Her new interest was immediately made apparent in her books, for her characters henceforth began to talk theology in season and out of season. At an earlier stage of her career, I submit, this would have missed her her public. But her reputation was by now secure: her annual novel was eagerly awaited by the "passionate few" whose suffrage alone fine writing can win. Besides, it was noticeable her asceticism never strayed far from the purlieus and issues of Mayfair. One got up from her books feeling that one had been in very fine company indeed. She had that affinity to the highly placed which is less snobbery, I believe, than a kind of perverse idealism. And, beneath all the pomp and circumstance, sorrow always worked regardless of earthly shows, and kept the balance true.
Such, as far as the world has any right to know her, was Althea Rees at the date I tried to make her Paul Ingram's earthly providence. I pleaded his cause, not perhaps as strongly as I might, because I wanted the man and his work to complete the impression for themselves. That they might do more—that in trying to work good I might be working mischief—was a thought that, I protest, never once occurred to me.
XVI
HOA-HAKA-NANA-IA
It doesn't much matter how early in the autumn we come back to London; upon our return we always find the season has stolen a march upon us. Paul arrived in town on a dark, rainy afternoon. The impatient, scowling skies were already beginning the ruin of the short-lived English summer. Beyond the railway terminus the streets, with their stream of jostling umbrellas, their straining horses and shiny-coated drivers, were both bewildering and disheartening. Victoria was full of belated holiday makers setting an anxious face seaward. And on all sides, from the railway announcements with which the walls of the vestibule were placarded, from the covers of the summer magazines that still heaped the book-stalls, from advertisements of soap and jam and pickles and liquors, girl faces simpered and ogled. Girls in punts, dabbling their hands in lilied water: sunburnt girls in orchards, carrying baskets filled with apples: languid girls in hammocks, with shapely ankles peeping discreetly from their frilled skirts: girls smiling from carriage windows, or standing with hounds in leash on windy moors—but always girls, always women. In some of these journals there might be food for thought or fruit of experience: here and there—though rarely—an author's name seemed earnest of this; but in every case, for the written word as for bottled mineral water or patent cereal, the lure was the same—some pretty, foolish face; something to excite and feed for a moment the idle desire of the eye. Paul, as he viewed these things biliously, wondered whether it were true after all, as his French captain had declared to him once with cursing and swearing, that the Anglo-Saxon was the most woman-ridden race in the world; and, alas! remembering how he himself had been employed during the last fortnight, a spasm of self-contempt contracted and hardened his heart. He felt degraded, commonplace, banal; caught in the toils of the delusion that has deposed woman from her proper place as man's helpmeet and propounds her, tricked and adorned and set on a pedestal, as his reward.
He put his baggage in the cloak-room, and made first of all for my lodgings in Pimlico. This was particularly unfortunate, as Mrs. McNaughten, deceived by the morning's fair promise, had driven me forth betimes, bidding me, under pain of her displeasure, which is no light threat, not to return till night, the while my room should be swept and scoured, "before the murk days comes, and a body canna tell dir-rt frae darkness." Scribbling a message in the narrow hall, while his umbrella made a pool upon its shabby oilcloth and Dulcinea, with pail and broom, ascended laboriously to her attack upon matter in the wrong place, Paul had an opportunity for contemplating the rewards of literature, the sort that does get into print. It cannot have been inspiriting.
His own rooms were in Cowley Street, Westminster. He approached them, through Broad Sanctuary, with the sense of expectancy that every one feels after even a short absence who nears the spot upon which the activities of his life converge. He had not left his French address—and so much can happen in a fortnight!
There was only one letter and a packet: the harvest of two weeks! The package contained his bank pass-book. He glanced at it hastily and tossed it aside. The letter was from America, from the lawyers who managed a slender inheritance that had devolved upon him some years ago, as a tardy act of justice, years after the foreclosure upon his mother's farm. As he read it, the blood left his cheeks under their superficial sunburn. He pocketed it, and made a hasty calculation upon his fingers—counting months perhaps—or even weeks. He looked round his sitting-room with hunted eyes. They were particularly pleasant quarters, these rooms of Ingram's, in a charming old early Georgian house behind the Abbey. Their windows had deep seats and looked across the cloistral calm of Cowley Street to similar quaint windows, curtained with art fabrics and with a hint of pottery and brass beyond. Actresses of the serious sort, journalists, an artist or two, one junior Cabinet Minister, were his neighbors. He was proud and fond of the old-world parlor—of its panelled walls, the slight list of its floor, its grotesque fire-back and grate. It had been his home now for two years; even the dust and stillness that lay on it after a fortnight's absence seemed consecrated—seemed his. All the books and most of the furniture was his own. It is marvellous how much wandering and uprooting the instinct of a home-making race will survive. As, give a couple of beavers in an exhibition tank a few logs, and watch the poor beasts start building!
He had a hasty lunch and went to the Museum. He read hard: he was too disturbed to write. In its untroubled atmosphere little by little his agitation left him. A pleasant sense of comradeship reached him from silent neighbors, many of whom had grown gray in the same thankless task. He felt he would always be able to breathe freely here. There was a respite after all, and projects would suggest themselves once his mind was at rest. Once it was at rest! For certain distractions must be put out of his way once and for all. He was sorry, truly sorry, for the girl who used to sit quietly beside him reading "Who's Who" or turning the leaves of some illustrated book—there, in the seat where the mad poet was mowing and scribbling this afternoon, but he was sorry for her only in the same impersonal sense that he was sorry for the woes with which the musty volume before him was filled:
"Old unhappy, far-off things