A MARRYING MAN

BY G. B. STERN

London
NISBET & CO. LTD.
22 BERNERS STREET, W.

First Published in 1918

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

PANTOMIME
SEE-SAW
TWOS AND THREES
GRAND CHAIN

TO
OLIVE WADSLEY

CONTENTS

A MARRYING MAN

PART I

CHAPTER I

Kathleen Morrison, on her return to London, was not prepared for the empty, echoing house, the loud thud of her footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs, the ghostly appearance of the linen-shrouded furniture. Her brother and sister-in-law, with whom she made her home, usually abandoned the seaside towards the end of August; these were already the first days of September.

"Not before Tuesday week, Miss Kathleen," the one resentful housemaid-in-charge answered her enquiries; "the Missus said she'd written to you."

She had. Many times. But Kathleen, having once sent an assurance of her safety, together with a brief explanation of the circumstances of her escapade, very carefully refrained from opening the letters that came in reply. Not that family disapproval would for an instant have turned her from a decision to remain at least a month in Alpenruh; but the month itself was so strangely and perfectly apart from the sounding discordances of before and after, that she refused to mar its harmony by the possibility of a single jarring note. So the envelopes addressed in Edward's handwriting, and in Nelly's handwriting, accumulated in a neat little pile. Doubtless they contained "home-truths." Kathleen promised herself a careful perusal of these on the ensuing New Year's Eve, when from previous experience she anticipated a fit of depression so intense that nothing could possibly serve to augment it. Meanwhile, she was glad to find that Edward and Nelly, and Nelly's father, old Mr. Jeyne, and Nelly's two children, Muriel and Nicolas, and Nelly's nurse, and Nelly's cook, were still absent from the house in North Kensington.

The house was high and narrow-breasted, situated in a neighbourhood which, whatever the generation, had been fashionable with the generation before, so that its inhabitants mainly consisted of ghosts and grumblers. The grumblers were of the kind who religiously take their five weeks' holiday in the summer, and are firmly imbued with the immorality of leaving their homes at any other period of the year. Therefore North Kensington was now a deserted wilderness of drawn blinds and white-smocked house-painters, of spectral scaffoldings and forlornly prowling cats. The milkman's was an eerie cry at dawn; and at eve the German band blared mournfully to unresponsive areas. Kathleen trod softly from one empty room to another; was given her meals at eccentric hours, in unfamiliar parts of the house; shivered a little as she locked her front door at nights—how stiff they were, those bolts! and with what startling clangour they shot at last into their sockets!—and was wonderfully at peace. With a present entirely negative, with a future carefully unglanced at, she was free amidst the prevailing spells of silence to yield herself entirely to a memory still so fresh and near that it asked to be re-lived, caressed and handled, laid to sleep for the pleasure of bidding it wake again. Idly she wondered why it was that she did not miss Gareth more poignantly; why she was content to believe their idyll wholly a gift of thirty-one days which haphazard had capriciously flung them, that hot oily afternoon, on the wharf at Folkestone....

In company with Fräulein Gerhardt and Mademoiselle Lefranc, she had been shepherding a party of seven schoolgirls on an instructive trip to Switzerland. Gareth Albert Temple was one of the Society of Young Botanists, touring the Alps in search of specimens. And they had both missed the boat....

Thereafter, a headlong chase together across Europe in quest of their separate parties. A growing intimacy—"You must let me be of any assistance I can on your journey," the boy had remarked in his gentle courtly manner. He was not more than twenty-four; and good to look upon, with his wavy black hair and pleading dark eyes; eyes that were the only contradiction in a face compounded of strong curves, firm jaw and determined mouth and outjutting squarely-formed eyebrows.... Kathleen smiled tenderly enough at memory of his straight young comeliness. And was it incapacity or merely laziness on his part which had caused all the practical management of that fantastic continental scamper to lapse into her hands? management of times and trains and meals and foreign money and luggage at the Customs?... But she was accustomed to leadership, and she found a rare sweetness in Gareth's admiration of her competence; admiration which he mingled with an old-world romantic deference to a certain element of innocent and unprotected maidenhood which his upbringing seemed to take for granted even in a schoolmistress in her twenty-seventh year.

Twenty-seven!—and this was still the period of the late eighteen-nineties, when girlhood ended abruptly at thirty; when middle-age was supposed to begin at forty; and the intervening years were for the unmarried to learn their lesson of quiet resignation. Twenty-seven!—Kathleen was clutching hot-fingered at the moments, lest she should be left with empty hands. And the days ate at the years ... and she was going abroad in the company of nine females and the spirit of discontent.

... Gradually, a fretful eagerness to join up with her party, merged into a mischievous eagerness to avoid doing so; to prolong a little while, though by cheating and stealth, the charm of travelling a woman with a man by her side, as nature and tradition demanded. Folly, perhaps; but the sort of folly of which a girl—a very young and silly girl—would be capable.... As proof of her own capacity for such youth and folly, Kathleen welcomed the impulse; encouraged it. And then, just as it seemed impossible to stave off any longer the encounter with duty and discipline, fate had aided her with a genuine accident by which they had been shoved late on a rain-misted evening into the wrong train at the little Alpine station, and had been carried off to Alpenruh, instead of to Lauterbrunnen in the opposite direction; and had been forced to spend the night at the gold-brown châlet hotel. And the next morning was washed in vivid blue and sunshine; the snowy mountain peaks called for repetition of the thunderous saga of their names: Schreckhorn, Faulhorn, Wetterhorn, Finsteraarhorn!... And the tinkle of ascending cowbells among the mountains, duetted with the musical plash of cascade and rivulet; the mules champed and flicked their tails in the winding village street; the guides sat comfortably astride of the wall, and surveyed the round rickety tables outside the cafés, the bundles of walking-sticks and chamois-heads so prodigally displayed for sale; the pines wafted their resinous fragrance through the green-shuttered windows of the hotel; and down the polished wooden stairs, Gareth was awaiting her, and clear yellow honey for breakfast.... It was not a morning even to think of Fräulein Gerhardt and Mademoiselle Lefranc, and Elsie and Gwendolen and Kitty and Beatrice and Dora and Flo and Mary, doubtless angrily bewildered at this desertion of the English history and arithmetic teacher.

But Gareth had pleaded: "Let us stay here—just for to-day...."

Presently he confessed that on the latter part of their journey he had been taking the utmost care to avoid catching up with the Society of Young Botanists. Once he had even caught sight of them....

"I couldn't bear to end our good time. Can you forgive me for dragging you into this?"

Kathleen smiled—but made no counter confession. She let him think he was responsible for their daring escapade, because she was twenty-seven, and he twenty-four, and it gave him a fearful pleasure to think so.

Thus the affair had begun. Was she wrong in letting it take its course? Plenty of leisure now to regret, if regret were to be her portion.

No.... She was glad they had lingered on at Alpenruh; even when the brilliant fever of her youth at its zenith, the flame of reds and browns which she had inherited from an Indian grandmother, from whom had also been bequeathed her noiseless walk and the streak of buried fierceness in her nature, even when all this had rushed Gareth past all dreaming chivalry to a passion of strictly chivalrous adoration—even then she did not regret, in retrospect, having provided herself with this fortified memory against all future bitterness of self-reproach for wasting the years.

She did not for a second doubt that the episode was definitely at an end, and laid aside. Certainly, at parting, Gareth's hand had sought to detain hers in a lingering clasp; but beyond the actual "Good-bye, Kathleen," he had not put into words any desire to prolong the play after the curtain had fallen. Nor had she known till the present, how serenely one can dwell in the mellow afterglow of happiness, though summer be drawing to its end in the railinged squares of North Kensington.

A letter arrived, in Gareth's boldly uncharacteristic calligraphy. She withdrew the sheets lovingly enough from their envelope, as the postman's clattering passage retreated down the street.

"I want to thank you," thus the missive ran. "And I want to do it largely and wonderfully, with an effect of shouts and clarion-calls and crashing thunders, in case you should not understand how big a thing in my life our holiday together has been. And I want to do it delicately, in miniature, with a fairy paint-box, and a flute of reeds, and single raindrops pattering, that you may see how each separate second of your company was in itself perfection. But with all this, I can only just write 'thank you' with sober pen and ink, on plain white paper. And because it is you, you will know.

"Our holiday—yes, but I shall speak the word now according to its derivation: 'holy day.' Holy days, for us, Kathleen!

"I am shutting my eyes—which is why the lines have run crooked—and I can see the silly little wooden ink-pot châlets, the sun striping across the pink pine-stems, the foam and tumble of seven white cascades down the mountainside. I shall always see it; you have dowered the beggarman richly, queen Kathleen.

"Gareth."

The girl perused the quaint, rather formal sentences, with the feeling that just this was needed still to round off the incident completely. He had spoilt nothing, had sweetened still further the aftermath, and added to its fragrance. Well-pleased, she would have replaced the sheets in their envelope, when she noticed that she had overlooked on the last page yet another scribbled line; a postscript:

"When may I see you again?—G.A.D."

And suddenly the human man sprang alive to her. How often she had heard him putting the very same question; how often smiled at the absurd kink in his nature it revealed, a queer incapacity to take leave of her, be it for ever so slight a period of time, without the eager question: "When shall I see you again? When? Where? How?"... Seeking always to let one meeting overlap the next; no trust in chance or in management. "When shall I see you again?" The one phrase touched a spring that set free a whole warm gush of recollections. Of course he should see her again! She was impatient for his coming, wrote to him instantly a summons to visit her the very next evening.

At the far end of the dark narrow hall, was an outjutting ledge, hidden from view by the staircase. It was seated here that Kathleen awaited him, the expectant fire in her red-brown eyes quenched by the sombre lighting, her feet drumming impatiently against the wall, as she wondered if Gareth in North Kensington would be very different from Gareth in Alpenruh. She was guiltily conscious of having slipped on an evening-dress, something soft and clinging in moss-green. Glad, too, that Nelly was not present to comment on the fact.

It was an exciting vigil, listening for the crunch of footsteps, the sharp peal of the bell which would scatter stillness. And all her knowledge of its approach did not prevent a quick jump in her heart at the actual happening. Then she sat motionless, thinking of him on the other side of the door. Presently, muttering to herself, the disagreeable housemaid-in-charge opened to the visitor.

"Is Miss Morrison at home?"

"Yes, sir." Hannah left him standing while she departed in search. Then, with a leap and a laugh, Kathleen was before him.

"Isn't this fun?" She was radiant against her dull umber background. "Gareth, why don't you say something? Come in here."

"Here" was Edward's study, with swathed chairs, and chandeliers draped in a sheet. Kathleen had lit a pair of candles, but in the semi-obscurity he could form no impression of his surroundings. It might have been any house, anywhere. But he had a sensation that he ought to speak in whispers.

"Are you alone here?" and wondered whether, under those circumstances, he did not do wrong in coming? Which was absurd, considering Alpenruh. But North Kensington was different.

Before many minutes, she saw that he intended asking her to marry him, and rather feverishly sought to ward it off. The hushed room was a trap now, and the moss-green evening-gown an added menace. Gareth, quietly persistent, dodged all her bright and chatty openings, and succeeded at last in putting the question she dreaded.

"Will you, Kathleen?"

"Gareth, how do you see marriage?"

Astonished, he replied: "With you? As a fire-lit dream-come-true."

"Not with me. With anyone."

He drew her a series of charming, conventional pictures, steeped in a ruddy glow from the hearth of illusions; a child's laugh, a sundial in a garden, the flicker of lamplight on shelves of books, as needful accessories. He also mentioned, rather shyly, the illuminating spirit of love to lurk beneath outward trivialities; the joy of sharing evil and good alike; the flaming interest to be taken in each other's work, whatever that might chance to be. And he spoke of two as the only magical number in arithmetic; and threw in a Persian cat, to boot. And was silent. He had spoken earnestly and well; eloquence was at all times his strong point.

"Gareth."

"Yes, dear?"

"Do you care to know how I have learnt to see marriage?"

Gareth, in anticipation of her disclosure, shrank from it.

"Oh—please," he said. She mistook the appeal for assent.

"It's a clammy state of familiarity," thus Kathleen defied his fair visions; "familiarity of petty outward things that don't count. Breakfast-table intimacy, with the yolk from an eaten egg smeared yellow on the shell. Intimacy of letters: 'Who's your correspondent?' 'Who are you writing to?' Moving in lumps, undetachable, sticky; waiting about in the hall, and calling irritably up the stairs to know if the other will be long, instead of just—going. It's the shedding of all privacy; bursting into rooms without knocking: Thy room shall be my room! It's to hear a man's bath-water running in the morning, and to know exactly, by sounds, when he gets in and out. To be aware how many shirts he uses per week, because you count his dirty washing. Oh, if I loved a man, I shouldn't yearn for 'the tender privilege of darning his dear socks!' Rather keep him for ever remote, with the mystery still on him. But marriage offers the sight of unmade beds, use of the same piece of soap, pilgrimages to the same friends, the same question every evening: 'What have you been doing all day?' answer to be given in detail. Oh, Gareth, I'm sorry, I'm sorry; your pictures were ever so much prettier, but mine are true."

She paused for response. But the meaning of her tirade had percolated Gareth's mist-bound understanding not a whit. The outburst in itself struck him as harsh and ugly, quite out of keeping with the spirit in which a maiden should receive a declaration of love. She was spoiling something; petulantly he refused to recognize the necessity for its spoiling.

So he made no reply. And less vehemently she went on:

"You mustn't think that all this is because I'm cooped up with an unfortunate example. My brother and his wife are very fond of each other; what the neighbours would call an ideal pair. They see nothing of what I'm telling you; why should they? They're doing it all the time. But it's a mistake to be a perpetual onlooker at marriage when the couple are still young and in the throes. One's mother and father are different; one doesn't regard them as married, merely as parents. But I've lived most of my life a third in a family of three, and been robbed of the—glamour, you would call it, without getting anything in exchange, except a horror of wedded bliss, an utter horror of it. You mustn't ask me to be your wife, Gareth, because I'd be afraid; afraid of all that might happen to you and me; afraid, most of all, of seeing it happen."

The enshrouding linen draperies were removed from the house in North Kensington, revealing a taste for furnishing of which the governing principle had obviously been: "Here is a space—fill it!"

For Mrs. Edward Morrison had written, announcing the return of the family:

"We shall be back on Tuesday in time for supper. It must be awful for you alone in the empty house—especially now!"

Then a few advance orders respecting milk to be taken in, and a chicken to be roasted; an ecstatic description of Nicolas in bathing-drawers; and "Your loving sister, Nelly."

There were only two words in the epistle which contained matter for reflection: "especially now."...

Kathleen spent profitably her remaining days of golden solitude in visualizing the long weeks and months to come, when she could no more enter a room with the comfortable security of finding it untenanted.

For soon the Winter-fear would find her out.

An old enemy; she knew it well. It came, inevitable, monotonous, with the fall of the first leaf, the flicker of the first fire. "It's not warm enough for Nicolas without a coat," said Nelly; that was one of the heralds. There were many others. Always it came. The waiting for it was almost the worst. Winter-fear ... oh, the furious beating clenched resentment, resentment of a thousand Indian forefathers, that Kathleen harboured against the creeping cold. Cold that bit. Cold that gnawed. Cold that ached.

Winter-fear brought a special horror to the house in North Kensington. Concentration. Nelly, liberal enough in most matters, had, like all housewives, a special kink; she economized in coals. Except in cases of illness, in the dining-room only was a fire kept alight. And slowly, day by day, as the increasing cold drove them inwards, the entire family concentrated round this fire. Here they worked and read and talked and ate, huddled together in the semicircle of warmth. Kathleen, in an occasional frantic longing for solitude, would break away; retire to her chilly bedroom or to the raw streets, both harbours of refuge in the summer months. Always, numbed to the bone, she was compelled to surrender, return to the dining-room community—till April with soft warm fingers should come to release her.

A minor horror called cold-in-the-head. Nicolas, by three ominous sneezes, would give the sign; following which, every member of the household was stricken in turn, or in chorus; sometimes a solitary sufferer; sometimes a veritable orchestra of coughs and sniffs and trumpetings and throat-clearings. The talk would be all of handkerchiefs and the lack of hot water; and the faces round the dining-room fire would swell into a circle of grotesque caricatures, blotched, and red-eyed, and hideous. No respite, none! and seven long months of it to be faced.

"... We shall be back on Tuesday"—and already the ghost of Nelly was calling over the banisters for someone to fasten her frock—how the hooks would persist in catching those irritating stray hairs at the back of the neck! Already Edward was turning on the bath-taps; Muriel practising for two hours after tea; Nicolas spurting affection with a jammy mouth. Thus the members of her family, when they finally did return, were by anticipation distorted from quite ordinary figures to horrible marionettes whose slightest action set every nerve itching.

"Well, Katty dear," affectionately Nelly embraced her sister-in-law in the hall, calling her by the name most disliked; "here we are, you see."

Kathleen did see.

She saw also that Edward avoided her eyes, and that Nelly was nervous; while Muriel, aged nine, regarded her aunt curiously, as having been for many meals past the object of horrified conversation on the part of the elders.

Nicolas alone seemed unaware of any tension in the atmosphere. Up the stairs he staggered, a miniature Falstaff; laden to the ground by the burden of his own flesh, and, in addition, an iron spade, a wooden spade, a fishing-net, and two tin pails; relics of summer joys that were fled. Kathleen went to his assistance, listening sympathetically to his breathless explanations of how he wouldn't leave them behind for the landlady's little girl; Kathleen gathered that the landlady's little girl had always cast an eye of appropriation on that iron spade.

"An' I said: 'You won't have it, never!' An' I hit her knees wiv it." Nicolas collapsed triumphantly on the nursery floor; he was evidently a firm believer in the methods of the cave-man.

Kathleen rather liked Nicolas, despite jamminess. His years were five, and his voice was fat. When poked, he gurgled. Once indeed she had been moved to embrace him tenderly, to which moment his mother had unfortunately been witness. Kathleen's subsequent existence was spent in striving to correct the misapprehension that she possessed the maternal instinct. Nicolas had to suffer.

On the other hand, Muriel was no favourite. There was that small matter of practising to account for it; still more, the fact that she was a younger pupil at the establishment where her aunt was installed as teacher of history and arithmetic. From the schoolgirl point of view, this latter condition of things opened up vast fields of thought. Muriel, very neat about the legs and mind, was particularly concerned with the ethics of the situation. To be intimately connected with Authority was an awkwardness to which none of her mates were exposed, and involved a special code of law.

Was it a matter to be bragged about, for instance, or relegated to a shamed obscurity? What was the precise moment every day when careless familiarity must yield to awed respect, and vice versa? Was she justified in selling (for J nibs) details of Kathleen's home existence to Kathleen's infatuated adorers? Or did this come under the category of "hateful mean?" How could one avoid walking to school in company with Authority, when she and Authority left the same house at the same moment, bound in the same direction? In what spirit was punishment to be received, when she who punished had that morning been reprimanded before one's very eyes, for Encouraging the Cat? Above all, what was the good of striving for the first place in an exam. when you know jolly well it will be denied you—"for fear of being accused of showing favouritism"?

Muriel pondered a great deal on all this. She was an earnest child.

The prevailing attitude of condemnation-kindly-suspended-till-after-meals was responsible for a certain amount of strain at the first reunion of "happy family" round the supper-table. Nelly talked a great deal of their holiday in Felixstowe, and not at all of Kathleen's holiday in Alpenruh. And Edward again proved his claim to the old and ancient order of Salt-cellar Strategists, by fighting out an entire minor campaign then raging in the Balkans, with the simple aid of a cruet-stand, two knives, a spoon, a fork, a spreading stain of mulberry juice ("This is Albania, d'you see, Nelly?") and the sauce-boat. There was no topic of the hour that Edward could not illustrate with the assistance of these homely vessels, be the subject of his demonstration a railway accident, a mechanical invention, or the defence of Troy.

Having annihilated Montenegro and the chicken at the same time, he pushed back his chair, and remarked ponderously: "I should like a few minutes with you in the study, Kath, if you're not too busy."

"... Well?" Nelly queried eagerly, half an hour later, on finding her husband alone.

"Can't make head or tail of it," said Edward, very angry. "Either Kath is mad or I am."

Nelly supplied the necessary assurances.

"Well, but she says she won't marry him. Now what do you think of that?" The question was a mere form; Edward was aware what his wife thought of "that," and of everything else; to which satisfactory state of things might be attributed his domestic happiness.

"I've been very tactful," continued the head of the house; "very tactful and very lenient. I'm broad-minded, as you know."

"Yes. So am I, of course. But, Neddy, you must have bullied her. And you promised not to. Remember," and Nelly lowered her face, "she hasn't got a mother."

"Nor have I," crossly. "The same mother. That by no means explains her extraordinary statement that she doesn't want to marry this fellow who has"—he hesitated between "compromised" and "seduced," then discarded both in favour of—"led her astray."

"And a nice sort of a blackguard he must be," added indignant brotherhood. "Not want to marry him indeed! I should like to know why?" unconscious of anything contradictory in his explosive phrases.

But enlightenment had visited his wife, and her eyes brimmed with tears.

"Oh, poor Katty ... poor darling! I must go to her at once. Neddy, can't you see——" She paused on her hurrying mission of comfort to fling an aphorism of unwonted daring and brilliance at the head of her liege lord.

"It takes two to make a pair," said Nelly, and departed.

Slowly Edward Morrison grasped her meaning. Slowly, too, he grasped the fact that here was a perfectly unsubtle problem, to be attacked with a delightfully simple weapon—the horsewhip. And the soul of Edward Morrison was glad within him. That his sister should have sinned was terrible indeed; but not so terrible as that his sister should have new-fangled notions.

"'Pon my word, Nelly is a remarkable woman!"

The remarkable woman was at the moment mounting the stairs towards the bedrooms. Nelly Morrison, when unwed, had been known as the "Belle of Clapton," which over and beyond its reminiscence of pleasure-steamer, had also had a deteriorating effect upon her brains. Otherwise, she was a good-natured little soul, genuinely fond of her sister-in-law, and very anxious always that Kathleen should "feel that this is really her home." In furtherance of which desire, it was her habit to make Kathleen's room bright with flowers; flowers everywhere, on the dressing-table, amongst the ink and pens, on the window-sills, in the washstand-basin. She held now in her hand some half-wilted marguerites, symbols of comfort about as adequate as her husband's contemplated horsewhip of righteousness.

The room was in darkness when Nelly entered on tiptoe—and without knocking:

"Katty, are you in bed?"

Kathleen did not reply; drew the sheet close up to her burning cheeks. What a mess, what an unendurable mess these people were making of her days of enchantment. Perhaps if she did not move, Nelly would think her asleep, and go away. But a slight catch in the breath betrayed her wakefulness.

Nelly groped her way to the bed; felt for the other's hand.

"Katty, are you crying?"

No answer.

"Katty dear, won't he marry you? Is that it? Oh, Katty, I'm so sorry...."

CHAPTER II

"I looked on you as a youngster up till now," Mr. Temple said. He did not explain what were the circumstances which had shocked him into a change of opinion; but went on, in the heavy paternal voice: "You've got to shove your way, my lad. You've been playing at life; university education, and books and travel and this and that ... I've spoilt you. No wonder your father's business wasn't good enough for you. Well—I'm not a tyrant; I raised no objections to your starting on the architect line instead. But that wasn't good enough either—though goodness knows you talked enough about the responsibility of turning cities into things of beauty and form...." He broke off: "And now here you are!"

"'Not architect, artist, nor man!'" Gareth misquoted from the immortal Pecksniff.

Mr. Temple could not repress a smile of recognition. Dickens was cultivated, read aloud, assiduously, in the large handsome parlour above the chemist's shop at Paddington. Chemist's establishment, or dispensary, Mr. Temple would have preferred it to be called. For he was a chemist of a most refined and superior order, and employed two assistants and a boy; nor was the shop on the street-level, but up a broad flight of stone steps, indicated by a single ruby lamp at their base; which caused Mr. Temple the occasional illusion that he was a surgeon. He might with equal reason have thought himself a signalman.

Nevertheless, if Gareth imagined that by so simple an expedient as the mention of his father's favourite author, he could divert the threatened lecture on his own misdoings, he was mistaken. On receipt of a letter from William Payne, President of the Society of Young Botanists, officially announcing that Gareth had abandoned his holiday with the S.Y.B., in order to spend a month in sole company of a young female, Mr. Temple had at first been inclined to secret pride at his only son's first sowing of this very gentlemanly wild oat. He had discussed the matter with his wife—with considerable delicacy, be sure; for he could never quite forget that she was a gentlewoman, and above him in station: Miss Lucy Jamieson, before he had married her; governess to a family of consequence in the sleepy little country town where he had first "practised" before coming to London. Her opinions, therefore, influenced him more than he was prepared to acknowledge. And his present reproaches were the direct outcome of his change of mental attitude: If my son is old enough to incur responsibilities, he is old enough to be in a material position to discharge them....

"You'll come into all the money later on. 'Tisn't that I grudge your allowance, either. But I want to see what stuff you're made of."

"I don't believe I'm made of any stuff," Gareth confessed desperately.

Mr. Temple planted his hands deep in his pockets, and surveyed his offspring with disapproval.

"There's no room in the world for shirkers. The world wants men. You've had things made too easy. The world wants you to stand on your own legs, not on your father's shoulders. It's the law of the world that the weakest go to the wall and the strongest come out on top."

Gareth began to hate the world, as represented by his father's weighty platitudes. Not for one instant did he attempt to storm the barricade of years, and force his own point of view upon the old gentleman's reluctant sight. The remainder of the lecture rendered the fact patent that it henceforth devolved upon him to renounce his dreaming peace, his glamorous aspirations, and to do battle with the universe.... How he wished he had been a girl, and thus absolved from such duty.

And yet he had met girls by the score who had wanted to be men. Men!—the thickness of their understanding; the dense fibres they put out, without one sensitive tingle.... "You've got to shove your way, my lad!"—there it was again, his father's pet catch-phrase. It was hideous and hot—to shove. Oh, the hush and coolness and harmony of the woman's part; she might enjoy colours, and soft materials, and dreams, tears even, without a reproach. And when love came along, the wonder of being besieged and of yielding.... Someone afterwards and always, to clear her way, give her leisure and firelight. And suddenly came a vision of Kathleen with a blade in her hand that flashed this way and that, while she cut a path through the world, for him to tread in her wake....

The vision passed. But so intent had he been on it, that he missed his father's final hint of what was expected of him with regard to his recent conduct, on which, since his return from Switzerland, a discreet silence had been preserved. "We'll talk of that later on, when you've found your feet a bit!"

Gareth carried his aggrievements and his visions in a confused heap to the parlour, where he knew his mother would at this time be sitting, with her knitting in the lap of her smoke-grey silk dress, while she waited for Jane to draw the blinds and trim the wicks. He had an affection for the Confidence Hour, when the lamplighter was on his magical round, and Mr. Temple still busy in the dispensary below; an affection that dated from the days of his early childhood; when she would tell long sweet stirring tales from the "Idylls of the King" to a little round-eyed boy as yet unprotected by the dawn of reason. His very name he owed to a gentle fervour on her part for all matters appertaining to the Poet Laureate, and to chivalry, and to the Knights of Arthur's Round Table. It had been her wont to name him, half playfully, half wistfully, her "youngest knight."... Glancing across at his absorbed face, she wondered now how many of her teachings could be relied on at this crisis to bear fruit.

"Gareth, when are you going to bring my new daughter home to me?"

He smiled, amused at the suddenness of her onslaught upon his reverie. "Mother dear, what on earth do you mean?"

"Don't you think it time, my boy, that you told me all about it?" She held out a tentative hand; a very white and delicate hand, half covered by the falling lace ruffles of her sleeve; on her bright brown hair she wore a lace cap to match the ruffles; and at her throat a round cameo brooch secured the fleecy white shawl. Mrs. Temple was very pleasant to look upon; and her soft voice fell soothingly upon Gareth's hearing, jarred by his father's ponderous repetitions. He crossed the room, and seated himself upon the arm of her chair; while he played with her ball of knitting-silk.

"Do you want me to tell you about ... Kathleen, mother?"

"Is she pretty?" cunningly drawing him out. "I once had a pupil called Kathleen; she was Irish, and had blue eyes and black hair. Has your Kathleen blue eyes?" Purposely she leant rich stress on the possessive pronoun; he must be made to feel from the start that she did not regard the girl from the traditional mother's standpoint of "designing female," but with the deeper tenderness that is bred of understanding. She could trust her boy to love wisely even when he had acted foolishly.

Gareth tried to visualize Kathleen on the occasion most vivid to his memory, when flushed and radiant she had sprung before him from the gloomy passage of the house in North Kensington.

"Her eyes are dark," he said at length, slowly. "Not hard darkness, you know, but the brown of water in heavy shadow; and the brows are very close above them. She walks as if her feet were bare. Her skin is lovely, rich dusky colours, olive and geranium red." This last, mindful of his mother's weak point: "A true lady, Gareth, is always particular about her complexion and hands."

Bit by bit, led by artfully inserted queries, he related the whole chain of events; throwing in also as much as he knew of Kathleen's birth, relations, and conditions of life generally. He did not mention his visit to North Kensington.

"Go on, dear."

"There's no more to say, mother."

"Yes, Gareth, there is something more." Suddenly her tones rang out clear and accusing: "I'm waiting to hear that you are prepared to make the poor girl your wife."

Gareth was stricken dumb at thus finding himself thrust into the rôle of villain and betrayer. Before he could sufficiently collect himself for speech, Mrs. Temple went on, her voice trembling a little in genuine emotion:

"Oh, my dear, my dear, I know how it is with you; you are growing into a man with a man's ideas. Your companions have been telling you that chivalry is 'played out,' food only for old women and romantic girls and molly-coddles. Believe me, dear, it isn't so. Chivalry and honour are not weaknesses to be ashamed of. They are what in the olden days made a knight strongest: strong in battle, strong in love. Oh, Gareth, there are so many in the world to help a woman's tears to flow; don't join their ranks. Don't take up with this modern poisonous notion of living only for the gratification of the ... senses——" The white unwrinkled cheeks of the speaker blushed a faint rose at this use of a word offensive to her. "Have you forgotten the tales I used to tell you? Of Arthur and his queen; of Pelleas and Ettarre; Galahad, the maiden knight, the quest of Percivale; Launcelot and Elaine. Little son, these legends and songs are valuable only for their symbolic meaning. A damsel on a charger, a knight supporting her with his arm, the spirit of the picture exists equally without the steed and armour. And when you are an old white-haired man, my darling, I want you to be able to say, 'God helping me, I have never wronged a woman that I did not strive to put it right.' How are you to speak those words when the poor frightened child who loved you only too well, is left to fight her battles alone? There is only one way of righting that wrong, Gareth; and the way lies through a golden wedding-ring."

Gareth could not suppress a faint stirring of amusement at the fancy portrait of Kathleen's timorous anguish. But at the same time, he was genuinely touched and stirred by his mother's generous pleadings, by the tears he saw dimming her usually placid eyes.

Slipping an affectionate arm around her shoulders: "Mother dear," he said; "look at me—straight up at me. That's right. I've wronged no one, do you understand? I'm not that sort of fellow, thanks to you. I have asked Kathleen to be my wife. She refused."

"Refused?" incredulously.

"Yes."

"Impossible."

Mrs. Temple, outwardly so malleable, was a determined little woman, and once her brain struck out on a certain line it was a matter of some difficulty to divert it. Gareth made an effort.

"You see, mother, she's not at all the sort of silly helpless girl you imagine her. She knew what she was doing. She's free, and—and—I told you she walked as if her feet were bare; that's got to do with it, somehow. She doesn't want to marry."

But in his mother's scheme of things, girls did not refuse offers of marriage, especially under existing circumstances. Nor was it at that period, the close of the eighteen-nineties, as usual an occurrence as later.

For a moment she was silent, brain and knitting-needles bright and busy. Illumination came, and with it soft amusement at his denseness:

"O my youngest knight, you are younger even than I thought. Did you allow nothing for her pride, her delicacy? How clearly did you betray that it was a matter of duty that prompted your offer? Of course she drew back! What could you expect? She thinks she has cheapened herself in your sight; she thinks—you men, you are born blunderers, the best of you."

In an ecstasy of psychological comprehension she proceeded to reveal the intimate workings of Kathleen's mind, which led to refusal of Gareth's offer. Revealed them in fashion so plausible and withal so subtle that the analysis partook of the nature of a miracle.

It was only a pity that she happened to be even further adrift in her estimate of Kathleen as a clinging three-volume-novel heroine, than had been Nelly in her vision of Gareth as a gay deceiver.

But Gareth was impressed. He supposed it took a woman to understand a woman. Moreover, viewed in the natural light of things, the Kathleen he was striving to explain to his mother seemed improbable, not to say absurd. He withdrew to his own room to think things over.

After his departure Mrs. Temple let drop her knitting and sat a little while inactive and musing. It had cost something to be loyal to the ideals with which she had striven to inculcate her son, that he should not ever be responsible for suffering. For despite her brave words, she did not want Gareth to bring home a wife. What mother does?

Gareth lounged at his open window, and smoked a cigarette, and saw the moon washing Paddington in silver, and gave himself up to a course of clear hard logical thinking. His methods of thought left his brain very much in the state of a girl's bedroom when in a hurry she has dressed for the dance. That is to say, he pulled out a vast quantity of reflections from the drawers where they had lain hidden; tumbled them over the floor, and looked at them in some amaze at their multitude and variety.

His mother's explanations had smoothed for him the plumage of peace, sadly ruffled by Kathleen's startling mood of the day before. That her refusal to espouse him was due to pride—of the wounded-stag order—over-sensitiveness, shame even, was an attitude he could well understand, and combat with his shield and buckler. His shield and buckler, like Nelly's marguerites and Edward's horsewhip, were of little avail in forcing a way against what the last-named had termed "new-fangled notions."

But below in the stuffy little sitting-room, with its horsehair furniture, its framed and faded daguerreotypes of long-dead relatives, its wool antimacassars, and painted firescreens, and shelves of Dickens' works complete in seventeen volumes, the vision had come alive again; familiar truths respecting maiden's tears and knighthood's redress, slipped back into their old places.

"... She thinks she has cheapened herself in your eyes"—and chivalry tingled to clasp a lance.

"... Cheapened herself." Gravely, steadfastly, the lad vowed himself to the removal of that misconception. Marry her? Of course he would marry her ... and with that a creeping uneasy sensation of helplessness, of unseen pressure.

The objects scattering his brain in disorderly confusion grew blurred and indistinguishable.... He was drifting down stream, nearer and nearer to the grey borders of sleep.

"You've got to shove your own way, my lad——!"

Fear jogged his elbow, and awoke him to the window-sill; to Paddington, moonlit and unsubstantial; to the "Happy Warrior" framed above his bed; to the knowledge of his own utter inefficiency ever to pull desire to its successful fulfilment. A liquidity of purpose, as though the moral gelatine had been omitted from his composition. Hence his terror of realities, of "shove," of anything that might chance to drag to light his hidden weakness. Hence his longing for the vanished enchantment of Alpenruh, whither he had been borne as in some strange dream, without his own volition or denial. Hence his illusion that the perpetual presence of Kathleen would again and for ever restore to him the lost lotus-spell. Kathleen should marry him. In a spurt of resolution, he vowed in this one matter, if never again, he would beat down the questionings and hesitations of his soul, beat down opposition, beat down difficulty—even as she herself had taught him. Yes, that was the goad: her possession of just that gift he lacked, the power to do. Did he lack it, or only think he did? This accomplishment should be the test. Kathleen should marry him! Gareth was exultant in his new strength, as a man who had drunk red wines. His determination survived sleep, survived the sobriety of morning, sent him with martial tread and squared jaw to the house in North Kensington.

Kathleen was out; would be out to lunch. A temporary check. "Tell Miss Morrison I shall call at six o'clock," in tones of such ringing valour that the maid regarded him in astonishment. How could she know he was out on the quest, his eyes on the hill-tops and his head among the stars, slaying monsters and enchanters as he went? How was she to recognize herself as a minor monster? Nevertheless, in unconscious spite of him, she forgot to deliver the message. Gareth, on his arrival at five minutes to six, impatience having outleapt exactitude, was shown into the dining-room, ruddily illuminated by its first fire of the season. Kathleen had improved the occasion by shampooing her hair, and was now squatting on her heels before the hearth, holding up the long wet strands to the blaze. Nelly sewing; and Muriel reading "Little Women"; the aged grandfather prone on the floor protesting feebly while Nicolas stamped on his chest: "Mustn't say nuffing, Granpa—you're dead!" "But I'm not dead!" "You are, you are, you are!" "I'm not dead," repeated Mr. Jeyne, who really might have been expected to know best—all this made a picture calculated to reduce the crusty bachelor of tradition to tears of loneliness and envy. Gareth's abrupt entrance caused some commotion, and there ensued a great deal of business with chairs and introductions. Nelly was not sure whether she ought to look as if she knew all about everything, or nothing about anything. She telegraphed for her cue to Kathleen, who scornfully withheld it. For her the situation throbbed with that sensitive and unnecessary agony peculiar only to a girl on witnessing the advent of her man into the family circle. She did not know of which to be most ashamed: Nelly in the eyes of Gareth, or Gareth in the eyes of Nelly. Kathleen hated that he should see her thus placed, and off her guard; hated the circulating undercurrents: "Who the dooce is it?" in Mr. Jeyne's astonished eyebrows, and: "Take off your pinafore, Nicky," signalled from Muriel; hated herself for minding that the room was untidy, and two of Nicolas's handkerchiefs upon the carpet; above all, hated Gareth, as the cause of her discomfort. Why had he come? And what had happened to him that he should persist in throwing her those glances of glad triumph? He was talking very fast and easily, and his general bearing exactly resembled the fascinating blackguard of Nelly's expectations. Unconsciously, he exuded a buoyant challenge to the world at large; the atmosphere about him quivered and vibrated with something that was not of North Kensington nor yet of any other neighbourhood farther from the clouds than Valhalla itself; for he knew even in his intoxication that if he once paused, the old paralysing distrust would creep on him again and render him powerless—if it were once given a chance in this breathless onrush of speech and movement.

For this was his day of days indeed; something had happened between his first and second visit here, to convince him that enchantment was on his side.... He would tell Kathleen presently—when these people should leave them alone!

Edward's latchkey was heard grating in the lock, and Nelly flew out to warn him of the visitor. "And Neddy, shall I ask him to supper?"

"Look here," Edward protested in loud and distinct whispers, "we can't sit down with a fellow who——"

"Oh, hush, Neddy!"

And Gareth's mouth twitched whimsically in the direction of Kathleen. More Indian than ever did she look, sullen, crouching, her face framed in the shining hanks of black hair lying straight over her shoulders and down to her waist. Very unlike his radiant comrade of Alpenruh. Perhaps she had been right when she spoke of the destroying effects of intimate surroundings.

"All right, I'll be reasonable," grumbled Edward, on the threshold.

Edward was a man of his word; and though an occasional hint of "my sister's honour" slipped into his manner, he hovered for the most part between dignified-host and benevolent-cleric.

Gareth thought the Morrison family rather nice, considering; and accepted the invitation to supper: "If you don't mind taking us as we are," said Nelly, and retired to supervise culinary operations. Presently her voice was heard summoning Muriel and Nicolas.

"Yes, but Mummie, why——?"

"Because I say so, darling."

"Yes, but it isn't nearly——"

"Never mind. Come along. Ask Aunty Katty if she will come to the nursery presently to tuck you up."

Now or never, thought Nelly, was Kathleen's chance to display the suspected Maternal Instinct to the best advantage. But Nicolas and Kathleen, joint rebels against Nelly's schemes, gazed sulkily at one another, and parted with a cold good night.

"Excuse me, will you?" said Edward, rising; "I'm badly in need of a wash. City dirt, you know." He also quitted the dining-room. He had received his instructions. Obviously Nelly cherished hopes that a disgraceful episode might yet be decently wound up.

One swift glance convinced Gareth that old Mr. Jeyne was fast asleep in his corner.

"Kathleen—I've had a most wonderful stroke of good luck. I've found a job. The kind of job that I've dreamt of all my life. The job that lay east of the sun and west of the moon; at the end of the rainbow; over the hills and far away. And only yesterday I was disinherited. Yes, really, my father cast me off ... said I should never be heir to those huge glass bottles, red and blue and yellow, that fill up his shop-window.... I did so want them for my own when I was a kid. Never mind, fortune helps those who don't help themselves ... and I put my faith in the fairy-tales. How would Whittington have fared without faith in his Cat? Tell me that. Or Jack without faith in his Beanstalk——?"

"Or Aladdin without faith in his uncle?" insinuated Kathleen unkindly.

"It was all through you, Kathleen. Just because you weren't at home this morning; and I was restless; and went for a drive on top of an omnibus; and my new job tumbled from the clouds, and I've brought it home in my pocket." He produced a catalogue of Messrs. Dale and Dawson's Autumn publications; educational, historical, and general; fiction, poetry, belles-lettres; Henrietta Street, Covent Garden; and 48 Frederick Street, Glasgow. This he handed to Kathleen as if it were a talisman of rarest powers. She examined it, bewildered; but rather loving him in his mood of boyish enthusiasm....

"They've offered me the post of reader," condescending to simple language for pity of her perplexity. Then he was off again, past recall, drunk with ether, spurring his winged-horse ever faster on its empyreal flights.

"Books. Just nothing but books. From dawn till dusk, books. Books all around me, lining my life. Books in the making. Books my trade. The beginning and end of things, books. Great walls of them, shutting out real things, concrete things, ugly things, noisy things; advertisements and fathers and botanists. Delving continually into a thousand imaginations, treasure-finding; genius-hunting; word-juggling. Can you draw pictures from words? I can. 'Glamour,' for instance. Glamour ... and something elfin, with misty wings, scattering gold-dust; and part of it clings to your eyelashes. That's glamour. And 'fantastic' has a leap about it, and the flutter of rags, and pipes—yes, a figure with a pointed cap, playing on a pipe. You've never seen me gloating over my collection of books ... and every time I add one to the number, counting over all the old ones again ... handling them—the dears! And now to be permitted to make a living out of books—yes, actually; to scoop silver from a moonbeam, spin an income from a cobweb, seek sovereigns in a sea-shell. And there's my own book, too—the one I mean to write; did I ever tell you about it? How I shall be able to write now! My book! Other people's books——!" He stopped for sheer want of breath.

"And—you picked up all this on an omnibus?" eagerly. It was impossible to persist in any sort of gloom in opposition to his charming nonsense.

"Bound for Banbury Cross," Gareth explained, very seriously. "And there came a big spider and sat down beside me ... no, that doesn't rhyme. And anyway it wasn't a spider, though he looked remarkably like one."

"Who did?"

"Old Mr. Dale; Mark Dale, my Uncle Wilfred's crony. The late uncle from whom I'm supposed to inherit my scholarly tastes. I told him my troubles, for all the world as if he were a golden carp or a blue frog or a singing-tree, or some such traditional confidant. We got to talking about books; he put a lot of questions; I acquitted myself fairly well;—and then he suddenly informed me that one of the regular readers for his firm had given notice that morning, and would I care to take his place? Would I care.... And that things should happen like that for me! You should have heard my father yesterday.... And, Kathleen ... dear——" Both her hands in his now. No avail to struggle or sulk. Gareth was being masterful. Gareth was being manly. Gareth was carrying a woman by storm. And Gareth was enjoying it, intoxicated by this novel sense of power and success. He had borrowed her weapons of strength, and believed them to be his own.

"Kathleen, it has got to be. All you said the other night may be true enough for other people—it will be different for us. We're not going to lose now what we found in Alpenruh. And no one can give it to me but you; no one can give it to you but me. It was the ether of Paradise, of El Dorado we breathed—and by God! we'll breathe it now for the rest of our lives." He swept the hair from her face, that she might have no excuse for avoiding his triumphant gaze. "Our lives, Kathleen!"

She said: "I can't—no, I won't marry you, Gareth."

But he only laughed; for she had made no attempt to stir from his arms.

PART II

CHAPTER I

"Good-bye, Kathleen; no, I won't forget about the fish." Gareth Temple ran down the steps of Pacific Villa, and swung the gate behind him. He carried under his arm a bundle of manuscript, which he had been examining the evening before. When he reached the office, more manuscript would be awaiting him. For he was still a reader of books. Three years ago he had transferred his services from Messrs. Dale and Dawson to the newer firm of Leslie Campbell. That was all the change of fortune which sixteen years had brought about.

Campbell had himself been a reader at Dale and Dawson, publishers. An excitable and energetic little Scotsman with no prudent instincts whatsoever, he set up business in a third-floor room above the bustling offices of a popular magazine. Assets: Four hundred pounds capital, and the assistance of one impertinent small boy. Invisible asset, a soul that was an infallible touchstone for genius. Gradually he made himself a name for the publication of works by that brilliant intolerant set of young writers who flourished under the banners of Impressionism, Futurism, Iconoclasm, Realism and Super-Realism, New Thought and Modern Decadence, with equal pleasure and superiority. Presently, and without need to reproach himself with any pandering to popular taste, he was able to boast an inner room to his offices; and added to his staff Gareth Temple and Guy Burnett, in capacities of reader and confidential clerk. Nevertheless, the firm's treasury continued to be fed for the most part on Campbell's enthusiasm; till, by way of steadying himself, he took into partnership Vincent Alexander, lately an undergraduate of Balliol; who, frigid and level-headed, succeeded by sheer weight of his twenty-five imperturbable years, in setting a limit to the indecent exuberances of Campbell's middle-age.

Then Graham Carr wrote "Piccadilly." And the firm began to prosper.

Gareth turned off the Strand, up a by-street, till he came to a shop-window flaunting innumerable replicas of the July number of "The Blue Sky"; design consisting of a smiling maiden running precariously along a rainbow, and leading a peacock on a red ribbon. He passed through a side-entrance and up a wooden stairway, till confronted by the familiar black lettering: "Leslie Campbell, Publisher," on an opaque glass door. Then he heard the quick pattering trip of Mr. Campbell on the stairs behind him; and waited, holding the door open.

"Thank ye, Temple. Ah, while I think of it, mek out a report on this, will ye?" A bulky parcel was thrust into the reader's arms. "And ye needn't let Mr. Alexander see it ... just yet. Understand?"

Gareth understood that the senior partner had happened upon a new genius who might, with luck, sell about ninety-seven copies of an edition.

"Very well, Mr. Campbell."

Together they entered the outer office, as Guy Burnett banged the telephone receiver back on its hook.

"Hale's, sir. Two-fifty more copies of 'Piccadilly' wanted immediately for the branch libraries."

"Of 'Piccadilly'?"

Campbell groaned aloud. "Piccadilly" was the so-called Book of the Year. The volume in its dull red binding had since four months become an obsession in the office. They breathed, talked, dreamt "Piccadilly." It littered the floor, the desks, the tables, the shelves. Every 'phone call concerned "Piccadilly"; every letter. They took up a paper and read reviews of "Piccadilly." They went for a walk and the cover stared at them from library windows. The entire firm had floated to affluence on "Piccadilly." And one and all, Campbell and his partner; Guy Burnett, the clerk; Gareth Temple, the reader; and Jimmy, the Heart-breaker; one and all were deadly sick of "Piccadilly." Graham Carr was the only person who was not sick of it. Graham Carr had written it.

"Aweel, send Jimmy over to interview the binder." Campbell disappeared into his inner sanctum. Alexander, by way of reproof to enthusiasm, never arrived on the spot till noon.

The Heart-breaker was despatched on his congenial errand. Then, cheered and refreshed, returned to his task of making into parcels the rejected manuscripts. Merrily he whistled, as he jerked the string into knots; merrily he whistled as he banged the door behind him, and set off to catch the post. Jimmy, aged thirteen, had been the very first within these walls to break an unknown heart by dispatching a package with slip of paper enclosed: "Mr. Campbell has considered your MS. with much care, but regrets——" Consequently his title and his importance.

Burnett was called into the inner room to be dictated a letter which the senior partner was anxious to dispatch on the sly, before his relentless junior should appear. An exceedingly popular lady novelist, commanding the best existing sale of sentimental fiction, had offered her wares to Leslie Campbell, for the prestige of seeing his name stamped at the foot of her cover. Alexander was considering the advisability of lowering their standards to accept these overtures: "Psychology will never make us a fortune, Campbell; and we can't live for ever on the proceeds of 'Piccadilly.'" Now, sneakingly, and with immense delight, Campbell dictated his uncompromising refusal of Miss Ethel Erskine's offer. He would have nothing but the Intellectuals. The little Scotsman's admiration of his "Young Men" and their style of authorship was almost fanatical.

Gareth found them tiring. He felt always acutely conscious of being an outsider. Not that it mattered—he was only the reader; and though his judgment could be relied on as sound and scholarly, Campbell never made an intimate of him; never called him "my boy," as he did young Burnett, for instance. As for Alexander, he disapproved altogether of the reader, whom he classified as an idealist lacking in guts.

Temple was older than any of the others; older than the head of the firm, even. And sitting there at his desk, he seemed to have grown just a little dusty; to lag a few paces behind the times—while "Campbell's Young Men" rushed fully twenty years ahead of them.

The clock ticked fussily through the stillness. Gareth, proof-correcting, bent wearily over the long strips of evil-smelling print. Quick steps on the stone stairs outside; and the door burst open to admit a man in a worn Norfolk jacket, and square heavy boots; giving him, with his tanned skin and boyish blue eyes, somewhat the appearance of a country squire.

"Hullo. Where's everybody?"

"That you, Mr. Carr? The chief is busy, I think; shall I call him?"

"No, it's all right; I only strolled in to sit on the table and swing my legs." He glanced humorously at Gareth; and, having nothing better to do for the moment, dropped into casual conversation: "Has it ever struck you, Temple, what a wonderful thing it is to have the right to break in without apologies on a real live publisher, and swing one's legs from his real live dirty untidy desk? I used to pace up and down outside here, before you had decided on my fate—God! what a time it lasted!—and picture myself doing just that."

"Were we a long time? Yes, I remember now, the Chief was away. But you never enquired?"

"No. And d'you know, if the ordeal of waiting had lasted a decade longer, I should never have screwed myself to the point of asking for a decision."

"Why?"

"One is possessed by a curious spirit of fatalism where the first book is concerned. Things must take their course. What a period that was of ghastly thrills, imagining all the accidents of fire and water which were destroying my precious manuscript. And now——"

"Now you've got there, yes. There's been an order from Hale's for two-fifty more copies of 'Piccadilly.'"

"Good!" Carr made as if to pass on; then paused to say. "Had anything worth while up lately?"

Gareth's face was expressive.

"As bad as that?" laughed Carr. "You are fond of reading, of course?" He flung himself into a battered leather arm-chair, hands thrust deep into his pockets, legs stretched out towards the empty grate. He had never bothered much with the reader before now, and it struck him that this reserved man with the stern mouth and grey-flecked hair, might reward closer study. "You are fond of reading?"

"I—loathe—it."

The words were pushed out with such intense vehemence, that Carr was startled. "I didn't think it possible for an intelligent man to dislike books."

"Perhaps not. As a young man I loved them so much that the day I got my first job as a reader I walked through London with my head among the stars. But books were then magical mysterious things, that grew on trees, and dropped into my hands. I never gave a thought to the mechanism of producing them: authors, manuscripts, typists, publishers, readers, printers, binders, contracts, proofs—they were hard facts, and had nothing to do with just books. For the first time that evening I read with my brain instead of my heart ... and I've been reading with my brain ever since, till it's dog-tired. Good Lord, man! I can't enjoy a book; I have to be on the look-out for tautology and anachronisms and split infinitives. Books are my bread-and-butter; they nauseate me; it's all I can do not to send up one damning report after another. I read books all day, and carry home a pile with me to read at night. My imaginative chords have been thumped till they hang loose as a broken bell-rope. Books—I can't get outside them, their mechanism and jargon. The world is one vast book, clipped together in chapters. I'm surrounded by men like you, who never drop a pencil without turning it into an incident for their books." From a fierce abstraction, Gareth wheeled suddenly on his hearer. "Now, this very minute, you are thinking I would be an excellent tragic character for your next book: the reader who detests reading. Are you?"

Carr flushed a guilty crimson; he had just succeeded in placing Gareth in the third chapter of "The Gnome."

"Well—er—I think I'll go inside. I've got a new contributor to propose for the White 'un."

"What's that?"

Not to have heard of the "White Review" monthly journal whose issue the firm had been contemplating and discussing for weeks—well, for a week, ever since Ran Wyman, author of "Tom Tiddler's Ground" and spoilt enfant terrible at the office, had first mooted the notion? Carr explained, amazed at the other's ignorance.

"No, I've been told nothing about it. Oh, yes, I saw that some special scheme was in the air, but I'm used to that here. It sounds good enough; more destructive than beautiful, though."

"Oh—beautiful!" Carr shrugged his shoulders; no doubt of it, the reader was inclined to be old-fashioned. "All the same, Temple, I don't think you hate books; only other people's books. Why don't you write one yourself?"

"To add to the output of rubbish?"

"Thank you," laughed the author of "Piccadilly," then turned to Alexander, who, very sleek and immaculate, was in the act of hanging up his hat.

"Morning, Alex. Feel like contemplating a new series of explosions for the White 'un?"

"Yours?"

"No. Discovery of mine. Polish woman. I want to show some of her stuff to Campbell; it's soul-shattering."

"Then don't show it to him," languidly protested the junior partner; "already the journal is likely to be poison to the average intelligence. I intend asking Ethel Erskine to contribute an antidote." This, unaware of the letter reposing at the foot of the nearest pillar-box. Beneath his attitude of careful restraint, Vincent Alexander concealed an appreciation of talent as quick and keen as Campbell's own; but he considered the chief ought not to be indulged. With a careless "good morning" to Temple, he drew Carr through the swing-door marked "private."

Gareth sighed. Though he would not have owned it for worlds, had never owned it even to himself, he did sometimes long to be admitted into the charmed circle; the splendid bumptious fellowship of creators. To be acknowledged One of Them; himself to swagger into publishers' offices, pass the reader with a casual nod, sit on the tables and swing his legs and patronize young aspirants to fame. To have Leslie Campbell call him "my boy," and be in the confidence of Vincent Alexander; initiated into whatever literary scheme was afoot—nay, himself boldly to propound these schemes, and have them heard with respect. One of "Campbell's Young Men." One of Them....

He did not often sit dreaming thus. His sixteen years as reader had drained him not only of ambition, but of a great deal of his happy illusions. At whiles, he used to ask himself why he continued this especial work which had turned to drab substance what was once his fabric of enchantment. It was so difficult to break away from things. Gareth remained a reader. And the past few years had hardened him to mechanical acquiescence.

But his recent outbreak to Graham Carr seemed again to loosen discontent. Without thought of rebellion, merely with the mournful recognition upon him of how far he stood from the inner shrine of fellowship, he sat idly at his desk, hearing the occasional laughter which drifted from the room beyond. Even young Burnett was allowed at these confabulations; a mere boy of nineteen, he was engrossed in the writing of an "Episode in the Life of a Navvy," backed by the hearty encouragement of his two chiefs. Yes, Burnett had started already—and he, Gareth, was now in his fortieth year. Why had he never written his great book? Perhaps Carr had been right in saying that other people's books had swamped him entirely.

Leslie Campbell's office was not a good place for introspection. The telephone bell rang repeatedly. A miscellaneous procession of callers kept the swing-door in an endless gale and motion. The designer of the cover to the shilling edition of "Piccadilly" came to submit his rough idea of the sketch, comprising a hectic young man staring wildly into a candle-flame, above which floated a grinning skull: a bright and attractive notion which mightily pleased Campbell, but was rejected by Carr and Alexander both, since there was nothing in the text of either skulls or candles. Youthful authors of both sexes, timorous or determined, knocked continually at the outer gates, requesting interviews with Mr. Campbell. Jimmy's job to attend to these, whenever he was present; but Gareth had been steeled to execute hope with as little compunction as the Heart-breaker himself. The designer emerged from his colloquy within: "You had better ask the pretty-cover artist on the 'Blue Sky' to do your next job," sarcastically—and in his blind rage collided with Mona Gurney on the top stair. "Come in, my lass; you're the verra person we need," cried Campbell, catching sight of her; and she joined the conclave of Olympians. A thin slip of a girl, demure and refined as one of Jane Austen's heroines, she was the only woman writer whose books had attained the honour of being published by Leslie Campbell; great strapping books, reeking of the soil. "Campbell's Young Men" held her in profound respect; nay, Alexander almost committed the indiscretion of loving her, because her tailor-mades were of such irreproachable fit; the two would discuss fashion by the hour, interrupted ever by Campbell's disgusted comments, which but effected that they would mince their tones the more. You could do no wrong if you were One of Them.

The July sun filtered through the dirt-specked windows, on to the litter of books and papers, on to the dusty floor and splashed walls. Gareth had not moved for several minutes, engrossed in the study of a typed manuscript sent up for approval. "Spring-fret," by Moll Aynsleigh. And underneath the title-page, the quotation:

"Grant the path be clear before you

When the old spring-fret comes o'er you...."

Crude as the veriest green apple, and sentimental as a love-song heard by moonlight, Moll Aynsleigh was in all probability a young girl embarked tremulously on the wonderful adventure of a first novel. Not thus could one enter the favoured ranks of Leslie Campbell. Yet there was that in the hackneyed theme, the quest for Prince Charming, which sprayed on Gareth's parched imagination like water from a fountain. Love and an April dawn—children playing in a garden—the hopeless, laughably hopeless, despair of youth at grown-up frustration of their plans,—a certain tumultuous "I-want-I-know-not-what" which beat through every page like the beating of a little schoolgirl's heart.... Gareth, in midsummer, fell victim to a bad attack of spring-fret, vague and troubled and wishful. Knew that he should not be seeing the sunshine's gold splashing through grimy London panes; knew now that he had missed things; knew that he was over forty, and a failure.

He glanced at the end of the book; and set it aside for Jimmy to pack and return. Silly little Moll Aynsleigh ought to have known better than to send her romance to this address. Nevertheless, Gareth was sorry.

"Grant the path be clear before you ..." how hot and stuffy was the inside of the bus which carried him that evening to Hammersmith. No room on the roof; or else Gareth was not quick enough to shove a passage through the struggling mass on the step. The air was fetid with breath and the smell of clothing and an indefinable odour of food; the narrow seats crowded with a selection of the fat of the land, so that elbows were tightly wedged, and bodies sweltered in torturing proximity. "Grant the path be clear before you" ... he knew that path; had seen it often: it wound over a hill, a low hill, easy and pleasant to the climber; hill which humped a sun-slippery shoulder from among the silvery morning mists. And thence, on the further side, the path would dip to a young wood; the youngest wood in all the world; younger even than when broidered with the tender green tips and tassels of spring; younger far than when garbed in the self-satisfied foliage of summer or the crudely flaming tints of autumn. A wood with promises unfulfilled, soul unawakened. A wood of February. And here the hill-path would be laid with a carpet of sodden purple; the hollows spun by webs of glittering frost. Over all the bare branches of the tree-tops stole a haze of white and a cloud of dim mauve; but save for these it stood a bridal wood, pale and intangible; its mesh of lower boughs devoid of all colour; its spaces silent of all sound but the cold clean trill of single bird, awake too soon. Somewhere, the thin trickle of unseen water; somewhere, a dark pool with darker shadows. The sun slid faltering down the sentinel tree-trunks of that wood, dared not enter in. A wood haunted, yet passionless. A waiting wood; not for mischievous pixie or leaf-crowned Dryad; but for some wan girl, whose garments hung tattered as the tattered shreds of autumn yet lingering on the hedges; whose ankles were bare and slim; and whose eyes, blue hyacinths washed with rain, seemed mutely to wait their tryst with a lover so young as to know naught of evil. Gareth knew where she could be found: at the far end of the empurpled path; seated upon a broken gate. He would come upon her when he was hot and tired from climbing the hill....

He was made aware of the bus-conductor, who wanted his twopence. Of a bony female, stamping furiously upon his feet, because he had not risen to give her room, and of a basket dug into his side by a man in villainous corduroys, basket that evidently contained cheese of a vicious and unforgettable character. Gareth was glad when the Hammersmith vehicle finally jolted him forth at the nearest corner to his street. He knew he was late for dinner; he was usually late; but it was too hot to hurry. The evening had brought with it no relief of wind; merely a greater heaviness to the stale air. The shouts of swarming children free from the Board Schools, sounded intolerably shrill and close to his ear. The sun gave no sign of ever setting. Corners of houses and their roofs, chimneys and telegraph wires sawed and carved the sky into the various bright blue segments of a jig-saw puzzle. A passing water-cart raised longings in the heart and dust in the road, with equal incapacity to deal with either. And here at last was Pacific Villa; hideously uniform with its neighbours on the right and left; square of front garden, devoid of shade, devoid of grass, of everything save a few sticks at various angles of hopelessness; lace curtains at the dining-room window; blobs of lighter brown on the brown front door where the blistered paint had peeled away. Gareth fumbled for his latchkey; before he could find it, the door was burst open to him.

CHAPTER II

"Can't you be in time?" demanded Kathleen, not in the harsh tones of the scold, but with tragedy quivering behind her tense demand; "you knew the Collins were invited to dinner."

"I'm sorry," said Gareth gently. How hot it was. How hot—she was.

"And now Lulu has come without Jim—when one only puts up with her for the sake of Jim! And you'll have to see her home."

To Kathleen there were no molehills in a world of mountains.

"It doesn't matter. I hope you started without me?"

"No; we didn't; we're waiting. Come along—come along. Must you go up to wash?"

His hands felt sticky with the heat and the day's work. "Afraid so. I shan't be a minute." He felt her reluctant glance follow him up the stairs, measure the seconds while he plunged his throbbing head into cold water, tug him down again to the dining-room where she and Lulu Collins were already in their places at table.

Mr. and Mrs. Collins had at one time been their neighbours. And though they had moved since then several times—they were of the cheerful but shoddy type who instantly rent a house on the strength of a fiver unexpectedly turning up, and then quite gaily effect what is known as a "moonlight flit" when their fluctuating fortunes wavered downwards again—yet a spasmodic intimacy was still kept up.

"Jim would have come," explained Lulu in voluble apology, as Gareth took up the carving-knife and attacked the mutton; "but he's most frightfully busy. I oughtn't to tell you—but ... well, you've heard of this huge scheme they've got on hand for that new sort of wonderful photography?—well, Jim's in that, and of course it means a fortune to us. We're jogging along anyhow just now ... but in six weeks or so.... And then there's that other thing too—you know!—that's just going to come off with a tremendous bang. But you won't breathe a word of it, will you?"

Automatically the Temples made their vows of silence. Lulu's plucky optimism, her continual brag of her husband as the Power Behind in some gigantic experiment, social, financial, or theatrical, was too often unfounded to inspire the congratulatory awe it demanded. Jim Collins was a nice little chap; but Lulu was fourth-rate. Her illusions were fourth-rate. Her clothes were fourth-rate. She prided herself on a knack of turning "bits of things" into a thoroughly up-to-date rig-out: "Kath, did you notice my hat? I s'pose you thought it was new. Not it! My dear, I made it out of that piece of lace on my blue silk, and the remains of that velveteen dressing-gown Mabel gave me. And I'm sure no one would guess, would they?"... Everyone would guess; she always looked tawdry, fly-away; not dirty—but never definitely clean. Kathleen recognized now all the portions of her garments, and remembered the various conjunctions of bad taste in which they had already figured ... bits of trimming; bits of bead and feather and lace.... Lulu could have stood as a symbolic figure personifying "the Last Day of the Sale."...

"Gareth," said Kathleen, watching critically his incompetence with the joint, "when do you get your holidays?"

"I don't know exactly. At least, I haven't asked. Why?"

"We must decide at once if we're going away, that's all. Lulu says that every corner is booked already, everywhere."

"Yes, really, Mr. Temple. I would hardly believe it when Kath told me you hadn't fixed anything yet. We're going abroad as soon as Jim's thing is settled; I daresay it's not so full there. And meanwhile we're going to Ilfracombe, to my brother and his wife, for a fortnight. Jim must have a rest, poor boy."

"I expect we shall go somewhere ..." said Gareth slowly.

"Somewhere! Where?" from Kathleen.

"Well—where would you like to go?"

She laughed impatiently. "As if that had anything to do with it? Why do you pretend? I should like a holiday in Japan, or on a coral island."

"Japan ..." he mused indolently, unable to resist word-magic. "Ivory blossoms on a light-green sky.... Shall we go to Japan, Kathleen?"

Lulu stared. "Does he mean it?"

"We can afford it so well, can't we?" When Kathleen really craved for something—and her nature allowed nothing less than craving—it seemed to her violation to toss the sacred fancy idly as a toy-balloon. Her pride suffered that Gareth, so sensitive, could yet betray desire for what he made no effort to obtain.

"It would be a lark if you joined us in Ilfracombe. We should be such a large party, wouldn't we? Fred and Trixie, of course. And Fred's pal, Napier Kirby and his wife—the new one—and her son by her old husband—and his mother ... Kirby's, I mean; she's a Maori!—well, no, not exactly; but whatever it is you call them when their mother or father was. And me and Jim; and Trixie's Aunt Emmeline: and you and Kathleen——"

"It's very good of you to want us," said Gareth, striving weakly to extricate himself from Lulu's gaily growing snowball.

"And perhaps some of your great author chums would come too; tell them we're going to have a glorious time." Lulu's glorious times always took on their hues from the brilliant anticipation and the glamorous retrospect between which they were squeezed to invisibility.

Kathleen remarked that probably they were now too late to book rooms in any Ilfracombe boarding-house.

"Oh, my dear, we're not going into a boarding-house. Not much! Fred has taken a house for three months, if you please. Swank, I told him!"

"That finishes it, then. Gareth and I can't plant ourselves on your brother and sister-in-law. We don't know them."

"Oh, but it's quite all right—you can pay your share; needn't stand on ceremony with Trix. You see, the house is ever so much too large for them; they took it together with the Kirbys; and even then Emmeline Frazer is paying towards it——Not Jim and me, of course; but then Fred is very grateful to Jim because he let him in as a favour into that big thing of his I told you about last month, and it's going to do frightfully well. I'm sure Trixie would love to have you—she's awfully keen on literary people. Shall I give you the address for you to write to her?"

Kathleen was rather attracted by the notion. She had that restlessness upon her to get something settled, which came from seeing everyone round about her flitting and migrating, astir as swallows with the fever of the South upon them.

"Shall we try it, Gareth?"

"If you like...."

"Or would you rather I looked round at once for something else?"

"We can think it over; there's plenty of time."

"There isn't. There isn't plenty of time. You hear what Lulu says; every place will be crowded."

"Must we go where there's a crowd?"

She might have said: "Are we the right people to make holiday alone?" ... but pretence had never yet been completely shattered between them. "If we go when there's a crowd, yes. It can't be avoided in August."

He was silent. And helped his guest to prune jelly and custard.

"Shall I write to Ilfracombe? Do say one way or another"; her voice took on that driving note he so dreaded, and which, against his will, always plunged him into a counter-mood of stagnant negation.

"As you please."

"Is there any place you would prefer?"

Goaded less by her irritation than by its tightly drawn restraint, he let fall: "Alpenruh...."

"Where's that?" asked Lulu; "is it abroad? We're going abroad directly Jim's thing is settled—I told you, didn't I? I wonder if we should meet each other."

... Kathleen sat furiously biting her lip. How dared he understand so well what she had been all the while thinking? How dared he share this memory, and give utterance where she was silent?

The remainder of the evening was hardly a success. Her brooding indrawn pain seemed to transform the parlour into a tight hot circle of air, in which Gareth felt himself struggling like a fly in a web. Even Lulu was aware of strain, and rose early to take her departure.

"And here's Trixie's address, Kath, just in case you should decide to go after all."

"I have decided. I shall write to-night. Now. Fetch me the ink, Gareth."

Her glance challenged him to raise objections. But quietly and courteously Gareth did as she bade him. He would have made further amends for his mistake had he known how to do it without hurting her more.

"When did you say you'll be free?"

"I don't know. End of the month, I daresay."

"Can you find out for certain?"

"Perhaps, to-morrow. No, certainly it's no trouble to see you home, Mrs. Collins." Anything to escape the fretting discomfort of Kathleen's voice....

They alighted from the train at Notting Hill Station, and walked the few paces to the shop over which the Collins had rooms.

"Good night!"

"Oh, but you'll come up and have a drink with Jim. He might be able to put you on to something good; influence counts for an awful lot."

"I don't think I'll come up," indeterminedly.... The need of solitude became suddenly overwhelming: "No; if you'll excuse me; I'm tired; long day at the office."

"Good night, then; and I hope you'll arrange something nice for your holidays...."

Gareth sauntered moodily along the dull pavements, and past the blind shop-shutters of Ladbroke Grove. Holidays—and his mind sped back to a phrase in a letter, written some sixteen years ago: "Our holiday—Yes, but I shall always speak the word now according to its derivation: holy day. Holy days—for us, Kathleen."

Well, but what had gone wrong in the years, to have transformed the splendid impulsive creature of his mountain idyll, to the raw hectic woman of nerves who was now his housemate? Nerves—she was one nerve; worn to as thin an edge as the bending blade of an old and useless table-knife. Gareth could not tell how the gradual transformation had occurred. One morning he and Kathleen had had a sharp altercation about—what was it?—Yes, he had wanted to lie abed five minutes longer, and Kathleen had lost her temper; then as suddenly recovered it; and glancing round the untidy bedroom, her strewn brushes vying for place with his razor-strop on the mantelpiece where neither belonged, hearing the drizzle of rain on the window, and the cracked bell from the hall summoning them to a cold breakfast, she cried in a choking voice: "We're not a bit different from other people. I knew it. I warned you," and fled from the room. Then softly Gareth arose, and went to the bathroom, where already the paper was beginning to peel and flap from the damp walls. And there, sitting toothbrush in hand, on the edge of the tin enamelled bath, he strove to recollect the details of Kathleen's outbreak on her horror of certain trivial intimacies of wedlock, that by avoiding them he might yet retain a grip on the slippery substance of their dreams. Bathroom taps; his mind persistently dwelt on that one allusion: "To hear a man's bath-water running in the morning...." But that couldn't be all. The bathroom taps became to him an obsession, wholly responsible for the present state of disillusion between him and Kathleen. She had said it. And unable to cope with the actual trouble, he found relief in clinging to the one tangible grievance she might be nourishing ... he trickled the water very gently into the bath that morning, so that it was barely lukewarm when he stepped in. Gareth disliked lukewarm baths, and he was depressed at breakfast....

Well, after sixteen years, he knew that the bathroom taps had been as much—or as little—responsible as every other link in the dragging chain of habit.

He had learnt to fear Kathleen's intensity of feeling; her exaggeration of every trifle to a matter of life or death; to fear still more the overwhelming responsive leap of her, when he attempted any sudden tenderness. He feared her suffering of remembrance, knowing as he did that a moment lay in store for both when their inability to keep love between them was bound to be drawn from its sheath of pretence. Her one-time dread of seeing step by step that festering intimacy grow upon mystery, had now merged into a still greater dread of hearing the actuality spoken of in so many words. And he was sorry for her disappointment, with a sorrow that was bitterly helpless.

As for himself—Gareth was looking to-night with clear eyes at his cherished dream; and saw that he had dragged it too close, so that it was stained with thumbmarks. If only he could still have kept painless the memory of Alpenruh's glamour; if Kathleen had died directly after—he or Kathleen. She was less at fault than he; she had striven on their return from the land of enchantment to draw a charmed circle thrice around it, wherein to keep it detached and wonderful. It was he who had hung on; he who was responsible for the drab aftermath. Once in conquering vein he had swung past this very church on the hill, down the long slope to the house in North Kensington, to force Kathleen's consent to their marriage....