At the creak of chairs, Eric Lane buried himself in his paper, only looking up when the bull-necked, consequential young man and his lithe, decorative companion had sauntered languorously past, leaving in his nostrils an elusive hint of violets and in his memory a dissolving view of pearls, a gold bag, white gloves, a cloak tentatively martial and exquisitely neat shoes. Lady John he had never seen before; Carstairs he now remembered as a young man with too much chin and too little hair, intermittently to be found in London theatres; they had overlapped for a year or two at Oxford where Carstairs won a brief notoriety by removing the minute hand of the General Post Office clock every Sunday night throughout one term; twelve years in the diplomatic service had robbed him of irresponsibility without putting anything in its place. As they disappeared from sight, Eric threw his paper away and lighted a cigar. After long months of solitude, it was stimulating to hear how the world represented by Carstairs summarized and dismissed his contribution to the romantic Odyssey of Lady Barbara Neave.
He had not, himself, been able to dismiss it so easily; and, when he left England at the end of 1916, Eric was determined never to come back. His health was shattered; Dr. Gaisford bluntly threatened him with a sanatorium; and he needed distance and change of work to heal a bruised spirit. After lecturing in the United States, he travelled for six months in South America and started on an aimless and endless holiday in Japan. While he was in Tokio, he heard that Barbara was married. At a time when the German armies were pouring down on Paris, the news was telegraphed all over the world; and the press of Tokio, New York, Ottawa, Sydney and Calcutta gave her a column of description. Eric was dining with two men from the Embassy, and throughout the evening they discussed nothing else. When he first saw the headline: “Marriage of Lady Barbara Neave,” he fought for breath as though his heart had stopped; then, with slowly returning composure, he realized for the first time that finality had been achieved and that, in all the months when he was philosophizing and hardening his heart, he had been waiting for a fantastic miracle to happen, hoping to see Barbara, breathless and dusty from the train, coming into his hotel. The London telegram killed his faith in romance.
And the excited column of small type killed his faith in women, for Barbara had apparently walked into the street and married the first man that she saw....
“Who’s this Oakleigh?,” asked his host, squeezing the last drop of relish out of the story. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He’s a very nice fellow,” Eric found himself answering. Oakleigh henceforth was to have the stolen intoxication of glorying in Barbara when she was well and comforting her when she was ill, of seeing her great eyes change from mockery to tenderness and from tenderness to ecstasy; but Oakleigh could never have from her those fifteen fevered months when their hearts had beaten together... “I’ve known him ever since I was at Oxford. He used to be in the House; and then he ran a paper... He has a place in Ireland—”
“What they call ‘a suitable alliance’?,” suggested his host.
“Oh, very.”
“It’s rather a disappointing finish to her career...”
The gossiping discussion rambled on, introducing name after name of the men whom Lady Barbara had been expected to marry. Eric waited for his own and, when it was not cited, relapsed into reverie. He had received a letter that morning from his sister, telling him that she was engaged and asking whether he would be home in time for the wedding. If he had ever doubted, there was now no question of returning to England; he was too well known to be left in peace. The Oakleighs and Neaves, the Knightriders and Lorings, the Pentyres and Carstairs, the Maitlands and Poynters all moved in the same little set of three or four hundred people. Fifteen years before he had dreamed at Oxford of the day when he would burst upon their startled world and hold it captive; the dream had sustained him through the mortification of neglect and the despair of ill-health until of a sudden the reality threw his dream into shadow. In London, in Boston, in Tokio he was recognized in the street; to escape the fulfilment of his own prayers he had to travel by unfamiliar lines and hide himself in unknown hotels; for ultimate and enduring sanctuary he must retire to a land untouched by books and theatres.
After three months’ desultory wandering he returned to Tokio and booked a passage to China. Already his health was improving; and, if he could lose all touch with English ways of thought, he might begin to lose touch with himself, to shed his personality, almost to change his identity; upcountry it must be possible to find a civilization and scenery so strange that it would absorb him. As he left his hotel for the shipping office, he was handed a cable from his American agent: