Paul Kelver
by Jerome K. Jerome
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

CONTENTS.

PROLOGUE

BOOK I

I. PAUL, ARRIVED IN A STRANGE LAND, LEARNS MANY THINGS, AND GOES TO
MEET THE MAN IN GREY

II. IN WHICH PAUL MAKES ACQUAINTANCE OF THE MAN WITH THE UGLY MOUTH

III. HOW GOOD LUCK KNOCKED AT THE DOOR OF THE MAN IN GREY

IV. PAUL, FALLING IN WITH A GOODLY COMPANY OF PILGRIMS, LEARNS OF
THEM THE ROAD THAT HE MUST TRAVEL, AND MEETS THE PRINCESS OF THE
GOLDEN LOCKS

V. IN WHICH THERE COMES BY ONE BENT UPON PURSUING HIS OWN WAY

VI. OF THE SHADOW THAT CAME BETWEEN THE MAN IN GREY AND THE LADY OF
THE LOVE-LIT EYES

VII. OF THE PASSING OF THE SHADOW

VIII. HOW THE MAN IN GREY MADE READY FOR HIS GOING

IX. OF THE FASHIONING OF PAUL

X. IN WHICH PAUL IS SHIPWRECKED, AND CAST INTO DEEP WATERS

BOOK II.

I. DESCRIBES THE DESERT ISLAND TO WHICH PAUL WAS DRIFTED

II. PAUL, ESCAPING FROM HIS SOLITUDE, FALLS INTO STRANGE COMPANY, AND
BECOMES CAPTIVE TO ONE OF HAUGHTY MIEN

III. GOOD FRIENDS SHOW PAUL THE ROAD TO FREEDOM. BUT BEFORE SETTING
OUT, HE WILL GO A-VISITING

IV. LEADS TO A MEETING

V. HOW ON A SWEET GREY MORNING THE FUTURE CAME TO PAUL

VI. OF THE GLORY AND GOODNESS AND THE EVIL THAT GO TO THE MAKING OF
LOVE

VII. HOW PAUL SET FORTH UPON A QUEST

VIII. AND HOW CAME BACK AGAIN

IX. THE PRINCESS OF THE GOLDEN LOCKS SENDS PAUL A RING

X.  PAUL FINDS HIS WAY

PAUL KELVER

PROLOGUE.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR SEEKS TO CAST THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THIS STORY
UPON ANOTHER.

At the corner of a long, straight, brick-built street in the far East
End of London--one of those lifeless streets, made of two drab walls
upon which the level lines, formed by the precisely even window-sills
and doorsteps, stretch in weary perspective from end to end,
suggesting petrified diagrams proving dead problems--stands a house
that ever draws me to it; so that often, when least conscious of my
footsteps, I awake to find myself hurrying through noisy, crowded
thoroughfares, where flaring naphtha lamps illumine fierce, patient,
leaden-coloured faces; through dim-lit, empty streets, where monstrous
shadows come and go upon the close-drawn blinds; through narrow,
noisome streets, where the gutters swarm with children, and each
ever-open doorway vomits riot; past reeking corners, and across waste
places, till at last I reach the dreary goal of my memory-driven
desire, and, coming to a halt beside the broken railings, find rest.

The house, larger than its fellows, built when the street was still a
country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of
individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is
encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a
barren patch of stones and dust where clothes--it is odd any one
should have thought of washing--hang in perpetuity; while about the
door continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has
left exposed in all its naked insincerity.

Occasionally I drift hitherward in the day time, when slatternly women
gossip round the area gates, and the silence is broken by the hoarse,
wailing cry of "Coals--any coals--three and sixpence a
sack--co-o-o-als!" chanted in a tone that absence of response has
stamped with chronic melancholy; but then the street knows me not, and
my old friend of the corner, ashamed of its shabbiness in the
unpitying sunlight, turns its face away, and will not see me as I
pass.

Not until the Night, merciful alone of all things to the ugly, draws
her veil across its sordid features will it, as some fond old nurse,
sought out in after years, open wide its arms to welcome me. Then the
teeming life it now shelters, hushed for a time within its walls, the
flickering flare from the "King of Prussia" opposite extinguished,
will it talk with me of the past, asking me many questions, reminding
me of many things I had forgotten. Then into the silent street come
the well-remembered footsteps; in and out the creaking gate pass, not
seeing me, the well-remembered faces; and we talk concerning them; as
two cronies, turning the torn leaves of some old album where the faded
portraits in forgotten fashions, speak together in low tones of those
now dead or scattered, with now a smile and now a sigh, and many an
"Ah me!" or "Dear, dear!"

This bent, worn man, coming towards us with quick impatient steps,
which yet cease every fifty yards or so, while he pauses, leaning
heavily upon his high Malacca cane: "It is a handsome face, is it
not?" I ask, as I gaze upon it, shadow framed.

"Aye, handsome enough," answers the old House; "and handsomer still it
must have been before you and I knew it, before mean care had furrowed
it with fretful lines."

"I never could make out," continues the old House, musingly, "whom you
took after; for they were a handsome pair, your father and your
mother, though Lord! what a couple of children!"

"Children!" I say in surprise, for my father must have been past five
and thirty before the House could have known him, and my mother's face
is very close to mine, in the darkness, so that I see the many grey
hairs mingling with the bonny brown.

"Children," repeats the old House, irritably, so it seems to me, not
liking, perhaps, its opinions questioned, a failing common to old
folk; "the most helpless pair of children I ever set eyes upon. Who
but a child, I should like to know, would have conceived the notion of
repairing his fortune by becoming a solicitor at thirty-eight, or,
having conceived such a notion, would have selected the outskirts of
Poplar as a likely centre in which to put up his door-plate?"

"It was considered to be a rising neighbourhood," I reply, a little
resentful. No son cares to hear the family wisdom criticised, even
though at the bottom of his heart he may be in agreement with the
critic. "All sorts and conditions of men, whose affairs were in
connection with the sea would, it was thought, come to reside
hereabout, so as to be near to the new docks; and had they, it is not
unreasonable to suppose they would have quarrelled and disputed with
one another, much to the advantage of a cute solicitor, convenient to
their hand."

"Stuff and nonsense," retorts the old House, shortly; "why, the mere
smell of the place would have been sufficient to keep a sensible man
away. And"--the grim brick face before me twists itself into a goblin
smile--"he, of all men in the world, as 'the cute solicitor,' giving
advice to shady clients, eager to get out of trouble by the shortest
way, can you fancy it! he who for two years starved himself, living on
five shillings a week--that was before you came to London, when he was
here alone. Even your mother knew nothing of it till years
afterwards--so that no man should be a penny the poorer for having
trusted his good name. Do you think the crew of chandlers and
brokers, dock hustlers and freight wreckers would have found him a
useful man of business, even had they come to settle here?"

I have no answer; nor does the old House wait for any, but talks on.

"And your mother! would any but a child have taken that soft-tongued
wanton to her bosom, and not have seen through acting so transparent?
Would any but the veriest child that never ought to have been let out
into the world by itself have thought to dree her weird in such folly?
Children! poor babies they were, both of them."

"Tell me," I say--for at such times all my stock of common sense is
not sufficient to convince me that the old House is but clay. From
its walls so full of voices, from its floors so thick with footsteps,
surely it has learned to live; as a violin, long played on, comes to
learn at last a music of its own. "Tell me, I was but a child to whom
life speaks in a strange tongue, was there any truth in the story?"

"Truth!" snaps out the old House; "just truth enough to plant a lie
upon; and Lord knows not much ground is needed for that weed. I saw
what I saw, and I know what I know. Your mother had a good man, and
your father a true wife, but it was the old story: a man's way is not
a woman's way, and a woman's way is not a man's way, so there lives
ever doubt between them."

"But they came together in the end," I say, remembering.

"Aye, in the end," answers the House. "That is when you begin to
understand, you men and women, when you come to the end."

The grave face of a not too recently washed angel peeps shyly at me
through the railings, then, as I turn my head, darts back and
disappears.

"What has become of her?" I ask.

"She? Oh, she is well enough," replies the House. "She lives close
here. You must have passed the shop. You might have seen her had you
looked in. She weighs fourteen stone, about; and has nine children
living. She would be pleased to see you."

"Thank you," I say, with a laugh that is not wholly a laugh; "I do not
think I will call."  But I still hear the pit-pat of her tiny feet,
dying down the long street.

The faces thicken round me. A large looming, rubicund visage smiles
kindly on me, bringing back into my heart the old, odd mingling of
instinctive liking held in check by conscientious disapproval. I turn
from it, and see a massive, clean-shaven face, with the ugliest mouth
and the loveliest eyes I ever have known in a man.

"Was he as bad, do you think, as they said?" I ask of my ancient
friend.

"Shouldn't wonder," the old House answers. "I never knew a worse--nor
a better."

The wind whisks it aside, leaving to view a little old woman, hobbling
nimbly by aid of a stick. Three corkscrew curls each side of her head
bob with each step she takes, and as she draws near to me, making the
most alarming grimaces, I hear her whisper, as though confiding to
herself some fascinating secret, "I'd like to skin 'em. I'd like to
skin 'em all. I'd like to skin 'em all alive!"

It sounds a fiendish sentiment, yet I only laugh, and the little old
lady, with a final facial contortion surpassing all dreams, limps
beyond my ken.

Then, as though choosing contrasts, follows a fair, laughing face. I
saw it in the life only a few hours ago--at least, not it, but the
poor daub that Evil has painted over it, hating the sweetness
underlying. And as I stand gazing at it, wishing it were of the dead
who change not, there drifts back from the shadows that other face,
the one of the wicked mouth and the tender eyes, so that I stand again
helpless between the two I loved so well, he from whom I learned my
first steps in manhood, she from whom I caught my first glimpse of the
beauty and the mystery of woman. And again the cry rises from my
heart, "Whose fault was it--yours or hers?"  And again I hear his
mocking laugh as he answers, "Whose fault? God made us."  And
thinking of her and of the love I bore her, which was as the love of a
young pilgrim to a saint, it comes into my blood to hate him. But
when I look into his eyes and see the pain that lives there, my pity
grows stronger than my misery, and I can only echo his words, "God
made us."

Merry faces and sad, fair faces and foul, they ride upon the wind; but
the centre round which they circle remains always the one: a little
lad with golden curls more suitable to a girl than to a boy, with shy,
awkward ways and a silent tongue, and a grave, old-fashioned face.

And, turning from him to my old brick friend, I ask: "Would he know
me, could he see me, do you think?"

"How should he," answers the old House, "you are so different to what
he would expect. Would you recognise your own ghost, think you?"

"It is sad to think he would not recognise me," I say.

"It might be sadder if he did," grumbles the old House.

We both remained silent for awhile; but I know of what the old House
is thinking. Soon it speaks as I expected.

"You--writer of stories, why don't you write a book about him? There
is something that you know."

It is the favourite theme of the old House. I never visit it but it
suggests to me this idea.

"But he has done nothing?" I say.

"He has lived," answers the old House. "Is not that enough?"

"Aye, but only in London in these prosaic modern times," I persist.
"How of such can one make a story that shall interest the people?"

The old House waxes impatient of me.

"'The people!'" it retorts, "what are you all but children in a
dim-lit room, waiting until one by one you are called out to sleep.
And one mounts upon a stool and tells a tale to the others who have
gathered round. Who shall say what will please them, what will not."

Returning home with musing footsteps through the softly breathing
streets, I ponder the words of the old House. Is it but as some
foolish mother thinking all the world interested in her child, or may
there lie wisdom in its counsel? Then to my guidance or misguidance
comes the thought of a certain small section of the Public who often
of an evening commands of me a story; and who, when I have told her of
the dreadful giants and of the gallant youths who slay them, of the
wood-cutter's sons who rescue maidens from Ogre-guarded castles; of
the Princesses the most beautiful in all the world, of the Princes
with magic swords, still unsatisfied, creeps closer yet, saying: "Now
tell me a real story," adding for my comprehending: "You know: about
a little girl who lived in a big house with her father and mother, and
who was sometimes naughty, you know."

So perhaps among the many there may be some who for a moment will turn
aside from tales of haughty Heroes, ruffling it in Court and Camp, to
listen to the story of a very ordinary lad who lived with very
ordinary folk in a modern London street, and who grew up to be a very
ordinary sort of man, loving a little and grieving a little, helping a
few and harming a few, struggling and failing and hoping; and if any
such there be, let them come round me.

But let not those who come to me grow indignant as they listen,
saying: "This rascal tells us but a humdrum story, where nothing is
as it should be;" for I warn all beforehand that I tell but of things
that I have seen. My villains, I fear, are but poor sinners, not
altogether bad; and my good men but sorry saints. My princes do not
always slay their dragons; alas, sometimes, the dragon eats the
prince. The wicked fairies often prove more powerful than the good.
The magic thread leads sometimes wrong, and even the hero is not
always brave and true.

So let those come round me only who will be content to hear but their
own story, told by another, saying as they listen, "So dreamt I. Ah,
yes, that is true, I remember."

CHAPTER I

PAUL, ARRIVED IN A STRANGE LAND, LEARNS MANY THINGS, AND GOES TO MEET
THE MAN IN GREY.

Fate intended me for a singularly fortunate man. Properly, I ought to
have been born in June, which being, as is well known, the luckiest
month in all the year for such events, should, by thoughtful parents,
be more generally selected. How it was I came to be born in May,
which is, on the other hand, of all the twelve the most unlucky, as I
have proved, I leave to those more conversant with the subject to
explain. An early nurse, the first human being of whom I have any
distinct recollection, unhesitatingly attributed the unfortunate fact
to my natural impatience; which quality she at the same time predicted
would lead me into even greater trouble, a prophecy impressed by
future events with the stamp of prescience. It was from this same
bony lady that I likewise learned the manner of my coming. It seems
that I arrived, quite unexpectedly, two hours after news had reached
the house of the ruin of my father's mines through inundation;
misfortunes, as it was expounded to me, never coming singly in this
world to any one. That all things might be of a piece, my poor
mother, attempting to reach the bell, fell against and broke the
cheval-glass, thus further saddening herself with the conviction--for
no amount of reasoning ever succeeded in purging her Welsh blood of
its natural superstition--that whatever might be the result of future
battles with my evil star, the first seven years of tiny existence had
been, by her act, doomed to disaster.

"And I must confess," added the knobbly Mrs. Fursey, with a sigh, "it
does look as though there must be some truth in the saying, after
all."

"Then ain't I a lucky little boy?" I asked. For hitherto it had been
Mrs. Fursey's method to impress upon me my exceptional good fortune.
That I could and did, involuntarily, retire to bed at six, while less
happily placed children were deprived of their natural rest until
eight or nine o'clock, had always been held up to me as an astounding
piece of luck. Some little boys had not a bed at all; for the which,
in my more riotous moments, I envied them. Again, that at the first
sign of a cold it became my unavoidable privilege to lunch off linseed
gruel and sup off brimstone and treacle--a compound named with
deliberate intent to deceive the innocent, the treacle, so far as
taste is concerned, being wickedly subordinated to the brimstone--was
another example of Fortune's favouritism: other little boys were so
astoundingly unlucky as to be left alone when they felt ill. If
further proof were needed to convince that I had been signalled out by
Providence as its especial protege, there remained always the
circumstance that I possessed Mrs. Fursey for my nurse. The
suggestion that I was not altogether the luckiest of children was a
new departure.

The good dame evidently perceived her error, and made haste to correct
it.

"Oh, you! You are lucky enough," she replied; "I was thinking of your
poor mother."

"Isn't mamma lucky?"

"Well, she hasn't been too lucky since you came."

"Wasn't it lucky, her having me?"

"I can't say it was, at that particular time."

"Didn't she want me?"

Mrs. Fursey was one of those well-meaning persons who are of opinion
that the only reasonable attitude of childhood should be that of
perpetual apology for its existence.

"Well, I daresay she could have done without you," was the answer.

I can see the picture plainly still. I am sitting on a low chair
before the nursery fire, one knee supported in my locked hands,
meanwhile Mrs. Fursey's needle grated with monotonous regularity
against her thimble. At that moment knocked at my small soul for the
first time the problem of life.

Suddenly, without moving, I said:

"Then why did she take me in?"

The rasping click of the needle on the thimble ceased abruptly.

"Took you in! What's the child talking about? Who's took you in?"

"Why, mamma. If she didn't want me, why did she take me in?"

But even while, with heart full of dignified resentment, I propounded
this, as I proudly felt, logically unanswerable question, I was glad
that she had. The vision of my being refused at the bedroom window
presented itself to my imagination. I saw the stork, perplexed and
annoyed, looking as I had sometimes seen Tom Pinfold look when the
fish he had been holding out by the tail had been sniffed at by Anna,
and the kitchen door shut in his face. Would the stork also have gone
away thoughtfully scratching his head with one of those long,
compass-like legs of his, and muttering to himself. And here,
incidentally, I fell a-wondering how the stork had carried me. In the
garden I had often watched a blackbird carrying a worm, and the worm,
though no doubt really safe enough, had always appeared to me nervous
and uncomfortable. Had I wriggled and squirmed in like fashion? And
where would the stork have taken me to then? Possibly to Mrs.
Fursey's: their cottage was the nearest. But I felt sure Mrs. Fursey
would not have taken me in; and next to them, at the first house in
the village, lived Mr. Chumdley, the cobbler, who was lame, and who
sat all day hammering boots with very dirty hands, in a little cave
half under the ground, his whole appearance suggesting a poor-spirited
ogre. I should have hated being his little boy. Possibly nobody
would have taken me in. I grew pensive, thinking of myself as the
rejected of all the village. What would the stork have done with me,
left on his hands, so to speak. The reflection prompted a fresh
question.

"Nurse, where did I come from?"

"Why, I've told you often. The stork brought you."

"Yes, I know. But where did the stork get me from?"  Mrs. Fursey
paused for quite a long while before replying. Possibly she was
reflecting whether such answer might not make me unduly conceited.
Eventually she must have decided to run that risk; other opportunities
could be relied upon for neutralising the effect.

"Oh, from Heaven."

"But I thought Heaven was a place where you went to," I answered; "not
where you comed from."  I know I said "comed," for I remember that at
this period my irregular verbs were a bewildering anxiety to my poor
mother. "Comed" and "goned," which I had worked out for myself, were
particular favourites of mine.

Mrs. Fursey passed over my grammar in dignified silence. She had been
pointedly requested not to trouble herself with that part of my
education, my mother holding that diverging opinions upon the same
subject only confused a child.

"You came from Heaven," repeated Mrs. Fursey, "and you'll go to
Heaven--if you're good."

"Do all little boys and girls come from Heaven?"

"So they say."  Mrs. Fursey's tone implied that she was stating what
might possibly be but a popular fallacy, for which she individually
took no responsibility.

"And did you come from Heaven, Mrs. Fursey?"  Mrs. Fursey's reply to
this was decidedly more emphatic.

"Of course I did. Where do you think I came from?"

At once, I am ashamed to say, Heaven lost its exalted position in my
eyes. Even before this, it had puzzled me that everybody I knew
should be going there--for so I was always assured; now, connected as
it appeared to be with the origin of Mrs. Fursey, much of its charm
disappeared.

But this was not all. Mrs. Fursey's information had suggested to me a
fresh grief. I stopped not to console myself with the reflection that
my fate had been but the fate of all little boys and girls. With a
child's egoism I seized only upon my own particular case.

"Didn't they want me in Heaven then, either?" I asked. "Weren't they
fond of me up there?"

The misery in my voice must have penetrated even Mrs. Fursey's bosom,
for she answered more sympathetically than usual.

"Oh, they liked you well enough, I daresay. I like you, but I like to
get rid of you sometimes."  There could be no doubt as to this last.
Even at the time, I often doubted whether that six o'clock bedtime was
not occasionally half-past five.

The answer comforted me not. It remained clear that I was not wanted
either in Heaven nor upon the earth. God did not want me. He was
glad to get rid of me. My mother did not want me. She could have
done without me. Nobody wanted me. Why was I here?

And then, as the sudden opening and shutting of the door of a dark
room, came into my childish brain the feeling that Something,
somewhere, must have need of me, or I could not be, Something I felt I
belonged to and that belonged to me, Something that was as much a part
of me as I of It. The feeling came back to me more than once during
my childhood, though I could never put it into words. Years later the
son of the Portuguese Jew explained to me my thought. But all that I
myself could have told was that in that moment I knew for the first
time that I lived, that I was I.

The next instant all was dark again, and I once more a puzzled little
boy, sitting by a nursery fire, asking of a village dame questions
concerning life.

Suddenly a new thought came to me, or rather the recollection of an
old.

"Nurse, why haven't we got a husband?"

Mrs. Fursey left off her sewing, and stared at me.

"What maggot has the child got into its head now?" was her
observation; "who hasn't got a husband?"

"Why, mamma."

"Don't talk nonsense, Master Paul; you know your mamma has got a
husband."

"No, she ain't."

"And don't contradict. Your mamma's husband is your papa, who lives
in London."

"What's the good of _him_!"

Mrs. Fursey's reply appeared to me to be unnecessarily vehement.

"You wicked child, you; where's your commandments? Your father is in
London working hard to earn money to keep you in idleness, and you sit
there and say 'What's the good of him!'  I'd be ashamed to be such an
ungrateful little brat."

I had not meant to be ungrateful. My words were but the repetition of
a conversation I had overheard the day before between my mother and my
aunt.

Had said my aunt: "There she goes, moping again. Drat me if ever I
saw such a thing to mope as a woman."

My aunt was entitled to preach on the subject. She herself grumbled
all day about all things, but she did it cheerfully.

My mother was standing with her hands clasped behind her--a favourite
attitude of hers--gazing through the high French window into the
garden beyond. It must have been spring time, for I remember the
white and yellow crocuses decking the grass.

"I want a husband," had answered my mother, in a tone so ludicrously
childish that at sound of it I had looked up from the fairy story I
was reading, half expectant to find her changed into a little girl; "I
hate not having a husband."

"Help us and save us," my aunt had retorted; "how many more does a
girl want? She's got one."

"What's the good of him all that way off," had pouted my mother; "I
want him here where I can get at him."

I had often heard of this father of mine, who lived far away in
London, and to whom we owed all the blessings of life; but my childish
endeavours to square information with reflection had resulted in my
assigning to him an entirely spiritual existence. I agreed with my
mother that such an one, however to be revered, was no substitute for
the flesh and blood father possessed by luckier folk--the big, strong,
masculine thing that would carry a fellow pig-a-back round the garden,
or take a chap to sail in boats.

"You don't understand me, nurse," I explained; "what I mean is a
husband you can get at."

"Well, and you'll 'get at him,' poor gentleman, one of these days,"
answered Mrs. Fursey. "When he's ready for you he'll send for you,
and then you'll go to him in London."

I felt that still Mrs. Fursey didn't understand. But I foresaw that
further explanation would only shock her, so contented myself with a
simple, matter-of-fact question.

"How do you get to London; do you have to die first?"

"I do think," said Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of resigned despair
rather than of surprise, "that, without exception, you are the
silliest little boy I ever came across. I've no patience with you."

"I am very sorry, nurse," I answered; "I thought--"

"Then," interrupted Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of many generations,
"you shouldn't think. London," continued the good dame, her
experience no doubt suggesting that the shortest road to peace would
be through my understanding of this matter, "is a big town, and you go
there in a train. Some time--soon now--your father will write to your
mother that everything is ready. Then you and your mother and your
aunt will leave this place and go to London, and I shall be rid of
you."

"And shan't we come back here ever any more?"

"Never again."

"And I'll never play in the garden again, never go down to the
pebble-ridge to tea, or to Jacob's tower?"

"Never again."  I think Mrs. Fursey took a pleasure in the phrase. It
sounded, as she said it, like something out of the prayer-book.

"And I'll never see Anna, or Tom Pinfold, or old Yeo, or Pincher, or
you, ever any more?"  In this moment of the crumbling from under me of
all my footholds I would have clung even to that dry tuft, Mrs. Fursey
herself.

"Never any more. You'll go away and begin an entirely new life. And
I do hope, Master Paul," added Mrs. Fursey, piously, "it may be a
better one. That you will make up your mind to--"

But Mrs. Fursey's well-meant exhortations, whatever they may have
been, fell upon deaf ears. Here was I face to face with yet another
problem. This life into which I had fallen: it was understandable!
One went away, leaving the pleasant places that one knew, never to
return to them. One left one's labour and one's play to enter upon a
new existence in a strange land. One parted from the friends one had
always known, one saw them never again. Life was indeed a strange
thing; and, would a body comprehend it, then must a body sit staring
into the fire, thinking very hard, unheedful of all idle chatter.

That night, when my mother came to kiss me good-night, I turned my
face to the wall and pretended to be asleep, for children as well as
grown-ups have their foolish moods; but when I felt the soft curls
brush my cheek, my pride gave way, and clasping my arms about her
neck, and drawing her face still closer down to mine; I voiced the
question that all the evening had been knocking at my heart:

"I suppose you couldn't send me back now, could you? You see, you've
had me so long."

"Send you back?"

"Yes. I'd be too big for the stork to carry now, wouldn't I?"

My mother knelt down beside the bed so that her face and mine were on
a level, and looking into her eyes, the fear that had been haunting me
fell from me.

"Who has been talking foolishly to a foolish little boy?" asked my
mother, keeping my arms still clasped about her neck.

"Oh, nurse and I were discussing things, you know," I answered, "and
she said you could have done without me. Somehow, I did not mind
repeating the words now; clearly it could have been but Mrs. Fursey's
fun.

My mother drew me closer to her.

"And what made her think that?"

"Well, you see," I replied, "I came at a very awkward time, didn't I;
when you had a lot of other troubles."

My mother laughed, but the next moment looked grave again.

"I did not know you thought about such things," she said; "we must be
more together, you and I, Paul, and you shall tell me all you think,
because nurse does not quite understand you. It is true what she said
about the trouble; it came just at that time. But I could not have
done without you. I was very unhappy, and you were sent to comfort me
and help me to bear it."  I liked this explanation better.

"Then it was lucky, your having me?" I said. Again my mother laughed,
and again there followed that graver look upon her childish face.

"Will you remember what I am going to say?"  She spoke so earnestly
that I, wriggling into a sitting posture, became earnest also.

"I'll try," I answered; "but I ain't got a very good memory, have I?"

"Not very," smiled my mother; "but if you think about it a good deal
it will not leave you. When you are a good boy, and later on, when
you are a good man, then I am the luckiest little mother in all the
world. And every time you fail, that means bad luck for me. You will
remember that after I'm gone, when you are a big man, won't you,
Paul?"

So, both of us quite serious, I promised; and though I smile now when
I remember, seeing before me those two earnest, childish faces, yet I
think, however little success it may be I have to boast of, it would
perhaps have been still less had I entirely forgotten.

From that day my mother waxes in my memory; Mrs. Fursey, of the many
promontories, waning. There were sunny mornings in the neglected
garden, where the leaves played round us while we worked and read;
twilight evenings in the window seat where, half hidden by the dark
red curtains, we would talk in whispers, why I know not, of good men
and noble women, ogres, fairies, saints and demons; they were pleasant
days.

Possibly our curriculum lacked method; maybe it was too varied and
extensive for my age, in consequence of which chronology became
confused within my brain, and fact and fiction more confounded than
has usually been considered permissible, even in history. I saw
Aphrodite, ready armed and risen from the sea, move with stately grace
to meet King Canute, who, throned upon the sand, bade her come no
further lest she should wet his feet. In forest glade I saw King
Rufus fall from a poisoned arrow shot by Robin Hood; but thanks to
sweet Queen Eleanor, who sucked the poison from his wound, I knew he
lived. Oliver Cromwell, having killed King Charles, married his
widow, and was in turn stabbed by Hamlet. Ulysses, in the Argo, it
was fixed upon my mind, had discovered America. Romulus and Remus had
slain the wolf and rescued Little Red Riding Hood. Good King Arthur,
for letting the cakes burn, had been murdered by his uncle in the
Tower of London. Prometheus, bound to the Rock, had been saved by
good St. George. Paris had given the apple to William Tell. What
matter! the information was there. It needed rearranging, that was
all.

Sometimes, of an afternoon, we would climb the steep winding pathway
through the woods, past awful precipices, spirit-haunted, by grassy
swards where fairies danced o' nights, by briar and bracken sheltered
Caves where fearsome creatures lurked, till high above the creeping
sea we would reach the open plateau where rose old Jacob's ruined
tower. "Jacob's Folly" it was more often called about the country
side, and by some "The Devil's Tower;" for legend had it that there
old Jacob and his master, the Devil, had often met in windy weather to
wave false wrecking lights to troubled ships. Who "old Jacob" was, I
never, that I can remember, learned, nor how nor why he built the
Tower. Certain only it is his memory was unpopular, and the fisher
folk would swear that still on stormy nights strange lights would
gleam and flash from the ivy-curtained windows of his Folly.

But in day time no spot was more inviting, the short moss-grass before
its shattered door, the lichen on its crumbling stones. From its
topmost platform one saw the distant mountains, faint like spectres,
and the silent ships that came and vanished; and about one's feet the
pleasant farm lands and the grave, sweet river.

Smaller and poorer the world has grown since then. Now, behind those
hills lie naught but smoky towns and dingy villages; but then they
screened a land of wonder where princesses dwelt in castles, where the
cities were of gold. Now the ocean is but six days' journey wide,
ending at the New York Custom House. Then, had one set one's sail
upon it, one would have travelled far and far, beyond the golden
moonlight, beyond the gate of clouds; to the magic land of the blood
red shore, t'other side o' the sun. I never dreamt in those days a
world could be so small.

Upon the topmost platform a wooden seat ran round within the parapet,
and sitting there hand in hand, sheltered from the wind which ever
blew about the tower, my mother would people for me all the earth and
air with the forms of myth and legend--perhaps unwisely, yet I do not
know. I took no harm from it, good rather, I think. They were
beautiful fancies, most of them; or so my mother turned them, making
for love and pity, as do all the tales that live, whether poems or old
wives fables. But at that time of course they had no meaning for me
other than the literal; so that my mother, looking into my eyes, would
often hasten to add: "But that, you know, is only an old
superstition, and of course there are no such things nowadays."  Yet,
forgetful sometimes of the time, and overtaken homeward by the
shadows, we would hasten swiftly through the darkening path, holding
each other tightly by the hand.

Spring had waxed to summer, summer waned to autumn. Then my aunt and
I one morning, waiting at the breakfast table, saw through the open
window my mother skipping, dancing, pirouetting up the garden path.
She held a letter open in her hand, which as she drew near she waved
about her head, singing:

"Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, then comes Wednesday morning."

She caught me to her and began dancing with me round the room.

Observed my aunt, who continued steadily to eat bread and butter:

"Just like 'em all. Goes mad with joy. What for? Because she's
going to leave a decent house, to live in a poky hole in the East End
of London, and keep one servant."

To my aunt the second person ever remained a grammatical superfluity.
Invariably she spoke not to but of a person, throwing out her
conversation in the form of commentary. This had the advantage of
permitting the party intended to ignore it as mere impersonal
philosophy. Seeing it was generally uncomplimentary, most people
preferred so to regard it; but my mother had never succeeded in
schooling herself to indifference.

"It's not a poky hole," she replied; "it's an old-fashioned house,
near the river."

"Plaistow marshes!" ejaculated my aunt, "calls it the river!"

"So it is the river," returned my mother; "the river is the other side
of the marshes."

"Let's hope it will always stop there," said my aunt.

"And it's got a garden," continued my mother, ignoring my aunt's last
remark; "which is quite an unusual feature in a London house. And it
isn't the East End of London; it is a rising suburb. And you won't
make me miserable because I am too happy."

"Drat the woman!" said my aunt, "why can't she sit down and give us
our tea before it's all cold?"

"You are a disagreeable thing!" said my mother.

"Not half milk," said my aunt. My aunt was never in the least
disturbed by other people's opinion of her, which was perhaps well for
her.

For three days my mother packed and sang; and a dozen times a day
unpacked and laughed, looking for things wanted that were always found
at the very bottom of the very last box looked into, so that Anna,
waiting for a certain undergarment of my aunt's which shall be
nameless, suggested a saving of time:

"If I were you, ma'am," said Anna, "I'd look into the last box you're
going to look into first."

But it was found eventually in the first box-the box, that is, my
mother had intended to search first, but which, acting on Anna's
suggestion, she had reserved till the last. This caused my mother to
be quite short with Anna, who she said had wasted her time. But by
Tuesday afternoon all stood ready: we were to start early Wednesday
morning.

That evening, missing my mother in the house, I sought her in the
garden and found her, as I had expected, on her favourite seat under
the great lime tree; but to my surprise there were tears in her eyes.

"But I thought you were glad we were going," I said.

"So I am," answered my mother, drying her eyes only to make room for
fresh tears.

"Then why are you crying?"

"Because I'm sorry to leave here."

Grown-up folks with their contradictory ways were a continual puzzle
to me in those days; I am not sure I quite understand them even now,
myself included.

We were up and off next day before the dawn. The sun rose as the
wagon reached the top of the hill; and there we paused and took our
farewell look at Old Jacob's Tower. My mother cried a little behind
her veil; but my aunt only said, "I never did care for earwigs in my
tea;" and as for myself I was too excited and expectant to feel much
sentiment about anything.

On the journey I sat next to an exceptionally large and heavy man, who
in his sleep--and he slept often--imagined me to be a piece of
stuffing out of place. Then, grunting and wriggling, he would
endeavour to rub me out, until the continued irritation of my head
between the window and his back would cause him to awake, when he
would look down upon me reprovingly but not unkindly, observing to the
carriage generally: "It's a funny thing, ain't it, nobody's ever made
a boy yet that could keep still for ten seconds."  After which he
would pat me heartily on the head, to show he was not vexed with me,
and fall to sleep again upon me. He was a good-tempered man.

My mother sat occupied chiefly with her own thoughts, and my aunt had
found a congenial companion in a lady who had had her cap basket sat
upon; so I was left mainly to my own resources. When I could get my
head free of the big man's back, I gazed out of the window, and
watched the flying fragments as we shed the world. Now a village
would fall from us, now the yellow corn-land would cling to us for
awhile, or a wood catch at our rushing feet, and sometimes a strong
town would stop us, and hold us, panting for a space. Or, my eyes
weary, I would sit and listen to the hoarse singing of the wheels
beneath my feet. It was a monotonous chaunt, ever the same two lines:

     "Here we suffer grief and pain,
     Here we meet to part again,"
     
followed by a low, rumbling laugh. Sometimes fortissimo, sometimes
pianissimo; now vivace, now largo; but ever those same two lines, and
ever followed by the same low, rumbling laugh; still to this day the
iron wheels sing to me that same song.

Later on I also must have slept, for I dreamt that as the result of my
having engaged in single combat with a dragon, the dragon, ignoring
all the rules of Fairyland, had swallowed me. It was hot and stuffy
in the dragon's stomach. He had, so it appeared to me, disgracefully
overeaten himself; there were hundreds of us there, entirely
undigested, including Mother Hubbard and a gentleman named Johnson,
against whom, at that period, I entertained a strong prejudice by
reason of our divergent views upon the subject of spelling. Even in
this hour of our mutual discomfort Johnson would not leave me alone,
but persisted in asking me how I spelt Jonah. Nobody was looking, so
I kicked him. He sprang up and came after me. I tried to run away,
but became wedged between Hop-o'-my-Thumb and Julius Caesar. I
suppose our tearing about must have hurt the dragon, for at that
moment he gave vent to a most fearful scream, and I awoke to find the
fat man rubbing his left shin, while we struggled slowly, with steps
growing ever feebler, against a sea of brick that every moment closed
in closer round us.

We scrambled out of the carriage into a great echoing cave that might
have been the dragon's home, where, to my alarm, my mother was
immediately swooped down upon by a strange man in grey.

"Why's he do that?" I asked of my aunt.

"Because he's a fool," answered my aunt; "they all are."

He put my mother down and came towards us. He was a tall, thin man,
with eyes one felt one would never be afraid of; and instinctively
even then I associated him in my mind with windmills and a lank white
horse.

"Why, how he's grown," said the grey man, raising me in his arms until
my mother beside me appeared to me in a new light as quite a little
person; "and solid too."

My mother whispered something. I think from her face, for I knew the
signs, it was praise of me.

"And he's going to be our new fortune," she added aloud, as the grey
man lowered me.

"Then," said my aunt, who had this while been sitting rigid upon a
flat black box, "don't drop him down a coal-mine. That's all I say."

I wondered at the time why the grey man's pale face should flush so
crimson, and why my mother should whisper angrily:

"Flow can you be so wicked, Fanny? How dare you say such a thing?"

"I only said 'don't drop him down a coal-mine,'" returned my aunt,
apparently much surprised; "you don't want to drop him down a
coal-mine, do you?"

We passed through glittering, joyous streets, piled high each side
with all the good things of the earth; toys and baubles, jewels and
gold, things good to eat and good to drink, things good to wear and
good to see; through pleasant ways where fountains splashed and
flowers bloomed. The people wore bright clothes, had happy faces.
They rode in beautiful carriages, they strolled about, greeting one
another with smiles. The children ran and laughed. London, thought I
to myself, is the city of the fairies.

It passed, and we sank into a grim city of hoarse, roaring streets,
wherein the endless throngs swirled and surged as I had seen the
yellow waters curve and fret, contending, where the river pauses,
rock-bound. Here were no bright costumes, no bright faces, none
stayed to greet another; all was stern, and swift, and voiceless.
London, then, said I to myself, is the city of the giants. They must
live in these towering castles side by side, and these hurrying
thousands are their driven slaves.

But this passed also, and we sank lower yet until we reached a third
city, where a pale mist filled each sombre street. None of the
beautiful things of the world were to be seen here, but only the
things coarse and ugly. And wearily to and fro its sunless passages
trudged with heavy steps a weary people, coarse-clad, and with dull,
listless faces. And London, I knew, was the city of the gnomes who
labour sadly all their lives, imprisoned underground; and a terror
seized me lest I, too, should remain chained here, deep down below the
fairy city that was already but a dream.

We stopped at last in a long, unfinished street. I remember our
pushing our way through a group of dirty urchins, all of whom, my aunt
remarked in passing, ought to be skinned. It was my aunt's one
prescription for all to whom she took objection; but really in the
present instance I think it would have been of service; nothing else
whatever could have restored them to cleanliness. Then the door
closed behind us with an echoing clang, and the small, cold rooms came
forward stiffly to greet us.

The man in grey went to the one window and drew back the curtain; it
was growing dusk now. My aunt sat on a straight, hard chair and
stared fixedly at the three-armed gaselier. My mother stood in the
centre of the room with one small ungloved hand upon the table, and I
noticed--for I was very near--that the poor little one-legged thing
was trembling.

"Of course it's not what you've been accustomed to, Maggie," said the
man in grey; "but it's only for a little while."

He spoke in a new, angry voice; but I could not see his face, his back
being to the light.

My mother drew his arms around us both.

"It is the best home in all the world," she said; and thus we stayed
for awhile.

"Nonsense," said my aunt, suddenly; and this aroused us; "it's a poky
hole, as I told her it would be. Let her thank the Lord she's got a
man clever enough to get her out of it. I know him; he never could
rest where he was put. Now he's at the bottom; he'll go up."

It sounded to me a very disagreeable speech; but the grey man
laughed--I had not heard him laugh till then--and my mother ran to my
aunt and kissed her; and somehow the room seemed to become lighter.

For some reason I slept downstairs that night, on the floor, behind a
screen improvised out of a clothes horse and a blanket; and later in
the evening the clatter of knives and forks and the sound of subdued
voices awoke me. My aunt had apparently gone to bed; my mother and
the man in grey were talking together over their supper.

"We must buy land," said the voice of the grey man; "London is coming
this way. The Somebodies" (I forget the name my father mentioned)
"made all their money by buying up land round New York for a mere
song. Then, as the city spread, they became worth millions."

"But where will you get the money from, Luke?" asked the voice of my
mother.

The voice of the grey man answered airily:

"Oh, that's merely a matter of business. You grant a mortgage. The
property goes up in value. You borrow more. Then you buy more--and
so on."

"I see," said my mother.

"Being on the spot gives one such an advantage," said the grey man.
"I shall know just when to buy. It's a great thing, being on the
spot."

"Of course, it must be," said my mother.

I suppose I must have dozed, for the next words I heard the grey man
say were:

"Of course you have the park opposite, but then the house is small."

"But shall we need a very large one?" asked my mother.

"One never knows," said the grey man. "If I should go into
Parliament--"

At this point a hissing sound arose from the neighbourhood of the
fire.

"It _looks_," said my mother, "as if it were done."

"If you will hold the dish," said the grey man, "I think I can pour it
in without spilling."

Again I must have dozed.

"It depends," said the grey man, "upon what he is going to be. For
the classics, of course, Oxford."

"He's going to be very clever," said my mother. She spoke as one who
knows.

"We'll hope so," said the grey man.

"I shouldn't be surprised," said my mother, "if he turned out a poet."

The grey man said something in a low tone that I did not hear.

"I'm not so sure," answered my mother, "it's in the blood. I've often
thought that you, Luke, ought to have been a poet."

"I never had the time," said the grey man. "There were one or two
little things--"

"They were very beautiful," interrupted my mother. The clatter of the
knives and forks continued undisturbed for a few moments. Then
continued the grey man:

"There would be no harm, provided I made enough. It's the law of
nature. One generation earns, the next spends. We must see. In any
case, I think I should prefer Oxford for him."

"It will be so hard parting from him," said my mother.

"There will be the vacations," said the grey man, "when we shall
travel."

CHAPTER II.

IN WHICH PAUL MAKES ACQUAINTANCE OF THE MAN WITH THE UGLY MOUTH.

The case of my father and mother was not normal. You understand they
had been separated for some years, and though they were not young in
age--indeed, before my childish eyes they loomed quite ancient folk,
and in fact my father must have been nearly forty and my mother quit
of thirty--yet, as you will come to think yourself, no doubt, during
the course of my story, they were in all the essentials of life little
more than boy and girl. This I came to see later on, but at that
time, had I been consulted by enquiring maid or bachelor, I might
unwittingly have given wrong impressions concerning marriage in the
general. I should have described a husband as a man who could never
rest quite content unless his wife were by his side; who twenty times
a day would call from his office door: "Maggie, are you doing
anything important? I want to talk to you about a matter of
business."  ... "Maggie, are you alone? Oh, all right, I'll come
down."  Of a wife I should have said she was a woman whose eyes were
ever love-lit when resting on her man; who was glad where he was and
troubled where he was not. But in every case this might not have been
correct.

Also, I should have had something to say concerning the alarms and
excursions attending residence with any married couple. I should have
recommended the holding up of feet under the table lest, mistaken for
other feet, they should be trodden on and pressed. Also, I should
have advised against entry into any room unpreceded by what in
Stageland is termed "noise without."  It is somewhat disconcerting to
the nervous incomer to be met, the door still in his hand, by a sound
as of people springing suddenly into the air, followed by a weird
scuttling of feet, and then to discover the occupants sitting stiffly
in opposite corners, deeply engaged in book or needlework. But, as I
have said, with regard to some households, such precautions might be
needless.

Personally, I fear, I exercised little or no controlling influence
upon my parents in this respect, my intrusions coming soon to be
greeted with: "Oh, it's only Spud," in a tone of relief, accompanied
generally by the sofa cushion; but of my aunt they stood more in awe.
Not that she ever said anything, and, indeed, to do her justice, in
her efforts to spare their feelings she erred, if at all, on the side
of excess. Never did she move a footstep about the house except to
the music of a sustained and penetrating cough. As my father once
remarked, ungratefully, I must confess, the volume of bark produced by
my aunt in a single day would have done credit to the dying efforts of
a hospital load of consumptives; to a robust and perfectly healthy
lady the cost in nervous force must have been prodigious. Also, that
no fear should live with them that her eyes had seen aught not
intended for them, she would invariably enter backwards any room in
which they might be, closing the door loudly and with difficulty
before turning round: and through dark passages she would walk
singing. No woman alive could have done more; yet--such is human
nature!--neither my father nor my mother was grateful to her, so far
as I could judge.

Indeed, strange as it may appear, the more sympathetic towards them
she showed herself, the more irritated against her did they become.

"I believe, Fanny, you hate seeing Luke and me happy together," said
my mother one day, coming up from the kitchen to find my aunt
preparing for entry into the drawing-room by dropping teaspoons at
five-second intervals outside the door: "Don't make yourself so
ridiculous."  My mother spoke really quite unkindly.

"Hate it!" replied my aunt. "Why should I? Why shouldn't a pair of
turtle doves bill and coo, when their united age is only a little over
seventy, the pretty dears?"  The mildness of my aunt's answers often
surprised me.

As for my father, he grew positively vindictive. I remember the
occasion well. It was the first, though not the last time I knew him
lose his temper. What brought up the subject I forget, but my father
stopped suddenly; we were walking by the canal bank.

"Your aunt"--my father may not have intended it, but his tone and
manner when speaking of my aunt always conveyed to me the impression
that he regarded me as personally responsible for her existence. This
used to weigh upon me. "Your aunt is the most cantankerous, the
most--" he broke off, and shook his fist towards the setting sun. "I
wish to God," said my father, "your aunt had a comfortable little
income of her own, with a freehold cottage in the country, by God I
do!"  But the next moment, ashamed, I suppose, of his brutality: "Not
but what sometimes, of course, she can be very nice, you know," he
added; "don't tell your mother what I said just now."

Another who followed with sympathetic interest the domestic comedy was
Susan, our maid-of-all-work, the first of a long and varied series,
extending unto the advent of Amy, to whom the blessing of Heaven.
Susan was a stout and elderly female, liable to sudden fits of
sleepiness, the result, we were given to understand, of trouble; but
her heart, it was her own proud boast, was always in the right place.
She could never look at my father and mother sitting anywhere near
each other but she must flop down and weep awhile; the sight of
connubial bliss always reminding her, so she would explain, of the
past glories of her own married state.

Though an earnest enquirer, I was never able myself to grasp the ins
and outs of this past married life of Susan's. Whether her answers
were purposely framed to elude curiosity, or whether they were the
result of a naturally incoherent mind, I cannot say. Their tendency
was to convey confusion.

On Monday I have seen Susan shed tears of regret into the Brussels
sprouts, that she had been debarred by the pressure of other duties
from lately watering "his" grave, which, I gathered, was at Manor
Park. While on Tuesday I have listened, blood chilled, to the recital
of her intentions should she ever again enjoy the luxury of getting
her fingers near the scruff of his neck.

"But, I thought, Susan, he was dead," was my very natural comment upon
this outbreak.

"So did I, Master Paul," was Susan's rejoinder; "that was his
artfulness."

"Then he isn't buried in Manor Park Cemetery?"

"Not yet; but he'll wish he was, the half-baked monkey, when I get
hold of him."

"Then he wasn't a good man?"

"Who?"

"Your husband."

"Who says he ain't a good man?"  It was Susan's flying leaps from
tense to tense that most bewildered me. "If anybody says he ain't
I'll gouge their eye out!"

I hastened to assure Susan that my observation had been intended in
the nature of enquiry, not of assertion.

"Brings me a bottle of gin--for my headaches--every time he comes
home," continued Susan, showing cause for opinion, "every blessed
time."

And at some such point as this I would retire to the clearer
atmosphere of German grammar or mixed fractions.

We suffered a good deal from Susan one way and another; for having
regard to the admirable position of her heart, we all felt it our duty
to overlook mere failings of the flesh--all but my aunt, that is, who
never made any pretence of being a sentimentalist.

"She's a lazy hussy," was the opinion expressed of her one morning by
my aunt, who was rinsing; "a gulping, snorting, lazy hussy, that's
what she is."  There was some excuse for my aunt's indignation. It
was then eleven o'clock and Susan was still sleeping off an attack of
what she called "new-ralgy."

"She has seen a good deal of trouble," said my mother, who was wiping.

"And if she was my cook and housemaid," replied my aunt, "she would
see more, the slut!"

"She's not a good servant in many respects," admitted my mother, "but
I think she's good-hearted."

"Oh, drat her heart," was my aunt's retort. "The right place for that
heart of hers is on the doorstep. And that's where I'd put it, and
her and her box alongside it, if I had my way."

The departure of Susan did take place not long afterwards. It
occurred one Saturday night. My mother came upstairs looking pale.

"Luke," she said, "do please run for the doctor."

"What's the matter?" asked my father.

"Susan," gasped my mother, "she's lying on the kitchen floor breathing
in the strangest fashion and quite unable to speak."

"I'll go for Washburn," said my father; "if I am quick I shall catch
him at the dispensary."

Five minutes later my father came back panting, followed by the
doctor. This was a big, black-bearded man; added to which he had the
knack of looking bigger than even he really was. He came down the
kitchen stairs two at a time, shaking the whole house. He brushed my
mother aside, and bent over the unconscious Susan, who was on her back
with her mouth wide open. Then he rose and looked at my father and
mother, who were watching him with troubled faces; and then he opened
his mouth, and there came from it a roar of laughter, the like of
which sound I had never heard.

The next moment he had seized a pail half full of water and had flung
it over the woman. She opened her eyes and sat up.

"Feeling better?" said the doctor, with the pail still in his hand;
"have another dose?"

Susan began to gather herself together with the evident intention of
expressing her feelings; but before she could find the first word, he
had pushed the three of us outside and slammed the door behind us.

From the top of the stairs we could hear Susan's thick, rancorous
voice raging fiercer and fiercer, drowned every now and then by the
man's savage roar of laughter. And, when for want of breath she would
flag for a moment, he would yell out encouragement to her, shouting:
"Bravo! Go it, my beauty, give it tongue! Bark, bark! I love to
hear you," applauding her, clapping his hands and stamping his feet.

"What a beast of a man," said my mother.

"He is really a most interesting man when you come to know him,"
explained my father.

Replied my mother, stiffly: "I don't ever mean to know him."  But it
is only concerning the past that we possess knowledge.

The riot from below ceased at length, and was followed by a new voice,
speaking quietly and emphatically, and then we heard the doctor's step
again upon the stairs.

My mother held her purse open in her hand, and as the man entered the
room she went forward to meet him.

"How much do we owe you, Doctor?" said my mother. She spoke in a
voice trembling with severity.

He closed the purse and gently pushed it back towards her.

"A glass of beer and a chop, Mrs. Kelver," he answered, "which I am
coming back in an hour to cook for myself. And as you will be without
any servant," he continued, while my mother stood staring at him
incapable of utterance, "you had better let me cook some for you at
the same time. I am an expert at grilling chops."

"But, really, Doctor--" my mother began. He laid his huge hand upon
her shoulder, and my mother sat down upon the nearest chair.

"My dear lady," he said, "she's a person you never ought to have had
inside your house. She's promised me to be gone in half an hour, and
I'm coming back to see she keeps her word. Give her a month's wages,
and have a clear fire ready for me."  And before my mother could
reply, he had slammed the front door.

"What a very odd sort of a man," said my mother, recovering herself.

"He's a character," said my father; "you might not think it, but he's
worshipped about here."

"I hardly know what to make of him," said my mother; "I suppose I had
better go out and get some chops;" which she did.

Susan went, as sober as a judge, on Friday, as the saying is, her
great anxiety being to get out of the house before the doctor
returned. The doctor himself arrived true to his time, and I lay
awake--for no human being ever slept or felt he wanted to sleep while
Dr. Washburn was anywhere near--and listened to the gusts of laughter
that swept continually through the house. Even my aunt laughed that
supper time, and when the doctor himself laughed it seemed to me that
the bed shook under me. Not liking to be out of it, I did what spoilt
little boys and even spoilt little girls sometimes will do under
similar stress of feeling, wrapped the blanket round my legs and
pattered down, with my face set to express the sudden desire of a
sensitive and possibly short-lived child for parents' love. My mother
pretended to be angry, but that I knew was only her company manners.
Besides, I really had, if not exactly a pain, an extremely
uncomfortable sensation (one common to me about that period) as of
having swallowed the dome of St. Paul's. The doctor said it was a
frequent complaint with children, the result of too early hours and
too much study; and, taking me on his knee, wrote then and there a
diet chart for me, which included one tablespoonful of golden syrup
four times a day, and one ounce of sherbet to be placed upon the
tongue and taken neat ten minutes before each meal.

That evening will always live in my remembrance. My mother was
brighter than I had ever seen her. A flush was on her cheek and a
sparkle in her eye, and looking across at her as she sat holding a
small painted screen to shield her face from the fire, the sense of
beauty became suddenly born within me, and answering an impulse I
could not have explained, I slipped down, still with my blanket around
me, from the doctor's knee, and squatted on the edge of the fender,
from where, when I thought no one was noticing me, I could steal
furtive glances up into her face.

So also my father seemed to me to have become all at once bigger and
more dignified, talking with a vigour and an enjoyment that sat newly
on him. Aunt Fan was quite witty and agreeable--for her; and even I
asked one or two questions, at which, for some reason or another,
everybody laughed; which determined me to remember and ask those same
questions again on some future occasion.

That was the great charm of the man, that by the magnetic spell of his
magnificent vitality he drew from everyone their best. In his company
clever people waxed intellectual giants, while the dull sat amazed at
their own originality. Conversing with him, Podsnap might have been
piquant, Dogberry incisive. But better than all else, I found it
listening to his own talk. Of what he spoke I could tell you no more
than could the children of Hamelin have told the tune the Pied Piper
played. I only know that at the tangled music of his strong voice the
walls of the mean room faded away, and that beyond I saw a brave,
laughing world that called to me; a world full of joyous fight, where
some won and some lost. But that mattered not a jot, because whatever
else came of it there was a right royal game for all; a world where
merry gentlemen feared neither life nor death, and Fate was but the
Master of the Revels.

Such was my first introduction to Dr. Washburn, or to give him the
name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter,
Dr. Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the
whole man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites,
and then he was more brute than man--brutish in his instincts, in his
appetites, brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep
blue eyes would grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have
thought him an angel in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as
to suggest the possibility of his wings being folded away underneath.
Often have I tried to make up my mind whether it has been better for
me or worse that I ever came to know him; but as easy would it be for
the tree to say whether the rushing winds and the wild rains have
shaped it or mis-shaped.

Susan's place remained vacant for some time. My mother would explain
to the few friends who occasionally came from afar to see us, that her
"housemaid" she had been compelled to suddenly discharge, and that we
were waiting for the arrival of a new and better specimen. But the
months passed and we still waited, and my father on the rare days when
a client would ring the office bell, would, after pausing a decent
interval, open the front door himself, and then call downstairs
indignantly and loudly, to know why "Jane" or "Mary" could not attend
to their work. And my mother, that the bread-boy or the milkman might
not put it about the neighbourhood that the Kelvers in the big corner
house kept no servant, would hide herself behind a thick veil and
fetch all things herself from streets a long way off.

For this family of whom I am writing were, I confess, weak and human.
Their poverty they were ashamed of as though it were a crime, and in
consequence their life was more full of paltry and useless subterfuge
than should be perhaps the life of brave men and women. The larder, I
fancy, was very often bare, but the port and sherry with the sweet
biscuits stood always on the sideboard; and the fire had often to be
low in the grate that my father's tall hat might shine resplendent and
my mother's black silk rustle on Sundays.

But I would not have you sneer at them, thinking all pretence must
spring from snobbishness and never from mistaken self-respect. Some
fine gentleman writers there be--men whose world is bounded on the
east by Bond Street--who see in the struggles of poverty to hide its
darns only matter for jest. But myself, I cannot laugh at them. I
know the long hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the
long cost of the cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from
the confectioner's. But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous.
Heroism is not all of one pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of
Wales come to see him, would have put his bread and cheese and jug of
beer upon the table, and helped His Royal Highness to half. But my
father and mother's tea was very weak that Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith
might have a glass of wine should they come to dinner. I remember the
one egg for breakfast, my mother arguing that my father should have it
because he had his business to attend to; my father insisting that my
mother should eat it, she having to go out shopping, a compromise
being effected by their dividing it between them, each clamouring for
the white as the most nourishing. And I know however little the meal
looked upon the table when we started I always rose well satisfied.
These are small things to speak of, but then you must bear in mind
this is a story moving in narrow ways.

To me this life came as a good time. That I was encouraged to eat
treacle in preference to butter seemed to me admirable. Personally, I
preferred sausages for dinner; and a supper of fried fish and
potatoes, brought in stealthily in a carpet bag, was infinitely more
enjoyable than the set meal where nothing was of interest till one
came to the dessert. What fun there was about it all! The cleaning
of the doorstep by night, when from the ill-lit street a gentleman
with a piece of sacking round his legs might very well pass for a
somewhat tall charwoman. I would keep watch at the gate to give
warning should any one looking like a possible late caller turn the
corner of the street, coming back now and then in answer to a low
whistle to help my father grope about in the dark for the hearthstone;
he was always mislaying the hearthstone. How much better, helping to
clean the knives or running errands than wasting all one's morning
dwelling upon the shocking irregularity of certain classes of French
verbs; or making useless calculations as to how long X, walking four
and a quarter miles an hour, would be overtaking Y, whose powers were
limited to three and a half, but who had started two and three quarter
hours sooner; the whole argument being reduced to sheer pedantry by
reason of no information being afforded to the student concerning the
respective thirstiness of X and Y.

Even my father and mother were able to take it lightly with plenty of
laughter and no groaning that I ever heard. For over all lay the
morning light of hope, and what prisoner, escaping from his dungeon,
ever stayed to think of his torn hands and knees when beyond the
distant opening he could see the sunlight glinting through the
brambles?

"I had no idea," said my mother, "there was so much to do in a house.
In future I shall arrange for the servants to have regular hours, and
a little time to themselves, for rest. Don't you think it right,
Luke?"

"Quite right," replied my father; "and I'll tell you another thing
we'll do. I shall insist on the landlord's putting a marble doorstep
to the next house we take; you pass a sponge over marble and it is
always clean."

"Or tesselated," suggested my mother.

"Or tesselated," agreed my father; "but marble is more uncommon."

Only once, can I recall a cloud. That was one Sunday when my mother,
speaking across the table in the middle of dinner, said to my father,
"We might save the rest of that stew, Luke; there's an omelette
coming."

My father laid down the spoon. "An omelette!"

"Yes," said my mother. "I thought I would like to try again."

My father stepped into the back kitchen--we dined in the kitchen, as a
rule, it saved much carriage--returning with the wood chopper.

"What ever are you going to do, Luke, with the chopper?" said my
mother.

"Divide the omelette," replied my father.

My mother began to cry.

"Why, Maggie--!" said my father.

"I know the other one was leathery," said my mother, "but it was the
fault of the oven, you know it was, Luke."

"My dear," said my father, "I only meant it as a joke."

"I don't like that sort of joke," said my mother; "it isn't nice of
you, Luke."

I don't think, to be candid, my mother liked much any joke that was
against herself. Indeed, when I come to think of it, I have never met
a woman who did, nor man, either.

There had soon grown up a comradeship between my father and myself for
he was the youngest thing I had met with as yet. Sometimes my mother
seemed very young, and later I met boys and girls nearer to my own age
in years; but they grew, while my father remained always the same.
The hair about his temples was turning grey, and when you looked close
you saw many crow's feet and lines, especially about the mouth. But
his eyes were the eyes of a boy, his laugh the laugh of a boy, and his
heart the heart of a boy. So we were very close to each other.

In a narrow strip of ground we called our garden we would play a
cricket of our own, encompassed about by many novel rules, rendered
necessary by the locality. For instance, all hitting to leg was
forbidden, as tending to endanger neighbouring windows, while hitting
to off was likewise not to be encouraged, as causing a temporary
adjournment of the game, while batter and bowler went through the
house and out into the street to recover the ball from some predatory
crowd of urchins to whom it had evidently appeared as a gift direct
from Heaven. Sometimes rising very early we would walk across the
marshes to bathe in a small creek that led down to the river, but this
was muddy work, necessitating much washing of legs on the return home.
And on rare days we would, taking the train to Hackney and walking to
the bridge, row up the river Lea, perhaps as far as Ponder's End.

But these sports being hedged around with difficulties, more commonly
for recreation we would take long walks. There were pleasant nooks
even in the neighbourhood of Plaistow marshes in those days. Here and
there a graceful elm still clung to the troubled soil. Surrounded on
all sides by hideousness, picturesque inns still remained hidden
within green walls where, if you were careful not to pry too
curiously, you might sit and sip your glass of beer beneath the oak
and dream yourself where reeking chimneys and mean streets were not.
During such walks my father would talk to me as he would talk to my
mother, telling me all his wild, hopeful plans, discussing with me how
I was to lodge at Oxford, to what particular branches of study and of
sport I was to give my preference, speaking always with such catching
confidence that I came to regard my sojourn in this brick and mortar
prison as only a question of months.

One day, talking of this future, and laughing as we walked briskly.
through the shrill streets, I told him the words my mother had
said--long ago, as it seemed to me, for life is as a stone rolling
down-hill, and moves but slowly at first; she and I sitting on the
moss at the foot of old "Jacob's Folly"--that he was our Prince
fighting to deliver us from the grim castle called "Hard Times,"
guarded by the dragon Poverty.

My father laughed and his boyish face flushed with pleasure.

"And she was right, Paul," he whispered, pressing my small hand in
his--it was necessary to whisper, for the street where we were was
very crowded, but I knew that he wanted to shout. "I will fight him
and I will slay him."  My father made passes in the air with his
walking-stick, and it was evident from the way they drew aside that
the people round about fancied he was mad. "I will batter down the
iron gates and she shall be free. I will, God help me, I will."

The gallant gentleman! How long and how bravely he fought! But in
the end it was the Dragon triumphed, the Knight that lay upon the
ground, his great heart still. I have read how, with the sword of
Honest Industry, one may always conquer this grim Dragon. But such
was in foolish books. In truth, only with the sword of Chicanery and
the stout buckler of Unscrupulousness shall you be certain of victory
over him. If you care not to use these, pray to your Gods, and take
what comes with a stout heart.

CHAPTER III.

HOW GOOD LUCK KNOCKED AT THE DOOR OF THE MAN IN GREY.

"Louisa!" roared my father down the kitchen stairs, "are you all
asleep? Here have I had to answer the front door myself."  Then my
father strode into his office, and the door slammed. My father could
be very angry when nobody was by.

Quarter of an hour later his bell rang with a quick, authoritative
jangle. My mother, who was peeling potatoes with difficulty in
wash-leather gloves, looked at my aunt who was shelling peas. The
bell rang again louder still this time.

"Once for Louisa, twice for James, isn't it?" enquired my aunt.

"You go, Paul," said my mother; "say that Louisa--" but with the words
a sudden flush overspread my mother's face, and before I could lay
down my slate she had drawn off her gloves and had passed me. "No,
don't stop your lessons, I'll go myself," she said, and ran out.

A few minutes later the kitchen door opened softly, and my mother's
hand, appearing through the jar, beckoned to me mysteriously.

"Walk on your toes," whispered my mother, setting the example as she
led the way up the stairs; which after the manner of stairs showed
their disapproval of deception by creaking louder and more often than
under any other circumstances; and in this manner we reached my
parents' bedroom, where, in the old-fashioned wardrobe, relic of
better days, reposed my best suit of clothes, or, to be strictly
grammatical, my better.

Never before had I worn these on a week-day morning, but all
conversation not germane to the question of getting into them quickly
my mother swept aside; and when I was complete, down even to the new
shoes--Bluchers, we called them in those days--took me by the hand,
and together we crept down as we had crept up, silent, stealthy and
alert. My mother led me to the street door and opened it.

"Shan't I want my cap?" I whispered. But my mother only shook her
head and closed the door with a bang; and then the explanation of the
pantomime came to me, for with such "business"--comic, shall I call
it, or tragic?--I was becoming familiar; and, my mother's hand upon my
shoulder, we entered my father's office.

Whether from the fact that so often of an evening--our drawing-room
being reserved always as a show-room in case of chance visitors;
Cowper's poems, open face-downwards on the wobbly loo table; the
half-finished crochet work, suggestive of elegant leisure, thrown
carelessly over the arm of the smaller easy-chair--this office would
become our sitting-room, its books and papers, as things of no
account, being huddled out of sight; or whether from the readiness
with which my father would come out of it at all times to play at
something else--at cricket in the back garden on dry days or ninepins
in the passage on wet, charging back into it again whenever a knock
sounded at the front door, I cannot say. But I know that as a child
it never occurred to me to regard my father's profession as a serious
affair. To me he was merely playing there, surrounded by big books
and bundles of documents, labelled profusely but consisting only of
blank papers; by japanned tin boxes, lettered imposingly, but for the
most part empty. "Sutton Hampden, Esq.," I remember was practically
my mother's work-box. The "Drayton Estates" yielded apparently
nothing but apples, a fruit of which my father was fond; while
"Mortgages" it was not until later in life I discovered had no
connection with poems in manuscript, some in course of correction,
others completed.

Now, as the door opened, he rose and came towards us. His hair stood
up from his head, for it was a habit of his to rumple it as he talked;
and this added to his evident efforts to compose his face into an
expression of businesslike gravity, added emphasis, if such were
needed, to the suggestion of the over long schoolboy making believe.

"This is the youngster," said my father, taking me from my mother, and
passing me on. "Tall for his age, isn't he?"

With a twist of his thick lips, he rolled the evil-smelling cigar he
was smoking from the left corner of his mouth to the right; and held
out a fat and not too clean hand, which, as it closed round mine,
brought to my mind the picture of the walrus in my natural history
book; with the other he flapped me kindly on the head.

"Like 'is mother, wonderfully like 'is mother, ain't 'e?" he observed,
still holding my hand. "And that," he added with a wink of one of his
small eyes towards my father, "is about the 'ighest compliment I can
pay 'im, eh?"

His eyes were remarkably small, but marvellously bright and piercing;
so much so that when he turned them again upon me I tried to think
quickly of something nice about him, feeling sure that he could see
right into me.

"And where are you thinkin' of sendin' 'im?" he continued; "Eton or
'Arrow?"

"We haven't quite made up our minds as yet," replied my father; "at
present we are educating him at home."

"You take my tip," said the fat man, "and learn all you can. Look at
me! If I'd 'ad the opportunity of being a schollard I wouldn't be
here offering your father an extravagant price for doin' my work; I'd
be able to do it myself."

"You seem to have got on very well without it," laughed my father; and
in truth his air of prosperity might have justified greater
self-complacency. Rings sparkled on his blunt fingers, and upon the
swelling billows of his waistcoat rose and sank a massive gold cable.

"I'd 'ave done better with it," he grunted.

"But you look very clever," I said; and though divining with a child's
cuteness that it was desired I should make a favourable impression
upon him, I hoped this would please him, the words were yet
spontaneous.

He laughed heartily, his whole body shaking like some huge jelly.

"Well, old Noel Hasluck's not exactly a fool," he assented, "but I'd
like myself better if I could talk about something else than business,
and didn't drop my aitches. And so would my little gell."

"You have a daughter?" asked my mother, with whom a child, as a bond
of sympathy with the stranger took the place assigned by most women to
disrespectful cooks and incompetent housemaids.

"I won't tell you about 'er. But I'll just bring 'er to see you now
and then, ma'am, if you don't mind," answered Mr. Hasluck. "She don't
often meet gentle-folks, an' it'll do 'er good."

My mother glanced across at my father, but the man, intercepting her
question, replied to it himself.

"You needn't be afraid, ma'am, that she's anything like me," he
assured her quite good-temperedly; "nobody ever believes she's my
daughter, except me and the old woman. She's a little lady, she is.
Freak o' nature, I call it."

"We shall be delighted," explained my mother.

"Well, you will when you see 'er," replied Mr. Hasluck, quite
contentedly.

He pushed half-a-crown into my hand, overriding my parents'
susceptibilities with the easy good-temper of a man accustomed to have
his way in all things.

"No squanderin' it on the 'eathen," was his parting injunction as I
left the room; "you spend that on a Christian tradesman."

It was the first money I ever remember having to spend, that
half-crown of old Hasluck's; suggestions of the delights to be derived
from a new pair of gloves for Sunday, from a Latin grammar, which
would then be all my own, and so on, having hitherto displaced all
less exalted visions concerning the disposal of chance coins coming
into my small hands. But on this occasion I was left free to decide
for myself.

The anxiety it gave me! the long tossing hours in bed! the tramping of
the bewildering streets! Even advice when asked for was denied me.

"You must learn to think for yourself," said my father, who spoke
eloquently on the necessity of early acquiring sound judgment and what
he called "commercial aptitude."

"No, dear," said my mother, "Mr. Hasluck wanted you to spend it as you
like. If I told you, that would be spending it as I liked. Your
father and I want to see what you will do with it."

The good little boys in the books bought presents or gave away to
people in distress. For this I hated them with the malignity the
lower nature ever feels towards the higher. I consulted my aunt Fan.

"If somebody gave you half-a-crown," I put it to her, "what would you
buy with it?"

"Side-combs," said my aunt; she was always losing or breaking her
side-combs.

"But I mean if you were me," I explained.

"Drat the child!" said my aunt; "how do I know what he wants if he
don't know himself. Idiot!"

The shop windows into which I stared, my nose glued to the pane! The
things I asked the price of! The things I made up my mind to buy and
then decided that I wouldn't buy! Even my patient mother began to
show signs of irritation. It was rapidly assuming the dimensions of a
family curse, was old Hasluck's half-crown.

Then one day I made up my mind, and so ended the trouble. In the
window of a small plumber's shop in a back street near, stood on view
among brass taps, rolls of lead piping and cistern requisites, various
squares of coloured glass, the sort of thing chiefly used, I believe,
for lavatory doors and staircase windows. Some had stars in the
centre, and others, more elaborate, were enriched with designs, severe
but inoffensive. I purchased a dozen of these, the plumber, an
affable man who appeared glad to see me, throwing in two extra out of
sheer generosity.

Why I bought them I did not know at the time, and I do not know now.
My mother cried when she saw them. My father could get no further
than: "But what are you going to do with them?" to which I was unable
to reply. My aunt, alone, attempted comfort.

"If a person fancies coloured glass," said my aunt, "then he's a fool
not to buy coloured glass when he gets the chance. We haven't all the
same tastes."

In the end, I cut myself badly with them and consented to their being
thrown into the dust-bin. But looking back, I have come to regard
myself rather as the victim of Fate than of Folly. Many folks have I
met since, recipients of Hasluck's half-crowns--many a man who has
slapped his pocket and blessed the day he first met that "Napoleon of
Finance," as later he came to be known among his friends--but it ever
ended so; coloured glass and cut fingers. Is it fairy gold that he
and his kind fling round? It would seem to be.

Next time old Hasluck knocked at our front door a maid in cap and
apron opened it to him, and this was but the beginning of change. New
oilcloth glistened in the passage. Lace curtains, such as in that
neighbourhood were the hall-mark of the plutocrat, advertised our
rising fortunes to the street, and greatest marvel of all, at least to
my awed eyes, my father's Sunday clothes came into weekday wear, new
ones taking their place in the great wardrobe that hitherto had been
the stronghold of our gentility; to which we had ever turned for
comfort when rendered despondent by contemplation of the weakness of
our outer walls. "Seeing that everything was all right" is how my
mother would explain it. She would lay the lilac silk upon the bed,
fondly soothing down its rustling undulations, lingering lovingly over
its deep frosted flounces of rich Honiton. Maybe she had entered the
room weary looking and depressed, but soon there would proceed from
her a gentle humming as from some small winged thing when the sun
first touches it and warms it, and sometimes by the time the Indian
shawl, which could go through a wedding ring, but never would when it
was wanted to, had been refolded and fastened again with the great
cameo brooch, and the poke bonnet, like some fractious child, shaken
and petted into good condition, she would be singing softly to
herself, nodding her head to the words: which were generally to the
effect that somebody was too old and somebody else too bold and
another too cold, "so he wouldn't do for me;" and stepping lightly as
though the burden of the years had fallen from her.

One evening--it was before the advent of this Hasluck--I remember
climbing out of bed, for trouble was within me. Creatures,
indescribable but heavy, had sat upon my chest, after which I had
fallen downstairs, slowly and reasonably for the first few hundred
flights, then with haste for the next million miles or so, until I
found myself in the street with nothing on but my nightshirt.
Personally, I was shocked, but nobody else seemed to mind, and I
hailed a two-penny 'bus and climbed in. But when I tried to pay I
found I hadn't any pockets, so I jumped out and ran away and the
conductor came after me. My feet were like lead, and with every step
he gained on me, till with a scream I made one mighty effort and
awoke.

Feeling the need of comfort after these unpleasant but by no means
unfamiliar experiences, I wrapped some clothes round me and crept
downstairs. The "office" was dark, but to my surprise a light shone
from under the drawing-room door, and I opened it.

The candles in the silver candlesticks were lighted, and in state, one
in each easy-chair, sat my father and mother, both in their best
clothes; my father in the buckled shoes and the frilled shirt that I
had never seen him wear before, my mother with the Indian shawl about
her shoulders, and upon her head the cap of ceremony that reposed
three hundred and sixty days out of the year in its round wicker-work
nest lined with silk. They started guiltily as I pushed open the
door, but I congratulate myself that I had sense enough--or was it
instinct--to ask no questions.

The last time I had seen them, three hours ago, they had been engaged,
the lights carefully extinguished, cleaning the ground floor windows,
my father the outside, my mother within, and it astonished me the
change not only in their appearance, but in their manner and bearing,
and even in their very voices. My father brought over from the
sideboard the sherry and sweet biscuits and poured out and handed a
glass to my mother, and he and my mother drank to each other, while I
between them ate the biscuits, and the conversation was of Byron's
poems and the great glass palace in Hyde Park.

I wonder am I disloyal setting this down? Maybe to others it shows
but a foolish man and woman, and that is far from my intention. I
dwell upon such trifles because to me the memory of them is very
tender. The virtues of our loved ones we admire, yet after all 'tis
but what we expected of them: how could they do otherwise? Their
failings we would forget; no one of us is perfect. But over their
follies we love to linger, smiling.

To me personally, old Hasluck's coming and all that followed thereupon
made perhaps more difference than to any one else. My father now was
busy all the day; if not in his office, then away in the grim city of
the giants, as I still thought of it; while to my mother came every
day more social and domestic duties; so that for a time I was left
much to my own resources.

Rambling--"bummelling," as the Germans term it--was my bent. This my
mother would have checked, but my father said:

"Don't molly-coddle him. Let him learn to be smart."

"I don't think the smart people are always the nicest," demurred my
mother. "I don't call you at all 'smart,' Luke."

My father appeared surprised, but reflected.

"I should call myself smart--in a sense," he explained, after
consideration.

"Perhaps you are right, dear," replied my mother; "and of course boys
are different from girls."

Sometimes I would wander Victoria Park way, which was then surrounded
by many small cottages in leafy gardens; or even reach as far as
Clapton, where old red brick Georgian houses still stood behind high
palings, and tall elms gave to the wide road on sunny afternoons an
old-world air of peace. But such excursions were the exception, for
strange though it may read, the narrow, squalid streets had greater
hold on me. Not the few main thoroughfares, filled ever with a dull,
deep throbbing as of some tireless iron machine; where the endless
human files, streaming ever up and down, crossing and recrossing,
seemed mere rushing chains of flesh and blood, working upon unseen
wheels; but the dim, weary, lifeless streets--the dark, tortuous
roots, as I fancied them, of that grim forest of entangled brick.
Mystery lurked in their gloom. Fear whispered from behind their
silence. Dumb figures flitted swiftly to and fro, never pausing,
never glancing right nor left. Far-off footsteps, rising swiftly into
sound, as swiftly fading, echoed round their lonely comers. Dreading,
yet drawn on, I would creep along their pavements as through some city
of the dead, thinking of the eyes I saw not watching from the thousand
windows; starting at each muffled sound penetrating the long, dreary
walls, behind which that close-packed, writhing life lay hid.

One day there came a cry from behind a curtained window. I stood
still for a moment and then ran; but before I could get far enough
away I heard it again, a long, piercing cry, growing fiercer before it
ceased; so that I ran faster still, not heeding where I went, till I
found myself in a raw, unfinished street, ending in black waste land,
bordering the river. I stopped, panting, wondering how I should find
my way again. To recover myself and think I sat upon the doorstep of
an empty house, and there came dancing down the road with a curious,
half-running, half-hopping step--something like a water wagtail's--a
child, a boy about my own age, who, after eyeing me strangely sat down
beside me.

We watched each other for a few minutes; and I noticed that his mouth
kept opening and shutting, though he said nothing. Suddenly, edging
closer to me, he spoke in a thick whisper. It sounded as though his
mouth were full of wool.

"Wot 'appens to yer when yer dead?"

"If you're good you go to Heaven. If you're bad you go to Hell."

"Long way off, both of 'em, ain't they?"

"Yes. Millions of miles."

"They can't come after yer? Can't fetch yer back again?"

"No, never."

The doorstep that we occupied was the last. A yard beyond began the
black waste of mud. From the other end of the street, now growing
dark, he never took his staring eyes for an instant.

"Ever seen a stiff 'un--a dead 'un?"

"No."

"I 'ave--stuck a pin into 'im. 'E never felt it. Don't feel anything
when yer dead, do yer?"

All the while he kept swaying his body to and fro, twisting his arms
and legs, and making faces. Comical figures made of ginger-bread,
with quaintly curved limbs and grinning features, were to be bought
then in bakers' shops: he made me hungry, reminding me of such.

"Of course not. When you are dead you're not there, you know. Our
bodies are but senseless clay."  I was glad I remembered that line. I
tried to think of the next one, which was about food for worms; but it
evaded me.

"I like you," he said; and making a fist, he gave me a punch in the
chest. It was the token of palship among the youth of that
neighbourhood, and gravely I returned it, meaning it, for friendship
with children is an affair of the instant, or not at all, and I knew
him for my first chum.

He wormed himself up.

"Yer won't tell?" he said.

I had no notion what I was not to tell, but our compact demanded that
I should agree.

"Say 'I swear.'"

"I swear."

The heroes of my favourite fiction bound themselves by such like
secret oaths. Here evidently was a comrade after my own heart.

"Good-bye, cockey."

But he turned again, and taking from his pocket an old knife, thrust
it into my hand. Then with that extraordinary hopping movement of his
ran off across the mud.

I stood watching him, wondering where he could be going. He stumbled
a little further, where the mud began to get softer and deeper, but
struggling up again, went hopping on towards the river.

I shouted to him, but he never looked back. At every few yards he
would sink down almost to his knees in the black mud, but wrenching
himself free would flounder forward. Then, still some distance from
the river, he fell upon his face, and did not rise again. I saw his
arms beating feebler and feebler as he sank till at last the oily
slime closed over him, and I could detect nothing but a faint heaving
underneath the mud. And after a time even that ceased.

It was late before I reached home, and fortunately my father and
mother were still out. I did not tell any one what I had seen, having
sworn not to; and as time went on the incident haunted me less and
less until it became subservient to my will. But of my fancy for
those silent, lifeless streets it cured me for the time. From behind
their still walls I would hear that long cry; down their narrow vistas
see that writhing figure, like some animated ginger-bread, hopping,
springing, falling.

Yet in the more crowded streets another trouble awaited me, one more
tangible.

Have you ever noticed a pack of sparrows round some crumbs perchance
that you have thrown out from your window? Suddenly the rest of the
flock will set upon one. There is a tremendous Lilliputian hubbub, a
tossing of tiny wings and heads, a babel of shrill chirps. It is
comical.

"Spiteful little imps they are," you say to yourself, much amused.

So I have heard good-tempered men and women calling out to one another
with a laugh.

"There go those young devils chivvying that poor little beggar again;
ought to be ashamed of theirselves."

But, oh! the anguish of the poor little beggar! Can any one who has
not been through it imagine it! Reduced to its actualities, what was
it? Gibes and jeers that, after all, break no bones. A few pinches,
kicks and slaps; at worst a few hard knocks. But the dreading of it
beforehand! Terror lived in every street, hid, waiting for me, round
each corner. The half-dozen wrangling over their marbles--had they
seen me? The boy whistling as he stood staring into the print shop,
would I get past him without his noticing me; or would he, swinging
round upon his heel, raise the shrill whoop that brought them from
every doorway to hunt me?

The shame, when caught at last and cornered: the grinning face that
would stop to watch; the careless jokes of passers-by, regarding the
whole thing but as a sparrows' squabble: worst of all, perhaps, the
rare pity! The after humiliation when, finally released, I would dart
away, followed by shouted taunts and laughter; every eye turned to
watch me, shrinking by; my whole small carcass shaking with dry sobs
of bitterness and rage!

If only I could have turned and faced them! So far as the mere
bearing of pain was concerned, I knew myself brave. The physical
suffering resulting from any number of stand-up fights would have been
trivial compared with the mental agony I endured. That I, the comrade
of a hundred heroes--I, who nightly rode with Richard Coeur de Lion,
who against Sir Lancelot himself had couched a lance, and that not
altogether unsuccessful, I to whom all damsels in distress were wont
to look for succour--that I should run from varlets such as these!

My friend, my bosom friend, good Robin Hood! how would he have behaved
under similar circumstances? how Ivanhoe, my chosen companion in all
quests of knightly enterprise? how--to come to modern times--Jack
Harkaway, mere schoolboy though he might be? Would not one and all
have welcomed such incident with a joyous shout, and in a trice have
scattered to the winds the worthless herd?

But, alas! upon my pale lips the joyous shout sank into an unheard
whisper, and the thing that became scattered to the wind was myself,
the first opening that occurred.

Sometimes, the blood boiling in my veins, I would turn, thinking to go
back and at all risk defying my tormentors, prove to myself I was no
coward. But before I had retraced my steps a dozen paces, I would see
in imagination the whole scene again before me: the laughing crowd,
the halting passers-by, the spiteful, mocking little faces every way I
turned; and so instead would creep on home, and climbing stealthily up
into my own room, cry my heart out in the dark upon my bed.

Until one blessed day, when a blessed Fairy, in the form of a small
kitten, lifted the spell that bound me, and set free my limbs.

I have always had a passionate affection for the dumb world, if it be
dumb. My first playmate, I remember, was a water rat. A stream ran
at the bottom of our garden; and sometimes, escaping the vigilant eye
of Mrs. Fursey, I would steal out with my supper and join him on the
banks. There, hidden behind the osiers, we would play at banquets,
he, it is true, doing most of the banqueting, and I the make-believe.
But it was a good game; added to which it was the only game I could
ever get him to play, though I tried. He was a one-ideaed rat.

Later I came into the possession of a white specimen all my own. He
lived chiefly in the outside breast pocket of my jacket, in company
with my handkerchief, so that glancing down I could generally see his
little pink eyes gleaming up at me, except on very cold days, when it
would be only his tail that I could see; and when I felt miserable,
somehow he would know it, and, swarming up, push his little cold snout
against my ear. He died just so, clinging round my neck; and from
many of my fellow-men and women have I parted with less pain. It
sounds callous to say so; but, after all, our feelings are not under
our own control; and I have never been able to understand the use of
pretending to emotions one has not. All this, however, comes later.
Let me return now to my fairy kitten.

I heard its cry of pain from afar, and instinctively hastened my
steps. Three or four times I heard it again, and at each call I ran
faster, till, breathless, I arrived upon the scene, the opening of a
narrow court, leading out of a by-street. At first I saw nothing but
the backs of a small mob of urchins. Then from the centre of them
came another wailing appeal for help, and without waiting for any
invitation, I pushed my way into the group.

What I saw was Hecuba to me--gave me the motive and the cue for
passion, transformed me from the dull and muddy-mettled little
John-a-dreams I had been into a small, blind Fury. Pale Thought, that
mental emetic, banished from my system, I became the healthy,
unreasoning animal, and acted as such.

From my methods, I frankly admit, science was absent. In simple,
primitive fashion that would have charmed a Darwinian disciple to
observe, I "went for" the whole crowd. To employ the expressive idiom
of the neighbourhood, I was "all over it and inside."  Something clung
about my feet. By kicking myself free and then standing on it I
gained the advantage of quite an extra foot in height; I don't know
what it was and didn't care. I fought with my arms and I fought with
my legs; where I could get in with my head I did. I fought whatever
came to hand in a spirit of simple thankfulness, grateful for what I
could reach and indifferent to what was beyond me.

That the "show"--if again I may be permitted the local idiom--was not
entirely mine I was well aware. That not alone my person but my
property also was being damaged in the rear became dimly conveyed to
me through the sensation of draught. Already the world to the left of
me was mere picturesque perspective, while the growing importance of
my nose was threatening the absorption of all my other features.
These things did not trouble me. I merely noted them as phenomena and
continued to punch steadily.

Until I found that I was punching something soft and yet unyielding.
I looked up to see what this foreign matter that thus mysteriously had
entered into the mixture might be, and discovered it to be a
policeman. Still I did not care. The felon's dock! the prison cell!
a fig for such mere bogies. An impudent word, an insulting look, and
I would have gone for the Law itself. Pale Thought--it must have been
a livid green by this time--still trembled at respectful distance from
me.

Fortunately for all of us, he was not impertinent, and though he spoke
the language of his order, his tone disarmed offence.

"Now, then. Now, then. What is all this about?"

There was no need for me to answer. A dozen voluble tongues were
ready to explain to him; and to explain wholly in my favour. This
time the crowd was with me. Let a man school himself to bear
dispraise, for thereby alone shall he call his soul his own. But let
no man lie, saying he is indifferent to popular opinion. That was my
first taste of public applause. The public was not select, and the
applause might, by the sticklers for English pure and undefiled, have
been deemed ill-worded, but to me it was the sweetest music I had ever
heard, or have heard since. I was called a "plucky little devil," a
"fair 'ot 'un," not only a "good 'un," but a "good 'un" preceded by
the adjective that in the East bestows upon its principal every
admirable quality that can possibly apply. Under the circumstances it
likewise fitted me literally; but I knew it was intended rather in its
complimentary sense.

Kind, if dirty, hands wiped my face. A neighbouring butcher presented
me with a choice morsel of steak, not to eat but to wear; and I found
it, if I may so express myself without infringing right, "grateful
and comforting."  My enemies had long since scooted, some of them, I
had rejoiced to notice, with lame and halting steps. The mutilated
kitten had been restored to its owner, a lady of ample bosom, who,
carried beyond judgment by emotion, publicly offered to adopt me on
the spot. The Law suggested, not for the first time, that everybody
should now move on; and slowly, followed by feminine commendation
mingled with masculine advice as to improved methods for the future, I
was allowed to drift away.

My bones ached, my flesh stung me, yet I walked as upon air.
Gradually I became conscious that I was not alone. A light, pattering
step was trying to keep pace with me. Graciously I slacked my speed,
and the pattering step settled down beside me. Every now and again
she would run ahead and then turn round to look up into my face, much
as your small dog does when he happens not to be misbehaving himself
and desires you to note the fact. Evidently she approved of me. I
was not at my best, as far as appearance was concerned, but women are
kittle cattle, and I think she preferred me so. Thus we walked for
quite a long distance without speaking, I drinking in the tribute of
her worship and enjoying it. Then gaining confidence, she shyly put
her hand into mine, and finding I did not repel her, promptly assumed
possession of me, according to woman's way.

For her age and station she must have been a person of means, for
having tried in vain various methods to make me more acceptable to
followers and such as having passed would turn their heads, she said:

"I know, gelatines;" and disappearing into a sweetstuff shop, returned
with quite a quantity. With these, first sucked till glutinous, we
joined my many tatters. I still attracted attention, but felt warmer.

She informed me that her name was Cissy, and that her father's shop
was in Three Colt Street. I informed her that my name was Paul, and
that my father was a lawyer. I also pointed out to her that a lawyer
is much superior in social position to a shopkeeper, which she
acknowledged cheerfully. We parted at the corner of the Stainsby
Road, and I let her kiss me once. It was understood that in the
Stainsby Road we might meet again.

I left Eliza gaping after me, the front door in her hand, and ran
straight up into my own room. Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur, The Last
of the Barons, Rob Roy! I looked them all in the face and was not
ashamed. I also was a gentleman.

My mother was much troubled when she saw me, but my father, hearing
the story, approved.

"But he looks so awful," said my mother. "In this world," said my
father, "one must occasionally be aggressive--if necessary, brutal."

My father would at times be quite savage in his sentiments.

CHAPTER IV.

PAUL, FALLING IN WITH A GOODLY COMPANY OF PILGRIMS, LEARNS OF THEM THE
ROAD THAT HE MUST TRAVEL. AND MEETS THE PRINCESS OF THE GOLDEN LOCKS.

The East India Dock Road is nowadays a busy, crowded thoroughfare.
The jingle of the tram-bell and the rattle of the omnibus and cart
mingle continuously with the rain of many feet, beating ceaselessly
upon its pavements. But at the time of which I write it was an empty,
voiceless way, bounded on the one side by the long, echoing wall of
the docks and on the other by occasional small houses isolated amid
market gardens, drying grounds and rubbish heaps. Only one thing
remains--or did remain last time I passed along it, connecting it with
its former self--and that is the one-storeyed brick cottage at the
commencement of the bridge, and which was formerly the toll-house. I
remember this toll-house so well because it was there that my
childhood fell from me, and sad and frightened I saw the world beyond.

I cannot explain it better. I had been that afternoon to Plaistow on
a visit to the family dentist. It was an out-of-the-way place in which
to keep him, but there existed advantages of a counterbalancing
nature.

"Have the half-crown in your hand," my mother would direct me, while
making herself sure that the purse containing it was safe at the
bottom of my knickerbocker pocket; "but of course if he won't take it,
why, you must bring it home again."

I am not sure, but I think he was some distant connection of ours; at
all events, I know he was a kind friend. I, seated in the velvet
chair of state, he would unroll his case of instruments before me, and
ask me to choose, recommending with affectionate eulogisms the most
murderous looking.

But on my opening my mouth to discuss the fearful topic, lo! a pair
would shoot from under his coat-sleeve, and almost before I knew what
had happened, the trouble would be over. After that we would have tea
together. He was an old bachelor, and his house stood in a great
garden--for Plaistow in those days was a picturesque village--and out
of the plentiful fruit thereof his housekeeper made the most wonderful
of jams and jellies. Oh, they were good, those teas! Generally our
conversation was of my mother who, it appeared, was once a little
girl: not at all the sort of little girl I should have imagined her;
on the contrary, a prankish, wilful little girl, though good company,
I should say, if all the tales he told of her were true. And I am
inclined to think they were, in spite of the fact that my mother, when
I repeated them to her, would laugh, saying she was sure she had no
recollection of anything of the kind, adding severely that it was a
pity he and I could not find something better to gossip about. Yet
her next question would be:

"And what else did he say, if you please?" explaining impatiently when
my answer was not of the kind expected: "No, no, I mean about me."

The tea things cleared away, he would bring out his great microscope.
To me it was a peep-hole into a fairy world where dwelt strange
dragons, mighty monsters, so that I came to regard him as a sort of
harmless magician. It was his pet study, and looking back, I cannot
help associating his enthusiasm for all things microscopical with the
fact that he was an exceptionally little man himself, but one of the
biggest hearted that ever breathed.

On leaving I would formally hand him my half-crown, "with mamma's
compliments," and he would formally accept it. But on putting my hand
into my jacket pocket when outside the gate I would invariably find it
there. The first time I took it back to him, but unblushingly he
repudiated all knowledge.

"Must be another half-crown," he suggested; "such things do happen.
One puts change into a pocket and overlooks it. Slippery things,
half-crowns."

Returning home on this particular day of days, I paused upon the
bridge, and watched for awhile the lazy barges manoeuvring their way
between the piers. It was one of those hushed summer evenings when
the air even of grim cities is full of whispering voices; and as,
turning away from the river, I passed through the white toll-gate, I
had a sense of leaving myself behind me on the bridge. So vivid was
the impression, that I looked back, half expecting to see myself still
leaning over the iron parapet, looking down into the sunlit water.

It sounds foolish, but I leave it standing, wondering if to others a
like experience has ever come. The little chap never came back to me.
He passed away from me as a man's body may possibly pass away from
him, leaving him only remembrance and regret. For a time I tried to
play his games, to dream his dreams, but the substance was wanting. I
was only a thin ghost, making believe.

It troubled me for quite a spell of time, even to the point of tears,
this feeling that my childhood lay behind me, this sudden realisation
that I was travelling swiftly the strange road called growing up. I
did not want to grow up; could nothing be done to stop it? Rather
would I be always as I had been, playing, dreaming. The dark way
frightened me. Must I go forward?

Then gradually, but very slowly, with the long months and years, came
to me the consciousness of a new being, new pulsations, sensories,
throbbings, rooted in but differing widely from the old; and little
Paul, the Paul of whom I have hitherto spoken, faded from my life.

So likewise must I let him fade with sorrow from this book. But
before I part with him entirely, let me recall what else I can
remember of him. Thus we shall be quit of him, and he will interfere
with us no more.

Chief among the pictures that I see is that of my aunt Fan, crouching
over the kitchen fire; her skirt and crinoline rolled up round her
waist, leaving as sacrifice to custom only her petticoat. Up and down
her body sways in rhythmic motion, her hands stroking affectionately
her own knees; the while I, with paper knife for sword, or horse of
broomstick, stand opposite her, flourishing and declaiming. Sometimes
I am a knight and she a wicked ogre. She is slain, growling and
swearing, and at once becomes the beautiful princess that I secure and
bear away with me upon the prancing broomstick. So long as the
princess is merely holding sweet converse with me from her high-barred
window, the scene is realistic, at least, to sufficiency; but the
bearing away has to be make-believe; for my aunt cannot be persuaded
to leave her chair before the fire, and the everlasting rubbing of her
knees.

At other times, with the assistance of the meat chopper, I am an
Indian brave, and then she is Laughing Water or Singing Sunshine, and
we go out scalping together; or in less bloodthirsty moods I am the
Fairy Prince and she the Sleeping Beauty. But in such parts she is
not at her best. Better, when seated in the centre of the up-turned
table, I am Captain Cook, and she the Cannibal Chief.

"I shall skin him and hang him in the larder till Sunday week," says
my aunt, smacking her lips, "then he'll be just in right condition;
not too tough and not too high."  She was always strong in detail, was
my aunt Fan.

I do not wish to deprive my aunt of any credit due to her, but the
more I exercise my memory for evidence, the more I am convinced that
her compliance on these occasions was not conceived entirely in the
spirit of self-sacrifice. Often would she suggest the game and even
the theme; in such case, casting herself invariably for what, in old
theatrical parlance, would have been termed the heavy lead, the
dragons and the wicked uncles, the fussy necromancers and the
uninvited fairies. As authoress of a new cookery book for use in
giant-land, my aunt, I am sure, would have been successful. Most
recipes that one reads are so monotonously meagre: "Boil him," "Put
her on the spit and roast her for supper," "Cook 'em in a pie--with
plenty of gravy;" but my aunt into the domestic economy of Ogredom
introduced variety and daintiness.

"I think, my dear," my aunt would direct, "we'll have him stuffed with
chestnuts and served on toast. And don't forget the giblets. They
make such excellent sauce."

With regard to the diet of imprisoned maidens she would advise:

"Not too much fish--it spoils the flesh for roasting."

The things that she would turn people into--king's sons, rightful
princesses, such sort of people--people who after a time, one would
think, must have quite forgotten what they started as. To let her
have her way was a lesson to me in natural history both present and
pre-historic. The most beautiful damsel that ever lived she would
without a moment's hesitation turn into a Glyptodon or a Hippocrepian.
Afterwards, when I could guess at the spelling, I would look these
creatures up in the illustrated dictionary, and feel that under no
circumstances could I have loved the lady ever again. Warriors and
kings she would delight in transforming into plaice or prawns, and
haughty queens into Brussels sprouts.

With gusto would she plan a complicated slaughter, paying heed to
every detail: the sharpening of the knives, the having ready of mops
and pails of water for purposes of after cleaning up. As a writer she
would have followed the realistic school.

Her death, with which we invariably wound up the afternoon, was
another conscientious effort. Indeed, her groans and writhings would
sometimes frighten me. I always welcomed the last gurgle. That
finished, but not a moment before, my aunt would let down her
skirt--in this way suggesting the fall of the curtain upon our
play--and set to work to get the tea.

Another frequently recurring picture that I see is of myself in
glazed-peaked cap explaining many things the while we walk through
dingy streets to yet a smaller figure curly haired and open eyed.
Still every now and then she runs ahead to turn and look admiringly
into my face as on the day she first became captive to the praise and
fame of me.

I was glad of her company for more reasons than she knew of. For one,
she protected me against my baser self. With her beside me I should
not have dared to flee from sudden foes. Indeed, together we courted
adventure; for once you get used to it this standing hazard of attack
adds a charm to outdoor exercise that older folk in districts better
policed enjoy not. So possibly my dog feels when together we take the
air. To me it is a simple walk, maybe a little tiresome, suggested
rather by contemplation of my waistband than by desire for walking for
mere walking's sake; to him an expedition full of danger and
surprises: "The gentleman asleep with one eye open on The Chequer's
doorstep! will he greet me with a friendly sniff or try to bite my
head off? This cross-eyed, lop-eared loafer, lurching against the
lamp-post! shall we pass with a careless wag and a 'how-do,' or become
locked in a life and death struggle? Impossible to say. This coming
corner, now, 'Ware! Is anybody waiting round there to kill me, or
not?"

But the trusting face beside me nerved me. As reward in lonely places
I would let her hold my hand.

A second advantage I derived from her company was that of being less
trampled on, less walked over, less swept aside into doorway or gutter
than when alone. A pretty, winsome face had this little maid, if
Memory plays me not kindly false; but also she had a vocabulary; and
when the blind idiot, male or female, instead of passing us by walking
round us, would, after the custom of the blind idiot, seek to gain the
other side of us by walking through us, she would use it.

"Now, then, where yer coming to, old glass-eye? We ain't sperrits.
Can't yer see us?"

And if they attempted reply, her child's treble, so strangely at
variance with her dainty appearance, would only rise more shrill.

"Garn! They'd run out of 'eads when they was making you. That's only
a turnip wot you've got stuck on top of yer!"  I offer but specimens.

Nor was it of the slightest use attempting personal chastisement, as
sometimes an irate lady or gentleman would be foolish enough to do.
As well might an hippopotamus attempt to reprove a terrier. The only
result was to provide comedy for the entire street.

On these occasions our positions were reversed, I being the admiring
spectator of her prowess. Yet to me she was ever meek, almost
irritatingly submissive. She found out where I lived and would often
come and wait for me for hours, her little face pressed tight against
the iron railings, until either I came out or shook my head at her
from my bedroom window, when she would run off, the dying away into
silence of her pattering feet leaving me a little sad.

I think I cared for her in a way, yet she never entered into my
day-dreams, which means that she existed for me only in the outer
world of shadows that lay round about me and was not of my real life.

Also, I think she was unwise, introducing me to the shop, for children
and dogs--one seems unconsciously to bracket them in one's
thoughts--are snobbish little wretches. If only her father had been a
dealer in firewood I could have soothed myself by imagining mistakes.
It was a common occurrence, as I well knew, for children of quite the
best families to be brought up by wood choppers. Fairies, the best
intentioned in the world, but born muddlers, were generally
responsible for these mishaps, which, however, always became righted
in time for the wedding. Or even had he been a pork butcher, and
there were many in the neighbourhood, I could have thought of him as a
swineherd, and so found precedent for hope.

But a fishmonger--from six in the evening a fried fishmonger! I
searched history in vain. Fried fishmongers were without the pale.

So gradually our meetings became less frequent, though I knew that
every afternoon she waited in the quiet Stainsby Road, where dwelt in
semi-detached, six-roomed villas the aristocracy of Poplar, and that
after awhile, for arriving late at times I have been witness to the
sad fact, tears would trace pathetic patterns upon her
dust-besprinkled cheeks; and with the advent of the world-illuminating
Barbara, to which event I am drawing near, they ceased altogether.

So began and ended my first romance. One of these days--some quiet
summer's afternoon, when even the air of Pigott Street vibrates with
tenderness beneath the whispered sighs of Memory, I shall walk into
the little grocer's shop and boldly ask to see her. So far have I
already gone as to trace her, and often have I tried to catch sight of
her through the glass door, but hitherto in vain. I know she is the
more or less troubled mother of a numerous progeny. I am told she has
grown stout, and probable enough it is that her tongue has gained
rather than lost in sharpness. Yet under all the unrealities the
clumsy-handed world has built about her, I shall see, I know, the
lithesome little maid with fond, admiring eyes. What help they were
to me I never knew till I had lost them. How hard to gain such eyes I
have learned since. Were we to write the truth in our confession
books, should we not admit the quality we most admire in others is
admiration of ourselves? And is it not a wise selection? If you
would have me admirable, my friend, admire me, and speak your
commendation without stint that in the sunshine of your praises I may
wax. For indifference maketh an indifferent man, and contempt a
contemptible man. Come, is it not true? Does not all that is worthy
in us grow best by honour?

Chief among the remaining figures on my childhood's stage were the
many servants of our house, the "generals," as they were termed. So
rapid, as a rule, was their transit through our kitchen that only one
or two, conspicuous by reason of their lingering, remain upon my view.
It was a neighbourhood in which domestic servants were not much
required. Those intending to take up the calling seriously went
westward. The local ranks were recruited mainly from the discontented
or the disappointed, from those who, unappreciated at home, hoped from
the stranger more discernment; or from the love-lorn, the jilted and
the jealous, who took the cap and apron as in an earlier age their
like would have taken the veil. Maybe, to the comparative seclusion
of our basement, as contrasted with the alternative frivolity of shop
or factory, they felt in such mood more attuned. With the advent of
the new or the recovery of the old young man they would plunge again
into the vain world, leaving my poor mother to search afresh amid the
legions of the cursed.

With these I made such comradeship as I could, for I had no child
friends. Kind creatures were most of them, at least so I found them.
They were poor at "making believe," but would always squeeze ten
minutes from their work to romp with me, and that, perhaps, was
healthier for me. What, perhaps, was not so good for me was that,
staggered at the amount of "book-learning" implied by my conversation
(for the journalistic instinct, I am inclined to think, was early
displayed in me), they would listen open-mouthed to all my
information, regarding me as a precocious oracle. Sometimes they
would obtain permission to take me home with them to tea, generously
eager that their friends should also profit by me. Then, encouraged
by admiring, grinning faces, I would "hold forth," keenly enjoying the
sound of my own proud piping.

"As good as a book, ain't he?" was the tribute most often paid to me.

"As good as a play," one enthusiastic listener, an old greengrocer,
went so far as to say.

Already I regarded myself as among the Immortals.

One girl, a dear, wholesome creature named Janet, stayed with us for
months and might have stayed years, but for her addiction to strong
language. The only and well-beloved child of the captain of the barge
"Nancy Jane," trading between Purfleet and Ponder's End, her
conversation was at once my terror and delight.

"Janet," my mother would exclaim in agony, her hands going up
instinctively to guard her ears, "how can you use such words?"

"What words, mum?"

"The things you have just called the gas man."

"Him! Well, did you see what he did, mum? Walked straight into my
clean kitchen, without even wiping his boots, the--" And before my
mother could stop her, Janet had relieved her feelings by calling him
it--or rather them--again, without any idea that she had done aught
else than express in fitting phraseology a natural human emotion.

We were good friends, Janet and I, and therefore it was that I
personally undertook her reformation. It was not an occasion for
mincing one's words. The stake at issue was, I felt, too important.
I told her bluntly that if she persisted in using such language she
would inevitably go to hell.

"Then where's my father going?" demanded Janet.

"Does he use language?"

I gathered from Janet that no one who had enjoyed the privilege of
hearing her father could ever again take interest in the feeble
efforts of herself.

"I am afraid, Janet," I explained, "that if he doesn't give it up--"

"But it's the only way he can talk," interrupted Janet. "He don't
mean anything by it."

I sighed, yet set my face against weakness. "You see, Janet, people
who swear do go there."

But Janet would not believe.

"God send my dear, kind father to hell just because he can't talk like
the gentlefolks! Don't you believe it of Him, Master Paul. He's got
more sense."

I hope I pain no one by quoting Janet's common sense. For that I
should be sorry. I remember her words because so often, when sinking
in sloughs of childish despond, they afforded me firm foothold. More
often than I can tell, when compelled to listen to the sententious
voice of immeasurable Folly glibly explaining the eternal mysteries,
has it comforted me to whisper to myself: "I don't believe it of Him.
He's got more sense."

And about that period I had need of all the comfort I could get. As
we descend the road of life, the journey, demanding so much of our
attention, becomes of more importance than the journey's end; but to
the child, standing at the valley's gate, the terminating hills are
clearly visible. What lies beyond them is his constant wonder. I
never questioned my parents directly on the subject, shrinking as so
strangely we all do, both young and old, from discussion of the very
matters of most moment to us; and they, on their part, not guessing my
need, contented themselves with the vague generalities with which we
seek to hide even from ourselves the poverty of our beliefs. But
there were foolish voices about me less reticent; while the
literature, illustrated and otherwise, provided in those days for
serious-minded youth, answered all questionings with blunt brutality.
If you did wrong you burnt in a fiery furnace for ever and ever. Were
your imagination weak you could turn to the accompanying illustration,
and see at a glance how you yourself would writhe and shrink and
scream, while cheerful devils, well organised, were busy stoking. I
had been burnt once, rather badly, in consequence of live coals, in
course of transit on a shovel, being let fall upon me. I imagined
these burning coals, not confined to a mere part of my body, but
pressing upon me everywhere, not snatched swiftly off by loving hands,
the pain assuaged by applications of soft soap and the blue bag, but
left there, eating into my flesh and veins. And this continued for
eternity. You suffered for an hour, a day, a thousand years, and were
no nearer to the end; ten thousand, a million years, and yet, as at
the very first, it was for ever, and for ever still it would always be
for ever! I suffered also from insomnia about this period.

"Then be good," replied the foolish voices round me; "never do wrong,
and so avoid this endless agony."

But it was so easy to do wrong. There were so many wrong things to
do, and the doing of them was so natural.

"Then repent," said the voices, always ready.

But how did one repent? What was repentance? Did I "hate my sin," as
I was instructed I must, or merely hate the idea of going to hell for
it? Because the latter, even my child's sense told me, was no true
repentance. Yet how could one know the difference?

Above all else there haunted me the fear of the "Unforgivable Sin."
What this was I was never able to discover. I dreaded to enquire too
closely, lest I should find I had committed it. Day and night the
terror of it clung to me.

"Believe," said the voices; "so only shall you be saved."  How
believe? How know you did believe? Hours would I kneel in the dark,
repeating in a whispered scream:

"I believe, I believe. Oh, I do believe!" and then rise with white
knuckles, wondering if I really did believe.

Another question rose to trouble me. In the course of my meanderings
I had made the acquaintance of an old sailor, one of the most
disreputable specimens possible to find; and had learned to love him.
Our first meeting had been outside a confectioner's window, in the
Commercial Road, where he had discovered me standing, my nose against
the glass, a mere palpitating Appetite on legs. He had seized me by
the collar, and hauled me into the shop. There, dropping me upon a
stool, he bade me eat. Pride of race prompted me politely to decline,
but his language became so awful that in fear and trembling I obeyed.
So soon as I was finished--it cost him two and fourpence, I
remember--we walked down to the docks together, and he told me stories
of the sea and land that made my blood run cold. Altogether, in the
course of three weeks or a month, we met about half a dozen times,
when much the same programme was gone through. I think I was a fairly
frank child, but I said nothing about him at home, feeling
instinctively that if I did there would be an end of our comradeship,
which was dear to me: not merely by reason of the pastry, though I
admit that was a consideration, but also for his wondrous tales. I
believed them all implicitly, and so came to regard him as one of the
most interesting criminals as yet unhanged: and what was sad about
the case, as I felt myself, was that his recital of his many
iniquities, instead of repelling, attracted me to him. If ever there
existed a sinner, here was one. He chewed tobacco--one of the hundred
or so deadly sins, according to my theological library--and was
generally more or less drunk. Not that a stranger would have noticed
this; the only difference being that when sober he appeared
constrained--was less his natural, genial self. In a burst of
confidence he once admitted to me that he was the biggest blackguard
in the merchant service. Unacquainted with the merchant service, as
at the time I was, I saw no reason to doubt him.

One night in a state of intoxication he walked over a gangway and was
drowned. Our mutual friend, the confectioner, seeing me pass the
window, came out to tell me so; and having heard, I walked on, heavy
of heart, and pondering.

About his eternal destination there could be no question. The known
facts precluded the least ray of hope. How could I be happy in
heaven, supposing I eventually did succeed in slipping in, knowing
that he, the lovable old scamp, was burning for ever in hell?

How could Janet, taking it that she reformed and thus escaped
damnation, be contented, knowing the father she loved doomed to
torment? The heavenly hosts, so I argued, could be composed only of
the callous and indifferent.

I wondered how people could go about their business, eat, drink and be
merry, with tremendous fate hanging thus ever suspended over their
heads. When for a little space I myself forgot it, always it fell
back upon me with increased weight.

Nor was the contemplation of heaven itself particularly attractive to
me, for it was a foolish paradise these foolish voices had fashioned
out of their folly. You stood about and sang hymns--for ever! I was
assured that my fear of finding the programme monotonous was due only
to my state of original sin, that when I got there I should discover I
liked it. But I would have given much for the hope of avoiding both
their heaven and their hell.

Fortunately for my sanity I was not left long to brood unoccupied upon
such themes. Our worldly affairs, under the sunshine of old Hasluck's
round red face, prospered--for awhile; and one afternoon my father,
who had been away from home since breakfast time, calling me into his
office where also sat my mother, informed me that the long-talked-of
school was become at last a concrete thing.

"The term commences next week," explained my father. "It is not
exactly what I had intended, but it will do--for the present. Later,
of course, you will go to one of the big public schools; your mother
and I have not yet quite decided which."

"You will meet other boys there, good and bad," said my mother, who
sat clasping and unclasping her hands. "Be very careful, dear, how
you choose your companions."

"You will learn to take your own part," said my father. "School is an
epitome of the world. One must assert oneself, or one is sat upon."

I knew not what to reply, the vista thus opened out to me was so
unexpected. My blood rejoiced, but my heart sank.

"Take one of your long walks," said my father, smiling, "and think it
over."

"And if you are in any doubt, you know where to go for guidance, don't
you?" whispered my mother, who was very grave.

Yet I went to bed, dreaming of quite other things that night: of
Queens of Beauty bending down to crown my brows with laurel: of
wronged Princesses for whose cause I rode to death or victory. For on
my return home, being called into the drawing-room by my father, I
stood transfixed, my cap in hand, staring with all my eyes at the
vision that I saw.

No such wonder had I ever seen before, at all events, not to my
remembrance. The maidens that one meets in Poplar streets may be fair
enough in their way, but their millinery displays them not to
advantage; and the few lady visitors that came to us were of a staid
and matronly appearance. Only out of pictures hitherto had such
witchery looked upon me; and from these the spell faded as one gazed.

I heard old Hasluck's smoky voice saying, "My little gell, Barbara,"
and I went nearer to her, moving unconsciously.

"You can kiss 'er," said the smoky voice again; "she won't bite."  But
I did not kiss her. Nor ever felt I wanted to, upon the mouth.

I suppose she must have been about fourteen, and I a little over ten,
though tall for my age. Later I came to know she had that rare gold
hair that holds the light, so that upon her face, which seemed of
dainty porcelain, there ever fell a softened radiance as from some
shining aureole; those blue eyes where dwell mysteries, shadow veiled.
At the time I knew nothing, but that it seemed to me as though the
fairy-tales had all come true.

She smiled, understanding and well pleased with my confusion. Child
though I was--little more than child though she was, it flattered her
vanity.

Fair and sweet, you had but that one fault. Would it had been
another, less cruel to you yourself.

CHAPTER V.

IN WHICH THERE COMES BY ONE BENT UPON PURSUING HIS OWN WAY.

"Correct" is, I think, the adjective by which I can best describe
Doctor Florret and all his attributes. He was a large man, but not
too large--just the size one would select for the head-master of an
important middle-class school; stout, not fat, suggesting comfort, not
grossness. His hands were white and well shaped. On the left he wore
a fine diamond ring, but it shone rather than sparkled. He spoke of
commonplace things in a voice that lent dignity even to the weather.
His face, which was clean-shaven, radiated benignity tempered by
discretion.

So likewise all about him: his wife, the feminine counterpart of
himself. Seeing them side by side one felt tempted to believe that
for his special benefit original methods had been reverted to, and she
fashioned, as his particular helpmeet, out of one of his own ribs.
His furniture was solid, meant for use, not decoration. His pictures,
following the rule laid down for dress, graced without drawing
attention to his walls. He ever said the correct thing at the correct
time in the correct manner. Doubtful of the correct thing to do, one
could always learn it by waiting till he did it; when one at once felt
that nothing else could possibly have been correct. He held on all
matters the correct views. To differ from him was to discover oneself
a revolutionary.

In practice, as I learned at the cost of four more or less wasted
years, he of course followed the methods considered correct by English
schoolmen from the days of Edward VI. onwards.

Heaven knows I worked hard. I wanted to learn. Ambition--the all
containing ambition of a boy that "has its centre everywhere nor cares
to fix itself to form" stirred within me. Did I pass a speaker at
some corner, hatless, perspiring, pointing Utopias in the air to
restless hungry eyes, at once I saw myself, a Demosthenes swaying
multitudes, a statesman holding the House of Commons spellbound, the
Prime Minister of England, worshipped by the entire country. Even the
Opposition papers, had I known of them, I should have imagined forced
to reluctant admiration. Did the echo of a distant drum fall upon my
ear, then before me rose picturesque fields of carnage, one figure
ever conspicuous: Myself, well to the front, isolated. Promotion in
the British army of my dream being a matter purely of merit, I
returned Commander-in-Chief. Vast crowds thronged every flag-decked
street. I saw white waving hands from every roof and window. I heard
the dull, deep roar of welcome, as with superb seat upon my snow-white
charger--or should it be coal-black? The point cost me much
consideration, so anxious was I that the day should be without a
flaw--I slowly paced at the head of my victorious troops, between wild
waves of upturned faces: walked into a lamp-post or on to the toes of
some irascible old gentleman, and awoke. A drunken sailor stormed
from between swing doors and tacked tumultuously down the street: the
factory chimney belching smoke became a swaying mast. The costers
round about me shouted "Ay, ay, sir. 'Ready, ay, ready."  I was
Christopher Columbus, Drake, Nelson, rolled into one. Spurning the
presumption of modern geographers, I discovered new continents. I
defeated the French--those useful French! I died in the moment of
victory. A nation mourned me and I was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Also I lived and was created a Duke. Either alternative had its
charm: personally I was indifferent. Boys who on November the ninth,
as explained by letters from their mothers, read by Doctor Florret
with a snort, were suffering from a severe toothache, told me on
November the tenth of the glories of Lord Mayor's Shows. I heard
their chatter fainter and fainter as from an ever-increasing distance.
The bells of Bow were ringing in my ears. I saw myself a merchant
prince, though still young. Nobles crowded my counting house. I lent
them millions and married their daughters. I listened, unobserved in
a corner, to discussion on some new book. Immediately I was a famous
author. All men praised me: for of reviewers and their density I, in
those days, knew nothing. Poetry, fiction, history, I wrote them all;
and all men read, and wondered. Only here was a crumpled rose leaf in
the pillow on which I laid my swelling head: penmanship was vexation
to me, and spelling puzzled me, so that I wrote with sorrow and many
blots and scratchings out. Almost I put aside the idea of becoming an
author.

But along whichever road I might fight my way to the Elysian Fields of
fame, education, I dimly but most certainly comprehended, was a
necessary weapon to my hand. And so, with aching heart and aching
head, I pored over my many books. I see myself now in my small
bedroom, my elbows planted on the shaky, one-legged table, startled
every now and again by the frizzling of my hair coming in contact with
the solitary candle. On cold nights I wear my overcoat, turned up
about the neck, a blanket round my legs, and often I must sit with my
fingers in my ears, the better to shut out the sounds of life, rising
importunately from below. "A song, Of a song, To a song, A song, 0!
song!"  "I love, Thou lovest, He she or it loves. I should or would
love" over and over again, till my own voice seems some strange
buzzing thing about me, while my head grows smaller and smaller till I
put my hands up frightened, wondering if it still be entire upon my
shoulders.

Was I more stupid than the average, or is a boy's brain physically
incapable of the work our educational system demands of it?

"Latin and Greek" I hear repeating the suave tones of Doctor Florret,
echoing as ever the solemn croak of Correctness, "are useful as mental
gymnastics."  My dear Doctor Florret and Co., cannot you, out of the
vast storehouse of really necessary knowledge, select apparatus better
fitted to strengthen and not overstrain the mental muscles of
ten-to-fourteen? You, gentle reader, with brain fully grown, trained
by years of practice to its subtlest uses, take me from your
bookshelf, say, your Browning or even your Shakespeare. Come, you
know this language well. You have not merely learned: it is your
mother tongue. Construe for me this short passage, these few verses:
parse, analyse, resolve into component parts! And now, will you
maintain that it is good for Tommy, tear-stained, ink-bespattered
little brat, to be given AEsop's Fables, Ovid's Metamorphoses to treat
in like manner? Would it not be just as sensible to insist upon his
practising his skinny little arms with hundred pounds dumb-bells?

We were the sons of City men, of not well-to-do professional men, of
minor officials, clerks, shopkeepers, our roads leading through the
workaday world. Yet quite half our time was taken up in studies
utterly useless to us. How I hated them, these youth-tormenting
Shades. Homer! how I wished the fishermen had asked him that absurd
riddle earlier. Horace! why could not that shipwreck have succeeded:
it would have in the case of any one but a classic.

Until one blessed day there fell into my hands a wondrous talisman.

Hearken unto me, ye heavy burdened little brethren of mine. Waste not
your substance upon tops and marbles, nor yet upon tuck (Do ye still
call it "tuck"?), but scrape and save. For in the neighbourhood of
Paternoster Row there dwells a good magician who for silver will
provide you with a "Key" that shall open wide for you the gates of
Hades.

By its aid, the Frogs of Aristophanes became my merry friends. With
Ulysses I wandered eagerly through Wonderland. Doctor Florret was
charmed with my progress, which was real, for now, at last, I was
studying according to the laws of common sense, understanding first,
explaining afterwards. Let Youth, that the folly of Age would
imprison in ignorance, provide itself with "Keys."

But let me not seem to claim credit due to another. Dan it was--Dan
of the strong arm and the soft smile, Dan the wise hater of all
useless labour, sharp-witted, easy-going Dan, who made this grand
discovery.

Dan followed me a term later into the Lower Fourth, but before he had
been there a week was handling Latin verse with an ease and dexterity
suggestive of unholy dealings with the Devil. In a lonely corner of
Regent's Park, first making sure no one was within earshot, he
revealed to me his magic.

"Don't tell the others," he commanded; "or it will get out, and then
nobody will be any the better."

"But is it right?" I asked.

"Look here, young 'un," said Dan; "what are you here for--what's your
father paying school fees for (it was the appeal to our
conscientiousness most often employed by Dr. Florret himself), for you
to play a silly game, or to learn something?

"Because if it's only a game--we boys against the masters," continued
Dan, "then let's play according to rule. If we're here to
learn--well, you've been in the class four months and I've just come,
and I bet I know more Ovid than you do already."  Which was true.

So I thanked Dan and shared with him his key; and all the Latin I
remember, for whatever good it may be to me, I take it I owe to him.

And knowledge of yet greater value do I owe to the good fortune that
his sound mother wit was ever at my disposal to correct my dreamy
unfeasibility; for from first to last he was my friend; and to have
been the chosen friend of Dan, shrewd judge of man and boy, I deem no
unimportant feather in my cap. He "took to" me, he said, because I
was so jolly green"--"such a rummy little mug."  No other reason would
he ever give me, save only a sweet smile and a tumbling of my hair
with his great hand; but I think I understood. And I loved him
because he was big and strong and handsome and kind; no one but a
little boy knows how brutal or how kind a big boy can be. I was still
somewhat of an effeminate little chap, nervous and shy, with a pink
and white face, and hair that no amount of wetting would make
straight. I was growing too fast, which took what strength I had, and
my journey every day, added to school work and home work, maybe was
too much for my years. Every morning I had to be up at six, leaving
the house before seven to catch the seven fifteen from Poplar station;
and from Chalk Farm I had to walk yet another couple of miles. But
that I did not mind, for at Chalk Farm station Dan was always waiting
for me. In the afternoon we walked back together also; and when I was
tired and my back ached--just as if some one had cut a piece out of
it, I felt--he would put his arm round me, for he always knew, and oh,
how strong and restful it was to lean against, so that one walked as
in an easy-chair.

It seems to me, remembering how I would walk thus by his side, looking
up shyly into his face, thinking how strong and good he was, feeling
so glad he liked me, I can understand a little how a woman loves. He
was so solid. With his arm round me, it was good to feel weak.

At first we were in the same class, the Lower Third. He had no
business there. He was head and shoulders taller than any of us and
years older. It was a disgrace to him that he was not in the Upper
Fourth. The Doctor would tell him so before us all twenty times a
week. Old Waterhouse (I call him "Old Waterhouse" because "Mister
Waterhouse, M.A.," would convey no meaning to me, and I should not
know about whom I was speaking) who cordially liked him, was honestly
grieved. We, his friends, though it was pleasant to have him among
us, suffered in our pride of him. The only person quite contented was
Dan himself. It was his way in all things. Others had their opinion
of what was good for him. He had his own, and his own was the only
opinion that ever influenced him. The Lower Third suited him. For
him personally the Upper Fourth had no attraction.

And even in the Lower Third he was always at the bottom. He preferred
it. He selected the seat and kept it, in spite of all allurements, in
spite of all reproaches. It was nearest to the door. It enabled him
to be first out and last in. Also it afforded a certain sense of
retirement. Its occupant, to an extent screened from observation,
became in the course of time almost forgotten. To Dan's philosophical
temperament its practical advantages outweighed all sentimental
objection.

Only on one occasion do I remember his losing it. As a rule, tiresome
questions, concerning past participles, square roots, or meridians
never reached him, being snapped up in transit by arm-waving lovers of
such trifles. The few that by chance trickled so far he took no
notice of. They possessed no interest for him, and he never pretended
that they did. But one day, taken off his guard, he gave voice quite
unconsciously to a correct reply, with the immediate result of finding
himself in an exposed position on the front bench. I had never seen
Dan out of temper before, but that moment had any of us ventured upon
a whispered congratulation we would have had our head punched, I feel
confident.

Old Waterhouse thought that here at last was reformation. "Come,
Brian," he cried, rubbing his long thin hands together with delight,
"after all, you're not such a fool as you pretend."

"Never said I was," muttered Dan to himself, with a backward glance of
regret towards his lost seclusion; and before the day was out he had
worked his way back to it again.

As we were going out together, old Waterhouse passed us on the stairs:
"Haven't you any sense of shame, my boy?" he asked sorrowfully, laying
his hand kindly on Dan's shoulder.

"Yes, sir," answered Dan, with his frank smile; "plenty. It isn't
yours, that's all."

He was an excellent fighter. In the whole school of over two hundred
boys, not half a dozen, and those only Upper Sixth boys--fellows who
came in top hats with umbrellas, and who wouldn't out of regard to
their own dignity--could have challenged him with any chance of
success. Yet he fought very seldom, and then always in a bored, lazy
fashion, as though he were doing it purely to oblige the other fellow.

One afternoon, just as we were about to enter Regent's Park by the
wicket opposite Hanover Gate, a biggish boy, an errand boy carrying an
empty basket, and supported by two smaller boys, barred our way.

"Can't come in here," said the boy with the basket.

"Why not?" inquired Dan.

"'Cos if you do I shall kick you," was the simple explanation.

Without a word Dan turned away, prepared to walk on to the next
opening. The boy with the basket, evidently encouraged, followed us:
"Now, I'm going to give you your coward's blow," he said, stepping in
front of us; "will you take it quietly?"  It is a lonely way, the
Outer Circle, on a winter's afternoon.

"I'll tell you afterwards," said Dan, stopping short.

The boy gave him a slight slap on the cheek. It could not have hurt,
but the indignity, of course, was great. No boy of honour, according
to our code, could have accepted it without retaliating.

"Is that all?" asked Dan.

"That's all--for the present," replied the boy with the basket.

"Good-bye," said Dan, and walked on.

"Glad he didn't insist on fighting," remarked Dan, cheerfully, as we
proceeded; "I'm going to a party tonight."

Yet on another occasion, in a street off Lisson Grove, he insisted on
fighting a young rough half again his own weight, who, brushing up
against him, had knocked his hat off into the mud.

"I wouldn't have said anything about his knocking it off," explained
Dan afterwards, tenderly brushing the poor bruised thing with his coat
sleeve, "if he hadn't kicked it."

On another occasion I remember, three or four of us, Dan among the
number, were on our way one broiling summer's afternoon to Hadley
Woods. As we turned off from the highroad just beyond Barnet and
struck into the fields, Dan drew from his pocket an enormous
juicy-looking pear.

"Where did you get that from?" inquired one, Dudley.

"From that big greengrocer's opposite Barnet Church," answered Dan.
"Have a bit?"

"You told me you hadn't any more money," retorted Dudley, in
reproachful tones.

"No more I had," replied Dan, holding out a tempting slice at the end
of his pocket-knife.

"You must have had some, or you couldn't have bought that pear,"
argued Dudley, accepting.

"Didn't buy it."

"Do you mean to say you stole it?"

"Yes."

"You're a thief," denounced Dudley, wiping his mouth and throwing away
a pip.

"I know it. So are you."

"No, I'm not."

"What's the good of talking nonsense. You robbed an orchard only last
Wednesday at Mill Hill, and gave yourself the stomach-ache."

"That isn't stealing."

"What is it?"

"It isn't the same thing."

"What's the difference?"

And nothing could make Dan comprehend the difference. "Stealing is
stealing," he would have it, "whether you take it off a tree or out of
a basket. You're a thief, Dudley; so am I. Anybody else say a
piece?"

The thermometer was at that point where morals become slack. We all
had a piece; but we were all of us shocked at Dan, and told him so.
It did not agitate him in the least.

To Dan I could speak my inmost thoughts, knowing he would understand
me, and sometimes from him I received assistance and sometimes
confusion. The yearly examination was approaching. My father and
mother said nothing, but I knew how anxiously each of them awaited the
result; my father, to see how much I had accomplished; my mother, how
much I had endeavoured. I had worked hard, but was doubtful, knowing
that prizes depend less upon what you know than upon what you can make
others believe you know; which applies to prizes beyond those of
school.

"Are you going in for anything, Dan?" I asked him. We were discussing
the subject, crossing Primrose Hill, one bright June morning.

I knew the question absurd. I asked it of him because I wanted him to
ask it of me.

"They're not giving away anything I particularly want," murmured Dan,
in his lazy drawl: looked at from that point of view, school prizes
are, it must be confessed, not worth their cost.

"You're sweating yourself, young 'un, of course?" he asked next, as I
expected.

"I mean to have a shot at the History," I admitted. "Wish I was
better at dates."

"It's always two-thirds dates," Dan assured me, to my discouragement.
"Old Florret thinks you can't eat a potato until you know the date
that chap Raleigh was born."

"I've prayed so hard that I may win the History prize," I explained to
him. I never felt shy with Dan. He never laughed at me.

"You oughtn't to have done that," he said. I stared. "It isn't fair
to the other fellows. That won't be your winning the prize; that will
be your getting it through favouritism."

"But they can pray, too," I reminded him.

"If you all pray for it," answered Dan, "then it will go, not to the
fellow that knows most history, but to the fellow that's prayed the
hardest. That isn't old Florret's idea, I'm sure."

"But we are told to pray for things we want," I insisted.

"Beastly mean way of getting 'em," retorted Dan. And no argument that
came to me, neither then nor at any future time, brought him to right
thinking on this point.

He would judge all matters for himself. In his opinion Achilles was a
coward, not a hero.

"He ought to have told the Trojans that they couldn't hurt any part of
him except his heel, and let them have a shot at that," he argued;
"King Arthur and all the rest of them with their magic swords, it
wasn't playing the game. There's no pluck in fighting if you know
you're bound to win. Beastly cads, I call them all."

I won no prize that year. Oddly enough, Dan did, for arithmetic; the
only subject studied in the Lower Fourth that interested him. He
liked to see things coming right, he explained.

My father shut himself up with me for half an hour and examined me
himself.

"It's very curious, Paul," he said, "you seem to know a good deal."

"They asked me all the things I didn't know. They seemed to do it on
purpose," I blurted out, and laid my head upon my arm. My father
crossed the room and sat down beside me.

"Spud!" he said--it was a long time since he had called me by that
childish nickname--"perhaps you are going to be with me, one of the
unlucky ones."

"Are you unlucky?" I asked.

"Invariably," answered my father, rumpling his hair. "I don't know
why. I try hard--I do the right thing, but it turns out wrong. It
always does."

"But I thought Mr. Hasluck was bringing us such good fortune," I said,
looking up in surprise. "We're getting on, aren't we?"

"I have thought so before, so often," said my father, "and it has
always ended in a--in a collapse."

I put my arms round his neck, for I always felt to my father as to
another boy; bigger than myself and older, but not so very much.

"You see, when I married your mother," he went on, "I was a rich man.
She had everything she wanted."

"But you will get it all back," I cried.

"I try to think so," he answered. "I do think so--generally speaking.
But there are times--you would not understand--they come to you."

"But she is happy," I persisted; "we are all happy."

He shook his head.

"I watch her," he said. "Women suffer more than we do. They live
more in the present. I see my hopes, but she--she sees only me, and I
have always been a failure. She has lost faith in me.

I could say nothing. I understood but dimly.

"That is why I want you to be an educated man, Paul," he continued
after a silence. "You can't think what a help education is to a man.
I don't mean it helps you to get on in the world; I think for that it
rather hampers you. But it helps you to bear adversity. To a man
with a well-stored mind, life is interesting on a piece of bread and a
cup of tea. I know. If it were not for you and your mother I should
not trouble."

And yet at that time our fortunes were at their brightest, so far as I
remember them; and when they were dark again he was full of fresh
hope, planning, scheming, dreaming again. It was never acting. A
worse actor never trod this stage on which we fret. His occasional
attempts at a cheerfulness he did not feel inevitably resulted in our
all three crying in one another's arms. No; it was only when things
were going well that experience came to his injury. Child of
misfortune, he ever rose, Antaeus-like, renewed in strength from
contact with his mother.

Nor must it be understood that his despondent moods, even in time of
prosperity, were oft recurring. Generally speaking, as he himself
said, he was full of confidence. Already had he fixed upon our new
house in Guilford Street, then still a good residential quarter; while
at the same time, as he would explain to my mother, sufficiently
central for office purposes, close as it was to Lincoln and Grey's Inn
and Bedford Row, pavements long worn with the weary footsteps of the
Law's sad courtiers.

"Poplar," said my father, "has disappointed me. It seemed a good
idea--a rapidly rising district, singularly destitute of solicitors.
It ought to have turned out well, and yet somehow it hasn't."

"There have been a few come," my mother reminded him.

"Of a sort," admitted my father; "a criminal lawyer might gather
something of a practice here, I have no doubt. But for general work,
of course, you must he in a central position. Now, in Guilford Street
people will come to me."

"It should certainly be a pleasanter neighbourhood to live in," agreed
my mother.

"Later on," said my father, "in case I want the whole house for
offices, we could live ourselves in Regent's Park. It is quite near
to the Park."

"Of course you have consulted Mr. Hasluck?" asked my mother, who of
the two was by far the more practical.

"For Hasluck," replied my father, "it will be much more convenient.
He grumbles every time at the distance."

"I have never been quite able to understand," said my mother, "why Mr.
Hasluck should have come so far out of his way. There must surely be
plenty of solicitors in the City."

"He had heard of me," explained my father. "A curiou[s] old
fellow--likes his own way of doing things. It's not everyone who
would care for him as a client. But I seem able to manage him."

Often we would go together, my father and I, to Guilford Street. It
was a large corner house that had taken his fancy, half creeper
covered, with a balcony, and pleasantly situated, overlooking the
gardens of the Foundling Hospital. The wizened old caretaker knew us
well, and having opened the door, would leave us to wander through the
empty, echoing rooms at our own will. We furnished them handsomely in
later Queen Anne style, of which my father was a connoisseur, sparing
no necessary expense; for, as my father observed, good furniture is
always worth its price, while to buy cheap is pure waste of money.

"This," said my father, on the second floor, stepping from the bedroom
into the smaller room adjoining, "I shall make your mother's boudoir.
We will have the walls in lavender and maple green--she is fond of
soft tones--and the window looks out upon the gardens. There we will
put her writing-table."

My own bedroom was on the third floor, a sunny little room.

"You will be quiet here," said my father, "and we can shut out the bed
and the washstand with a screen."

Later, I came to occupy it; though its rent--eight and sixpence a
week, including attendance--was somewhat more than at the time I ought
to have afforded. Nevertheless, I adventured it, taking the
opportunity of being an inmate of the house to refurnish it, unknown
to my stout landlady, in later Queen Anne style, putting a neat brass
plate with my father's name upon the door. "Luke Kelver, Solicitor.
Office hours, 10 till 4."  A medical student thought he occupied my
mother's boudoir. He was a dull dog, full of tiresome talk. But I
made acquaintanceship with him; and often of an evening would smoke my
pipe there in silence while pretending to be listening to his
monotonous brag.

The poor thing! he had no idea that he was only a foolish ghost; that
his walls, seemingly covered with coarse-coloured prints of
wooden-looking horses, simpering ballet girls and petrified
prize-fighters, were in reality a delicate tone of lavender and maple
green; that at her writing-table in the sunlit window sat my mother,
her soft curls curtaining her quiet face.

CHAPTER VI.

OF THE SHADOW THAT CAME BETWEEN THE MAN IN GREY AND THE LADY OF THE
LOVE-LIT EYES.

"There's nothing missing," said my mother, "so far as I can find out.
Depend upon it, that's the explanation: she has got frightened and
has run away.

"But what was there to frighten her?" said my father, pausing with a
decanter in one hand and the bottle in the other.

"It was the idea of the thing," replied my mother. "She has never
been used to waiting at table. She was actually crying about it only
last night."

"But what's to be done?" said my father. "They will be here in less
than an hour."

"There will be no dinner for them," said my mother, "unless I put on
an apron and bring it up myself."

"Where does she live?" asked my father.

"At Ilford," answered my mother.

"We must make a joke of it," said my father.

My mother, sitting down, began to cry. It had been a trying week for
my mother. A party to dinner--to a real dinner, beginning with
anchovies and ending with ices from the confectioner's; if only they
would remain ices and not, giving way to unaccustomed influences,
present themselves as cold custard--was an extraordinary departure
from the even tenor of our narrow domestic way; indeed, I recollect
none previous. First there had been the house to clean and rearrange
almost from top to bottom; endless small purchases to be made of
articles that Need never misses, but which Ostentation, if ever you
let her sneering nose inside the door, at once demands. Then the
kitchen range--it goes without saying: one might imagine them all
members of a stove union, controlled by some agitating old boiler out
of work--had taken the opportunity to strike, refusing to bake another
dish except under permanently improved conditions, necessitating weary
days with plumbers. Fat cookery books, long neglected on their shelf,
had been consulted, argued with and abused; experiments made, failures
sighed over, successes noted; cost calculated anxiously; means and
ways adjusted, hope finally achieved, shadowed by fear.

And now with victory practically won, to have the reward thus dashed
from her hand at the last moment! Downstairs in the kitchen would be
the dinner, waiting for the guests; upstairs round the glittering
table would be the assembled guests, waiting for their dinner. But
between the two yawned an impassable gulf. The bridge, without a word
of warning, had bolted--was probably by this time well on its way to
Ilford. There was excuse for my mother's tears.

"Isn't it possible to get somebody else?" asked my father.

"Impossible, in the time," said my mother. "I had been training her
for the whole week. We had rehearsed it perfectly."

"Have it in the kitchen," suggested my aunt, who was folding napkins
to look like ships, which they didn't in the least, "and call it a
picnic."  Really it seemed the only practical solution.

There came a light knock at the front door.

"It can't be anybody yet, surely," exclaimed my father in alarm,
making for his coat.

"It's Barbara, I expect," explained my mother. "She promised to come
round and help me dress. But now, of course, I shan't want her."  My
mother's nature was pessimistic.

But with the words Barbara ran into the room, for I had taken it upon
myself to admit her, knowing that shadows slipped out through the
window when Barbara came in at the door--in those days, I mean.

She kissed them all three, though it seemed but one movement, she was
so quick. And at once they saw the humour of the thing.

"There's going to be no dinner," laughed my father. "We are going to
look surprised and pretend that it was yesterday. It will be fun to
see their faces."

"There will be a very nice dinner," smiled my mother, "but it will be
in the kitchen, and there's no way of getting it upstairs."  And they
explained to her the situation.

She stood for an instant, her sweet face the gravest in the group.
Then a light broke upon it.

"I'll get you someone," she said.

"My dear, you don't even know the neighbourhood," began my mother.
But Barbara had snatched the latchkey from its nail and was gone.

With her disappearance, shadow fell again upon us. "If there were
only an hotel in this beastly neighbourhood," said my father.

"You must entertain them by yourself, Luke," said my mother; "and I
must wait--that's all."

"Don't be absurd, Maggie," cried my father, getting angry. "Can't
cook bring it in?"

"No one can cook a dinner and serve it, too," answered my mother,
impatiently. "Besides, she's not presentable."

"What about Fan?" whispered my father.

My mother merely looked. It was sufficient.

"Paul?" suggested my father.

"Thank you," retorted my mother. "I don't choose to have my son
turned into a footman, if you do."

"Well, hadn't you better go and dress?" was my father's next remark.

"It won't take me long to put on an apron," was my mother's reply.

"I was looking forward to seeing you in that new frock," said my
father. In the case of another, one might have attributed such a
speech to tact; in the case of my father, one felt it was a happy
accident.

My mother confessed--speaking with a certain indulgence, as one does
of one's own follies when past--that she herself also had looked
forward to seeing herself therein. Threatening discord melted into
mutual sympathy.

"I so wanted everything to be all right, for your sake, Luke," said my
mother; "I know you were hoping it would help on the business."

"I was only thinking of you, Maggie, dear," answered my father. "You
are my business."

"I know, dear," said my mother. "It is hard."

The key turned in the lock, and we all stood quiet to listen.

"She's come back alone," said my mother. "I knew it was hopeless."

The door opened.

"Please, ma'am," said the new parlour-maid, "will I do?"

She stood there, framed by the lintel, in the daintiest of aprons, the
daintiest of caps upon her golden hair; and every objection she swept
aside with the wind of her merry wilfulness. No one ever had their
way with her, nor wanted it.

"You shall be footman," she ordered, turning to me--but this time my
mother only laughed. "Wait here till I come down again."  Then to my
mother: "Now, ma'am, are you ready?"

It was the first time I had seen my mother, or, indeed, any other
flesh and blood woman, in evening dress, and to tell the truth I was a
little shocked. Nay, more than a little, and showed it, I suppose;
for my mother flushed and drew her shawl over the gleaming whiteness
of her shoulders, pleading coldness. But Barbara cried out against
this, saying it was a sin such beauty should be hid; and my father,
filching a shawl with a quick hand, so dextrously indeed as to suggest
some previous practice in the feat, dropped on one knee--as though the
world were some sweet picture book--and raised my mother's hand with
grave reverence to his lips; and Barbara, standing behind my mother's
chair, insisted on my following suit, saying the Queen was receiving.
So I knelt also, glancing up shyly as towards the gracious face of
some fair lady hitherto unknown, thus Catching my first glimpse of the
philosophy of clothes.

My memory lingers upon this scene by contrast with the sad, changed
days that swiftly followed, when my mother's eyes would flash towards
my father angry gleams, and her voice ring cruel and hard; though the
moment he was gone her lips would tremble and her eyes grow soft again
and fill with tears; when my father would sit with averted face and
sullen lips tight pressed, or worse, would open them only to pour
forth a rapid flood of savage speech; and fling out of the room,
slamming the door behind him, and I would find him hours afterwards,
sitting alone in the dark, with bowed head between his hands.

Wretched, I would lie awake, hearing through the flimsy walls their
passionate tones, now rising high, now fiercely forced into cold
whispers; and then their words to each other sounded even crueller.

In their estrangement from each other, so new to them, both clung
closer to me, though they would tell me nothing, nor should I have
understood if they had. When my mother was sobbing softly, her arms
clasping me tighter and tighter with each quivering throb, then I
hated my father, who I felt had inflicted this sorrow upon her. Yet
when my father drew me down upon his knee, and I looked into his kind
eyes so full of pain, then I felt angry with my mother, remembering
her bitter tongue.

It seemed to me as though some cruel, unseen thing had crept into the
house to stand ever between them, so that they might never look into
each other's loving eyes but only into the eyes of this evil shadow.
The idea grew upon me until at times I could almost detect its outline
in the air, feel a chillness as it passed me. It trod silently
through the pokey rooms, always alert to thrust its grinning face
before them. Now beside my mother it would whisper in her ear; and
the next moment, stealing across to my father, answer for him with his
voice, but strangely different. I used to think I could hear it
laughing to itself as it stepped back into enfolding space.

To this day I seem to see it, ever following with noiseless footsteps
man and woman, waiting patiently its opportunity to thrust its face
between them. So that I can read no love tale, but, glancing round, I
see its mocking eyes behind my shoulder, reading also, with a silent
laugh. So that never can I meet with boy and girl, whispering in the
twilight, but I see it lurking amid the half lights, just behind them,
creeping after them with stealthy tread, as hand in hand they pass me
in quiet ways.

Shall any of us escape, or lies the road of all through this dark
valley of the shadow of dead love? Is it Love's ordeal? testing the
feeble-hearted from the strong in faith, who shall find each other yet
again, the darkness passed?

Of the dinner itself, until time of dessert, I can give no consecutive
account, for as footman, under the orders of this enthusiastic
parlour-maid, my place was no sinecure, and but few opportunities of
observation through the crack of the door were afforded me. All that
was clear to me was that the chief guest was a Mr. Teidelmann--or
Tiedelmann, I cannot now remember which--a snuffy, mumbling old frump,
with whose name then, however, I was familiar by reason of seeing it
so often in huge letters, though with a Co. added, on dreary long
blank walls, bordering the Limehouse reach. He sat at my mother's
right hand; and I wondered, noticing him so ugly and so foolish
seeming, how she could be so interested in him, shouting much and
often to him; for added to his other disattractions he was very deaf,
which necessitated his putting his hand up to his ear at every other
observation made to him, crying querulously: "Eh, what? What are you
talking about? Say it again,"--smiling upon him and paying close
attention to his every want. Even old Hasluck, opposite to him, and
who, though pleasant enough in his careless way, was far from being a
slave to politeness, roared himself purple, praising some new
disinfectant of which this same Teidelmann appeared to be the
proprietor.

"My wife swears by it," bellowed Hasluck, leaning across the table.

"Our drains!" chimed in Mrs. Hasluck, who was a homely soul; "well,
you'd hardly know there was any in the house since I've took to using
it."

"What are they talking about?" asked Teidelmann, appealing to my
mother. "What's he say his wife does?"

"Your disinfectant," explained my mother; "Mrs. Hasluck swears by it."

"Who?"

"Mrs. Hasluck."

"Does she? Delighted to hear it," grunted the old gentleman,
evidently bored.

"Nothing like it for a sick-room," persisted Hasluck; "might almost
call it a scent."

"Makes one quite anxious to be ill," remarked my aunt, addressing no
one in particular.

"Reminds me of cocoanuts," continued Hasluck.

Its proprietor appeared not to hear, but Hasluck was determined his
flattery should not be lost.

"I say it reminds me of cocoanuts."  He screamed it this time.

"Oh, does it?" was the reply.

"Doesn't it you?"

"Can't say it does," answered Teidelmann. "As a matter of fact, don't
know much about it myself. Never use it."

Old Teidelmann went on with his dinner, but Hasluck was still full of
the subject.

"Take my advice," he shouted, "and buy a bottle."

"Buy a what?"

"A bottle," roared the other, with an effort palpably beyond his
strength.

"What's he say? What's he talking about now?" asked Teidelmann, again
appealing to my mother.

"He says you ought to buy a bottle," again explained my mother.

"What of?"

"Of your own disinfectant."

"Silly fool!"

Whether he intended the remark to be heard and thus to close the topic
(which it did), or whether, as deaf people are apt to, merely
misjudged the audibility of an intended sotto vocalism, I cannot say.
I only know that outside in the passage I heard the words distinctly,
and therefore assume they reached round the table also.

A lull in the conversation followed, but Hasluck was not thin-skinned,
and the next thing I distinguished was his cheery laugh.

"He's quite right," was Hasluck's comment; "that's what I am
undoubtedly. Because I can't talk about anything but shop myself, I
think everybody else is the same sort of fool."

But he was doing himself an injustice, for on my next arrival in the
passage he was again shouting across the table, and this time
Teidelmann was evidently interested.

"Well, if you could spare the time, I'd be more obliged than I can
tell you," Hasluck was saying. "I know absolutely nothing about
pictures myself, and Pearsall says you are one of the best judges in
Europe."

"He ought to know," chuckled old Teidelmann. "He's tried often enough
to palm off rubbish onto me."

"That last purchase of yours must have been a good thing for young--"
Hasluck mentioned the name of a painter since world famous; "been the
making of him, I should say."

"I gave him two thousand for the six," replied Teidelmann, "and
they'll sell for twenty thousand."

"But you'll never sell them?" exclaimed my father.

"No," grunted old Teidelmann, "but my widow will."  There came a soft,
low laugh from a corner of the table I could not see.

"It's Anderson's great disappointment," followed a languid, caressing
voice (the musical laugh translated into prose, it seemed), "that he
has never been able to educate me to a proper appreciation of art.
He'll pay thousands of pounds for a child in rags or a badly dressed
Madonna. Such a waste of money, it appears to me."

"But you would pay thousands for a diamond to hang upon your neck,"
argued my father's voice.

"It would enhance the beauty of my neck," replied the musical voice.

"An even more absolute waste of money," was my father's answer, spoken
low. And I heard again the musical, soft laugh.

"Who is she?" I asked Barbara.

"The second Mrs. Teidelmann," whispered Barbara. "She is quite a
swell. Married him for his money--I don't like her myself, but she's
very beautiful."

"As beautiful as you?" I asked incredulously. We were sitting on the
stairs, sharing a jelly.

"Oh, me!" answered Barbara. "I'm only a child. Nobody takes any
notice of me--except other kids, like you."  For some reason she
appeared out of conceit with herself, which was not her usual state of
mind.

"But everybody thinks you beautiful," I maintained.

"Who?" she asked quickly.

"Dr. Hal," I answered.

We were with our backs to the light, so that I could not see her face.

"What did he say?" she asked, and her voice had more of contentment in
it.

I could not remember his exact words, but about the sense of them I
was positive.

"Ask him what he thinks of me, as if you wanted to know yourself,"
Barbara instructed me, "and don't forget what he says this time. I'm
curious."  And though it seemed to me a foolish command--for what
could he say of her more than I myself could tell her--I never
questioned Barbara's wishes.

Yet if I am right in thinking that jealousy of Mrs. Teidelmann may
have clouded for a moment Barbara's sunny nature, surely there was no
reason for this, seeing that no one attracted greater attention
throughout the dinner than the parlour-maid.

"Where ever did you get her from?" asked Mrs. Florret, Barbara having
just descended the kitchen stairs.

"A neat-handed Phillis," commented Dr. Florret with approval.

"I'll take good care she never waits at my table," laughed the wife of
our minister, the Rev. Cottle, a broad-built, breezy-voiced woman,
mother of eleven, eight of them boys.

"To tell the truth," said my mother, "she's only here temporarily."

"As a matter of fact," said my father, "we have to thank Mrs. Hasluck
for her."

"Don't leave me out of it," laughed Hasluck; "can't let the old girl
take all the credit."

Later my father absent-mindedly addressed her as "My dear," at which
Mrs. Cottle shot a swift glance towards my mother; and before that
incident could have been forgotten, Hasluck, when no one was looking,
pinched her elbow, which would not have mattered had not the
unexpectedness of it drawn from her an involuntary "augh," upon which,
for the reputation of the house, and the dinner being then towards its
end; my mother deemed it better to take the whole company into her
confidence. Naturally the story gained for Barbara still greater
admiration, so that when with the dessert, discarding the apron but
still wearing the dainty cap, which showed wisdom, she and the footman
took their places among the guests, she was even more than before the
centre of attention and remark.

"It was very nice of you," said Mrs. Cottle, thus completing the
circle of compliments, "and, as I always tell my girls, that is better
than being beautiful."

"Kind hearts," added Dr. Florret, summing up the case, "are more than
coronets."  Dr. Florret had ever ready for the occasion the correct
quotation, but from him, somehow, it never irritated; rather it fell
upon the ear as a necessary rounding and completing of the theme; like
the Amen in church.

Only to my aunt would further observations have occurred.

"When I was a girl," said my aunt, breaking suddenly upon the passing
silence, "I used to look into the glass and say to myself: 'Fanny,
you've got to be amiable,' and I was amiable," added my aunt,
challenging contradiction with a look; "nobody can say that I wasn't,
for years."

"It didn't pay?" suggested Hasluck.

"It attracted," replied my aunt, "no attention whatever."

Hasluck had changed places with my mother, and having after many
experiments learned the correct pitch for conversation with old
Teidelmann, talked with him as much aside as the circumstances of the
case would permit. Hasluck never wasted time on anything else than
business. It was in his opera box on the first night of Verdi's Aida
(I am speaking of course of days then to come) that he arranged the
details of his celebrated deal in guano; and even his very religion,
so I have been told and can believe, he varied to suit the enterprise
of the moment, once during the protracted preliminaries of a cocoa
scheme becoming converted to Quakerism.

But for the most of us interest lay in a discussion between Washburn
and Florret concerning the superior advantages attaching to residence
in the East End.

As a rule, incorrect opinion found itself unable to exist in Dr.
Florret's presence. As no bird, it is said, can continue its song
once looked at by an owl, so all originality grew silent under the
cold stare of his disapproving eye. But Dr. "Fighting Hal" was no
gentle warbler of thought. Vehement, direct, indifferent, he swept
through all polite argument as a strong wind through a murmuring wood,
carrying his partisans with him further than they meant to go, and
quite unable to turn back; leaving his opponents clinging
desperately--upside down, anyhow--to their perches, angry, their
feathers much ruffled.

"Life!" flung out Washburn--Dr. Florret had just laid down
unimpeachable rules for the conduct of all mankind on all
occasions--"what do you respectable folk know of life? You are not
men and women, you are marionettes. You don't move to your natural
emotions implanted by God; you dance according to the latest book of
etiquette. You live and love, laugh and weep and sin by rule. Only
one moment do you come face to face with life; that is in the moment
when you die, leaving the other puppets to be dressed in black and
make believe to cry."

It was a favourite subject of denunciation with him, the artificiality
of us all.

"Little doll," he had once called me, and I had resented the term.

"That's all you are, little Paul," he had persisted, "a good little
hard-working doll, that does what it's made to do, and thinks what
it's made to think. We are all dolls. Your father is a
gallant-hearted, soft-headed little doll; your mother the sweetest and
primmest of dolls. And I'm a silly, dissatisfied doll that longs to
be a man, but hasn't the pluck. We are only dolls, little Paul."

"He's a trifle--a trifle whimsical on some subjects," explained my
father, on my repeating this conversation.

"There are a certain class of men," explained my mother--"you will
meet with them more as you grow up--who talk for talking's sake. They
don't know what they mean. And nobody else does either."

"But what would you have?" argued Dr. Florret, "that every man should
do that which is right in his own eyes?"

"Far better than, like the old man in the fable, he should do what
every other fool thinks right," retorted Washburn. "The other day I
called to see whether a patient of mine was still alive or not. His
wife was washing clothes in the front room. 'How's your husband?' I
asked. 'I think he's dead,' replied the woman. Then, without leaving
off her work, 'Jim,' she shouted, 'are you there?'  No answer came
from the inner room. 'He's a goner,' she said, wringing out a
stocking."

"But surely," said Dr. Florret, "you don't admire a woman for being
indifferent to the death of her husband?"

"I don't admire her for that," replied Washburn, "and I don't blame
her. I didn't make the world and I'm not responsible for it. What I
do admire her for is not pretending a grief she didn't feel. In
Berkeley Square she'd have met me at the door with an agonised face
and a handkerchief to her eyes.

"Assume a virtue, if you have it not," murmured Dr. Florret.

"Go on," said Washburn. "How does it run? 'That monster, custom, who
all sense doth eat, of devil's habit, is angel yet in this, that to
the use of actions fair and good he gives a frock that aptly is put
on.'  So was the lion's skin by the ass, but it showed him only the
more an ass. Here asses go about as asses, but there are lions also.
I had a woman under my hands only a little while ago. I could have
cured her easily. Why she got worse every day instead of better I
could not understand. Then by accident learned the truth: instead of
helping me she was doing all she could to kill herself. 'I must,
Doctor,' she cried. 'I must. I have promised. If I get well he will
only leave me, and if I die now he has sworn to be good to the
children.'  Here, I tell you, they live--think their thoughts, work
their will, kill those they hate, die for those they love; savages if
you like, but savage men and women, not bloodless dolls."

"I prefer the dolls," concluded Dr. Florret.

"I admit they are pretty," answered Washburn.

"I remember," said my father, "the first masked ball I ever went to
when I was a student in Paris. It struck me just as you say, Hal;
everybody was so exactly alike. I was glad to get out into the street
and see faces."

"But I thought they always unmasked at midnight," said the second Mrs.
Teidelmann in her soft, languid tones.

"I did not wait," explained my father.

"That was a pity," she replied. "I should have been interested to see
what they were like, underneath."

"I might have been disappointed," answered my father. "I agree with
Dr. Florret that sometimes the mask is an improvement."

Barbara was right. She was a beautiful woman, with a face that would
have been singularly winning if one could have avoided the hard cold
eyes ever restless behind the half-closed lids.

Always she was very kind to me. Moreover, since the disappearance of
Cissy she was the first to bestow again upon me a good opinion of my
small self. My mother praised me when I was good, which to her was
the one thing needful; but few of us, I fear, child or grown-up, take
much pride in our solid virtues, finding them generally hindrances to
our desires: like the oyster's pearl, of more comfort to the world
than to ourselves. If others there were who admired me, very
guardedly must they have kept the secret I would so gladly have shared
with them. But this new friend of ours--or had I not better at once
say enemy--made me feel when in her presence a person of importance.
How it was accomplished I cannot explain. No word of flattery nor
even of mere approval ever passed her lips. Her charm to me was not
that she admired me, but that she led me by some mysterious process to
admire myself.

And yet in spite of this and many lesser kindnesses she showed to me,
I never really liked her; but rather feared her, dreading always the
sudden raising of those ever half-closed eyelids.

She sat next to my father at the corner of the table, her chin resting
on her long white hands, her sweet lips parted, and as often as his
eyes were turned away from her, her soft low voice would draw them
back again. Once she laid her hand on his, laughing the while at some
light jest of his, and I saw that he flushed; and following his quick
glance, saw that my mother's eyes were watching also.

I have spoken of my father only as he then appeared to me, a child--an
older chum with many lines about his mobile mouth, the tumbled hair
edged round with grey; but looking back with older eyes, I see him a
slightly stooping, yet still tall and graceful man, with the face of a
poet--the face I mean a poet ought to possess but rarely does, nature
apparently abhorring the obvious--with the shy eyes of a boy, and a
voice tender as a woman's. Never the dingiest little drab that
entered the kitchen but adored him, speaking always of "the master" in
tones of fond proprietorship, for to the most slatternly his "orders"
had ever the air of requests for favours. Women, I so often read, can
care for only masterful men. But may there not be variety in women as
in other species? Or perhaps--if the suggestion be not
over-daring--the many writers, deeming themselves authorities upon
this subject of woman, may in this one particular have erred? I only
know my father spoke to few women whose eyes did not brighten. Yet
hardly should I call him a masterful man.

"I think it's all right," whispered Hasluck to my father in the
passage--they were the last to go. "What does she think of it, eh?"

"I think she'll be with us," answered my father.

"Nothing like food for bringing people together," said Hasluck.
"Good-night."

The door closed, but Something had crept into the house. It stood
between my father and mother. It followed them silently up the narrow
creaking stairs.

CHAPTER VII.

OF THE PASSING OF THE SHADOW.

Better is little, than treasure and trouble therewith. Better a
dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
None but a great man would have dared to utter such a glaring
commonplace as that. Not only on Sundays now, but all the week, came
the hot joint to table, and on every day there was pudding, till a
body grew indifferent to pudding; thus a joy-giving luxury of life
being lost and but another item added to the long list of
uninteresting needs. Now we could eat and drink without stint. No
need now to organise for the morrow's hash. No need now to cut one's
bread instead of breaking it, thinking of Saturday's bread pudding.
But there the saying fails, for never now were we merry. A silent
unseen guest sat with us at the board, so that no longer we laughed
and teased as over the half pound of sausages or the two sweet-scented
herrings; but talked constrainedly of empty things that lay outside
us.

Easy enough would it have been for us to move to Guilford Street.
Occasionally in the spiritless tones in which they now spoke on all
subjects save the one, my mother and father would discuss the project;
but always into the conversation would fall, sooner or later, some
loosened thought to stir it to anger, and so the aching months went
by, and the cloud grew.

Then one day the news came that old Teidelmann had died suddenly in
his counting house.

"You are going to her?" said my mother.

"I have been sent for," said my father; "I must--it may mean
business."

My mother laughed bitterly; why, at the time, I could not understand;
and my father flung out of the house. During the many hours that he
was away my mother remained locked in her room, and, stealing
sometimes to the door, I was sure I heard her crying; and that she
should grieve so at old Teidelmann's death puzzled me.

She came oftener to our house after that. Her mourning added, I
think, to her beauty, softening--or seeming to soften--the hardness of
her eyes. Always she was very sweet to my mother, who by contrast
beside her appeared witless and ungracious; and to me, whatever her
motive, she was kindness itself; hardly ever arriving without some
trifling gift or plan for affording me some childish treat. By
instinct she understood exactly what I desired and liked, the books
that would appeal to me as those my mother gave me never did, the
pleasures that did please me as opposed to the pleasures that should
have pleased me. Often my mother, talking to me, would chill me with
the vista of the life that lay before me: a narrow, viewless way
between twin endless walls of "Must" and "Must not."  This soft-voiced
lady set me dreaming of life as of sunny fields through which one
wandered laughing, along the winding path of Will; so that, although
as I have said, there lurked at the bottom of my thoughts a fear of
her; yet something within me I seemed unable to control went out to
her, drawn by her subtle sympathy and understanding of it.

"Has he ever seen a pantomime?" she asked of my father one morning,
looking at me the while with a whimsical screwing of her mouth.

My heart leaped within me. My father raised his eyebrows: "What
would your mother say, do you think?" he asked. My heart sank.

"She thinks," I replied, "that theatres are very wicked places."  It
was the first time that any doubt as to the correctness of my mother's
judgments had ever crossed my mind.

Mrs. Teidelmann's smile strengthened my doubt. "Dear me," she said,
"I am afraid I must be very wicked. I have always regarded a
pantomime as quite a moral entertainment. All the bad people go down
so very straight to--well, to the fit and proper place for them. And
we could promise to leave before the Clown stole the sausages,
couldn't we, Paul?"

My mother was called and came; and I could not help thinking how
insignificant she looked with her pale face and plain dark frock,
standing stiffly beside this shining lady in her rustling clothes.

"You will let him come, Mrs. Kelver," she pleaded in her soft
caressing tones; "it's Dick Whittington, you know--such an excellent
moral."

My mother had stood silent, clasping and unclasping her hands, a
childish trick she had when troubled; and her lips were trembling.
Important as the matter loomed before my own eyes, I wondered at her
agitation.

"I am very sorry," said my mother, "it is very kind of you. But I
would rather he did not go."

"Just this once," persisted Mrs. Teidelmann. "It is holiday time."

A ray of sunlight fell into the room, lighting upon her coaxing face,
making where my mother stood seem shadow.

"I would rather he did not go," repeated my mother, and her voice
sounded harsh and grating. "When he is older others must judge for
him, but for the present he must be guided by me--alone."

"I really don't think there could be any harm, Maggie," urged my
father. "Things have changed since we were young."

"That may be," answered my mother, still in the same harsh voice; "it
is long ago since then."

"I didn't intend it that way," said my father with a short laugh.

"I merely meant that I may be wrong," answered my mother. "I seem so
old among you all--so out of place. I have tried to change, but I
cannot."

"We will say no more about it," said Mrs. Teidelmann, sweetly. "I
merely thought it would give him pleasure; and he has worked so hard
this last term, his father tells me."

She laid her hand caressingly on my shoulder, drawing me a little
closer to her; and it remained there.

"It was very kind of you," said my mother, "I would do anything to
give him pleasure, anything-I could. He knows that. He understands."

My mother's hand, I knew, was seeking mine, but I was angry and would
not see; and without another word she left the room.

My mother did not allude again to the subject; but the very next
afternoon she took me herself to a hall in the neighbourhood, where we
saw a magic-lantern, followed by a conjurer. She had dressed herself
in a prettier frock than she had worn for many a long day, and was
brighter and gayer in herself than had lately been her wont, laughing
and talking merrily. But I, nursing my wrongs, remained moody and
sulky. At any other time such rare amusement would have overjoyed me;
but the wonders of the great theatre that from other boys I had heard
so much of, that from gaudy-coloured posters I had built up for
myself, were floating vague and undefined before me in the air; and
neither the open-mouthed sleeper, swallowing his endless chain of
rats; nor even the live rabbit found in the stout old gentleman's
hat--the last sort of person in whose hat one would have expected to
find such a thing--could draw away my mind from the joy I had caught a
glimpse of only to lose.

So we walked home through the muddy, darkening streets, speaking but
little; and that night, waking--or rather half waking, as children
do--I thought I saw a figure in white crouching at the foot of my bed.
I must have gone to sleep again; and later, though I cannot say
whether the intervening time was short or long, I opened my eyes to
see it still there; and frightened, I cried out; and my mother rose
from her knees.

She laughed, a curious broken laugh, in answer to my questions. "It
was a silly dream I had," she explained "I must have been thinking of
the conjurer we saw. I dreamt that a wicked Magician had spirited you
away from me. I could not find you and was all alone in the world."

She put her arms around me, so tight as almost to hurt me. And thus
we remained until again I must have fallen asleep.

It was towards the close of these same holidays that my mother and I
called upon Mrs. Teidelmann in her great stone-built house at Clapton.
She had sent a note round that morning, saying she was suffering from
terrible headaches that quite took her senses away, so that she was
unable to come out. She would be leaving England in a few days to
travel. Would my mother come and see her, she would like to say
good-bye to her before she went. My mother handed the letter across
the table to my father.

"Of course you will go," said my father. "Poor girl, I wonder what
the cause can be. She used to be so free from everything of the
kind."

"Do you think it well for me to go?" said my mother. "What can she
have to say to me?"

"Oh, just to say good-bye," answered my father. "It would look so
pointed not to go."

It was a dull, sombre house without, but one entered through its
commonplace door as through the weed-grown rock into Aladdin's cave.
Old Teidelmann had been a great collector all his life, and his
treasures, now scattered through a dozen galleries, were then heaped
there in curious confusion. Pictures filled every inch of wall, stood
propped against the wonderful old furniture, were even stretched
unframed across the ceilings. Statues gleamed from every corner (a
few of the statues were, I remember, the only things out of the entire
collection that Mrs. Teidelmann kept for herself), carvings,
embroideries, priceless china, miniatures framed in gems, illuminated
missals and gorgeously bound books crowded the room. The ugly little
thick-lipped man had surrounded himself with the beauty of every age,
brought from every land. He himself must have been the only thing
cheap and uninteresting to be found within his own walls; and now he
lay shrivelled up in his coffin, under a monument by means of which an
unknown cemetery became quite famous.

Instructions had been given that my mother was to be shown up into
Mrs. Teidelmann's boudoir. She was lying on a sofa near the fire when
we entered, asleep, dressed in a loose lace robe that fell away,
showing her thin but snow-white arms, her rich dark hair falling loose
about her. In sleep she looked less beautiful: harder and with a
suggestion of coarseness about the face, of which at other times it
showed no trace. My mother said she would wait, perhaps Mrs.
Teidelmann would awake; and the servant, closing the door softly, left
us alone with her.

An old French clock standing on the mantelpiece, a heart supported by
Cupids, ticked with a muffled, soothing sound. My mother, choosing a
chair by the window, sat with her eyes fixed on the sleeping woman's
face, and it seemed to me--though this may have been but my fancy born
of after-thought--that a faint smile relaxed for a moment the sleeping
woman's pained, pressed lips. Neither I nor my mother spoke, the only
sound in the room being the hushed ticking of the great gilt clock.
Until the other woman after a few slight movements of unrest began to
talk in her sleep.

Only confused murmurs escaped her at first, and then I heard her
whisper my father's name. Very low--hardly more than breathed--were
the words, but upon the silence each syllable struck clear and
distinct: "Ah no, we must not. Luke, my darling."

My mother rose swiftly from her chair, but she spoke in quite
matter-of-fact tones.

"Go, Paul," she said, "wait for me downstairs;" and noiselessly
opening the door, she pushed me gently out, and closed it again behind
me.

It was half an hour or more before she came down, and at once we left
the house, letting ourselves out. All the way home my mother never
once spoke, but walked as one in a dream with eyes that saw not. With
her hand upon the lock of our gate she came back to life.

"You must say nothing, Paul, do you understand?" she said. "When
people are delirious they use strange words that have no meaning. Do
you understand, Paul; you must never breathe a word--never."

I promised, and we entered the house; and from that day my mother's
whole manner changed. Not another angry word ever again escaped her
lips, never an angry flash lighted up again her eyes. Mrs. Teidelmann
remained away three months. My father, of course, wrote to her often,
for he was managing all her affairs. But my mother wrote to her
also--though this my father, I do not think, knew--long letters that
she would go away by herself to pen, writing them always in the
twilight, close to the window.

"Why do you choose this time, just when it's getting dark, to write
your letters," my father would expostulate, when by chance he happened
to look into the room. "Let me ring for the lamp, you will strain
your eyes."  But my mother would always excuse herself, saying she had
only a few lines to finish.

"I can think better in this light," she would explain.

And when Mrs. Teidelmann returned, it was my mother who was the first
to call upon her; before even my father knew that she was back. And
from thence onward one might have thought them the closest of friends,
my mother visiting her often, speaking of her to all in terms of
praise and liking.

In this way peace returned unto the house, and my father was tender
again in all his words and actions towards my mother, and my mother
thoughtful as before of all his wants and whims, her voice soft and
low, the sweet smile ever lurking around her lips as in the old days
before this evil thing had come to dwell among us; and I might have
forgotten it had ever cast its blight upon our life but that every day
my mother grew feebler, the little ways that had seemed a part of her
gone from her.

The summer came and went--that time in towns of panting days and
stifling nights, when through the open window crawls to one's face the
hot foul air, heavy with reeking odours drawn from a thousand streets;
when lying awake one seems to hear the fitful breathing of the myriad
mass around, as of some over-laboured beast too tired to even rest;
and my mother moved about the house ever more listlessly.

"There's nothing really the matter with her," said Dr. Hal, "only
weakness. It is the place. Cannot you get her away from it?"

"I cannot leave myself," said my father, "just yet; but there is no
reason why you and the boy should not take a holiday. This year I can
afford it, and later I might possibly join you."

My mother consented, as she did to all things now, and so it came
about that again of afternoons we climbed--though more slowly and with
many pauses--the steep path to the ruined tower old Jacob in his happy
foolishness had built upon the headland, rested once again upon its
topmost platform, sheltered from the wind that ever blew about its
crumbling walls, saw once more the distant mountains, faint like
spectres, and the silent ships that came and vanished, and about our
feet the pleasant farm lands, and the grave, sweet river.

We had taken lodgings in the village: smaller now it seemed than
previously; but wonderful its sunny calm, after the turmoil of the
fierce dark streets. Mrs. Fursey was there still, but quite another
than the Mrs. Fursey of my remembrance, a still angular but cheery
dame, bent no longer on suppressing me, but rather on drawing me out
before admiring neighbours, as one saying: "The material was
unpromising, as you know. There were times when I almost despaired.
But with patience, and--may I say, a natural gift that way--you see
what can be accomplished!"  And Anna, now a buxom wife and mother,
with an uncontrollable desire to fall upon and kiss me at most
unexpected moments, necessitating a never sleeping watchfulness on my
part, and a choosing of positions affording means of ready retreat.
And old Chumbley, still cobbling shoes in his tiny cave. On the bench
before him in a row they sat and watched him while he tapped and
tapped and hammered: pert little shoes piping "Be quick, be quick, we
want to be toddling. You seem to have no idea, my good man, how much
toddling there is to be done."  Dapper boots, sighing: "Oh, please
make haste, we are waiting to dance and to strut. Jack walks in the
lane, Jill waits by the gate. Oh, deary, how slowly he taps."  Stout
sober boots, saying: "As soon as you can, old friend. Remember we've
work to do."  Flat-footed old boots, rusty and limp, mumbling: "We
haven't much time, Mr. Chumbley. Just a patch, that is all, we
haven't much further to go."  And old Joe, still peddling his pack,
with the help of the same old jokes. And Tom Pinfold, still puzzled
and scratching his head, the rejected fish still hanging by its tail
from his expostulating hand; one might almost have imagined it the
same fish. Grown-up folks had changed but little. Only the foolish
children had been playing tricks; parties I had left mere sucking
babes now swaggering in pinafore or knickerbocker; children I had
known now mincing it as men and women; such affectation annoyed me.

One afternoon--it was towards the close of the last week of our
stay--my mother and I had climbed, as was so often our wont, to the
upper platform of old Jacob's tower. My mother leant upon the
parapet, her eyes fixed dreamingly upon the distant mountains, and a
smile crept to her lips.

"What are you thinking of?" I asked.

"Oh, only of things that happened over there"--she nodded her head
towards the distant hills as to some old crony with whom she shares
secrets--"when I was a girl."

"You lived there, long ago, didn't you, when you were young?" I asked.
Boys do not always stop to consider whether their questions might or
might not be better expressed.

"You're very rude," said my mother--it was long since a tone of her
old self had rung from her in answer to any touch; "it was a very
little while ago."

Suddenly she raised her head and listened. Perhaps some twenty
seconds she remained so with her lips parted, and then from the woods
came a faint, long-drawn "Coo-ee."  We ran to the side of the tower
commanding the pathway from the village, and waited until from among
the dark pines my father emerged into the sunlight.

Seeing us, he shouted again and waved his stick, and from the light of
his eves and his gallant bearing, and the spring of his step across
the heathery turf, we knew instinctively that trouble had come upon
him. He always rose to meet it with that look and air. It was the
old Norse blood in his veins, I suppose. So, one imagines, must those
godless old Pirates have sprung to their feet when the North wind,
loosed as a hawk from the leash, struck at the beaked prow.

We heard his quick step on the rickety stair, and the next moment he
was between us, breathing a little hard, but laughing.

He stood for awhile beside my mother without speaking, both of them
gazing at the distant hills among which, as my mother had explained,
things had happened long ago. And maybe, "over there," their memories
met and looked upon each other with kind eyes.

"Do you remember," said my father, "we climbed up here--it was the
first walk we took together after coming here. We discussed our plans
for the future, how we would retrieve our fortunes."

"And the future," answered my mother, "has a way of making plans for
us instead."

"It would seem so," replied my father, with a laugh. "I am an unlucky
beggar, Maggie. I dropped all your money as well as my own down that
wretched mine."

"It was the will--it was Fate, or whatever you call it," said my
mother. "You could not help that, Luke."

"If only that damned pump hadn't jambed," said my father.

"Do you remember that Mrs. Tharand?" asked my mother.

"Yes, what of her?"

"A worldly woman, I always thought her. She called on me the morning
we were leaving; I don't think you saw her. 'I've been through more
worries than you would think, to look at me,' she said to me,
laughing. I've always remembered her words: 'and of all the troubles
that come to us in this world, believe me, Mrs. Kelver, money troubles
are the easiest to bear.'"

"I wish I could think so," said my father.

"She rather irritated me at the time," continued my mother. "I
thought it one of those commonplaces with which we console ourselves
for other people's misfortunes. But now I know she spoke the truth."

There was silence between them for awhile. Then said my father in a
cheery tone:

"I've broken with old Hasluck."

"I thought you would be compelled to sooner or later," answered my
mother.

"Hasluck," exclaimed my father, with sudden vehemence, "is little
better than a thief; I told him so."

"What did he say?" asked my mother.

"Laughed, and said that was better than some people."

My father laughed himself.

I wish to do the memory of Noel Hasluck no injustice. Ever was he a
kind friend to me; not only then, but in later years, when, having
come to learn that kindness is rarer in the world than I had dreamt, I
was glad of it. Added to which, if only for Barbara's sake, I would
prefer to write of him throughout in terms of praise. Yet even were
his good-tempered, thick-skinned ghost (and unless it were
good-tempered and thick-skinned it would be no true ghost of old Noel
Hasluck) to be reading over my shoulder the words as I write them
down, I think it would agree with me--I do not think it would be
offended with me (for ever in his life he was an admirer and a lover
of the Truth, being one of those good fighters capable of respecting
even his foe, his enemy, against whom from ten to four, occasionally a
little later, he fought right valiantly) for saying that of all the
men who go down into the City each day in a cab or 'bus or train, he
was perhaps one of the most unprincipled: and whether that be saying
much or little I leave to those with more knowledge to decide.

To do others, as it was his conviction, right or wrong, that they
would do him if ever he gave them half a chance, was his notion of
"business;" and in most of his transactions he was successful. "I
play a game," he would argue, "where cheating is the rule. Nine out
of every ten men round the table are sharpers like myself, and the
tenth man is a fool who has no business to be there. We prey upon
each other, and the cutest of us is the winner."

"But the innocent people, lured by your fine promises," I ventured
once to suggest to him, "the widows and the orphans?"

"My dear lad," he said, with a laugh, laying his fat hand upon my
shoulder, "I remember one of your widows writing me a pathetic letter
about some shares she had taken in a Silver Company of mine. Lord
knows where the mine is now--somewhere in Spain, I think. It looked
as though all her savings were gone. She had an only son, and it was
nearly all they possessed in the world, etc., etc.--you know the sort
of thing. Well, I did what I've often been numskull enough to do in
similar cases, wrote and offered to buy her out at par. A week later
she answered, thanking me, but saying it did not matter. There had
occurred a momentary rise, and she had sold out at a profit--to her
own brother-in-law, as I discovered, happening to come across the
transfers. You can find widows and orphans round the Monte Carlo card
tables, if you like to look for them; they are no more deserving of
consideration than the rest of the crowd. Besides, if it comes to
that, I'm an orphan myself;" and he laughed again, one of his deep,
hearty, honest laughs. No one ever possessed a laugh more suggestive
in its every cadence of simple, transparent honesty. He used to say
himself it was worth thousands to him.

Better from the Moralists' point of view had such a man been an
out-and-out rogue. Then might one have pointed, crying: "Behold:
Dishonesty, as you will observe in the person of our awful example, to
be hated, needs but to be seen."  But the duty of the Chronicler is to
bear witness to what he knows, leaving Truth with the whole case
before her to sum up and direct the verdict. In the City, old Hasluck
had a bad reputation and deserved it; in Stoke-Newington--then a green
suburb, containing many fine old houses, standing in great wooded
gardens--he was loved and respected. In his business, he was a man
void of all moral sense, without bowels of compassion for any living
thing; in retirement, a man with a strong sense of duty and a fine
regard for the rights and feelings of others, never happier than when
planning to help or give pleasure. In his office, he would have
robbed his own mother. At home, he would have spent his last penny to
add to her happiness or comfort. I make no attempt to explain. I
only know that such men do exist, and that Hasluck was one of them.
One avoids difficulties by dismissing them as a product of our
curiously complex civilisation--a convenient phrase; let us hope the
recording angel may be equally impressed by it.

Casting about for some reason of excuse to myself for my liking of
him, I hit upon the expedient of regarding him as a modern Robin Hood,
whom we are taught to admire without shame, a Robin Hood up to date,
adapted to the changed conditions of modern environment; making his
living relieving the rich; taking pleasure relieving the poor.

"What will you do?" asked my mother.

"I shall have to give up the office," answered my father. "Without
him there's not enough to keep it going. He was quite good-tempered
about the matter--offered to divide the work, letting me retain the
straightforward portion for whatever that might be worth. But I
declined. Now I know, I feel I would rather have nothing more to do
with him."

"I think you were quite right," agreed my mother.

"What I blame myself for," said my father, "is that I didn't see
through him before. Of course he has been making a mere tool of me
from the beginning. I ought to have seen through him. Why didn't I?"

They discussed the future, or, rather, my father discussed, my mother
listening in silence, stealing a puzzled look at him from time to
time, as though there were something she could not understand.

He would take a situation in the City. One had been offered him. It
might sound poor, but it would be a steady income on which we must
contrive to live. The little money he had saved must be kept for
investments--nothing speculative--judicious "dealings," by means of
which a cool, clear-headed man could soon accumulate capital. Here
the training acquired by working for old Hasluck would serve him well.
One man my father knew--quite a dull, commonplace man--starting a few
years ago with only a few hundreds, was now worth tens of thousands.
Foresight was the necessary qualification. You watched the "tendency"
of things. So often had my father said to himself: "This is going to
be a big thing. That other, it is no good," and in every instance his
prognostications had been verified. He had "felt it;" some men had
that gift. Now was the time to use it for practical purposes.

"Here," said my father, breaking off, and casting an approving eye
upon the surrounding scenery, "would be a pleasant place to end one's
days. The house you had was very pretty and you liked it. We might
enlarge it, the drawing-room might be thrown out--perhaps another
wing."  I felt that our good fortune as from this day was at last
established.

But my mother had been listening with growing impatience, her puzzled
glances giving place gradually to flashes of anger; and now she turned
her face full upon him, her question written plainly thereon,
demanding answer.

Some idea of it I had even then, watching her; and since I have come
to read it word for word: "But that woman--that woman that loves you,
that you love. Ah, I know--why do you play with me? She is rich.
With her your life will be smooth. And the boy--it will be better far
for him. Cannot you three wait a little longer? What more can I do?
Cannot you see that I am surely dying--dying as quickly as I
can--dying as that poor creature your friend once told us of; knowing
it was the only thing she could do for those she loved. Be honest
with me: I am no longer jealous. All that is past: a man is ever
younger than a woman, and a man changes. I do not blame you. It is
for the best. She and I have talked; it is far better so. Only be
honest with me, or at least silent. Will you not honour me enough for
even that?"

My father did not answer, having that to speak of that put my mother's
question out of her mind for all time; so that until the end no word
concerning that other woman passed again between them. Twenty years
later, nearly, I myself happened to meet her, and then long physical
suffering had chased the wantonness away for ever from the pain-worn
mouth; but in that hour of waning voices, as some trouble of the
fretful day when evening falls, so she faded from their life; and if
even the remembrance of her returned at times to either of them, I
think it must have been in those moments when, for no seeming reason,
shyly their hands sought one another.

So the truth of the sad ado--how far my mother's suspicions wronged my
father; for the eye of jealousy (and what loving woman ever lived that
was not jealous?) has its optic nerve terminating not in the brain but
in the heart, which was not constructed for the reception of true
vision--I never knew. Later, long after the curtain of green earth
had been rolled down upon the players, I spoke once on the matter with
Doctor Hal, who must have seen something of the play and with more
understanding eyes than mine, and who thereupon delivered to me a
short lecture on life in general, a performance at which he excelled.

"Flee from temptation and pray that you may be delivered from evil,"
shouted the Doctor--(his was not the Socratic method)--"but remember
this: that as sure as the sparks fly upward there will come a time
when, however fast you run, you will be overtaken--cornered--no one to
deliver you but yourself--the gods sitting round interested. It is a
grim fight, for the Thing, you may be sure, has chosen its right
moment. And every woman in the world will sympathise with you and be
just to you, not even despising you should you be overcome; for
however they may talk, every woman in the world knows that male and
female cannot be judged by the same standard. To woman, Nature and
the Law speak with one voice: 'Sin not, lest you be cursed of your
sex!'  It is no law of man: it is the law of creation. When the
woman sins, she sins not only against her conscience, but against her
every instinct. But to the man Nature whispers: 'Yield.'  It is the
Law alone that holds him back. Therefore every woman in the world,
knowing this, will be just to you--every woman in the world but
one--the woman that loves you. From her, hope for no sympathy, hope
for no justice."

"Then you think--" I began.

"I think," said the Doctor, "that your father loved your mother
devotedly; but he was one of those fighters that for the first
half-dozen rounds or so cause their backers much anxiety. It is a
dangerous method."

"Then you think my mother--"

"I think your mother was a good woman, Paul; and the good woman will
never be satisfied with man till the Lord lets her take him to pieces
and put him together herself."

My father had been pacing to and fro the tiny platform. Now he came
to a halt opposite my mother, placing his hands upon her shoulders.

"I want you to help me, Maggie--help me to be brave. I have only a
year or two longer to live, and there's a lot to be done in that
time."

Slowly the anger died out of my mother's face.

"You remember that fall I had when the cage broke," my father went on.
"Andrews, as you know, feared from the first it might lead to that.
But I always laughed at him."

"How long have you known?" my mother asked.

"Oh, about six months. I felt it at the beginning of the year, but I
didn't say anything to Washburn till a month later. I thought it
might be only fancy."

"And he is sure?"

My father nodded.

"But why have you never told me?"

"Because," replied my father, with a laugh, "I didn't want you to
know. If I could have done without you, I should not have told you
now."

And at this there came a light into my mother's face that never
altogether left it until the end.

She drew him down beside her on the seat. I had come nearer; and my
father, stretching out his hand, would have had me with them. But my
mother, putting her arms about him, held him close to her, as though
in that moment she would have had him to herself alone.

CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THE MAN IN GREY MADE READY FOR HIS GOING.

The eighteen months that followed--for the end came sooner than we had
expected--were, I think, the happiest days my father and mother had
ever known; or if happy be not altogether the right word, let me say
the most beautiful, and most nearly perfect. To them it was as though
God in His sweet thoughtfulness had sent death to knock lightly at the
door, saying: "Not yet. You have still a little longer to be
together. In a little while."  In those last days all things false
and meaningless they laid aside. Nothing was of real importance to
them but that they should love each other, comforting each other,
learning to understand each other. Again we lived poorly; but there
was now no pitiful straining to keep up appearances, no haunting
terror of what the neighbours might think. The petty cares and
worries concerning matters not worth a moment's thought, the mean
desires and fears with which we disfigure ourselves, fell from them.
There came to them broader thought, a wider charity, a deeper pity.
Their love grew greater even than their needs, overflowing towards at
things. Sometimes, recalling these months, it has seemed to me that
we make a mistake seeking to keep Death, God's go-between, ever from
our thoughts. Is it not closing the door to a friend who would help
us would we let him (for who knows life so well), whispering to us:
"In a little while. Only a little longer that you have to be
together. Is it worth taking so much thought for self? Is it worth
while being unkind?"

From them a graciousness emanated pervading all around. Even my aunt
Fan decided for the second time in her career to give amiability a
trial. This intention she announced publicly to my mother and myself
one afternoon soon after our return from Devonshire.

"I'm a beast of an old woman," said my aunt, suddenly.

"Don't say that, Fan," urged my mother.

"What's the good of saying 'Don't say it' when I've just said it,"
snapped back my aunt.

"It's your manner," explained my mother; "people sometimes think you
disagreeable."

"They'd be daft if they didn't," interrupted my aunt. "Of course you
don't really mean it," continued my mother.

"Stuff and nonsense," snorted my aunt; "does she think I'm a fool. I
like being disagreeable. I like to see 'em squirming."

My mother laughed.

"I can be agreeable," continued my aunt, "if I choose. Nobody more
so."

"Then why not choose?" suggested my mother. "I tried it once," said
my aunt, "and it fell flat. Nothing could have fallen flatter."

"It may not have attracted much attention," replied my mother, with a
smile, "but one should not be agreeable merely to attract attention."

"It wasn't only that," returned my aunt, "it was that it gave no
satisfaction to anybody. It didn't suit me. A disagreeable person is
at their best when they are disagreeable."

"I can hardly agree with you there," answered my mother.

"I could do it again," communed my aunt to herself. There was a
suggestion of vindictiveness in her tones. "It's easy enough. Look
at the sort of fools that are agreeable."

"I'm sure you could be if you tried," urged my mother.

"Let 'em have it," continued my aunt, still to herself; "that's the
way to teach 'em sense. Let 'em have it."

And strange though it may seem, my aunt was right and my mother
altogether wrong. My father was the first to notice the change.

"Nothing the matter with poor old Fan, is there?" he asked. It was
one evening a day or two after my aunt had carried her threat into
effect. "Nothing happened, has there?"

"No," answered my mother, "nothing that I know of."

"Her manner is so strange," explained my father, "so--so weird."

My mother smiled. "Don't say anything to her. She's trying to be
agreeable."

My father laughed and then looked wistful. "I almost wish she
wouldn't," he remarked; "we were used to it, and she was rather
amusing."

But my aunt, being a woman of will, kept her way; and about the same
time that occurred tending to confirm her in her new departure. This
was the introduction into our small circle of James Wellington Gadley.
Properly speaking, it should have been Wellington James, that being
the order in which he had been christened in the year 1815. But in
course of time, and particularly during his school career, it had been
borne in upon him that Wellington is a burdensome name for a
commonplace mortal to bear, and very wisely he had reversed the
arrangement. He was a slightly pompous but simpleminded little old
gentleman, very proud of his position as head clerk to Mr. Stillwood,
the solicitor to whom my father was now assistant. Stillwood,
Waterhead and Royal dated back to the Georges, and was a firm bound up
with the history--occasionally shady--of aristocratic England. True,
in these later years its glory was dwindling. Old Mr. Stillwood, its
sole surviving representative, declined to be troubled with new
partners, explaining frankly, in answer to all applications, that the
business was a dying one, and that attempting to work it up again
would be but putting new wine into worn-out skins. But though its
clientele was a yearly diminishing quantity, much business yet
remained to it, and that of a good class, its name being still a
synonym for solid respectability; and my father had deemed himself
fortunate indeed in securing such an appointment. James Gadley had
entered the firm as office boy in the days of its pride, and had never
awakened to the fact that it was not still the most important legal
firm within the half mile radius from Lombard Street. Nothing
delighted him more than to discuss over and over again the many
strange affairs in which Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal had been
concerned, all of which he had at his tongue's tip. Could he find a
hearer, these he would reargue interminably, but with professional
reticence, personages becoming Mr. Y. and Lady X.; and places, "the
capital of, let us say, a foreign country," or "a certain town not a
thousand miles from where we are now sitting."  The majority of his
friends, his methods being somewhat forensic, would seek to discourage
him, but my aunt was a never wearied listener, especially if the case
were one involving suspicion of mystery and crime. When, during their
very first conversation, he exclaimed: "Now why--why, after keeping
away from his wife for nearly eighteen years, never even letting her
know whether he was alive or dead, why this sudden resolve to return
to her? That is what I want explained to me!" he paused, as was his
wont, for sympathetic comment, my aunt, instead of answering as
others, with a yawn: "Oh, I'm sure I don't know. Felt he wanted to
see her, I suppose," replied with prompt intelligence:

"To murder her--by slow poison."

"To murder her! But why?"

"In order to marry the other woman."

"What other woman?"

"The woman he had just met and fallen in love with. Before that it
was immaterial to him what had become of his wife. This woman had
said to him: 'Come back to me a free man or never see my face
again.'"

"Dear me! Now that's very curious."

"Nothing of the sort. Plain common sense."

"I mean, it's curious because, as a matter of fact, his wife did die a
little later, and he did marry again."

"Told you so," remarked my aunt.

In this way every case in the Stillwood annals was reviewed, and light
thrown upon it by my aunt's insight into the hidden springs of human
action. Fortunate that the actors remained mere Mr. X. and Lady Y.,
for into the most innocent seeming behaviour my aunt read ever dark
criminal intent.

"I think you are a little too severe," Mr. Gadley would now and then
plead.

"We're all of us miserable sinners," my aunt would cheerfully affirm;
"only we don't all get the same chances."

An elderly maiden lady, a Miss Z., residing in "a western town once
famous as the resort of fashion, but which we will not name," my aunt
was convinced had burnt down a house containing a will, and forged
another under which her children--should she ever marry and be blessed
with such--would inherit among them on coming of age a fortune of
seven hundred pounds.

The freshness of her views on this, his favourite topic, always
fascinated Mr. Gadley.

"I have to thank you, ma'am," he would remark on rising, "for a most
delightful conversation. I may not be able to agree with your
conclusions, but they afford food for reflection."

To which my aunt would reply, "I hate talking to any one who agrees
with me. It's like taking a walk to see one's own looking-glass. I'd
rather talk to somebody who didn't, even if he were a fool," which for
her was gracious.

He was a stout little gentleman with a stomach that protruded about a
foot in front of him, and of this he appeared to be quite unaware.
Nor would it have mattered had it not been for his desire when talking
to approach as close to his listener as possible. Gradually in the
course of conversation, his stomach acting as a gentle battering ram,
he would in this way drive you backwards round the room, sometimes,
unless you were artful, pinning you hopelessly into a corner, when it
would surprise him that in spite of all his efforts he never succeeded
in getting any nearer to you. His first evening at our house he was
talking to my aunt from the corner of his chair. As he grew more
interested so he drew his chair nearer and nearer, till at length,
having withdrawn inch by inch to avoid his encroachments, my aunt was
sitting on the extreme edge of her own. His next move sent her on to
the floor. She said nothing, which surprised me; but on the occasion
of his next visit she was busy darning stockings, an unusual
occupation for her. He approached nearer and nearer as before; but
this time she sat her ground, and it was he who in course of time
sprang back with an exclamation foreign to the subject under
discussion.

Ever afterwards my aunt met him with stockings in her hand, and they
talked with a space between their chairs.

Nothing further came of it, though his being a widower added to their
intercourse that spice of possibility no woman is ever too old to
relish; but that he admired her intellectually was evident. Once he
even went so far as to exclaim: "Miss Davies, you should have been a
solicitor's wife!" to his thinking the crown of feminine ambition. To
which my aunt had replied: "Chances are I should have been if one had
ever asked me."  And warmed by appreciation, my aunt's amiability took
root and flourished, though assuming, as all growth developed late is
apt to, fantastic shape.

There came to her the idea, by no means ill-founded, that by flattery
one can most readily render oneself agreeable; so conscientiously she
set to work to flatter in season and out. I am sure she meant to give
pleasure, but the effect produced was that of thinly veiled sarcasm.

My father would relate to us some trifling story, some incident
noticed during the day that had seemed to him amusing. At once she
would break out into enthusiasm, holding up her hands in astonishment.

"What a funny man he is! And to think that it comes to him naturally
without an effort. What a gift it is!"

On my mother appearing in a new bonnet, or an old one retrimmed, an
event not unfrequent; for in these days my mother took more thought
than ever formerly for her appearance (you will understand, you women
who have loved), she would step back in simulated amazement.

"Don't tell me it's a married woman with a boy getting on for
fourteen. It's a girl. A saucy, tripping girl. That's what it is."

Persons have been known, I believe, whose vanity, not checked in time,
has grown into a hopeless disease. But I am inclined to think that a
dose of my aunt, about this period, would have cured the most
obstinate case.

So also, and solely for our benefit, she assumed a vivacity and
spriteliness that ill suited her, that having regard to her age and
tendency towards rheumatism must have cost her no small effort. From
these experiences there remains to me the perhaps immoral opinion that
Virtue, in common with all other things, is at her best when
unassuming.

Occasionally the old Adam--or should one say Eve--would assert itself
in my aunt, and then, still thoughtful for others, she would descend
into the kitchen and be disagreeable to Amy, our new servitor, who
never minded it. Amy was a philosopher who reconciled herself to all
things by the reflection that there were only twenty-four hours in a
day. It sounds a dismal theory, but from it Amy succeeded in
extracting perpetual cheerfulness. My mother would apologise to her
for my aunt's interference.

"Lord bless you, mum, it don't matter. If I wasn't listening to her
something else worse might be happening. Everything's all the same
when it's over."

Amy had come to us merely as a stop gap, explaining to my mother that
she was about to be married and desired only a temporary engagement to
bridge over the few weeks between then and the ceremony.

"It's rather unsatisfactory," had said my mother. "I dislike
changes."

"I can quite understand it, mum," had replied Amy; "I dislike 'em
myself. Only I heard you were in a hurry, and I thought maybe that
while you were on the lookout for somebody permanent--"

So on that understanding she came. A month later my mother asked her
when she thought the marriage would actually take place.

"Don't think I'm wishing you to go," explained my mother, "indeed I'd
like you to stop. I only want to know in time to make my
arrangements."

"Oh, some time in the spring, I expect," was Amy's answer.

"Oh!" said my mother, "I understood it was coming off almost
immediately."

Amy appeared shocked.

"I must know a little bit more about him before I go as far as that,"
she said.

"But I don't understand," said my mother; "you told me when you came
to me that you were going to be married in a few weeks."

"Oh, that one!"  Her tone suggested that an unfair strain was being
put upon her memory. "I didn't feel I wanted him as much as I thought
I did when it came to the point."

"You had meantime met the other one?" suggested my mother, with a
smile.

"Well, we can't help our feelings, can we, mum?" admitted Amy,
frankly, "and what I always say is"--she spoke as one with experience
even then--"better change your mind before it's too late afterwards."

Amiable, sweet-faced, broad-hearted Amy! most faithful of friends, but
oh! most faithless of lovers. Age has not withered nor custom staled
her liking for infinite variety. Butchers, bakers, soldiers, sailors,
Jacks of all trades! Does the sighing procession never pass before
you, Amy, pointing ghostly fingers of reproach! Still Amy is engaged.
To whom at the particular moment I cannot say, but I fancy to an early
one who has lately become a widower. After more exact knowledge I do
not care to enquire; for to confess ignorance on the subject, implying
that one has treated as a triviality and has forgotten the most
important detail of a matter that to her is of vital importance, is to
hurt her feelings; while to angle for information is but to entangle
oneself. To speak of Him as "Tom," when Tom has belonged for weeks to
the dead and buried past, to hastily correct oneself to "Dick" when
there hasn't been a Dick for years, clearly not to know that he is now
Harry, annoys her even more. In my mother's time we always referred
to him as "Dearest."  It was the title with which she herself
distinguished them all, and it avoided confusion.

"Well, and how's Dearest?" my mother would enquire, opening the door
to Amy on the Sunday evening.

"Oh, very well indeed, mum, thank you, and he sends you his respects,"
or, "Well, not so nicely as I could wish. I'm a little anxious about
him, poor dear!"

"When you are married you will be able to take good care of him."

"That's really what he wants--some one to take care of him. It's what
they all want, the poor dears."

"And when is it coming off?"

"In the spring, mum."  She always chose the spring when possible.

Amy was nice to all men, and to Amy all men were nice. Could she have
married a dozen, she might have settled down, with only occasional
regrets concerning those left without in the cold. But to ask her to
select only one out of so many "poor dears" was to suggest shameful
waste of affection.

We had meant to keep our grim secret to ourselves; but to hide one's
troubles long from Amy was like keeping cold hands from the fire.
Very soon she knew everything that was to be known, drawing it all
from my mother as from some overburdened child. Then she put my
mother down into a chair and stood over her.

"Now you leave the house and everything connected with it to me, mum,"
commanded Amy; "you've got something else to do."

And from that day we were in the hands of Amy, and had nothing else to
do but praise the Lord for His goodness.

Barbara also found out (from Washburn, I expect), though she said
nothing, but came often. Old Hasluck would have come himself, I am
sure, had he thought he would be welcome. As it was, he always sent
kind messages and presents of fruit and flowers by Barbara, and always
welcomed me most heartily whenever she allowed me to see her home.

She brought, as ever, sunshine with her, making all trouble seem far
off and shadowy. My mother tended to the fire of love, but Barbara
lit the cheerful lamp of laughter.

And with the lessening days my father seemed to grow younger, life
lying lighter on him.

One summer's night he and I were walking with Barbara to Poplar
station, for sometimes, when he was not looking tired, she would order
him to fetch his hat and stick, explaining to him with a caress, "I
like them tall and slight and full grown. The young ones, they don't
know how to flirt! We will take the boy with us as gooseberry;" and
he, pretending to be anxious that my mother did not see, would kiss
her hand, and slip out quietly with her arm linked under his. It was
admirable the way he would enter into the spirit of the thing.

The last cloud faded from before the moon as we turned the corner, and
even the East India Dock Road lay restful in front of us.

"I have always regarded myself," said my father, "as a failure in
life, and it has troubled me."  I felt him pulled the slightest little
bit away from me, as though Barbara, who held his other arm, had drawn
him towards her with a swift pressure. "But do you know the idea that
has come to me within the last few months? That on the whole I have
been successful. I am like a man," continued my father, "who in some
deep wood has been frightened, thinking he has lost his way, and
suddenly coming to the end of it, finds that by some lucky chance he
has been guided to the right point after all. I cannot tell you what
a comfort it is to me.

"What is the right point?" asked Barbara.

"Ah, that I cannot tell you," answered my father, with a laugh. "I
only know that for me it is here where I am. All the time I thought I
was wandering away from it I was drawing nearer to it. It is very
wonderful. I am just where I ought to be. If I had only known I
never need have worried."

Whether it would have troubled either him or my mother very much even
had it been otherwise I cannot say, for Life, so small a thing when
looked at beside Death, seemed to have lost all terror for them; but
be that as it may, I like to remember that Fortune at the last was
kind to my father, prospering his adventures, not to the extent his
sanguine nature had dreamt, but sufficiently: so that no fear for our
future marred the peaceful passing of his tender spirit.

Or should I award thanks not to Fate, but rather to sweet Barbara, and
behind her do I not detect shameless old Hasluck, grinning
good-naturedly in the background?

"Now, Uncle Luke, I want your advice. Dad's given me this cheque as a
birthday present. I don't want to spend it. How shall I invest it?"

"My dear, why not consult your father?"

"Now, Uncle Luke, dad's a dear, especially after dinner, but you and I
know him. Giving me a present is one thing, doing business for me is
another. He'd unload on me. He'd never be able to resist the
temptation."

My father would suggest, and Barbara would thank him. But a minute
later would murmur: "You don't know anything about Argentinos."

My father did not, but Barbara did; to quite a remarkable extent for a
young girl.

"That child has insisted on leaving this cheque with me and I have
advised her to buy Argentinos," my father would observe after she was
gone. "I am going to put a few hundreds into them myself. I hope
they will turn out all right, if only for her sake. I have a
presentiment somehow that they will."

A month later Barbara would greet him with: "Isn't it lucky we bought
Argentinos!"

"Yes; they haven't turned out badly, have they? I had a feeling, you
know, for Argentinos."

"You're a genius, Uncle Luke. And now we will sell out and buy
Calcuttas, won't we?"

"Sell out? But why?"

"You said so. You said, 'We will sell out in about a month and be
quite safe.'"

"My dear, I've no recollection of it."

But Barbara had, and before she had done with him, so had he. And the
next day Argentinos would be sold--not any too soon--and Calcuttas
bought.

Could money so gained bring a blessing with it? The question would
plague my father.

"It's very much like gambling," he would mutter uneasily to himself at
each success, "uncommonly like gambling."

"It is for your mother," he would impress upon me. "When she is gone,
Paul, put it aside, Keep it for doing good; that may make it clean.
Start your own life without any help from it."

He need not have troubled. It went the road that all luck derived
however indirectly from old Hasluck ever went. Yet it served good
purpose on its way.

But the most marvellous feat, to my thinking, ever accomplished by
Barbara was the bearing off of my father and mother to witness "A
Voice from the Grave, or the Power of Love, New and Original Drama in
five acts and thirteen tableaux."

They had been bred in a narrow creed, both my father and my mother.
That Puritan blood flowed in their veins that throughout our land has
drowned much harmless joyousness; yet those who know of it only from
hearsay do foolishly to speak but ill of it. If ever earnest times
should come again, not how to enjoy but how to live being the
question, Fate demanding of us to show not what we have but what we
are, we may regret that they are fewer among us than formerly, those
who trained themselves to despise all pleasure, because in pleasure
they saw the subtlest foe to principle and duty. No graceful growth,
this Puritanism, for its roots are in the hard, stern facts of life;
but it is strong, and from it has sprung all that is worth preserving
in the Anglo-Saxon character. Its men feared and its women loved God,
and if their words were harsh their hearts were tender. If they shut
out the sunshine from their lives it was that their eyes might see
better the glory lying beyond; and if their view be correct, that
earth's threescore years and ten are but as preparation for eternity,
then who shall call them even foolish for turning away their thoughts
from its allurements.

"Still, I think I should like to have a look at one, just to see what
it is like," argued my father; "one cannot judge of a thing that one
knows nothing about."

I imagine it was his first argument rather than his second that
convinced my mother.

"That is true," she answered. "I remember how shocked my poor father
was when he found me one night at the bedroom window reading Sir
Walter Scott by the light of the moon."

"What about the boy?" said my father, for I had been included in the
invitation.

"We will all be wicked together," said my mother.

So an evening or two later the four of us stood at the corner of
Pigott Street waiting for the 'bus.

"It is a close evening," said my father; "let's go the whole hog and
ride outside."

In those days for a lady to ride outside a 'bus was as in these days
for a lady to smoke in public. Surely my mother's guardian angel must
have betaken himself off in a huff.

"Will you keep close behind and see to my skirt?" answered my mother,
commencing preparations. If you will remember that these were the
days of crinolines, that the "knife-boards" of omnibuses were then
approached by a perpendicular ladder, the rungs two feet apart, you
will understand the necessity for such precaution.

Which of us was the most excited throughout that long ride it would be
difficult to say. Barbara, feeling keenly her responsibility as
prompter and leader of the dread enterprise, sat anxious, as she
explained to us afterwards, hoping there would be nothing shocking in
the play, nothing to belie its innocent title; pleased with her
success so far, yet still fearful of failure, doubtful till the last
moment lest we should suddenly repent, and stopping the 'bus, flee
from the wrath to come. My father was the youngest of us all.
Compared with him I was sober and contained. He fidgeted: people
remarked upon it. He hummed. But for the stern eye of a thin young
man sitting next to him trying to read a paper, I believe he would
have broken out into song. Every minute he would lean across to
enquire of my mother: "How are you feeling--all right?"  To which my
mother would reply with a nod and a smile, She sat very silent
herself, clasping and unclasping her hands. As for myself, I remember
feeling so sorry for the crowds that passed us on their way home. It
was sad to think of the long dull evening that lay before them. I
wondered how they could face it.

Our seats were in the front row of the upper circle. The lights were
low and the house only half full when we reached them.

"It seems very orderly and--and respectable," whispered my mother.
There seemed a touch of disappointment in her tone.

"We are rather early," replied Barbara; "it will be livelier when the
band comes in and they turn up the gas."

But even when this happened my mother was not content. "There is so
little room for the actors," she complained.

It was explained to her that the green curtain would go up, that the
stage lay behind.

So we waited, my mother sitting stiffly on the extreme edge of her
seat, holding me tightly by the hand; I believe with some vague idea
of flight, should out of that vault-scented gloom the devil suddenly
appear to claim us for his own. But before the curtain was quite up
she had forgotten him.

You poor folk that go to the theatre a dozen times a year, perhaps
oftener, what do you know of plays? You see no drama, you see but
middle-aged Mr. Brown, churchwarden, payer of taxes, foolishly
pretending to be a brigand; Miss Jones, daughter of old Jones the
Chemist, making believe to be a haughty Princess. How can you, a
grown man, waste money on a seat to witness such tomfoolery! What we
saw was something very different. A young and beautiful girl--true,
not a lady by birth, being merely the daughter of an honest yeoman,
but one equal in all the essentials of womanhood to the noblest in the
land--suffered before our very eyes an amount of misfortune that, had
one not seen it for oneself, one would never have believed Fate could
have accumulated upon the head of any single individual. Beside her
woes our own poor troubles sank into insignificance. We had used to
grieve, as my mother in a whisper reminded my father, if now and again
we had not been able to afford meat for dinner. This poor creature,
driven even from her wretched attic, compelled to wander through the
snow without so much as an umbrella to protect her, had not even a
crust to eat; and yet never lost her faith in Providence. It was a
lesson, as my mother remarked afterwards, that she should never
forget. And virtue had been triumphant, let shallow cynics say what
they will. Had we not proved it with our own senses? The villain--I
think his Christian name, if one can apply the word "Christian" in
connection with such a fiend, was Jasper--had never really loved the
heroine. He was incapable of love. My mother had felt this before he
had been on the stage five minutes, and my father--in spite of
protests from callous people behind who appeared to be utterly
indifferent to what was going on under their very noses--had agreed
with her. What he was in love with was her fortune--the fortune that
had been left to her by her uncle in Australia, but about which nobody
but the villain knew anything. Had she swerved a hair's breadth from
the course of almost supernatural rectitude, had her love for the hero
ever weakened, her belief in him--in spite of damning evidence to the
contrary--for a moment wavered, then wickedness might have triumphed.
How at times, knowing all the facts but helpless to interfere, we
trembled, lest deceived by the cruel lies the villain told her; she
should yield to importunity. How we thrilled when, in language
eloquent though rude, she flung his false love back into his teeth.
Yet still we feared. We knew well that it was not the hero who had
done the murder. "Poor dear," as Amy would have called him, he was
quite incapable of doing anything requiring one-half as much
smartness. We knew that it was not he, poor innocent lamb! who had
betrayed the lady with the French accent; we had heard her on the
subject and had formed a very shrewd conjecture. But appearances, we
could not help admitting, were terribly to his disfavour. The
circumstantial evidence against him would have hanged an Archbishop.
Could she in face of it still retain her faith? There were moments
when my mother restrained with difficulty her desire to rise and
explain.

Between the acts Barbara would whisper to her that she was not to
mind, because it was only a play, and that everything would be sure to
come right in the end.

"I know, my dear," my mother would answer, laughing, "it is very
foolish of me; I forget. Paul, when you see me getting excited, you
must remind me."

But of what use was I in such case! I, who only by holding on to the
arms of my seat could keep myself from swarming down on to the stage
to fling myself between this noble damsel and her persecutor--this
fair-haired, creamy angel in whose presence for the time being I had
forgotten even Barbara.

The end came at last. The uncle from Australia was not dead. The
villain--bungler as well as knave--had killed the wrong man, somebody
of no importance whatever. As a matter of fact, the comic man himself
was the uncle from Australia--had been so all along. My mother had
had a suspicion of this from the very first. She told us so three
times, to make up, I suppose, for not having mentioned it before. How
we cheered and laughed, in spite of the tears in our eyes.

By pure accident it happened to be the first night of the piece, and
the author, in response to much shouting and whistling, came before
the curtain. He was fat and looked commonplace; but I deemed him a
genius, and my mother said he had a good face, and waved her
handkerchief wildly; while my father shouted "Bravo!" long after
everybody else had finished; and people round about muttered "packed
house," which I didn't understand at the time, but came to later.

And stranger still, it happened to be before that very same curtain
that many years later I myself stepped forth to make my first bow as a
playwright. I saw the house but dimly, for on such occasion one's
vision is apt to be clouded. All that I saw clearly was in the front
row of the second circle--a sweet face laughing though the tears were
in her eyes; and she waved to me a handkerchief. And on one side of
her stood a gallant gentleman with merry eyes who shouted "Bravo!" and
on the other a dreamy-looking lad; but he appeared disappointed,
having expected better work from me. And the fourth face I could not
see, for it was turned away from me.

Barbara, determined on completeness, insisted upon supper. In those
days respectability fed at home; but one resort possible there was, an
eating-house with some pretence to gaiety behind St. Clement Danes,
and to that she led us. It was a long, narrow room, divided into
wooden compartments, after the old coffee-house plan, a gangway down
the centre. Now we should call it a dismal hole, and closing the door
hasten away. But to Adam, Eve in her Sunday fig-leaves was a
stylishly dressed woman; and to my eyes, with its gilded mirrors and
its flaring gas, the place seemed a palace.

Barbara ordered oysters, a fish that familiarity with its empty shell
had made me curious concerning. Truly no spot on the globe is so rich
in oyster shells as the East End of London. A stranger might be led
to the impression (erroneous) that the customary lunch of the East End
labourer consists of oysters. How they collect there in such
quantities is a mystery, though Washburn, to whom I once presented the
problem, found no difficulty in solving it to his own satisfaction:
"To the rich man the oyster; to the poor man the shell; thus are the
Creator's gifts divided among all His creatures; none being sent empty
away."  For drink the others had stout and I had ginger beer. The
waiter, who called me "Sir," advised against this mixture; but among
us all the dominating sentiment by this time was that nothing really
mattered very much. Afterwards my father called for a cigar and
boldly lighted it, though my mother looked anxious; and fortunately
perhaps it would not draw. And then it came out that he himself had
once written a play.

"You never told me of that," complained my mother.

"It was a long while ago," replied my father; "nothing came of it."

"It might have been a success," said my mother; "you always had a gift
for writing."

"I must look it over again," said my father; "I had quite forgotten
it. I have an impression it wasn't at all bad."

"It can be of much help," said my mother, "a good play. It makes one
think."

We put Barbara into a cab and rode home ourselves inside a 'bus. My
mother was tired, so my father slipped his arm round her, telling her
to lean against him, and soon she fell asleep with her head upon his
shoulder. A coarse-looking wench sat opposite, her man's arm round
her likewise, and she also fell asleep, her powdered face against his
coat.

"They can do with a bit of nursing, can't they?" said the man with a
grin to the conductor.

"Ah, they're just kids," agreed the conductor, sympathetically,
"that's what they are, all of 'em, just kids."

So the day ended. But oh, the emptiness of the morrow! Life without
a crime, without a single noble sentiment to brighten it!--no comic
uncles, no creamy angels! Oh, the barrenness and dreariness of life!
Even my mother at moments was quite irritable.

We were much together again, my father and I, about this time. Often,
making my way from school into the City, I would walk home with him,
he leaning on each occasion a little heavier upon my arm. To this day
I can always meet and walk with him down the Commercial Road. And on
Saturday afternoons, crossing the river to Greenwich, we would climb
the hill and sit there talking, or sometimes merely thinking together,
watching the dim vast city so strangely still and silent at our feet.

At first I did not grasp the fact that he was dying. The "year to
two" of life that Washburn had allowed to him had somehow become
converted in my mind to vague years, a fate with no immediate meaning;
the meanwhile he himself appeared to grow from day to day in buoyancy.
How could I know it was his great heart rising to his need.

The comprehension came to me suddenly. It was one afternoon in early
spring. I was on my way to the City to meet him. The Holborn Viaduct
was then in building, and the traffic round about was in consequence
always much disorganised. The 'bus on which I was riding became
entangled in a block at the corner of Snow Hill, and for ten minutes
we had been merely crawling, one joint of a long, sinuous serpent
moving by short, painful jerks. It came to me while I was sitting
there with a sharp spasm of physical pain. I jumped from the 'bus and
began to run, and the terror and the hurt of it grew with every step.
I ran as if I feared he might be dead before I could reach the office.
He was waiting for me with a smile as usual, and I flung myself
sobbing into his arms.

I think he understood, though I could explain nothing, but that I had
had a fear something had happened to him, for from that time forward
he dropped all reserve with me, and talked openly of our approaching
parting.

"It might have come to us earlier, my dear boy," he would say with his
arm round me, "or it might have been a little later. A year or so one
way or the other, what does it matter? And it is only for a little
while, Paul. We shall meet again."

But I could not answer him, for clutch them to me as I would, all my
beliefs--the beliefs in which I had been bred, the beliefs that until
then I had never doubted, in that hour of their first trial, were
falling from me. I could not even pray. If I could have prayed for
anything, it would have been for my father's life. But if prayer were
all powerful, as they said, would our loved ones ever die? Man has
not faith enough, they would explain; if he had there would be no
parting. So the Lord jests with His creatures, offering with the one
hand to snatch back with the other. I flung the mockery from me.
There was no firm foothold anywhere. What were all the religions of
the word but narcotics with which Humanity seeks to dull its pain,
drugs in which it drowns its terrors, faith but a bubble that death
pricks.

I do not mean my thoughts took this form. I was little more than a
lad, and to the young all thought is dumb, speaking only with a cry.
But they were there, vague, inarticulate. Thoughts do not come to us
as we grow older. They are with us all our lives. We learn their
language, that is all.

One fair still evening it burst from me. We had lingered in the Park
longer than usual, slowly pacing the broad avenue leading from the
Observatory to the Heath. I poured forth all my doubts and
fears--that he was leaving me for ever, that I should never see him
again, I could not believe. What could I do to believe?

"I am glad you have spoken, Paul," he said, "it would have been sad
had we parted not understanding each other. It has been my fault. I
did not know you had these doubts. They come to all of us sooner or
later. But we hide them from one another. It is foolish."

"But tell me," I cried, "what can I do? How can I make myself
believe?"

"My dear lad," answered my father, "how can it matter what we believe
or disbelieve? It will not alter God's facts. Would you liken Him to
some irritable schoolmaster, angry because you cannot understand him?"

"What do you believe," I asked, "father, really I mean."

The night had fallen. My father put his arm round me and drew me to
him.

"That we are God's children, little brother," he answered, "that what
He wills for us is best. It may be life, it may be sleep; it will be
best. I cannot think that He will let us die: that were to think of
Him as without purpose. But His uses may not be our desires. We must
trust Him. 'Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him.'"

We walked awhile in silence before my father spoke again.

"'Now abideth these three, Faith, Hope and Charity'--you remember the
verse--Faith in God's goodness to us, Hope that our dreams may be
fulfiled. But these concern but ourselves--the greatest of all is
Charity."

Out of the night-shrouded human hive beneath our feet shone here and
there a point of light.

"Be kind, that is all it means," continued my father. "Often we do
what we think right, and evil comes of it, and out of evil comes good.
We cannot understand--maybe the old laws we have misread. But the new
Law, that we love one another--all creatures He has made; that is so
clear. And if it be that we are here together only for a little
while, Paul, the future dark, how much the greater need have we of one
another."

I looked up into my father's face, and the peace that shone from it
slid into my soul and gave me strength.

CHAPTER IX.

OF THE FASHIONING OF PAUL.

Loves of my youth, whither are ye vanished? Tubby of the golden
locks; Langley of the dented nose; Shamus stout of heart but faint of
limb, easy enough to "down," but utterly impossible to make to cry:
"I give you best;" Neal the thin; and Dicky, "dicky Dick" the fat;
Ballett of the weeping eye; Beau Bunnie lord of many ties, who always
fought in black kid gloves; all ye others, ye whose names I cannot
recollect, though I well remember ye were very dear to me, whither are
ye vanished, where haunt your creeping ghosts? Had one told me then
there would come a day I should never see again your merry faces,
never hear your wild, shrill whoop of greeting, never feel again the
warm clasp of your inky fingers, never fight again nor quarrel with
you, never hate you, never love you, could I then have borne the
thought, I wonder?

Once, methinks, not long ago, I saw you, Tubby, you with whom so often
I discovered the North Pole, probed the problem of the sources of the
Nile, (Have you forgotten, Tubby, our secret camping ground beside the
lonely waters of the Regent's Park canal, where discussing our frugal
meal of toasted elephant's tongue--by the uninitiated mistakable for
jumbles--there would break upon our trained hunters' ear the hungry
lion or tiger's distant roar, mingled with the melancholy, long-drawn
growling of the Polar Bear, growing ever in volume and impatience
until half-past four precisely; and we would snatch our rifles, and
with stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the
jungle--until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological
Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and
the greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks.
You were hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black
bag. I should have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare,
having to catch a train at Liverpool Street and to get shaved on the
way. I wonder if you recognised me: you looked at me a little hard,
I thought. Gallant, kindly hearted Shamus, you who fought once for
half an hour to save a frog from being skinned; they tell me you are
now an Income Tax assessor; a man, it is reported, with power of
disbelief unusual among even Inland Revenue circles; of little faith,
lacking in the charity that thinketh no evil. May Providence direct
you to other districts than to mine.

So Time, Nature's handy-man, bustles to and fro about the many rooms,
making all things tidy, covers with sweet earth the burnt volcanoes,
turns to use the debris of the ages, smoothes again the ground above
the dead, heals again the beech bark marred by lovers.

In the beginning I was far from being a favourite with my schoolmates,
and this was the first time trouble came to dwell with me. Later, we
men and women generally succeed in convincing ourselves that whatever
else we may have missed in life, popularity in a greater or less
degree we have at all events secured, for without it altogether few of
us, I think, would care to face existence. But where the child
suffers keener than the man is in finding himself exposed to the cold
truth without the protecting clothes of self-deception. My ostracism
was painfully plain to me, and, as was my nature, I brooded upon it in
silence.

"Can you run?" asked of me one day a most important personage whose
name I have forgotten. He was head of the Lower Fourth, a tall youth
with a nose like a beak, and the manner of one born to authority. He
was the son of a draper in the Edgware Road, and his father failing,
he had to be content for a niche in life with a lower clerkship in the
Civil Service. But to us youngsters he always appeared a Duke of
Wellington in embryo, and under other circumstances might, perhaps,
have become one.

"Yes," I answered. As a matter of fact it was my one accomplishment,
and rumour of it maybe had reached him.

"Run round the playground twice at your fastest," he commanded; "let
me see you."

I clinched my fists and charged off. How grateful I was to him for
having spoken to me, the outcast of the class, thus publicly, I could
only show by my exertions to please him. When I drew up before him I
was panting hard, but I could see that he was satisfied.

"Why don't the fellows like you?" he asked bluntly.

If only I could have stepped out of my shyness, spoken my real
thoughts! "0 Lord of the Lower Fourth! You upon whom success--the
only success in life worth having--has fallen as from the laps of the
gods! You to whom all Lower Fourth hearts turn! tell me the secret of
this popularity. How may I acquire it? No price can be too great for
me to pay for it. Vain little egoist that I am, it is the sum of my
desires, and will be till the long years have taught me wisdom. The
want of it embitters all my days. Why does silence fall upon their
chattering groups when I draw near? Why do they drive me from their
games? What is it shuts me out from them, repels them from me? I
creep into the corners and shed scalding tears of shame. I watch with
envious eyes and ears all you to whom the wondrous gift is given.
What is your secret? Is it Tommy's swagger? Then I will swagger,
too, with anxious heart, with mingled fear and hope. But why--why,
seeing that in Tommy they admire it, do they wait for me with
imitations of cock-a-doodle-do, strut beside me mimicking a pouter
pigeon? Is it Dicky's playfulness?--Dicky, who runs away with their
balls, snatches their caps from off their heads, springs upon their
backs when they are least expecting it?

Why should Dicky's reward be laughter, and mine a bloody nose and a
widened, deepened circle of dislike? I am no heavier than Dicky; if
anything a pound or two lighter. Is it Billy's friendliness? I too
would fling my arms about their necks; but from me they angrily wrench
themselves free. Is indifference the best plan? I walk apart with
step I try so hard to render careless; but none follows, no little
friendly arm is slipped through mine. Should one seek to win one's
way by kind offices? Ah, if one could! How I would fag for them. I
could do their sums for them--I am good at sums--write their
impositions for them, gladly take upon myself their punishments, would
they but return my service with a little love and--more important
still--a little admiration."

But all I could find to say was, sulkily: "They do like me, some of
them."  I dared not, aloud, acknowledge the truth.

"Don't tell lies," he answered; "you know they don't--none of them."
And I hung my head.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he continued in his lordly way; "I'll
give you a chance. We're starting hare and hounds next Saturday; you
can be a hare. You needn't tell anybody. Just turn up on Saturday
and I'll see to it. Mind, you'll have to run like the devil."

He walked away without waiting for my answer, leaving me to meet Joy
running towards me with outstretched hands. The great moment comes to
all of us; to the politician, when the Party whip slips from
confabulation with the Front Bench to congratulate him, smiling, on
his really admirable little speech; to the youthful dramatist, reading
in his bed-sitting-room the managerial note asking him to call that
morning at eleven; to the subaltern, beckoned to the stirrup of his
chief--the moment when the sun breaks through the morning mists, and
the world lies stretched before us, our way clear.

Obeying orders, I gave no hint in school of the great fortune that had
come to me; but hurrying home, I exploded in the passage before the
front door could be closed behind me.

"I am to be a hare because I run so fast. Anybody can be a hound, but
there's only two hares, and they all want me. And can I have a
jersey? We begin next Saturday. He saw me run. I ran twice round
the playground. He said I was splendid! Of course, it's a great
honour to be a hare. We start from Hampstead Heath. And may I have a
pair of shoes?"

The jersey and the shoes my mother and I purchased that very day, for
the fear was upon me that unless we hastened, the last blue and white
striped jersey in London might be sold, and the market be empty of
running shoes. That evening, before getting into bed, I dressed
myself in full costume to admire myself before the glass; and from
then till the end of the week, to the terror of my mother, I practised
leaping over chairs, and my method of descending stairs was perilous
and roundabout. But, as I explained to them, the credit of the Lower
Fourth was at stake, and banisters and legs equally of small account
as compared with fame and honour; and my father, nodding his head,
supported me with manly argument; but my mother added to her prayers
another line.

Saturday came. The members of the hunt were mostly boys who lived in
the neighbourhood; so the arrangement was that at half-past two we
should meet at the turnpike gate outside the Spaniards. I brought my
lunch with me and ate it in Regent's Park, and then took the 'bus to
the Heath. One by one the others came up. Beyond mere glances, none
of them took any notice of me. I was wearing my ordinary clothes over
my jersey. I knew they thought I had come merely to see them start,
and I hugged to myself the dream of the surprise that was in store for
them, and of which I should be the hero. He came, one of the last,
our leader and chief, and I sidled up behind him and waited, while he
busied himself organising and constructing.

"But we've only got one hare," cried one of them. "We ought to have
two, you know, in case one gets blown."

"We've got two," answered the Duke. "Think I don't know what I'm
about? Young Kelver's going to be the other one."

Silence fell upon the meet.

"Oh, I say, we don't want him," at last broke in a voice. "He's a
muff."

"He can run," explained the Duke.

"Let him run home," came another voice, which was greeted with
laughter.

"You'll run home in a minute yourself," threatened the Duke, "if I
have any of your cheek. Who's captain here--you or me? Now, young
'un, are you ready?"

I had commenced unbuttoning my jacket, but my hands fell to my side.
"I don't want to come," I answered, "if they don't want me."

"He'll get his feet wet," suggested the boy who had spoken first.
"Don't spoil him, he's his mother's pet."

"Are you coming or are you not?" shouted the Duke, seeing me still
motionless. But the tears were coming into my eyes and would not go
back. I turned my face away without speaking.

"All right, stop then," cried the Duke, who, like all authoritative
people, was impatient above all things of hesitation. "Here, Keefe,
you take the bag and be off. It'll be dark before we start."

My substitute snatched eagerly at the chance, and away went the hares,
while I, still keeping my face hid, moved slowly off.

"Cry-baby!" shouted a sharp-eyed youngster.

"Let him alone," growled the Duke; and I went on to where the cedars
grew.

I heard them start off a few minutes later with a whoop. How could I
go home, confess my disappointment, my shame? My father would be
expecting me with many questions, my mother waiting for me with hot
water and blankets. What explanation could I give that would not
betray my miserable secret?

It was a chill, dismal afternoon, the Heath deserted, a thin rain
commencing. I slipped off my shirt and jacket, and rolling them under
my arm, trotted off alone, hare and hounds combined in one small
carcass, to chase myself sadly by myself.

I see it still, that pathetically ridiculous little figure, jogging
doggedly over the dank fields. Mile after mile it runs, the little
idiot; jumping--sometimes falling into the muddy ditches: it seems
anxious rather than otherwise to get itself into a mess; scrambling
through the dripping hedges; swarming over tarry fence and slimy
paling. On, on it pants--through Bishop's Wood, by tangled Churchyard
Bottom, where now the railway shrieks; down sloppy lanes, bordering
Muswell Hill, where now stand rows of jerry-built, prim villas. At
intervals it stops an instant to dab its eyes with its dingy little
rag of a handkerchief, to rearrange the bundle under its arm, its
chief anxiety to keep well out of sight of chance wanderers, to dodge
farmhouses, to dart across highroads when nobody is looking. And so
tear-smeared and mud-bespattered up the long rise of darkening Crouch
End Lane, where to-night the electric light blazes from a hundred
shops, and dead beat into the Seven Sisters Road station, there to
tear off its soaked jersey; and then home to Poplar, with shameless
account of the jolly afternoon that it has spent, of the admiration
and the praise that it has won.

You poor, pitiful little brat! Popularity? it is a shadow. Turn your
eyes towards it, and it shall ever run before you, escaping you. Turn
your back upon it, walk joyously towards the living sun, and it shall
follow you. Am I not right? Why, then, do you look at me, your
little face twisted into that quizzical grin?

When one takes service with Deceit, one signs a contract that one may
not break but under penalty. Maybe it was good for my health, those
lonely runs; but oh, they were dreary! By a process of argument not
uncommon I persuaded myself that truth was a matter of mere words,
that so long as I had actually gone over the ground I described I was
not lying. To further satisfy my conscience, I bought a big satchel
and scattered from it torn-up paper as I ran.

"And they never catch you?" asked my mother.

"Oh, no, never; they never even get within sight of me."

"Be careful, dear," would advise my mother; "don't overstrain
yourself."  But I could see that she was proud of me.

And after awhile imagination came to my help, so that often I could
hear behind me the sound of pursuing feet, catch through gaps in the
trees a sight of a merry, host upon my trail, and would redouble my
speed.

Thus, but for Dan, my loneliness would have been unbearable. His
friendship was always there for me to creep to, the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land. To this day one may always know Dan's politics:
they are those of the Party out of power. Always without question one
may know the cause that he will champion, the unpopular cause; the man
he will defend, the man who is down.

"You are such an un-understandable chap," complained a fellow Clubman
to him once in my hearing. "I sometimes ask myself if you have any
opinions at all."

"I hate a crowd," was Dan's only confession of faith.

He never claimed anything from me in return for his affection; he was
there for me to hold to when I wanted him. When, baffled in all my
attempts to win the affections of others, I returned to him for
comfort, he gave it me, without even relieving himself of friendly
advice. When at length childish success came to me and I needed him
less, he was neither hurt nor surprised. Other people--their
thoughts, their actions, even when these concerned himself--never
troubled him. He loved to bestow, but as to response was strangely
indifferent; indeed, if anything, it bored him. His nature appeared
to be that of the fountain, which fulfils itself by giving, but is
unable to receive.

My popularity came to me unexpectedly after I had given up hoping for
it; surprising me, annoying me. Gradually it dawned upon me that my
company was being sought.

"Come along, Kelver," would say the spokesman of one group; "we're
going part of your way home. You can walk with us."

Maybe I would go with them, but more often, before we reached the
gate, the delight of my society would be claimed by a rival troop.

"He's coming with us this afternoon. He promised."

"No, he didn't."

"Yes, he did."

"Well, he ain't, anyhow. See?"

"Oh, isn't he? Who says he isn't?"

"I do."

"Punch his head, Dick!"

"Yes, you do, Jimmy Blake, and I'll punch yours. Come, Kelver."

I might have been some Queen of Beauty offered as prize for knightly
contest. Indeed, more than once the argument concluded thus
primitively, I being carried off in triumph by the victorious party.

For a period it remained a mystery to me, until I asked explanation of
Norval--we called him "Norval," he being one George Grampian: it was
our wit. From taking joy in teasing me, Norval had suddenly become
one of my greatest admirers. This by itself was difficult enough to
understand. He was in the second eleven, and after Dan the best
fighter in the lower school. If I could understand Norval's change of
attitude all would be plain to me; so when next time, bounding upon me
in the cloakroom and slipping his arm into mine, he clamoured for my
company to Camden Town, I put the question to him bluntly.

"Why should I walk home with you? Why do you want me?"

"Because we like you."

"But why do you like me?"

"Why! Why, because you're such a funny chap. You say such funny
things."

It struck me like a slap in the face. I had thought to reach
popularity upon the ladder of heroic qualities. In all the school
books I had read, Leonard or Marmaduke (we had a Marmaduke in the
Lower Fifth--they called him Marmalade: in the school books these
disasters are not contemplated), won love and admiration by reason of
integrity of character, nobility of sentiment, goodness of heart,
brilliance of intellect; combined maybe with a certain amount of
agility, instinct in the direction of bowling, or aptitude for
jumping; but such only by the way. Not one of them had ever said a
funny thing, either consciously or unconsciously.

"Don't be disagreeable, Kelver. Come with us and we will let you into
the team as an extra. I'll teach you batting."

So I was to be their Fool--I, dreamer of knightly dreams, aspirant to
hero's fame! I craved their wonder; I had won their laughter. I had
prayed for popularity; it had been granted to me--in this guise. Were
the gods still the heartless practical jokers poor Midas had found
them?

Had my vanity been less I should have flung their gift back in their
faces. But my thirst for approbation was too intense. I had to
choose: Cut capers and be followed, or walk in dignity, ignored. I
chose to cut the capers. As time wore on I found myself striving to
cut them quicker, quainter, thinking out funny stories, preparing
ingenuous impromptus, twisting all ideas into odd expression.

I had my reward. Before long my company was desired by all the
school. But I was never content. I would rather have been the
Captain of their football club, even his deputy Vice; would have given
all my meed of laughter for stuttering Jerry's one round of applause
when in our match against Highbury he knocked up his century, and so
won the victory for us by just three.

Till the end I never quite abandoned hope of exchanging my vine leaves
for the laurels. I would rise an hour earlier in the morning to
practise throwing at broomsticks set up in waste places. At another
time, the sport coming into temporary fashion, I wearied body and mind
for weeks in vain attempts to acquire skill on stilts. That even fat
Tubby could out-distance me upon them saddened my life for months.

A lad there was, a Sixth Form boy, one Wakeham by name, if I remember
rightly, who greatly envied me my gift of being able to amuse. He was
of the age when the other sex begins to be of importance to a fellow,
and the desire had come to him to be regarded as a star of wit among
the social circles of Gospel Oak. Need I say that by nature he was a
ponderously dull boy.

One afternoon I happened to be the centre of a small group in the
playground. I had been holding forth and they had been laughing.
Whether I had delivered myself of anything really entertaining or not
I cannot say. It made no difference; they had got into the habit of
laughing when I talked. Sometimes I would say quite serious things on
purpose; they would laugh just the same. Wakeham was among them, his
eyes fixed on me, watching me as boys watch a conjurer in the hope of
finding out "how he does it."  Later in the afternoon he slipped his
arm through mine, and drew me away into an empty corner of the ground.

"I say, Kelver," he broke out, the moment we were beyond hearing, "you
really are funny!"

It gave me no pleasure. If he had told me that he admired my bowling
I might not have believed him, but should have loved him for it.

"So are you," I answered savagely, "only you don't know it."

"No, I'm not," he replied. "Wish I was. I say, Kelver"--he glanced
round to see that no one was within earshot--"do you think you could
teach me to be funny?"

I was about to reply with conviction in the negative when an idea
occurred to me. Wakeham was famous among us for one thing; he could,
inserting two fingers in his mouth, produce a whistle capable of
confusing dogs a quarter of a mile off, and of causing people near at
hand to jump from six to eighteen inches into the air.

This accomplishment of his I envied him as keenly as he envied me
mine. I did not admire it; I could not see the use of it. Generally
speaking, it called forth irritation rather than affection. A
purple-faced old gentleman, close to whose ear he once performed,
promptly cuffed his head for it; and for so doing was commended by the
whole street as a public benefactor. Drivers of vehicles would
respond by flicking at him, occasionally with success. Even youth,
from whom sympathy might have been expected, appeared impelled, if
anything happened to be at all handy, to take it up and throw it at
him. My own social circle would, I knew, regard it as a vulgar
accomplishment, and even Wakeham himself dared not perform it in the
hearing of his own classmates. That any human being should have
desired to acquire it seems incomprehensible. Yet for weeks in secret
I had wrestled to produce the hideous sound. Why? For three reasons,
so far as I can analyse this youngster of whom I am writing:

Firstly, here was a means of attracting attention; secondly, it was
something that somebody else could do and that he couldn't; thirdly,
it was a thing for which he evidently had no natural aptitude
whatever, and therefore a thing to acquire which his soul yearned the
more. Had a boy come across his path, clever at walking on his hands
with his heels in the air, Master Paul Kelver would in all probability
have broken his neck in attempts to copy and excel. I make no
apologies for the brat: I merely present him as a study for the
amusement of a world of wiser boys--and men.

I struck a bargain with young Wakeham; I undertook to teach him to be
funny in return for his teaching me this costermonger's whistle.

Each of us strove conscientiously to impart knowledge. Neither of us
succeeded. Wakeham tried hard to be funny; I tried hard to whistle.
He did all I told him; I followed his instructions implicitly. The
result was the feeblest of wit and the feeblest of whistles.

"Do you think anybody would laugh at that?" Wakeham would pathetically
enquire at the termination of his supremest effort. And honestly I
would have to confess I did not think any living being would.

"How far off do you think any one could hear that?" I would demand
anxiously, on recovering sufficient breath to speak at all.

"Well, it would depend upon whether you knew it was coming," Wakeham
would reply kindly, not wishing to discourage me.

We abandoned the scheme by mutual consent at about the end of a
fortnight.

"I suppose it's something that you've got to have inside you," I
suggested to Wakeham in consolation.

"I don't think the roof of your mouth can be quite the right shape for
it," concluded Wakeham.

My success as story-teller, commentator, critic, jester, revived my
childish ambition towards authorship. My first stirrings in this
direction I cannot rightly place. I remember when very small falling
into a sunk dust-bin--a deep hole, rather, into which the gardener
shot his rubbish. The fall twisted my ankle so that I could not move;
and the time being evening and my prison some distance from the house,
my predicament loomed large before me. Yet one consolation remained
with me: the incident would be of value to me in the autobiography
upon which I was then engaged. I can distinctly recollect lying on my
back among decaying leaves and broken glass, framing my account. "On
this day a strange adventure befell me. Walking in the garden, all
unheeding, I suddenly"--I did not want to add the truth--"tumbled into
a dust-hole, six feet square, that any one but a moon calf might have
seen."  I puzzled to evolve a more dignified situation. The dust-bin
became a cavern, the entrance to which had been artfully concealed;
the six or seven feet I had really fallen, "an endless descent,
terminating in a vast and gloomy chamber."  I was divided between
opposing desires: One, for rescue followed by sympathy and supper;
the other, for the alarming experience of a night of terror where I
lay. Nature conquering Art, I yelled; and the episode terminated
prosaically with a warm bath and arnica. But from it I judge that
desire for the woes and perils of authorship was with me somewhat
early.

Of my many other dreams I would speak freely, discussing them at
length with sympathetic souls, but concerning this one ambition I was
curiously reticent. Only to two--my mother and a grey-bearded
Stranger--did I ever breathe a word of it. Even from my father I kept
it a secret, close comrades in all else though we were. He would have
talked of it much and freely, dragged it into the light of day; and
from this I shrank.

My talk with the Stranger came about in this wise. One evening I had
taken a walk to Victoria Park--a favourite haunt of mine at summer
time. It was a fair and peaceful evening, and I fell a-wandering
there in pleasant reverie, until the waning light hinted to me the
question of time. I looked about me. Only one human being was in
sight, a man with his back towards me, seated upon a bench overlooking
the ornamental water.

I drew nearer. He took no notice of me, and interested--though why, I
could not say--I seated myself beside him at the other end of the
bench. He was a handsome, distinguished-looking man, with wonderfully
bright, clear eyes and iron-grey hair and beard. I might have thought
him a sea captain, of whom many were always to be met with in that
neighbourhood, but for his hands, which were crossed upon his stick,
and which were white and delicate as a woman's. He turned his face
and glanced at me. I fancied that his lips beneath the grey moustache
smiled; and instinctively I edged a little nearer to him.

"Please, sir," I said, after awhile, "could you tell me the right
time?"

"Twenty minutes to eight," he answered, looking at his watch. And his
voice drew me towards him even more than had his beautiful strong
face. I thanked him, and we fell back into silence.

"Where do you live?" he turned and suddenly asked me.

"Oh, only over there," I answered, with a wave of my arm towards the
chimney-fringed horizon behind us. "I needn't be in till half-past
eight. I like this Park so much," I added, "I often come and sit here
of an evening.'

"Why do you like to come and sit here?" he asked. "Tell me."

"Oh, I don't know," I answered. "I think."

I marvelled at myself. With strangers generally I was shy and silent;
but the magic of his bright eyes seemed to have loosened my tongue.

I told him my name; that we lived in a street always full of ugly
sounds, so that a gentleman could not think, not even in the evening
time, when Thought goes a-visiting.

"Mamma does not like the twilight time," I confided to him. "It
always makes her cry. But then mamma is--not very young, you know,
and has had a deal of trouble; and that makes a difference, I
suppose."

He laid his hand upon mine. We were sitting nearer to each other now.
"God made women weak to teach us men to be tender," he said. "But
you, Paul, like this 'twilight time'?"

"Yes," I answered, "very much. Don't you?"

"And why do you like it?" he asked.

"Oh," I answered, "things come to you."

"What things?"

"Oh, fancies," I explained to him. "I am going to be an author when I
grow up, and write books."

He took my hand in his and shook it gravely, and then returned it to
me. "I, too, am a writer of books," he said.

And then I knew what had drawn me to him.

So for the first time I understood the joy of talking "shop" with a
fellow craftsman. I told him my favourite authors--Scott, and Dumas,
and Victor Hugo; and to my delight found they were his also; he
agreeing with me that real stories were the best, stories in which
people did things.

"I used to read silly stuff once," I confessed, "Indian tales and that
sort of thing, you know. But mamma said I'd never be able to write if
I read that rubbish."

"You will find it so all through life, Paul," he replied. "The things
that are nice are rarely good for us. And what do you read now?"

"I am reading Marlowe's Plays and De Quincey's Confessions just now,"
I confided to him.

"And do you understand them?"

"Fairly well," I answered. "Mamma says I'll like them better as I go
on. I want to learn to write very, very well indeed," I admitted to
him; "then I'll be able to earn heaps of money."

He smiled. "So you don't believe in Art for Art's sake, Paul?"

I was puzzled. "What does that mean?" I asked.

"It means in our case, Paul," he answered, "writing books for the
pleasure of writing books, without thinking of any reward, without
desiring either money or fame."

It was a new idea to me. "Do many authors do that?" I asked.

He laughed outright this time. It was a delightful laugh. It rang
through the quiet Park, awaking echoes; and caught by it, I laughed
with him.

"Hush!" he said; and he glanced round with a whimsical expression of
fear, lest we might have been overheard. "Between ourselves, Paul,"
he continued, drawing me more closely towards him and whispering, "I
don't think any of us do. We talk about it. But I'll tell you this,
Paul; it is a trade secret and you must remember it: No man ever made
money or fame but by writing his very best. It may not be as good as
somebody else's best, but it is his best. Remember that, Paul."

I promised I would.

"And you must not think merely of the money and the fame, Paul," he
added the next moment, speaking more seriously. "Money and fame are
very good things, and only hypocrites pretend to despise them. But if
you write books thinking only of money, you will be disappointed. It
is earned easier in other ways. Tell me, that is not your only idea?"

I pondered. "Mamma says it is a very noble calling, authorship," I
remembered, "and that any one ought to be very proud and glad to be
able to write books, because they give people happiness and make them
forget things; and that one ought to be very good if one is going to
be an author, so as to be worthy to help and teach others."

"And do you try to be good, Paul?" he enquired.

"Yes," I answered; "but it's very hard to be quite good--until of
course you're grown up."

He smiled, but more to himself than to me. "Yes," he said, "I suppose
it is difficult to be good until you are grown up. Perhaps we shall
all of us be good when we're quite grown up."  Which, from a gentleman
with a grey beard, appeared to me a puzzling observation.

"And what else does mamma say about literature?" he asked. "Can you
remember?"

Again I pondered, and her words came back to me. "That he who can
write a great book is greater than a king; that the gift of being able
to write is given to anybody in trust; that an author should never
forget he is God's servant."

He sat for awhile without speaking, his chin resting on his folded
hands supported by his gold-topped cane. Then he turned and laid a
hand upon my shoulder, and his clear, bright eyes were close to mine.

"Your mother is a wise lady, Paul," he said. "Remember her words
always. In later life let them come back to you; they will guide you
better than the chatter of the Clubs."

"And what modern authors do you read?" he asked after a silence: "any
of them--Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, Dickens?"

"I have read 'The Last of the Barons,'" I told him; "I like that. And
I've been to Barnet and seen the church. And some of Mr. Dickens'."

"And what do you think of Mr. Dickens?" he asked. But he did not seem
very interested in the subject. He had picked up a few small stones,
and was throwing them carefully into the water.

"I like him very much," I answered; "he makes you laugh."

"Not always?" he asked. He stopped his stone-throwing, and turned
sharply towards me.

"Oh, no, not always," I admitted; "but I like the funny bits best. I
like so much where Mr. Pickwick--"

"Oh, damn Mr. Pickwick!" he said.

"Don't you like him?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, I like him well enough, or used to," he replied; "I'm a bit
tired of him, that's all. Does your mamma like Mr.--Mr. Dickens?"

"Not the funny parts," I explained to him. "She thinks he is
occasionally--"

"I know," he interrupted, rather irritably, I thought; "a trifle
vulgar."

It surprised me that he should have guessed her exact words. "I don't
think mamma has much sense of humour," I explained to him. "Sometimes
she doesn't even see papa's jokes."

At that he laughed again. "But she likes the other parts?" he
enquired, "the parts where Mr. Dickens isn't--vulgar?"

"Oh, yes," I answered. "She says he can be so beautiful and tender,
when he likes."

Twilight was deepening. It occurred to me to enquire of him again the
time.

"Just over the quarter," he answered, looking at his watch.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "I must go now."

"So am I sorry, Paul," he answered. "Perhaps we shall meet again.
Good-bye."  Then as our hands touched: "You have never asked me my
name, Paul," he reminded me.

"Oh, haven't I?" I answered.

"No, Paul," he replied, "and that makes me think of your future with
hope. You are an egotist, Paul; and that is the beginning of all
art."

And after that he would not tell me his name. "Perhaps next time we
meet," he said. "Good-bye, Paul. Good luck to you!"

So I went my way. Where the path winds out of sight I turned. He was
still seated upon the bench, but his face was towards me, and he waved
his hand to me. I answered with a wave of mine. And then the
intervening boughs and bushes gradually closed in around me. And
across the rising mist there rose the hoarse, harsh cry:

"All out! All out!"

CHAPTER X.

IN WHICH PAUL IS SHIPWRECKED, AND CAST INTO DEEP WATERS.

My father died, curiously enough, on the morning of his birthday. We
had not expected the end to arrive for some time, and at first did not
know that it had come.

"I have left him sleeping," said my mother, who had slipped out very
quietly in her dressing-gown. "Washburn gave him a draught last
night. We won't disturb him."

So we sat round the breakfast table, speaking in low tones, for the
house was small and flimsy, all sound easily heard through its thin
partitions. Afterwards my mother crept upstairs, I following, and
cautiously opened the door a little way.

The blinds were still down, and the room dark. It seemed a long time
that my mother stood there listening, her ear against the jar. The
first costermonger--a girl's voice, it sounded--passed, crying
shrilly: "Watercreases, fine fresh watercreases with your
breakfast-a'penny a bundle watercreases;" and further off a hoarse
youth was wailing: "Mee-ilk-mee-ilk-oi."

Inch by inch my mother opened the door wider and we stole in. He was
lying with his eyes still closed, the lips just slightly parted. I
had never seen death before, and could not realise it. All that I
could see was that he looked even younger than I had ever seen him
look before. By slow degrees only, it came home to me, the knowledge
that he was gone away from us. For days--for weeks, I would hear his
step behind me in the street, his voice calling to me, see his face
among the crowds, and hastening to meet him, stand bewildered because
it had mysteriously disappeared. But at first I felt no pain
whatever.

To my mother it was but a short parting. Into her placid faith had
never fallen fear nor doubt. He was waiting for her. In God's good
time they would meet again. What need of sorrow! Without him the
days passed slowly: the house must ever be a little dull when the
good man's away. But that was all. So my mother would speak of him
always--of his dear, kind ways, of his oddities and follies we loved
so to recall, not through tears, but smiles, thinking of him not as of
one belonging to the past, but as of one beckoning to her from the
future.

We lived on still in the old house though ever planning to move, for
the great brick monster had crept closer round about us year by year,
devouring in his progress all things fair. Field and garden, tree and
cottage, time-mellowed house suggesting story, kind hedgerow hiding
hideousness beyond--the few spots yet in that doomed land lingering to
remind one of the sunshine, one by one had he scrunched them between
his ugly teeth. A world apart, this east end of London, this ghetto
of the poor for ever growing, dreariness added year by year to
dreariness, hopelessness stretching ever farther its long, shrivelled
arms, these endless rows of reeking cells where London herds her
slaves. Often of a misty afternoon when we knew that without this
city of the dead life was stirring in the sunshine, we would fare
forth to house-hunt in pleasant suburbs, now themselves added to the
weary catacomb of narrow streets--to Highgate, then a tiny town
connected by a coach with leafy Holloway; to Hampstead with its rows
of ancient red-brick houses, from whose wind-blown heath one saw
beyond the woods and farms, far London's domes and spires, to Wood
Green among the pastures, where smock-coated labourers discussed their
politics and ale beneath wide-spreading elms; to Hornsey, then a
village consisting of an ivy-covered church and one grass-bordered
way. But though we often saw "the very thing for us" and would
discuss its possibilities from every point of view and find them good,
we yet delayed.

"We must think it over," would say my mother; "there is no hurry; for
some reasons I shall be sorry to leave Poplar."

"For what reasons, mother?"

"Oh, well, no particular reason, Paul. Only we have lived there so
long, you know. It will be a wrench leaving the old house."

To the making of man go all things, even to the instincts of the
clinging vine. We fling our tendrils round what is the nearest
castle-keep or pig-stye wall, rain and sunshine fastening them but
firmer. Dying Sir Walter Scott--do you remember?--hastening home from
Italy, fearful lest he might not be in time to breathe again the damp
mists of the barren hills. An ancient dame I knew, they had carried
her from her attic in slumland that she might be fanned by the sea
breezes, and the poor old soul lay pining for what she called her
"home."  Wife, mother, widow, she had lived there till the alley's
reek smelt good to her nostrils, till its riot was the voices of her
people. Who shall understand us save He who fashioned us?

So the old house held us to its dismal bosom; and not until within its
homely but unlovely arms, first my aunt, and later on my mother had
died, and I had said good-bye to Amy, crying in the midst of littered
emptiness, did I leave it.

My aunt died as she had lived, grumbling.

"You will be glad to get rid of me, all of you!" she said, dropping
for the first and last time I can recollect into the retort direct;
"and I can't say I shall be very sorry to go myself. It hasn't been
my idea of life."

Poor old lady! That was only a couple of weeks before the end. I do
not suppose she guessed it was so certain or perhaps she might have
been more sentimental.

"Don't be foolish," said my mother, "you're not going to die!"

"What's the use of talking like an idiot," retorted my aunt, "I've got
to do it some time. Why not now, when everything's all ready for it.
It isn't as if I was enjoying myself."

"I am sure we do all we can for you," said my mother. "I know you
do," replied my aunt. "I'm a burden to you. I always have been."

"Not a burden," corrected my mother.

"What does the woman call it then," snapped back my aunt. "Does she
reckon I've been a sunbeam in the house? I've been a trial to
everybody. That's what I was born for; it's my metier."

My mother put her arms about the poor old soul and kissed her. "We
should miss you very much," she said.

"I'm sure I hope they all will!" answered my aunt. "It's the only
thing I've got to leave 'em, worth having."

My mother laughed.

"Maybe it's been a good thing for you, Maggie," grumbled my aunt; "if
it wasn't for cantankerous, disagreeable people like me, gentle,
patient people like you wouldn't get any practice. Perhaps, after
all, I've been a blessing to you in disguise."

I cannot honestly say we ever wished her back; though we certainly did
miss her--missed many a joke at her oddities, many a laugh at her
cornery ways. It takes all sorts, as the saying goes, to make a
world. Possibly enough if only we perfect folk were left in it we
would find it uncomfortably monotonous.

As for Amy, I believe she really regretted her.

"One never knows what's good for one till one's lost it," sighed Amy.

"I'm glad to think you liked her," said my mother.

"You see, mum," explained Amy, "I was one of a large family; and a bit
of a row now and again cheers one up, I always think. I'll be losing
the power of my tongue if something doesn't come along soon."

"Well, you are going to be married in a few weeks now," my mother
reminded her.

But Amy remained despondent. "They're poor things, the men, at a few
words, the best of them," she replied. "As likely as not just when
you're getting interested you turn round to find that they've put on
their hat and gone out."

My mother and I were very much alone after my aunt's death. Barbara
had gone abroad to put the finishing touches to her education--to
learn the tricks of the Nobs' trade, as old Hasluck phrased it; and I
had left school and taken employment with Mr. Stillwood, without
salary, the idea being that I should study for the law.

"You are in luck's way, my boy, in luck's way," old Mr. Gadley had
assured me. "To have commenced your career in the office of
Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal will be a passport for you anywhere.
It will stamp you, my boy."

Mr. Stillwood himself was an extremely old and feeble gentleman--so
old and feeble it seemed strange that he, a wealthy man, had not long
ago retired.

"I am always meaning to," he explained to me one day soon after my
advent in his office. "When your poor father came to me he told me
very frankly the sad fact--that he had only a few more years to live.
'Mr. Kelver,' I answered him, 'do not let that trouble you, so far as
I am concerned. There are one or two matters in the office I should
like to see cleared up, and in these you can help me. When they are
completed I shall retire! Yet, you see, I linger on. I am like the
old hackney coach horse, Mr. Weller--or is it Mr. Jingle--tells us of;
if the shafts were drawn away I should probably collapse. So I jog
on, I jog on.'"

He had married late in life a common woman much younger than himself,
who had brought to him a horde of needy and greedy relatives, and no
doubt, as a refuge from her noisy neighbourhood, the daily peace of
Lombard Street was welcome to him. We saw her occasionally. She was
one of those blustering, "managing" women who go through life under
the impression that making a disturbance is somehow "putting things to
rights."  Ridiculously ashamed of her origin, she sought to hide it
under what her friends assured her was the air of a duchess, but
which, as a matter of fact, resembled rather the Sunday manners of an
elderly barmaid. Mr. Gadley alone was not afraid of her; but, on the
contrary, kept her always very much in fear of him, often speaking to
her with refreshing candour. He had known her in the days it was her
desire should be buried in oblivion, and had always resented as a
personal insult her entry into the old established aristocratic firm
of Stillwood & Co.

Her history was peculiar. Mr. Stillwood, when a blase man about town,
verging on forty, had first seen her, then a fair-haired,
ethereal-looking child, in spite of her dirt, playing in the gutter.
To his lasting self-reproach it was young Gadley himself, accompanying
his employer home from Westminster, who had drawn Mr. Stillwood's
attention to the girl by boxing her ears for having, as he passed,
slapped his face with a convenient sprat. Stillwood, acting on the
impulse of the moment, had taken the child by the hand and dragged
her, unwilling, to her father's place of business--a small coal shed
in the Horseferry Road. The arrangement he there made amounted
practically to the purchase of the child. She was sent abroad to
school and the coal shed closed. On her return, ten years later, a
big, handsome young woman, he married her, and learned at leisure the
truth of the old saying, "what's bred in the bone will come out in the
flesh," scrub it and paint it and hide it away under fine clothes as
you will.

Her constant complaint against her husband was that he was only a
solicitor, a profession she considered vulgar; and nothing "riled" old
Gadley more than hearing her views upon this point.

"It's not fair to the gals," I once heard her say to him. I was
working in the next room, with the door not quite closed, added to
which she talked at the top of her voice on all subjects. "What real
gentleman, I should like to know, is going to marry the daughter of a
City attorney? As I told him years ago, he ought to have retired and
gone into the House."

"The very thing your poor father used to talk of doing whenever things
were going a bit queer in the retail coal and potato business,"
grunted old Gadley.

Mrs. Stillwood called him a "low beast" in her most aristocratic
tones, and swept out of the room.

Not that old Stillwood himself ever expressed fondness for the law.

"I am not at all sure, Kelver," I remember his saying to me on one
occasion, "that you have done wisely in choosing the law. It makes
one regard humanity morally as the medical profession regards it
physically:--as universally unsound. You suspect everybody of being a
rogue. When people are behaving themselves, we lawyers hear nothing
of them. All we hear of is roguery, trickery and hypocrisy. It
deteriorates the character, Kelver. We live in a perpetual atmosphere
of transgression. I sometimes fancy it may be infectious."

"It does not seem to have infected you, sir," I replied; for, as I
think I have already mentioned, the firm of Stillwood, Waterhead and
Royal was held in legal circles as the synonym for rectitude of
dealing quite old-fashioned.

"I hope not, Kelver, I hope not," the old gentleman replied; "and yet,
do you know, I sometimes suspect myself--wonder if I may not perhaps
be a scamp without realising it. A rogue, you know, Kelver, can
always explain himself into an honest man to his own satisfaction. A
scamp is never a scamp to himself."

His words for the moment alarmed me, for, acting on old Gadley's
advice, I had persuaded my mother to put all her small capital into
Mr. Stillwood's hands for re-investment, a transaction that had
resulted in substantial increase of our small income. But, looking
into his smiling eyes, my momentary fear vanished.

Laughing, he laid his hand upon my shoulder. "One person always be
suspicious of, Kelver--yourself. Nobody can do you so much harm as
yourself."

Of Washburn we saw more and more. "Hal" we both called him now, for
removing with his gentle, masterful hands my mother's shyness from
about her, he had established himself almost as one of the family, my
mother regarding him as she might some absurdly bearded boy entrusted
to her care without his knowing it, I looking up to him as to some
wonderful elder brother.

"You rest me, Mrs. Kelver," he would say, lighting his pipe and
sinking down into the deep leathern chair that always waited for him
in our parlour. "Your even voice, your soft eyes, your quiet hands,
they soothe me."

"It is good for a man," he would say, looking from one to the other of
us through the hanging smoke, "to test his wisdom by two things: the
face of a good woman, and the ear of a child--I beg your pardon,
Paul--of a young man. A good woman's face is the white sunlight.
Under the gas-lamps who shall tell diamond from paste? Bring it into
the sunlight: does it stand that test? Then it is good. And the
children! they are the waiting earth on which we fling our store. Is
it chaff and dust or living seed? Wait and watch. I shower my
thoughts over our Paul, Mrs. Kelver. They seem to me brilliant, deep,
original. The young beggar swallows them, forgets them. They were
rubbish. Then I say something that dwells with him, that grows. Ah,
that was alive, that was a seed. The waiting earth, it can make use
only of what is true."

"You should marry, Hal," my mother would say. It was her panacea for
all mankind.

"I would, Mrs. Kelver," he answered her on one occasion, "I would
to-morrow if I could marry half a dozen women. I should make an ideal
husband for half a dozen wives. One I should neglect for five days,
and be a burden to upon the sixth."

From any other than Hal my mother would have taken such a remark, made
even in jest, as an insult to her sex. But Hal's smile was a coating
that could sugar any pill.

"I am not one man, Mrs. Kelver, I am half a dozen. If I were to marry
one wife she would be married to six husbands. It is too many for any
woman to manage."

"Have you never fallen in love?" asked my mother.

"Three of me have, but on each occasion the other five of me out-voted
him."

"You're sure six would be sufficient?" queried my mother, smiling.

"Just the right number, Mrs. Kelver. There is one of me must worship,
adore a woman madly, abjectly; grovel before her like the Troubadour
before his Queen of Song, eat her slipper, drink the water she has
washed in, scourge himself before her window, die for a kiss of her
glove flung down with a laugh. She must be scornful, contemptuous,
cruel. There is another I would cherish, a tender, yielding creature,
one whose face would light at my coming, cloud at my going; one to
whom I should be a god. There is a third I, a child of Pan--an ugly
little beast, Mrs. Kelver; horns on head and hoofs on feet, leering
through the wood, seeking its fit mate. And a fourth would wed a
wholesome, homely wench, deep of bosom, broad of hip; fit mother of a
sturdy brood. A fifth could only be content with a true friend, a
comrade wise and witty, a sharer and understander of all joys and
thoughts and feelings. And a last, Mrs. Kelver, yearns for a woman
pure and sweet, clothed in love and crowned with holiness. Shouldn't
we be a handful, Mrs. Kelver, for any one woman in an eight-roomed
house?"

But my mother was not to be discouraged. "You will find the woman one
day, Hal, who will be all of them to you--all of them that are worth
having, that is. And your eight-roomed house will be a kingdom!"

"A man is many, and a woman but one," answered Hal.

"That is what men say who are too blind to see more than one side of a
woman," retorted my mother, a little sharply; for the honour and
credit of her own sex in all things was very dear to my mother. And
indeed this I have learned, that the flag of Womanhood you shall ever
find upheld by all true women, flouted only by the false. For a judge
in petticoats is ever but a witness in a wig.

Hal laid aside his pipe and leant forward in his chair. "Now tell us,
Mrs. Kelver, for our guidance, we two young bachelors, what must the
lover of a young girl be?"

Always very serious on this subject of love, my mother answered
gravely: "She asks for the whole of a man, Hal, not merely for a
sixth, nor any other part of him. She is a child asking for a lover
to whom she can look up, who will teach her, guide her, protect her.
She is a queen demanding homage, and yet he is her king whom it is her
joy to serve. She asks to be his partner, his fellow-worker, his
playmate, and at the same time she loves to think of him as her child,
her big baby she must take care of.    Whatever he has to give she
has also to respond with. You need not marry six wives, Hal; you will
find your six in one.

"'As the water to the vessel, woman shapes herself to man;' an old
heathen said that three thousand years ago, and others have repeated
him; that is what you mean."

"I don't like that way of putting it," answered my mother. "I mean
that as you say of man, so in every true woman is contained all women.
But to know her completely you must love her with all love."

Sometimes the talk would be of religion, for my mother's faith was no
dead thing that must be kept ever sheltered from the air, lest it
crumble.

One evening "Who are we that we should live?" cried Hal. "The spider
is less cruel; the very pig less greedy, gluttonous and foul; the
tiger less tigerish; our cousin ape less monkeyish. What are we but
savages, clothed and ashamed, nine-tenths of us?"

"But Sodom and Gomorrah," reminded him my mother, "would have been
spared for the sake of ten just men."

"Much more sensible to have hurried the ten men out, leaving the
remainder to be buried with all their abominations under their own
ashes," growled Hal.

"And we shall be purified," continued my mother, "the evil in us
washed away."

"Why have made us ill merely to mend us? If the Almighty were so
anxious for our company, why not have made us decent in the
beginning?"  He had just come away from a meeting of Poor Law
Guardians, and was in a state of dissatisfaction with human nature
generally.

"It is His way," answered my mother. "The precious stone lies hid in
clay. He has His purpose."

"Is the stone so very precious?"

"Would He have taken so much pains to fashion it if it were not? You
see it all around you, Hal, in your daily practice--heroism,
self-sacrifice, love stronger than death. Can you think He will waste
it, He who uses again even the dead leaf?"

"Shall the new leaf remember the new flower?"

"Yes, if it ever knew it. Shall memory be the only thing to die?"

Often of an evening I would accompany Hal upon his rounds. By the
savage tribe he both served and ruled he had come to be regarded as
medicine man and priest combined. He was both their tyrant and their
slave, working for them early and late, yet bullying them
unmercifully, enforcing his commands sometimes with vehement tongue,
and where that would not suffice with quick fists; the counsellor,
helper, ruler, literally of thousands. Of income he could have made
barely enough to live upon; but few men could have enjoyed more sense
of power; and that I think it was that held him to the neighbourhood.

"Nature laid me by and forgot me for a couple of thousand years," was
his own explanation of himself. "Born in my proper period, I should
have climbed to chieftainship upon uplifted shields. I might have
been an Attila, an Alaric. Among the civilised one can only climb by
crawling, and I am too impatient to crawl. Here I am king at once by
force of brain and muscle."  So in Poplar he remained, poor in fees
but rich in honour.

The love of justice was a passion with him. The oppressors of the
poor knew and feared him well. Injustice once proved before him,
vengeance followed sure. If the law would not help, he never
hesitated to employ lawlessness, of which he could always command a
satisfactory supply. Bumble might have the Board of Guardians at his
back, Shylock legal support for his pound of flesh; but sooner or
later the dark night brought punishment, a ducking in dock basin or
canal, "Brutal Assault Upon a Respected Resident" (according to the
local papers), the "miscreants" always making and keeping good their
escape, for he was an admirable organiser.

One night it seemed to him necessary that a child should go at once
into the Infirmary.

"It ain't no use my taking her now," explained the mother, "I'll only
get bullyragged for disturbing 'em. My old man was carried there
three months ago when he broke his leg, but they wouldn't take him in
till the morning."

"Oho! oho! oho!" sang Hal, taking the child up in his arms and putting
on his hat. "You follow me; we'll have some sport. Tally ho! tally
ho!"  And away we went, Hal heading our procession through the
streets, shouting a rollicking song, the baby staring at him
openmouthed.

"Now ring," cried Hal to the mother on our reaching the Workhouse
gate. "Ring modestly, as becomes the poor ringing at the gate of
Charity."  And the bell tinkled faintly.

"Ring again!" cried Hal, drawing back into the shadow; and at last the
wicket opened.

"Oh, if you please, sir, my baby--"

"Blast your baby!" answered a husky voice, "what d'ye mean by coming
here this time of night?"

"Please, sir, I'm afraid it's dying, and the Doctor--"

The man was no sentimentalist, and to do him justice made no
hypocritical pretence of being one. He consigned the baby and its
mother and the doctor to Hell, and the wicket would have closed but
for the point of Hal's stick.

"Open the gate!" roared Hal. It was idle pretending not to hear Hal
anywhere within half a mile of him when he filled his lungs for a cry.
"Open it quick, you blackguard! You gross vat-load of potato spirit,
you--"

That the Governor should speak a language familiar to the governed was
held by the Romans, born rulers of men, essential to authority. This
theory Hal also maintained. His command of idiom understanded by his
people was one of his rods of power. In less time than it took the
trembling porter to loosen the bolts, Hal had presented him with a
word picture of himself, as seen by others, that must have lessened
his self-esteem.

"I didn't know as it was you, Doctor," explained the man.

"No, you thought you had only to deal with some helpless creature you
could bully. Stir your fat carcass, you ugly cur! I'm in a hurry."

The House Surgeon was away, but an attendant or two were lounging
about, unfortunately for themselves, for Hal, being there, took it
upon himself to go round the ward setting crooked things straight; and
a busy and alarming time they had of it. Not till a couple of hours
later did he fling himself forth again, having enjoyed himself
greatly.

A gentleman came to reside in the district, a firm believer in the
wisdom of the couplet: "A woman, a spaniel and a walnut tree, The
more you beat them the better they be."  The spaniel and the walnut
tree he did not possess, so his wife had the benefit of his undivided
energies. Whether his treatment had improved her morally, one cannot
say; her evident desire to do her best may have been natural or may
have been assisted; but physically it was injuring her. He used to
beat her about the head with his strap, his argument being that she
always seemed half asleep, and that this, for the time being, woke her
up. Sympathisers brought complaint to Hal, for the police in that
neighbourhood are to keep the streets respectable. With the life in
the little cells that line them they are no more concerned than are
the scavengers of the sewers with the domestic arrangements of the
rats.

"What's he like?" asked Hal.

"He's a big 'un," answered the woman who had come with the tale, "and
he's good with his fists--I've seen him. But there's no getting at
him. He's the sort to have the law on you if you interfere with him,
and she's the sort to help him."

"Any likely time to catch him at it?" asked Hal.

"Saturdays it's as regular as early closing," answered the woman, "but
you might have to wait a bit."

"I'll wait in your room, granny, next Saturday," suggested Hal.

"All right," agreed the woman, "I'll risk it, even if I do get a
bloody head for it."

So that week end we sat very still on two rickety chairs listening to
a long succession of sharp, cracking sounds that, had one not known,
one might have imagined produced by some child monotonously exploding
percussion caps, each one followed by an answering groan. Hal never
moved, but sat smoking his pipe, an ugly smile about his mouth. Only
once he opened his lips, and then it was to murmur to himself: "And
God blessed them and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply."

The horror ceased at last, and later we heard the door unlock and a
man's foot upon the landing above. Hal beckoned to me, and swiftly we
slipped out and down the creaking stairs. He opened the front door,
and we waited in the evil-smelling little passage. The man came
towards us whistling. He was a powerfully built fellow, rather
good-looking, I remember. He stopped abruptly upon catching sight of
Hal, who stood crouching in the shadow of the door.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"Waiting to pull your nose!" answered Hal, suiting the action to the
word. And then laughing he ran down the street, I following.

The man gave chase, calling to us with a string of imprecations to
stop. But Hal only ran the faster, though after a street or two he
slackened, and the man gained on us a little.

So we continued, the distance between us and our pursuer now a little
more, now a little less. People turned and stared at us. A few boys,
scenting grim fun, followed shouting for awhile; but these we soon
out-paced, till at last in deserted streets, winding among warehouses
bordering the river, we three ran alone, between long, lifeless walls.
I looked into Hal's face from time to time, and he was laughing; but
every now and then he would look over his shoulder at the man behind
him still following doggedly, and then his face would be twisted into
a comically terrified grimace. Turning into a narrow cul-de-sac, Hal
suddenly ducked behind a wide brick buttress, and the man, still
running, passed us. And then Hal stood up and called to him, and the
man turned, looked into Hal's eyes, and understood.

He was not a coward. Besides, even a rat when cornered will fight for
its life. He made a rush at Hal, and Hal made no attempt to defend
himself. He stood there laughing, and the man struck him full in the
face, and the blood spurted out and flowed down into his mouth. The
man came on again, though terror was in every line of his face, all
his desire being to escape. But this time Hal drove him back again.
They fought for awhile, if one can call it fighting, till the man, mad
for air, reeled against the wall, stood there quivering convulsively,
his mouth wide open, resembling more than anything else some huge
dying fish. And Hal drew away and waited.

I have no desire to see again the sight I saw that quiet, still
evening, framed by those high, windowless walls, from behind which
sounded with ceaseless regularity the gentle swish of the incoming
tide. All sense of retribution was drowned in the sight of Hal's
evident enjoyment of his sport. The judge had disappeared, leaving
the work to be accomplished by a savage animal loosened for the
purpose.

The wretched creature flung itself again towards its only door of
escape, fought with the vehemence of despair, to be flung back again,
a hideous, bleeding mass of broken flesh. I tried to cling to Hal's
arm, but one jerk of his steel muscles flung me ten feet away.

"Keep off, you fool!" he cried. "I won't kill him. I'm keeping my
head. I shall know when to stop."  And I crept away and waited.

Hal joined me a little later, wiping the blood from his face. We made
our way to a small public-house near the river, and from there Hal
sent a couple of men on whom he could rely with instructions how to
act. I never heard any more of the matter. It was a subject on which
I did not care to speak to Hal. I can only hope that good came of it.

There was a spot--it has been cleared away since to make room for the
approach to Greenwich Tunnel--it was then the entrance to a grain
depot in connection with the Milwall Docks. A curious brick well it
resembled, in the centre of which a roadway wound downward, corkscrew
fashion, disappearing at the bottom into darkness under a yawning
arch. The place possessed the curious property of being ever filled
with a ceaseless murmur, as though it were some aerial maelstrom,
drawing into its silent vacuum all wandering waves of sound from the
restless human ocean flowing round it. No single tone could one ever
distinguish: it was a mingling of all voices, heard there like the
murmur of a sea-soaked shell.

We passed through it on our return. Its work for the day was
finished, its strange, weary song uninterrupted by the mighty waggons
thundering up and down its spiral way. Hal paused, leaning against
the railings that encircled its centre, and listened.

"Hark, do you not hear it, Paul?" he asked. "It is the music of
Humanity. All human notes are needful to its making: the faint wail
of the new-born, the cry of the dying thief; the beating of the
hammers, the merry trip of dancers; the clatter of the teacups, the
roaring of the streets; the crooning of the mother to her babe, the
scream of the tortured child; the meeting kiss of lovers, the sob of
those that part. Listen! prayers and curses, sighs and laughter; the
soft breathing of the sleeping, the fretful feet of pain; voices of
pity, voices of hate; the glad song of the strong, the foolish
complaining of the weak. Listen to it, Paul! Right and wrong, good
and evil, hope and despair, it is but one voice--a single note, drawn
by the sweep of the Player's hand across the quivering strings of man.
What is the meaning of it, Paul? Can you read it? Sometimes it seems
to me a note of joy, so full, so endless, so complete, that I cry:
'Blessed be the Lord whose hammers have beaten upon us, whose fires
have shaped us to His ends!'  And sometimes it sounds to me a dying
note, so that I could curse Him who in wantonness has wrung it from
the anguish of His creatures--till I would that I could fling myself,
Prometheus like, between Him and His victims, calling: "My darkness,
but their light; my agony, 0 God; their hope!'"

The faint light from a neighbouring gas-lamp fell upon his face that
an hour before I had seen the face of a wild beast. The ugly mouth was
quivering, tears stood in his great, tender eyes. Could his prayer in
that moment have been granted, could he have pressed against his bosom
all the pain of the world, he would have rejoiced.

He shook himself together with a laugh. "Come, Paul, we have had a
busy afternoon, and I'm thirsty. Let us drink some beer, my boy, good
sound beer, and plenty of it."

My mother fell ill that winter. Mountain born and mountain bred, the
close streets had never agreed with her, and scolded by all of us, she
promised, "come the fine weather," to put sentiment behind her, and go
away from them.

"I'm thinking she will," said Hal, gripping my shoulder with his
strong hand, "but it'll be by herself that she'll go, lad. My wonder
is," he continued, "that she has held out so long. If anything, it is
you that have kept her alive. Now that you are off her mind to a
certain extent, she is worrying about your father, I expect. These
women, they never will believe a man can take care of himself, even in
Heaven. She's never quite trusted the Lord with him, and never will
till she's there to give an eye to things herself."

Hal's prophecy fell true. She left "come the fine weather," as she
had promised: I remember it was the first day primroses were hawked
in the street. But another death had occurred just before; which,
concerning me closely as it does, I had better here dispose of; and
that was the death of old Mr. Stillwood, who passed away rich in
honour and regret, and was buried with much ostentation and much
sincere sorrow; for he had been to many of his clients, mostly old
folk, rather a friend than a mere man of business, and had gained from
all with whom he had come in contact, respect, and from many real
affection.

In conformity with the old legal fashions that in his life he had so
fondly clung to, his will was read aloud by Mr. Gadley after the
return from the funeral, and many were the tears its recital called
forth. Written years ago by himself and never altered, its quaint
phraseology was full of kindly thought and expression. No one had
been forgotten. Clerks, servants, poor relations, all had been
treated with even-handed justice, while for those with claim upon him,
ample provision had been made. Few wills, I think, could ever have
been read less open to criticism.

Old Gadley slipped his arm into mine as we left the house. "If you've
nothing to do, young 'un," he said, "I'll get you to come with me to
the office. I have got all the keys in my pocket, and we shall be
quiet. It will be sad work for me, and I had rather we were alone. A
couple of hours will show us everything."

We lighted the wax candles--old Stillwood could never tolerate gas in
his own room--and opening the safe took out the heavy ledgers one by
one, and from them Gadley dictated figures which I wrote down and
added up.

"Thirty years I have kept these books for him," said old Gadley, as we
laid by the last of them, "thirty years come Christmas next, he and I
together. No other hands but ours have ever touched them, and now
people to whom they mean nothing but so much business will fling them
about, drop greasy crumbs upon them--I know their ways, the
brutes!--scribble all over them. And he who always would have
everything so neat and orderly!"

We came to the end of them in less than the time old Gadley had
thought needful: in such perfect order had everything been
maintained. I was preparing to go, but old Gadley had drawn a couple
of small keys from his pocket, and was shuffling again towards the
safe.

"Only one more," he explained in answer to my look, "his own private
ledger. It will merely be in the nature of a summary, but we'll just
glance through it."

He opened an inner drawer and took from it a small thick volume bound
in green leather and closed with two brass locks. An ancient volume,
it appeared, its strong binding faded and stained. Old Gadley sat
down with it at the dead man's own desk, and snuffing the two shaded
candles, unlocked and opened it. I was standing opposite, so that the
book to me was upside down, but the date on the first page, "1841,"
caught my eye, as also the small neat writing now brown with age.

"So neat, so orderly he always was," murmured old Gadley again,
smoothing the page affectionately with his hand, and I waited for his
dictation.

But no glib flow of figures fell from him. His eyebrows suddenly
contracted, his body stiffened itself. Then for the next quarter of
an hour nothing sounded in the quiet room but his turning of the
creakling pages. Once or twice he glanced round swiftly over his
shoulder, as though haunted by the idea of some one behind him; then
back to the neat, closely written folios, his little eyes, now
exhibiting a comical look of horror, starting out of his round red
face. First slowly, then quickly with trembling hands he turned the
pages, till the continual ratling of the leaves sounded like strange,
mocking laughter through the silent, empty room; almost one could
imagine it coming from some watching creature hidden in the shadows.

The end reached, he sat staring before him, his whole body quivering,
great beads of sweat upon his shiny bald head.

"Am I mad?" was all he could find to say. "Kelver, am I mad?"

He handed me the book. It was a cynically truthful record of fraud,
extending over thirty years. Every client, every friend, every
relative that had fallen into his net he had robbed: the fortunate
ones of a part, the majority of their all. Its very first entry
debited him with the proceeds of his own partner's estate. Its last
ran --"Re Kelver--various sales of stock."  To his credit were his
payments year after year of imaginary interests on imaginary
securities, the surplus accounted for with simple brevity:
"Transferred to own account."  No record could have been more clear,
more frank. Beneath each transaction was written its true history;
the actual investments, sometimes necessary, carefully distinguished
from the false. In neat red ink would occur here and there a note for
his own guidance: "Eldest child comes of age August, '73. Be
prepared for trustees desiring production."  Turning to "August, '73,"
one found that genuine investment had been made, to be sold again a
few months later on. From beginning to end not a single false step
had he committed. Suspicious clients had been ear-marked: the
trusting discriminated with gratitude, and milked again and again to
meet emergency.

As a piece of organisation it was magnificent. No one but a financial
genius could have picked a dozen steps through such a network of
chicanery. For half a lifetime he had moved among it, dignified,
respected and secure.

Whether even he could have maintained his position for another month
was doubtful. Suicide, though hinted at, was proved to have been
impossible. It seemed as though with his amazing audacity he had
tricked even Death into becoming his accomplice.

"But it is impossible, Kelver!" cried Gadley, "this must be some
dream. Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal! What is the meaning of it?"

He took the book into his hands again, then burst into tears. "You
never knew him," wailed the poor little man. "Stillwood, Waterhead
and Royal! I came here as office boy fifty years ago. He was more
like a friend to me than--" and again the sobs shook his little fat
body.

I locked the books away and put him into his hat and coat. But I had
much difficulty in getting him out of the office.

"I daren't, young 'un," he cried, drawing back. "Fifty years I have
walked out of this office, proud of it, proud of being connected with
it. I daren't face the street!"

All the way home his only idea was: Could it not be hidden? Honest,
kindly little man that he was, he seemed to have no thought for the
unfortunate victims. The good name of his master, of his friend,
gone! Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal, a by-word! To have avoided
that I believe he would have been willing for yet another hundred
clients to be ruined.

I saw him to his door, then turned homeward; and to my surprise in a
dark by-street heard myself laughing heartily. I checked myself
instantly, feeling ashamed of my callousness, of my seeming
indifference to the trouble even of myself and my mother. Yet as
there passed before me the remembrance of that imposing and expensive
funeral with its mournful following of tearful faces; the hushed
reading of the will with its accompaniment of rustling approval; the
picture of the admirably sympathetic clergyman consoling with white
hands Mrs. Stillwood, inclined to hysteria, but anxious concerning her
two hundred pounds' worth of crape which by no possibility of means
could now be paid for--recurred to me the obituary notice in "The
Chelsea Weekly Chronicle": the humour of the thing swept all else
before it, and I laughed again--I could not help it--loud and long.
It was my first introduction to the comedy of life, which is apt to be
more brutal than the comedy of fiction.

But nearing home, the serious side of the matter forced itself
uppermost. Fortunately, our supposed dividends had been paid to us by
Mr. Stillwood only the month before. Could I keep the thing from
troubling my mother's last days? It would be hard work. I should
have to do it alone, for a perhaps foolish pride prevented my taking
Hal into my confidence, even made his friendship a dread to me, lest
he should come to learn and offer help. There is a higher generosity,
it is said, that can receive with pleasure as well as bestow favour;
but I have never felt it. Could I be sure of acting my part, of not
betraying myself to her sharp eyes, of keeping newspapers and chance
gossip away from her? Good shrewd Amy I cautioned, but I shrank from
even speaking on the subject to Hal, and my fear was lest he should
blunder into the subject, which for the usual nine days occupied much
public attention. But fortunately he appeared not even to have heard
of the scandal.

Possibly had the need lasted longer I might have failed, but as it
was, a few weeks saw the end.

"Don't leave me to-day, Paul," whispered my mother to me one morning.
So I stayed, and in the evening my mother put her arms around my neck
and I lay beside her, my head upon her breast, as I used to when a
little boy. And when the morning came I was alone.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I

DESCRIBES THE DESERT ISLAND TO WHICH PAUL WAS DRIFTED.

"Room to let for a single gentleman."  Sometimes in an idle hour,
impelled by foolishness, I will knock at the door. It is opened after
a longer or shorter interval by the "slavey"--in the morning,
slatternly, her arms concealed beneath her apron; in the afternoon,
smart in dirty cap and apron. How well I know her! Unchanged, not
grown an inch--her round bewildered eyes, her open mouth, her touzled
hair, her scored red hands. With an effort I refrain from muttering:
"So sorry, forgot my key," from pushing past her and mounting two at a
time the narrow stairs, carpeted to the first floor, but bare beyond.
Instead, I say, "Oh, what rooms have you to let?" when, scuttling to
the top of the kitchen stairs, she will call over the banisters: "A
gentleman to see the rooms."  There comes up, panting, a
harassed-looking, elderly female, but genteel in black. She crushes
past the little "slavey," and approaching, eyes me critically.

"I have a very nice room on the first floor," she informs me, "and one
behind on the third."

I agree to see them, explaining that I am seeking them for a young
friend of mine. We squeeze past the hat and umbrella stand: there is
just room, but one must keep close to the wall. The first floor is
rather an imposing apartment, with a marble-topped sideboard measuring
quite three feet by two, the doors of which will remain closed if you
introduce a wad of paper between them. A green table-cloth, matching
the curtains, covers the loo-table. The lamp is perfectly safe so
long as it stands in the exact centre of the table, but should not be
shifted. A paper fire-stove ornament in some mysterious way bestows
upon the room an air of chastity. Above the mantelpiec