy. But pretty soon I am seek, and it is necessaire I go to the hospital. It was the appendicite. When I get out I try to get back to the atalier, but my place have been fill. No work, no money—truly, I have no chance.”

“Well, what happened then?”

“Ah! then it was not interesting. I often go very hungry. I live for many days on bread, just bread. But by and by I get more work. Then again I am very ’appy. But I have no chance. I become seek once more. I have headache very much; my hair tumble out, and every night I cry. But I try very ’ard. I must keep my work, I must, I must. Then the doctor tell me I must have more air. I must respire. I tell him it is not for the poor to respire, and he say you must do something outside, or you will die. Well, I leave the atalier and for two months I fetch somesing outside. But I have no chance. Once more my money is finish, then one day I get work with Monsieur O’Flazzaire. I would not have taken it, but that I am starve, and I am ’fraid. It was so ’ard, and every day I get more weak. Then, yesterday, he tell me: ‘Go! I don’ pay you,’—and I don’ care for myself any more.”

“Why,” I said gravely, looking her in the face, “did you not do as others would have done?”

She stared at me in a startled way:

“You do not mean dishonour, monsieur. Ah no! You cannot mean that.”

“Is it not better to do that than starve?”

“It is better to die than to do that, I sink. I am good Catholic, Monsieur.”

“Do not call me Monsieur! Are we not fellow waifs? So you think it is less sin to take your own life than to sell your honour?”

“It is that that I think, Monsieur.”

As I looked into the steady, blue eyes I saw a look of faith that almost amounted to fanaticism, a sort of Joan of Arc look. “How curious!” I thought. “I was under the impression such sentiments were confined to books.” However, I determined to fall back on cynicism, and to seem the more cynical I lit a cigarette. She watched me with a curious intensity; and as she stood there quietly, a naphtha lamp lit up her pale, earnest face.

“Ah! young lady,” I remarked mockingly, “you speak like a penny novelette. In fact, you say the same thing as did my heroine Monica Klein in A Shirtmaker’s Romance. It only remains for you to die to slow music in the snow outside the door of a fashionable church. That’s what happened to Monica. I shed a bucket of tears as I wrote that scene. But I thought we had decided you were to be Fact not Fiction?”

“I do not understand, Monsieur.”

“Then let me explain. Idealism is a luxury we poor people can’t afford. If you should be forced into dishonour for bread, lives there a man that would dare blame you? To me you would be as good as the purest woman, even though you walk the streets. Nay! I’m not sure that you wouldn’t be better, because you would be a victim, a sacrifice, a martyr. No, you’re wrong, mademoiselle. I think you’re wrong.”

“It is easy to die; it must be ’ard to live like zat.”

“How lucky you find it so easy to die. Me, I’d rather be a live lackey than a dead demi-god. But let me tell you you won’t get much credit in this world for dying in the cause of virtue, and I have my doubts about the next. And it doesn’t seem to me to make much odds whether you die quickly, as you intended doing a little while ago, or whether you die slowly by hard work and poor living. Society’s going to do for you anyway. You’re Waste, that’s what you are. In every process there must be waste, even in the civilising one. You’re going to be swept into the rubbish heap pretty soon. Poor pitiful Waste! What do you mean to do now?”

Her face fell sullenly. She would not look at me any more, but she answered bravely enough.

“Me! Oh, I suppose I try again. Perhaps I starve. Perhaps I find work. Anyway, I fight.”

“What chance have you got—a poor physique, hard toil, bad air, cheap food. You’ll go on fighting till you fall, then no one will care. If it’s fighting you’re after, why don’t you fight Society, fight with your women’s weapons, your allure, your appeal to the worst in man. You can do it. Any woman can if she’s determined and forgets certain scruples. Do as I would in your case, as many men would if they had the cursed ill-luck to be women. Then, when you’re sixty you can turn round and have a pew in church, instead of rotting at thirty in Potter’s Field.”

“You advice me like zat?” I could feel that she shrank from me.

“Doesn’t it seem good, practical advice?”

“Suppose no one want me?”

“True. There’s many a woman guarding ever so jealously a jewel no man wants to steal. That’s almost more bitter than having it stolen. However, don’t you worry about that, there’s no need to.”

She raised her head which had been down-hung. Intently, oddly she looked at me.

“Will you take me?” she said suddenly.

“Me!” I laughed. “Why no! I’m speaking as one wastrel to another. How could I?”

“Would you if you could?”

“Well, er—I don’t think so. You see—I’m not that sort.”

“No, I knew you were not,” she said slowly; “you’re good man.”

“I’m not,” I protested indignantly. How one hates to be called “good”—especially if one is a woman.

“Yes, you are,” she insisted. Then she threw back her head with a certain fine pride, and the dark sea-blue eyes were unfathomable.

“You have saved my life. It is yours now. Will you not take me? I am good girl. I have always been serious, I have always been virtuous. I will work hard for you. I will help you while you are so poor; zen if one day you are become rich, famous, and you are tire of me, I will go away.”

I was taken aback. If there’s one thing worse than to be convicted of vice it’s to be convicted of virtue. I squirmed, stammered, shuffled.

“Well, you see I— Hang it all! somewhere in my make-up there’s that uncomfortable possession, a Puritan conscience. I’m sorry—let me consider.... Perhaps there’s another way.”

How terrible to a woman to have the best she has to offer refused; but the girl bore up bravely.

“What is it?” she asked, without any particular interest.

I was doing some rapid thinking. An idea had come into my head which startled me. It was an inspiration, a solution of a pressing problem. Swiftly I decided.

“To do as you suggest,” I said, “would be very wrong, and what’s worse, it would be crudely conventional. It is commonplace now in some society to live with a person without marrying them; the original thing’s to marry them. Well, will you marry me?”

She looked at me incredulously. I went on calmly.

“But for me, as you say, your troubles would by now have been over. In a way I’m responsible for your life. What’s to be done? I’m not old enough to adopt you, and to constitute myself your guardian would lay me open to uncharitable suspicion. From now on I know I shall be infernally worried about you. Well, the easiest way out of the difficulty seems to be to marry you, doesn’t it?”

“But you don’t know me,” she gasped.

“You’ve got ‘nothing on me’ there,” I said airily; “you don’t know me. That’s precisely what makes it so interesting. Any man can marry a woman he knows; it takes an original to marry one he doesn’t. But after all, has not the method some merit? We start with no illusions. There will be no eye-opening process, no finding our swans geese. The beauty of such a marriage is that we don’t entirely ring down the curtain on romance.”

“But—I have no money.”

“Neither have I. What does that matter? Any fool can marry if he’s got money; it takes a brave man to do it if he’s broke.”

“But—”

“Not another word. It’s all settled. I think it’s a splendid idea. We’ll be married to-morrow if possible. I’ll get a licence at once. By the way, what’s your name? It’s of no consequence, you know, but I fancy it’s necessary for the licence.”

“Anastasia Guinoval.”

“Thank you. Now I’ll take you to where you live, and you must accept a little money to satisfy your landlady. To-morrow I’ll call for you. Hold on a minute—as we’re affianced, seems to me we ought to kiss?”

“I—don’t know.”

“Yes, I believe it’s customary.” I pecked at her lightly in the dark. “Now, you understand we’re making a real sensible marriage, without any sentimental nonsense about it. You understand I’m not a sentimental man. I hate sentiment.”

“I understand,” she said doubtfully.

As we moved away, up there in the dark that great sonorous bell boomed the stroke of one. Only an hour, yet how busy had the fates been on my particular account! In what ludicrous ways had they worked out their design! On what trivial things does destiny seem to hinge! Ah! who shall say what is trivial?

On reaching my room my first act was to take up my half-finished letter to Mrs. Fitz. I read the words: “If ever we should find ourselves free to marry, you promised you would send for me.”

“Good!” I cried exultantly. “She will find herself free to marry all right, but I won’t; that is, I hope I won’t after to-morrow. Whoever could have guessed the motive behind my apparently rash proposal. To avoid one marriage I stake my chances on another. Well, that settles things as far as Mrs. Fitz is concerned. Ronnie and Lonnie, I defy you.”

So I tore my letter into small pieces with a vast satisfaction, and I was proceeding to tear also the luckless copy of the Gotham Gazette when I paused. I had not noticed that the fateful paragraph, begun near the bottom of a page, was continued on the next. Again I read:

“... when the nearest spectators could reach him to rescue him from his perilous position they found to their surprise that the man was dead....”

Quickly I turned over the page; then I gave a gasp, for this was the continuation:

“... to the world. The gallant captain had been imbibing not wisely but too well, and when aroused after some difficulty, claimed that he had a right to sleep there if he chose. It was only after much argument and resistance that he was finally persuaded to accompany an officer to the police station.”

“Of all the—”

Words failed me at this point. I plumped down on my chair and sat as if paralysed. And after all the captain was not dead—only dead drunk, and my brilliant effort to avoid marrying his widow had been entirely unnecessary. Then after all I was a fool.

Well, it was too late to find it out. At least I never went back on my word. I must go through with the other business.

“Anastasia Guinoval! Hum! maybe it’ll turn out all right. Time will show. Anyway—it will be a good chance to learn French.”

And with this comforting reflection I went to bed.

END OF BOOK I