# The Truth about Vignolles/Eve Damer

Sections: II — III — IV — V — VI — VII — VIII — IX — X — XI — XII — XIII — XIV — XV — XVI — XVII

### EVE DAMER

I
VIGNOLLES was fond of pictures. Often and often he would drag me in to the most impossible shows; though some of them weren't so bad. At the Grafton, the Leicester, and all sorts of odd galleries, out in Chelsea, off Bond Street, or wherever a placard or some unusually bilious poster caught his eye. Or he might draw me in to the National Gallery itself.
"Just for half an hour," he would say; "or till we get bored. I hate reading, but I like pictures. They tell you all about it. You look, and you're done with them. A book takes hours and hours; though there are books and books."
I have forgotten most of these exhibitions; but one I still remember. "Somebody's portraits," he had explained. "You must see them—at least, it said so in my morning paper—a fellow called Edwards. He's supposed to be remarkable—and cruel—does all the nuts."
We went along together, and paid our money and bought a catalogue; and this time I really was interested; for most of these pictures were impressions of well-known people, politicians and such-like, seen from a very uncompromising angle. And between them fluttered a half-dozen "great ladies"; or, at least, ladies conspicuous in the social world or of an equally outstanding "smartness." Edwards had not been kind to them; but, still, one guessed he was the fashion and that to have one's portrait painted by him was something of a privilege. He could pick and choose.
There was Lady Caroline Semphill, I remember, an evil-looking creature; at least, Edwards had made her look evil; though to my mind—and I had met her once or twice—she was just an effusive, over-ample woman who loved to perform in the center of a crowd.
When I d recovered from her, I found Vignolles in the clutches of a lady clothed in leopard skins and other barbaric ornament. She was smoking a cigarette out of a long tortoise-shell holder and addressing him loudly and almost fiercely, as though she owned him and the gallery and the pictures and the visitors, and didn't care a tinker's cuss for any of the lot.
Vignolles was not embarrassed, though he ought to have been. But it takes a good deal to embarrass Vignolles; and here was a case in point.
"What do you think of me?" we heard her ask him; and next she had led him off to where she was shown as only Edwards dared show her. A predatory object, a veritable bird of prey, he had made of her; with her aquiline nose slightly accentuated, hard-eyed, and hands that looked like claws.
"You aren't as bad as all that," said Vignolles, smiling. "What are you going to do to him?"
"Keep him waiting," she laughed. "He's always hard up, isn't he? Still, there's something in it," she conceded. "And he's got my hair right—he's got that right." One gathered she was proud of her hair.
In the portrait there were coils of it, and a tawny mass below the wreath that crowned her. She was in an evening gown, and the face wasn't any too pleasant—brazen, lean, nervous; but Edwards had somehow managed to show you the somber glory of her hair. And it wasn't dyed, either though he'd been pretty rough on the made-up face below it.
"Let's have a drink," said Vignolles, when she'd done with him.
He hadn't presented me, nor in any way drawn me in; but of course, I knew who she was without looking her up in the catalogue. For years that fine face of hers had been in all the picture-papers. No, it wasn't by any means a fine face as Edwards had drawn it; yet, not so very long ago, it had been fine, filled with vitality, and daring, and power of a certain kind; and, even now, Edwards, if he had liked, could have done something else with it.
"Didn't know you knew her," I said, as we went down the stairs together.
"Bather astonishes me sometimes, as well," he answered. "I don't know why she keeps it up. I'm no use to her; never was, for that matter. I suppose she's got what she wanted," he ended; "Damer's in the limelight, and she's got a double dose of it. You can't escape her, can you?"
No, try as one might, there was no escaping Mrs. Damer; nor Damer, either, for that matter. He, of course, is in politics; and Mrs. Damer is in everything else.
II
We'd had our drink and taken a turn in the the Park before Vignolles came out with it. Now, close to the dinner hour, the London season in full blast, there were a good many potential Mrs. Damers strolling here or sitting in the dull-green chairs. But it would require a special kind of courage to go as far as she had gone, and a fiercer egotism than any one might read on these controlled and guarded faces; and a fiercer intelligence, too, I guessed, from what I knew of some of them.
We'd chosen our places under a spreading tree that made a pool of shadow. We were alone and yet not alone, as one often is in London. To Vignolles, who had wandered so far and forever been much of a spectator, if not an actual outsider, there was always a certain grim enjoyment to be found in any place like this. I remember he began by telling me about a maiden aunt of his who'd died and left him five hundred pounds. It wasn't much; but it was the price of what he called a "beano"; and "Guess what I did with it?" he asked me, grinning pleasantly'"
"Put it in the savings bank," I suggested.
He grinned some more.
"No, I spent it on these people, the kind you see around you. It wasn't bad fun. They were worth it."
"You moved in what is called Society?" I asked him.
"I suppose that's what one would call it. I certainly moved. I went to the West Indies and back; I had a week in Scotland and some months here—trying to be respectable. It didn't agree with me."
We sat on in the long summer evening; we dined; and then we sat again; and by the time we separated and sought our beds that night, I had the story of the maiden aunt and her five hundred pounds. It threw a little light on Mrs. Damer. Yet, as Vignolles said, "It might have been some other girl; it just happened to be she. Twenty-five years ago—that makes her about fifty—" But I will let him tell the rest of the story, instead of getting at it in snatches.
III
Twenty-five years ago, it began; I'd had a spell of England. There was that five hundred pounds to collect, and I had just a hankering, a sort of a romantic hankering, to see my father and my mother. They didn't approve of me. I hadn't taken the snaffle and the curb; I hadn't settled down as a Vignolles ought. There was the family business, and no one to carry it on if I backed out. And I had backed out; run away at sixteen and joined the army, and been to sea when I'd done with that, and wandered a trifle round half the globe. I'd written to my sister occasionally. It was she who'd told me about the five hundred; but, apart from her, nobody seemed to care much. They'd given me up as a bad job. Still, as I said to my father once: "We Vignolles have been in trade for three generations; it's about time one of us started doing something else. It's against Darwin and evolution to go on forever." He was hot on Darwin and Huxley in his way; yet when it came to a matter of business, he threw his hobbies overboard and what had been good enough for him was good enough for me. However, for the time being, I was a sudden and sumptuous capitalist, and I cast round for ways and means of spending my Aunt Betty's savings in a way to do her credit or to make her turn in her grave. I'm not sure which.
It was winter, and when my family and I had had enough of one another, I found the right kind of excursion advertised in one of the papers. "Six weeks in the West Indies," it said, or something similar, and the prices ranged from a hundred guineas. First-class ship; first-class chef; everything first-class. I'd never traveled that way before—usually worked my passage. It'd be a change for me; and I wanted to see the West Indies, especially in winter, when half the world was gray and cold.
I bought a steamer-trunk full of clothes, and a deck-chair and a rug, and a large-sized ulster for the first days out. I was new as a guinea and just as smart. I wasn't going to impose on anybody or pretend I was the count, but, just for once in a way, I was going to wallow in the lap of luxury—and then forget it.
We started from Southampton in a gale though in a day or two we got clear of it into sunshine and blue skies; but the gale had broken the ice. You can't be cold and distant when you're seasick and so everybody was beginning to know everybody else. We were most of us leisurely people with daughters, well bred, well off, with a sprinkling of stock-brokers and rich men from the City. A few of us had titles, and a couple of bishops and a dean and a newspaper-proprietor kept an eye on us; and, taking us all in all, we were a classy crowd. And as I hadn't been seasick and had made myself useful, I was beginning to get popular and thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked these people: most of them were born loafers like myself; but they could afford it all the time, and, of course, I couldn't. I dare say I might have found a lady with enough money for both of us—a trifle tough, perhaps, and not too young. However, I wasn't out for that game. Nor any other worth mentioning. I was out for fun—for six good weeks of it—and then I'd disappear.
Well, it was pretty amusing. I've told you I liked these people. They were out for fun as well; and as I'd had no youth worth mentioning, I found myself making up for it like a boy just fresh from school. At thirty-odd one has no business to be so confoundedly young; but this was a holiday, the first real let-up I'd had in fifteen years; and in many ways my life had been a hard life, though in other ways it hadn't.
To me those people were so much cream. They had breeding, manners, freedom, and good looks. I dare say I exaggerated it all, just as a housemaid does who's reading a story about a duke. But on the surface—and I needed no more than the surface—these were the most marvelous people that I had ever struck.
I learnt to dance again, and I played cards with the men and sometimes with the women, and by the time we were nine days out I'd made one or two friendships of a kind. There was a dark girl with masses of tawny hair; there was a man who'd smashed himself up hunting and been ordered a sea-voyage after months in bed. These two I remember; the rest are all forgotten or else blurred. The dark girl's mother is just a gracious shadow nowadays, and I don't think she ever was much more.
As you may have guessed, I was pretty simple, one of those prattlers who, given a little encouragement, come out with everything, empty the whole bag. I found myself telling that dark girl all about it. Of how I had wandered and sailed and fought men with my fists; and sung in the chorus in Grand Opera and gone with pilgrims to a temple on a hill; it was rather mixed. There were horses I'd ridden and strange towns I'd come to, and women, half savage, half child—I slurred them over; but she wanted everything, from the scents that madden you in a tropical night to deserts where you rock on your camel and follow the stars. Thirst and hunger and danger and weariness—she wanted the whole lot. I'd seen a good deal of the world in my own way, and most of it was cruel, looking at it from here, from this security. But she loved the cruelty of it, the hardness of it, as well as its beauty.
"You'll see something of all that," I said, "when we touch land."
She wasn't listening. She was looking me over, much as a boy might do, with shining eyes; and then, "You're wonderful—quite wonderful," she answered, "and you don't know it!"
I dare say that found my vanity, though I pretended it didn't. I knew I was slightly different from these other men whose lives had been made for them; but that wasn't being "wonderful." It seemed to me then that to be "wonderful" you must have masses of gold-flecked hair and the courage to talk to a man like myself, of no account, and make a god of him.
I don't know that you would have called Eve Drummond a beauty. She was rather more than that. She had personality, daring, sex—it is these things I recall so much more than her features, her color, and the cool strength of her lithe body. There were better-looking girls on board than she; but no one half so vivid, so charged with power and energy. I guessed these at first rather than tested them; for, so far, she had only sat up in her chair and made me talk.
"Do you know, you've never had a chance," she said, sizing me up in her direct way. "Why didn't that stuffy father of yours send you to Eton and Oxford or the army? He could afford it, couldn't he?"
We must have been pretty thick by then for her to talk so freely. I know I'd confessed about the five hundred pounds. I'd kept nothing back from her: she knew me as I was and she seemed to like it. Bless her!
IV
It's no good asking me about the West Indies. I believe we landed on a dozen islands and anchored in as many bays or harbors, or just lay out to sea, with pinnaces going and coming. And black men in boats rocked alongside and offered us things they had to sell. But that happens everywhere; and to me the West Indies are just Eve Drummond.
I don't know who began it; does one ever know, unless one is refused? And, even then.... But I dare say the sun began it, and that abundant leisure, and the two pagan hearts inside of us that opened as flowers open to the light. Maybe, in such a release from work and care and custom, it was the only sensible thing to do. In any case, we did it. And I have never regretted it; nor, I feel sure, has she. We ought to have closed down again when we got back to England—looked back upon it as a dream, a foretaste of Perfection—something that had never happened before, could never happen again—and been thankful. But that is anticipating. Just now we landed on islands and ruled the world like kings and queens. We did exactly as we pleased. Old Mrs. Drummond was always gracious. I've never discovered what she thought: I only know what she said. And, perhaps, seeing me so leisured and so affluent—who knows? And the other passengers? I fancy we made a show for them, or offered them a good example. One or two followed it and became engaged.
I don't remember that we two ever did become engaged. Where was the use of registering the obvious, of making a contract when nothing was refused? She could have asked me for all I had to offer, and I would have given it, wondering why she asked. It was better than engagements, better than a honeymoon. We wanted nothing of one another except the magic of discovery, the revelation of companionship. Passion was there for the taking—but it was finer so. Passion is old and shadowed with death, but love is ever new; and, somehow, by instinct, by memories deeper than ourselves, we clung to this virginity, this wonder and amazement—a happiness unclouded that started afresh with each new day.
There was one island with a sandy cove we had found, and all that afternoon we bathed from it and laughed and lay in the sun. She wore one of my new suits of pajamas and I another; and when the silk clung to her I praised her beauty; and when the great coil of her wonderful hair was loose and spread in the sun to dry, we both admired it as one might admire a picture or something impersonal made by stranger hands.
She blushed when the Spaniards of another island asked if she was my wife; they could not understand it otherwise. I had said, "Yes," and told her. We had hired ponies and ridden out on them to see the world. At a plantation we had halted, and there the women had offered us a meal; and to her it was an adventure, and these simple people thought her marvelous. She dazzled them too, just as I was dazzled, as were most people who came near her. And later there was the ride home in the moonlight with half the village keeping us company. They had decked her with flowers and stuffed my pockets with cigars; so that we went back like conquerors and found our ship and pinnaces waiting. It was an adventure, right enough, and she fairly blazed with it.
"Why go back?" she had asked; and she would have stayed. At a word she would have thrown the whole of Europe overboard and followed me. We might have found a life in Mexico, or somewhere in the South. At times I have played with the idea and wondered.
I wasn't entirely mad; indeed, if one comes of a respectable family, there's always a residuum of respectability hidden away somewhere inside of one. Perhaps it was that which held me back, which made me in some measure her champion; which all along had driven me to feel that, sooner than any harm should come to her, I would die a thousand deaths or go through fire and water. On the ship that night I took her hand in mine and kissed it—the first time I had done anything so intimate. She wanted more. She did not know she wanted more; but I did, and blessed her innocence. I had not come there to disturb it. If I did anything, I would do the only right thing and wait till we were back in England.
Beyond her and the man who had been smashed up in the hunting-field and who wheeled himself about in a special kind of chair, I don't recollect anybody on board who mattered. This man looked on at us. Once he smiled up at me in his pleasant way; he often used to smile, and no wonder!
"Aren't you going in pretty deep?" he asked. "It's all right out here." And then, "She'd do well on the stage," he added; "It's the same temperament." He followed that up with questions about the last island and wanted to know whether he'd missed much by not getting ashore.
It might have been a warning; it might even have been meant for one. I let it go. I had no doubts; no ears for anybody else; no eyes for anybody else. She filled me. It must have been the same with her; for "Lots of men have wanted to kiss me," she once said; "But I have never wanted to kiss anybody but you. I don't know why; I can't help it."
She was amazingly frank, as the worst women are—and the best. She had a most alarming candor. It frightened many people; but me it did not frighten. For it seemed to me that I understood and knew her; and, maybe it was my pride or maybe it was out of love for her, I swore I would win her in the usual way—as her mother had been won and her grandmother. She was worth it; she was worth anything, I said. I'd work for her; I'd settle down and win her.
V
The pair of us had no end of a hump when England showed up out of the mists and we were back in the cold weather. Those frigid shores, that tidy landscape, made us feel that all the prose of things was heaped together in this bleak island. Though it looked so rich, it looked poor enough in all that made life worth the living. Pure idiocy, of course! But, remember, we were just come out of Paradise.
I don't know that she felt it as strongly as I did. For such as she there would be alleviations; friends, the warmth and light of splendid houses, sport, money to burn, town and country, and leisure and capacity to make the most of them. Still, what I felt she felt too. We knew all about one another; how I was going to see my father and have it out with him; and then I would go North and have it out with her people. From what she said, they did not appear to be very formidable, provided one made the right impression. She at least, had never been afraid of them; or of anybody else, for that matter. So we had settled it. At Southampton we went ashore; in London we separated. She was going North again. In London Mrs. Drummond, Eve, and I put up for the night at the same hotel.
A maid had arrived from somewhere and a manservant. There was a house in town, but it wasn't worth while opening it for the one night. The servants hovered round and took their orders; and at Euston I put Mrs. Drummond into a carriage marked "Reserved." They traveled in style. And next Eve grabbed me by the arm, and, marching me up and down the platform, "Mind you write," she said; "every blessed day. I will. And when you've settled with your father, come up and see mine. I'll get him ready."
Of the two, she was the man of us. I'd never bothered much about such detail until now. I'd lived in a less deliberate world, where individuals count and families do not exist. But I was done with all that: I realized I was done with all that. And when I took Mrs. Drummond's hand and wished her a pleasant journey and had been invited to come and visit, I realized it very completely and felt that that was their convention, and how I should have to fit in with it and be measured by it and stay within that way of life for all the rest of mine. But I'd accepted that, hadn't I? With all my heart and soul!
Their train started, Eve's face framed in the window. I waved. She waved. Then I went off to see my father.
I found him in his office. It was a mail-day and he was busy. "Come in to-morrow," he said, "or dine with us at seven."
I went down the musty staircase; I crossed the musty yard. His packing-room and offices were in an old house since demolished; a fine old house that had formerly belonged to one of those past merchants who weren't above living where they traded. It was in Basinghall Street. But now the City of London had become too valuable and too crowded for such an extravagance.
I meandered on, tasting that flood of life, so masculine, so ant-like, and so intent. Between the Bank and Ludgate Circus I seemed the only loafer. I carried a stick and sauntered. Once or twice I caught the eye of a young man looking at me with envy. I was brown and fit and fresh. The sea and sun had done their best for me; while here in London at the end of a long winter men had no color and all the druggist shops were selling stuffs for coughs and colds. That would be my life I said. But Eve was worth it. I realized then that all those men were selling themselves for women and children and a home; and after that they seemed more human, easier to understand; even rather heroic, I felt, as I watched them, hurrying upon their business, broken into it, habituated.
In a crowded place where men sat up at a counter and wolfed their food, I had lunch; and again I detected looks of envy, almost of inquiry, as though I were one of the lucky ones who had escaped and they wanted to know my secret—how I did it. My mind went back to Arabs eating in the shade, to brown men resting beside their yoke of oxen, to the leisure and the space of sunlit lands, and people who, having filled themselves, could take their ease. There was no ease for my neighbors at the counter. One by one they bustled out and others took their places.
I wandered down Holborn, and so to Oxford Street; and now, where there had been crowds of men before, were crowds of women, gazing into shop-windows, devouring hats and underclothing with their eyes, and frocks and fallals. It occurred to me that the men working farther east were slaving away to provide these women with money to spend in the west. I looked them over, and hardly one of them seemed worth it; and the older and harsher the woman, the more she seemed to hunger for fine clothes. I thought of other, duskier women, who let the sun ripen their beauty and sea and air put youth into their eyes. They didn't last so long, perhaps; but they gave their strength to their children, delight and service to their husbands.
I turned away. Eve Drummond was worth it all, I said to myself. She would take, perhaps, but what would she not give! And here, again, in the thin light of London, I saw the somber gold that filled her hair, laid out to the sun and spread before us like a robe. I saw her feet marking the sand, dancing toward me—she slim in those silk pajamas that clung to her and shaped her body and its pride. And I saw her again, decked with flowers, as we had ridden back amid our cloud of Spaniards, her face alight, her lips parted with the joy of an adventure. She made this London world seem common and cheap and tawdry; and by that time I had come to Regent's Park and seated myself upon a bench.
I killed an hour at the Zoo after that and visited my friend the bison. I bought him a bag of buns and commiserated with him on the disappearance of a noble race. There are not many bisons left in the worlds are there? And these few are but a survival, an exhibit more than a species.
He ate his buns; and he was old, mangy, and sorrowful; and, like me, he lived alone.
"When you die you will be stuffed," I said. "The world hasn't much use for you: it could neither tame you nor find room for you, and so you'll have to go. I'm sorry, bison."
He finished his bag of buns and asked for more.
I brought him more.
"You, my lad, were too strong, too primitive, too simple," I began: and then the other people came along and spoilt it.
VI
I found my mother and sister at our house and we waited for my father. The house was in St. John's Wood, one of those large gray stucco affairs which were easily run in the days when you could get plenty of servants. My father owned the house, and we children had been born and brought up in it. All that quarter of London was intimate and near to me, as it is to-day. The house itself, long passed to other hands, is still standing; and somehow, a part of me will always linger there, in spite of other houses, other lands. I still remember how every time I went back to it the old familiar feel of the place hit me—of everything inside of it and outside; from the sooty trees and rhododendrons in the garden to the heavy mahogany I had looted when I was a boy; I suppose every boy has stolen things out of sideboards. There were always biscuits and figs and raisins in ours, and a sticky syrup my mother liked—you mixed it with water. And there were cupboards, too, with glass and china, and other things I'd broken and been cursed for breaking. But here were my mother and my sister. They were not a bit surprised when I walked in.
"You're staying for dinner?" said my mother. She would have asked a tramp to stay; it was her nature. The world to her was a place full of people waiting to be fed, and she was there to feed them. She was a fine cook of a school that's gone and done with; and she wasn't above rolling up her sleeves and spending a morning in the kitchen.
My sister was not so proficient. She danced and went to parties; she had friends, she went shopping; and just then she had become engaged to a young stock-broker, a fellow called Carey-Holt. As a young man he was tolerable. He had his season and after that he passed into the ranks of the prosperous bores. One accepted him. There he was, and one knew exactly what he was going to say or do. But just now he was young and vivacious and Netta regarded herself as happy. I suppose she was. Happiness depends on what you want.
I don't know that I ever loved my mother or that she loved me. She wasn't built that way. Some women aren't. Thinking her over calmly, I've concluded that she was just a natural force, like wind, or rain, or sunshine. She bore her children easily; she ate and drank heartily; she slept soundly; and I'd never known her have a day's illness. She liked to go to theaters and to foreign watering-places, and she liked to see people sitting round her table. Instead of love she gave me a strong body. That, after all, is a good deal; and to-day, as I came in, she didn't put herself out, except to ask me to stay and share her dinner.
"Where have you been?" she added, looking up from one of my father's socks—she was mending a hole in it.
"To the West Indies and back," I answered.
She wasn't astonished.
"On business?" she asked.
"No, I've been spending Aunt Betty's savings."
She laughed at that.
"Poor old Betty!" she said. "When she was a young girl, she wanted to marry the postman; but, of course, father wouldn't let her; and so she never married anybody. He went off to America and did very well."
I always liked talking to her about her father. He had farmed somewhere in the north of Ireland and his chief merit, so I gathered, was to have raised seven handsome daughters. They all married well, except Aunt Betty. My own father had gone to Belfast on business; and there he had met and won my mother. It had been rather a romance on his side. I guessed now that she would have married any man able to give her a home and some position in a big city. She loved big cities, just as she loved those foreign watering-places or any place where she could hit on lots of people and life and bands of music. Her early years had been spent in a remote and stilly province; and to her the change was something magical and splendid. She hated talking of her father's farm and its simplicity; but late in life she wasn't so averse. Yet for years she had been rather ashamed, as though confessing to something that wasn't very creditable; and to me and to my sister she was at first incomprehensible, and we, no doubt, were just the same to her. But she was an easy women to get on with: she went her way and let us two take ours; till Carey-Holt came in and made a difference.... I suppose it's a pity. We might have made a pal of her; but she didn't want pals, nor any of us, specially.
My father arrived and went to his dressing-room. He didn't change for dinner. He tidied himself and put on a smoking-jacket and was complete.
He had been writing hard to catch the mail of this particular mail-day. He traded with Central and South America and the West Indies and once a fortnight he shut himself up and wrote the more important letters, in Spanish, in French, in Portuguese. He was a fine linguist and rather a remarkable man for a City merchant.
I tackled him after dinner.
"Guv'nor," I began—I always called him "Guv'nor," which he didn't quite like, but which he had to put up with—"do you think you could find room for me in the business?" I continued.
He looked at me dubiously; and then, "Mine?" he asked. "What would you do there?"
"Same as you, I suppose. I want to settle down and make a decent living and get married."
He still looked at me dubiously.
"I We had enough of seeing the world," I pursued, "and I suppose I've got engaged."
"You've got engaged?" he asked.
"Well, not exactly, but I suppose it comes to the same thing; and if I could support a wife, I'd marry her."
"So that's what's tamed you?" And, after an interval, "A girl you met on the steamer?"
"A Miss Drummond, a daughter of Drummond's up in Scotland. They build ships and there are iron-works and coal-mines; I believe they're rich."
"But surely a girl like that wouldn't marry you!"
"I don't think she'd object," I answered.
"But her father—her family—"
"Perhaps they wouldn't object. There's nothing serious against me. I haven't robbed anybody, or murdered anybody, or been in prison, or been divorced, or done anything that people make a fuss about."
"You're sure it's Drummond's?" replied my father.
"Quite," said I.
He was very much impressed. He couldn't help being impressed. His values were commercial; and in trade or industry the name stood mountains high—among the very highest! Far, far higher for instance, than Vignolles Brothers and Company of Basinghall Street.
"Well, if you're serious, I'll tell you what I will do," he began. 'You can have a place at the office. I'll try you for six months, and if you're in earnest I may be able to find room for you. It's not a bad business, really. You speak a little Spanish—"
"Quite a lot," I interrupted him, "and Arabic, French, German, and some Italian and a little Russian. Perhaps I could learn to write them."
He was rather impressed by that as well, I remember.
"You might be a good deal of use to me," he said. "Come in to-morrow and talk it over. I won't be busy in the morning."
We joined my mother and sister after that and my father read the evening paper, and young Carey-Holt came round and sang to us and was pretty cordial.
My mother got out that awful raspberry syrup of hers and mixed it with water, and there were biscuits and cake and wine and things that came out of the sideboard, and the Guy'nor's very excellent cigars.
I didn't tell my sister anything that evening.
"Where are you staying?" she asked.
"At Green's."
"You are grand!" she chaffed me, helping me on with my overcoat.
"Only another night of it, and then the grandeur will be over. Perhaps the Guv'nor is going to give me a job."
"You!" she answered. "He used to say he'd like to have you, but for years he's given you up—talks about selling the business and retiring. And when I get married this house'll be too large—"
"See you to-morrow evening," I replied; and went down the front steps lightly, and so into the street. She returned to Carey-Holt, indoors.
It was a moonlight night and I walked the way back to the hotel; past Lord's, past the Canal and Baker Street; and then I was in town again, in the heart of London, with Eve Drummond fast in mine; and her dear face—well, you know what an ass one is, don't you?
At the hotel, a most select affair—it looked as much like a private house as it could do and the servants all pretended I was a duke—at the hotel I found a telegram; and I had to read it twice before I tumbled to it. Eve and her mother had reached their home; but not before my girl had waltzed into the local post-office and wired, "Here's to us. Who's like us? Dam few!"
VII
My father was always an early bird and in his office at nine. Next morning I got there before him and he seemed surprised and rather pleased about it.
"You here?" he said; and evidently he had formed some sort of notion that I was a roving kind of vagabond with what are called Bohemian tastes and habits, and not very reliable when it came to keeping hours.
We settled down together at once.
"I am willing to give you a trial," he said; "but you'll start at the bottom, the same as I did, and if you're any good you'll be promoted."
I had nothing to say to that.
"And we can't have you living at home; you're not used to an ordinary house. You'll have to find a room somewhere, and then you can come in and go out as you please."
I had nothing to say to that.
"You can have dinner with us every evening if you want to. It's at seven. But we go to bed at ten or shortly after. Perhaps you'll want some money to begin with. I'll give you two pounds a week; I've managed on less."
"I've got some of Aunt Betty's over," I replied; "that'll keep me going the first six months. But I'll want a week's holiday as soon as it's arranged; I want to go up North and see old Drummond."
"Well, you can have that too if you like; but, in future, there will be no privileges. You'll be the same as all the rest of us. There's a desk in the outer office; tell Mr. Niederer to get it ready for you"; and with that I was dismissed and my father settled to the morning's correspondence.
It came out after a while in a basket, and Mr. Niederer, who was a kind of managing-clerk and foreign correspondent, sorted it out and handed some of it to Mr. Nairn, the bookkeeper, and some went to Lee, the packing-clerk, and now the day's work could begin.
It had been agreed that I was at liberty to hunt for rooms to-day and remove my belongings from the hotel. I found a bedroom and a little sitting-room in a small house near the family abode, close to a terrace of shops and reasonably cheap. I moved in that same afternoon, had tea in comfort by myself, and afterward went round to the house for dinner.
It was the same performance as the night before, with me definitely recognized as the Prodigal returned. Young Carey-Holt I remember, seemed to think I'd been on one long spree, among thieves and harlots and foreigners. It hadn't been quite like that, however.
"You were two years in the army?" he asked.
I wanted to know something about horses; it was the easiest way."
The little blighter had never been anywhere, nor seen anything, nor done anything, except run round his Stock Exchange with a notebook and persuade people to buy shares or sell them, and I dare say he had bought and sold a bit on his own account. He had made money over it, apparently, for he rather fancied himself on that score, and the wedding was fixed and not far off.
My mother seemed to think him a fool for giving up his liberty, but, otherwise, a very desirable match. My father accepted him, as one accepts the inevitable, and was prepared to make a suitable settlement. Netta was in love with him, I suppose; and he is the father of her children. Women can stand a deal of Carey-Holt on those terms.
I cleared off early that evening, after agreeing to escort my mother to a theater on the next one; she had the tickets. And in the new sitting-room, with the lamp burning and the fire alight, I sat for an hour and wrote to Eve.
I'd come up when she liked and see her father, I said; and I dutifully reported what progress I had made with mine. And I dare say I told her that London was a desert and that I missed her, missed her, and felt an absolute orphan and a confounded widow.
All that week I followed the same programme, till the Monday came with Mrs. Drummond's invitation. I went up to Scotland on the Friday.
VIII
Eve's father was a remarkable man; so far the most remarkable I had ever met at close quarters. Perhaps I had come across others just as big, but I had never known them as I was to know him. He just let everything rip till the second Saturday of my visit, but all those eight days he must have been watching us and taking me in; so that when he spoke, as, at last, he did speak, he seemed to know me better than I knew myself. Meanwhile we had kept to safer topics.
Of him, before then, I knew that as a boy he had been put into the navy, had thrown it up and gone into commerce, industry, and anything that came along. I knew that he was a younger son, that his father had held an ancient title, now passed to a brother, and that, if he had liked, he could have had one of his own. Eve had told me so much.
He seemed to take little notice of me the first eight days. He was away at his iron-works, at his shipyards, at his other concerns that ran along the Clyde. He was deep in his business, and I don't even know that he was at home all the time. Sometimes he was there for dinner and a hand at whist, and sometimes he was not. Everybody did as he pleased in that big house which stood within a rifle-shot of the moors. The town where old Drummond had his offices was a short hour's drive away, and once or twice I saw him start off in the morning behind a pair of roans. He was a fine whip, a fine horseman, with his trim figure and easy seat. Eve got her pluck from him, her fearless eyes.
All that week we made a playground of the moors, rode, walked, went picnics; and we danced and play-acted, and went to bed more often late than early. It was a fine, free life they led up here, she, her brothers, her sister, and their friends. The house was full of them, coming and going, young, delightful, spending somebody else's money. It was a life! I think I reveled in it, while it lasted. Mrs. Drummond was always gracious, but the sister seemed a bit puzzled, and, I suspect, regarded me as something of a freak. For every once in a while I came out with things which, if they didn't exactly make these people's hair curl, at least made them sit up. There was Cairo, for instance, and how I'd run a livery-stable there; and my two years as a trooper in the cavalry, and how I'd signed the pledge to get the money to buy myself out; and a cocktail bar I'd served at in the West and the man I beat over the head with a whisky bottle; and the Zoë that got piled up in the Straits when I was working a passage as cook's mate. Eve didn't care; but most women would have kicked my shins under the table and signaled to me to shut up. But she rather rejoiced in it; and all those gay young men—I've often wondered what they thought. They were respectful; but I suppose they voted me a barbarian; some sort of an outsider, at any rate, like a novelist or an explorer, or one or another of the celebrities that descended on us here and there. For, by Jove, what with Good Friday and Easter, we were a crowd! Politicians and professors and the meenister fra the kirk. And old Drummond stood them all, and even me! He didn't say much; he mostly listened, or put in a word that made us talk. And Eve was all kindness, jogging me and proud of me, and correcting me where I went wrong; for I wasn't great on etiquette and sometimes tripped up over titles. "Dropping bricks," we called it. I liked it best when we took a couple of ponies and went off by ourselves. And then I could tell her more about the office, and the house, and my father and mother, and Netta and young Carey-Holt They made her laugh; and, candidly, she didn't like them.
"But, don't you see, I'm going to pull you out of all that," she cried, "and give you a real home and a real family! I've spoken to Father, and he's quite willing. And Mother likes you—said you were most attentive. I suppose you are, though I hadn't noticed it."
And there was the wind playing through her great rope of hair; she let it down for me once and sat on it and coiled it up again. And here in the open she had a color and a light in her eyes and a fierce vitality that sometimes made me think of her as a young man rather than as a young woman.
"One could go anywhere with you," I said; and then we planned trips all over the world, in China and Persia and through the Southern Seas. And when we had a son we would make a great man of him. She never saw herself as the mother of girls, but the boy I remember. He was to have everything that boys can have—the best schools, the best clothes—the best of everything! And she's never had one—only girls.
It was all perfectly and utterly mad. But young love is like that. Once she looked up at me abruptly; and, "Why didn't you run away with me," she asked, "on that Spanish island? I would have come."
"And then?" I said.
"You would have had me then; we should have belonged to one another; and in this rotten Northern world—who knows?"
It was the first time I had ever seen her hesitate.
We sat on a boulder after that, a great rock ringed with turf and dead heather, and ate our sandwiches, and she looked out on the moors with questioning eyes.
"I ask so much of life," she said; "I ask so much. I wonder whether I'll ever find it."
She came down out of the clouds and was kind to me—put her arm round my shoulders and her cheek to mine.
"You're like this rock," she said; "that's why I love you. I don't think if the worst came to the worst you'd ever change."
I couldn't follow her; but I seemed to understand her. "Thanks, kid," I said; and I don't know that I ever have changed. She has, perhaps; but, even she.... How many people are we? I suppose a dozen.
IX
On the Easter Saturday, Drummond put his arm through mine. "You're coming for a walk with me this afternoon," he said; "never mind about Eve; she'll let you off." And, right enough as soon as lunch was over and we'd had our coffee and cigarettes he was ready.
I was glad he'd given me this opportunity. Out on the moors I could talk with more confidence, with more freedom, than in the house; and even than in the great library where he received people if he and they wanted to be alone together. It was the one room in the place that we youngsters respected.
"By the way," he began, "Eve told me you've gone into your father's business. How do you like it?"
"I don't know that it's a question of liking," I answered; "it's the only way."
"Nobody works for fun, I suppose—at least, that kind of work. I could give you a job up here; but you wouldn't stick it."
"I'd stick anything to make a decent income."
"I suppose you would," he answered; "and when you'd stuck it long enough, you'd suddenly wake up."
I was wide awake now, as we went on together, he talking as he had never talked to me before; most humanly, most kindly—more like an older brother and an equal than the chief of his great enterprises. And the clouds sailed overhead the wind was keen and stung the blood in us, the turf underfoot was good to walk on, and the wild hills lifted our spirits and carried them afar. The rumor of spring was in that valiant air as we strode forward. This was Eve's home, I thought to myself. No wonder that she carried herself so proudly! And next I turned and listened to her father.
"I like you, Vignolles," he had said; "that's why I'm taking all this trouble. I've spent a week trying to understand you. Eve I already know. She wouldn't stick it"; and when I turned a challenging face to him, he went on, unruffled.
"She fell in love with a hero," he pursued, "a romantic fellow she met on board a ship and rode with on islands; a careless young devil who'd taken his chances and didn't give a fig for any man. That's right, isn't it? But if you go into business, you'll lose all that. She didn't fall in love with your father's managing clerk, or one of mine."
He gave that time to soak in; he gave me time to feel the weight of it; and next, "I've been to sea myself," he said, "and I've been as hard up as you, Vignolles. I was a younger son of a poor house—blood, but no money. I've felt the lure of it; I've known the world and something of its wonders. I chucked all that, just as you propose to do. I chucked it all away when I was nineteen and a bittock. You're past thirty. You're too old to change. I wanted to win my wife, just as you want to win Eve. And I've won her," he continued. "I've given her all that any man could give; she wanted those things, and I don't blame her. Perhaps I wanted them, myself. Eve'll want them too, and more besides. Where are you going to find them?"
"She knows what she's taking on," I answered.
"No man and no woman know what they're taking on till the first year's over," he said abruptly.
"And after that?" I asked.
"They begin to put questions. You'd say, 'By Jove, is it worth it?' and Eve'd say, 'By Jove, is it worth it?' But you'd both go on and hide the doubt away from one another and even from yourselves. That's what I did, and, perhaps, I found a different answer. It was worth it. But I'm not like you, young Vignolles. And I'm not like Eve. She's had everything; she's never been denied. I've spoilt my women. Perhaps we've spoilt one another. Well, why not!" And he looked at me fiercely, just as Eve might have done, but his eyes changed of a sudden, and next we were back whence he had started.
"Yes, you might stick it; but you'd hate it," he resumed. "I've got over that, but you can't. I don't come from the South of France or wherever your people come from. I was born and bred in a hard country, where there isn't much sun. And you've got some streak in your blood—some old Moor or Jew or Arab mystic? I'm right, aren't I?"
It had never occurred to me; and even to-day there's no evidence; but I suspect he was not far wrong. I remember I stared at him instead of answering; and then he smiled. "Too young to bother, eh, Vignolles? I wish I were!"
He went on very gently after that: "You could come up to my works to-morrow if you liked; I'd make a place for you. But it's not your line," he added, thoughtfully; "you'd be unhappy; in the long run you'd be unhappy. I've said to Eve, 'as a friend or a lover'; we're pretty frank with one another. But as a husband you'd find you were caught up in a net—trapped and bound—you'd lose the very things that make you valuable. Most men can stand it; but you never could—the years going from you, and nothing to show for them but money. Neither knowledge nor wisdom nor truth nor beauty; but only money. And the wife you'd married would be the symbol of it all, and you'd get to hate her pride and her finery, for which you'd given your best years. And the children you'd begotten and were spending yourself over would be a burden, and all the kindness in the world wouldn't atone for it.... I'm different. I can stand it. So can most men. But you!
"You'd submit—you'd knuckle under," he ran on; "But, in your heart, you'd hate it. And Eve would ask for all that, and nothing else would satisfy her. It's nature. It's no good judging it or fighting it. Women are kind; but women are cruel. God made 'em so. And the women of the rich are more cruel than any."
I listened to this man, knocking the bottom out of my hopes and my illusions—or trying to—and I wasn't moved. I wasn't moved at all. I said as much.
"What other men have done, I can do," I said. "Haven't I worked and answered 'No!' Haven't I denied myself things and hung on to things—as much as most men—more than most men!"
He faced me then, and held me standing on that wind-swept moor.
"Yes, but you've always had what you really wanted. You've had the sea and the sky and the hills and the desert at noonday and a tree to rest under; and I dare say there were women who took what you could give them and asked no more than that; who wept when you left them, and laughed again and hoped anew."
He had drawn a pretty accurate picture.
"But all that's over," I admitted.
"It'll never be over," said he. "If you were younger, perhaps—" And then he veered. "I'm hardened," he said; "I'm broken to it; it's my life. I can remember. But to-day I look out on a landscape, and I think of iron and coal; I look out on the sea, and I think of freights and shipping; I look up to the hills, and I see the quarried stone in them, and the sun and stars are nothing to me but a calendar and the seasons. And where you see the wilderness I see a railroad and traffic returns; and where you see water I see power and wharfage—and that's all there is to it. But you, Vignolles, are different; and you 11 never change.
"If you had money you'd spend it—give it away to some other poor devil like yourself. If you had property it'd be an embarrassment and a tie to you. And you look out on the world, and everywhere you look you find the wealth your heart hungers for; and it isn't gold, my boy, or coal or iron, or freights or power. I suppose the minister up at the kirk could find the right word for it.... You may not know it," he ran on, "but you will some day, when these things clear and you have suffered to the limit. A man suffers what he can endure—no more, no less—and just now you're tolerably happy? And you won't believe me; not to-day at any rate. In a few years' time, perhaps. Then you'll say, 'The old fool was right.' To-day you'll be angry with me. I don't blame you. I'd have been angry if I'd met myself forty years ago.... You'll do as you like, in any case," he ended, "and so will Eve. But I want you to promise me one thing. You can write to her and see her as often as you like, but leave out an engagement till the pair of you have got down to facts. I'd offer you money; I'd be glad to start you; but you're not the sort that takes money, and no more is Eve.... And you won't bolt with her, either, if I am any judge. You'll play the game with us, and especially with her mother.... That's settled now, isn't it?"
I would have promised him anything he liked, so much I loved the man. He'd judged me and he'd treated me in the only way I could understand. For, in my heart of hearts, I knew that every word he had said to me was honest.
X
There is a reaction that follows upon every loss; when, one by one, the sacred things within you fall before the world's brutality. The maid who offers herself weeps when she has been accepted; the man, hired out, is shocked when his employer robs him. And it isn't the money; it's the loss of something greater; of trust, of faith, of loyalty 'twixt man and man. I didn't know that old Drummond's words had startled me till we reached home.
Taking my bath that evening and changing for dinner in the solitude of my room, my spirits suddenly went flop. Drummond had made me pause and look upon the naked face of things; not on our hopes, but on the things that are.
Downstairs, however, we were full of guests and bustle, and Eve was acting in a burlesque melodrama that had been prepared as a lark for us. I wasn't in it. They had pressed me to take a part, but I wasn't needed and I'm not an actor. So nobody saw the drop in me, and after dinner I was able to clear out. One has these moods. For an hour or two I felt like a wounded animal. I left the house and took the road that led toward the town. It was empty under a night of stars. I tramped it, walking out my pain. By ten o'clock I was in the town and cured.
I remember I took a cigarette out of my case, and found I had no matches.
I stopped the first man in the street and asked him for a light. I had to ask him twice before I understood.
"I cannot give you a light," he had said, "but I'll race you a mile for a shilling." He repeated it with the utmost gravity in the same broad Scots, of which I have given but an inadequate translation.
The genial fellow was three parts drunk and so was everybody else in that Scotch city. On a Saturday night, at this hour, I had never been in one before. But it was fantastic. I went into the best hotel to get some matches; and I seemed to be the only sober person in it. Strange men offered me drink; I was received like a conqueror. Matches, tobacco, whisky were all pressed hard upon me. It was something like that Spanish island where half the village had ridden back to the ship with us, only these good people were all filled with liquor instead of with the sun. But they showed a similar enthusiasm, the same warm heart It was a trifle embarrassing. I escaped into the street again and walked their whisky off on my way back.
Half a moon was rising above the moors; and I was perfectly and gloriously sober when I reached the house.
"Where have you been?" cried Eve.
I told her.
"You've missed the play!"
"I haven't missed anything or anybody," I said; and I described the man in the street the packed hotels and how I had evaded my captors.
It made her laugh.
Her father joined us. He was tickled, too.
"And they'll all turn up at the kirk to-morrow, solemn as judges," he commented.
On the Sunday, I remember, Eve and her young friends taught me to ride a bicycle. I had never been on one before.
They led me up to a slope where the road ran downhill, helped me on, and set me rolling. The thing had no brakes worth mentioning and off it went with me; and everybody yelled with rapture and delight. I'd been on a runaway horse, but this thing beat it. When it had finished, I turned it round and rode it back uphill. I don't think anything I could do or had ever done impressed these people more than that.
On the Monday I left them. My holiday was over, and next day I'd be clerking it in Basinghall Street. Eve drove me to the station, gay as a bird, the morning glory in her hair and eyes. We had gone over much of the ground that I had traversed with her father, and there was little else to say on that score.
"No engagement and no bolting." Thus she had summarized the argument; adding in her boyish direct way, "So that's all right!" And when the train came in and I had said good-by to her, "We'll be in town next month," she cried, "and we'll do all the theaters. You must take me everywhere." It was one way of looking at life; and, "Well," as old Drummond had said, "why not!"
XI
You can imagine that London and the office and my own people seemed pretty dull after all that; and, probably, they were. Nevertheless, I was amused in certain directions. My mother began it. She was most feudally impressed.
"You've been staying with Drummond of Drummond's—the Drummond?" she exclaimed. "He's a brother of the Earl of Mull and an Honorable himself, besides having all that money!"
She knew more about it than I did. There was a paper in those days called "Modern Society": women read it, and yet were ashamed to be seen with it. For it wasn't above a touch of scandal—Victorian scandal—and these Victorian ladies were pretty easily shocked. It had a bright-pink cover, which my mother would remove with care and caution, so that none of us should detect her; and then she'd settle down and read about the doings of the bold and great. So she knew a little of Drummond of Drummond's and his elder brother the Earl of Mull, and whom they'd married and whom they hadn't, if such a question might arise. The earl, it is true, had been rather lively, and I gathered from Eve that her father on occasion had helped him round one or two awkward corners. But now he was married to an American lady who kept a close watch on him, and to-day he was rather in the way of being a domestic pet. He purred on the hearth-rug and lapped milk out of a saucer. But my mother wasn't so much interested in him. She wanted to hear what we'd had for dinner every evening; and as there had been eight or nine of them, I found it rather difficult to remember.
"Hors d'œuvres?" she prompted me.
Yes, there had been hors d'œuvres.
"Caviar?"
Yes, I remembered caviar and anchovies and smoked salmon.
And next she got on to soup and fish and joints and birds and things, and finished up with shaped ice-cream. She was very particular. There were the vegetables. Had they been done with butter or just plain? I did my best for her.
After that we started on the servants.
Was there a chef, she wanted to know, and, if so, was he a Frenchman?
I satisfied her on that point.
And how was the table laid?
Upon my word, I hadn't noticed.
"You didn't notice!" she gasped; and it seemed for the moment as though she had sent me North to bring back a report, and here was I, returned without it!
We did better over the servants. For I remembered footmen, grooms, and girls who made the beds, and old Forbes, the butler, and the lady in the housekeeper's room, and gardeners. I'd tipped everybody in sight and made friends with them; and these Scottish servants were infinitely more human than ours in the South. They took an interest in you; and especially in me, who somehow they knew had come up in pursuit of Eve.
Young Carey-Holt listened and so did my sister. Carey-Holt, too, was much impressed. He didn't know, of course, what these people could "see" in me—Netta gave him away; in fact, he seemed to fancy that if they asked any of us, it ought to have been himself; for, in his own way, he was somebody, wasn't he?
"I'd like to know the two girls," said Netta.
"You probably will," said I.
"Do you think they'd like me?"
"Couldn't help 'emselves." She was a real good sort before she married that ass, Carey-Holt.
And when I'd satisfied everybody and answered all their questions, Carey-Holt said he was going to take up riding and learn it in a school and go for a hack round Hampstead Heath of an early morning. And my mother said, "Drummond of Drummond's, and brother to the Earl of Mull. He might be the making of you. Mind you keep in with him!"
It was all very suburban and strange and queer till I came up against my father.
Curiously enough, he'd escaped the family ambitions. I'd never known him very intimately till then, till those few months during which I worked with him in Basinghall Street. We got on well together after the first shock. I think it was because I stood up to him.
He too had his pride, his self-respect, his notion of things; and it wasn't in any way suburban. Vignolles Brothers and Company had begun in his father's day and had included two of his uncles. Both had died of yellow fever. They had founded the house at Lima, and then came the branch at Rio, and my father and his brother had removed the whole concern to London and left the two "stores" to the gentleman who had figured as "and Company." After they'd drawn out and transferred their capital—it took them several years—they were City merchants, buying on commission for the parent house and as many new ones as they could trust with goods and credit. My uncle Fred had been in it at first; but he had caught the fever out in Panama when the French were making a mess of the canal. Not so very long ago. The canal had been rather a gold-mine to Vignolles Brothers and Company—they still stuck to the old style from habit. I learnt all that over again—I d heard most of it vaguely—chatting away at luncheon and sometimes after dinner. My father's business now was buying goods and shipping them to his clients overseas. Sometimes they paid in produce and sometimes in bills. I was always quick at the theory of any business, though not so ready with the practice.
My father, as I learnt to know him then, was rightly proud of his position. He and his brother had made it, and it was certainly one of honor. In London, in the city that knew him and respected him, he was always a buyer and never a seller; for the produce went to auction and he had no interest in praising it. It was his pride, too, to owe no man a farthing beyond the day, and all his life he had been able to maintain this. He had a horror of debt, of borrowing; and when I spoke of pawnbrokers, with the ease born of necessity, my father shuddered. It was sometimes strange to think that I was his only son.
In the City itself, he was always the merchant, at that time something of a caste, almost Brahminical. Without his tall hat, his black coat and waistcoat, he would never have dared venture into Baisinghall Street. These were the uniform, the hall-mark of his rank and place. He was a City merchant; and I think he would rather have been that than any duke; even though "Modern Society" gave them the go-by and Queen Victoria seldom favored them with her regard.
XII
Do you know, I was very happy learning that business. In the first place, I was doing it for Eve; and, taking it all in all, the thing was full of interest, though some of the detail and drudgery might have been left out.
My father was set upon my starting from the bottom. So I started there and didn't find it too oppressive. I splashed about with a brush and water and copied letters in a book; I endorsed and folded and pigeonholed the ones that we had answered. I ran about the City with bills of exchange and bills of lading and consular invoices and even with the mail-day post. I learnt to know the country from Ludgate Circus to the Tower, every nook and every cranny—tucked-away churches and churchyards, museums, and halls of City companies, and Georgian and Queen Anne houses in back-waters and blind alleys. Carter, the office-boy, went with me sometimes, and always the first time. He usually made a picnic of our stroll; ate squashed dates out of a bag or cocoanut chips, or cubes of nougat bought from men with barrows—it tasted like paper; and when the strawberries came in he ought to have had a colic. He collected and dealt in foreign postage-stamps pinched off the firm's letters; he owned the half of a pair of roller-skates and performed on the asphalt; he smoked and spat equally, producing cheap cigarettes; and once he tried one of my father's unfinished cigars and had to be helped into his hat and overcoat and sent home early instead of at six p.m., when the business closed. I learnt his job; or, at least, the more serious parts of it.
Then there was Lee, the packing-clerk. He had charge of the packing-room downstairs. Most of the stuff we bought went straight from warehouse or factory to the docks, but small parcels always came to Basinghall Street—China-silk shawls and bandana handkerchiefs, uniforms for Central American generals, good cutlery and leather articles or personal commissions. Sometimes, acting under instructions, we swindled these South or Central American customs by putting false bottoms in the packing-cases. Lee looked after all that; and when each collection was ready he sewed up bales, or soldered the tin linings, or nailed down the lids and stenciled on the markings. At a push any of us would help the carriers and carters who called for the things and backed their horses in that cobbled yard; but it was Lee who tipped them and took receipts and wrote out advice notes. He was a serious young man with ambitions. In his leisure hours he studied Spanish; he was a teetotaler, a politician, and a chapel-goer; and I've no doubt but that to-day he's a prosperous man. For diversion he courted the housekeeper's daughter; they lived on the top floor, and Lee usually managed to get off and take a cup of tea with them.... I learnt most of his job.
Mr. Nairn, the bookkeeper, was the mathematician of the party. He kept all the accounts—day-book, journal, and ledger—in a wonderful handwriting that reminded me of monks and ancient missals. So far he hadn't illuminated his folios; but he might have done. His black-letter work, his figures and his capitals, were gems of art; and when he made a mistake—for even he was human—he fished out a special pen-knife and performed a surgical operation so delicate that he ought to have been employed in hospitals. Except through a microscope, you couldn't see that there had been an error. His books were beautifully clear; in addition, subtraction, or carrying over he was invulnerable, and at the end of each month he produced a balance-sheet that told us exactly how we stood. Apart from these accomplishments, he was a good-looking, youngish man with dark eyes and a long, fox-colored moustache of which he was justly proud. He twirled it and he twisted it and he had a hand-mirror in his desk in case it got refractory. He wore very tight trousers, as was the fashion in those days, displaying an elegant pair of legs; and in his large flat necktie he sported a horseshoe pin the color of gold; and he had spats and fancy waistcoats and his pointed shoes were always very highly polished. When my father was out and the coast all clear, Mr. Nairn used to talk about Girls. On such occasions he did not remind me of monks and ancient missals. Girls were his hobby; and especially the Girls of Islington, where he resided, the mainstay of a widowed mother. As long as he had his mother to keep he couldn't marry. So, failing that, he had become an incorrigible hunter.... I learnt most of his job; and bookkeeping, if you give your mind to it, is not so difficult as it appears.
Then there was Mr. Niederer, the managing-clerk and foreign correspondent. He was a German Swiss from Zürich, which accounted for his proficiency in foreign languages. He had studied these at school; he could write business letters in six; and would easily have managed several more had they been needed. I don't know that he could speak most of them or write anything else in most of them; but for business letters and foreign invoices he was invaluable. He was a very tall man, all legs and arms, with a small, thin body, and he reminded me of a praying mantis or a grasshopper. His diversion—for we all had our diversions—was to recite yards of German poetry; Schiller, Goethe, Heine, I could recognize. He'd sit up at his high desk on his high stool, wind his long legs about it, wave his long arms, and, in a deep voice that was most heartrending and unexpected, he would begin. Usually, he would end up on a groan and two lines from Schiller's "Bell":
"O, dass sie ewig gruenen bliebe Die schoene Zeit der Jungen Liebe!"
Which means, "Oh, that the beautiful days of young love might last forever!" I gathered that he had been jilted by a lady of his native city; and each time my eyes took in his long thin legs, his long thin arms, and narrow body, crowned with a large round head on a neck as long as a swan's, I wasn't surprised.... I learnt most of his job.
I leave my father to the end.
On mail-days he sat in his office and wrote; but on most other days, after he'd read and dealt with the morning's correspondence, he would put on his tall hat, change into his black coat, grasp his umbrella, and sally forth to buy. The "repeat" orders were dealt with in the office—one sent them out by post to the agents or the manufacturers; but when original orders came in, the customer relied on my father's judgment and experience. These never failed him; and if they had the customer would have been the last man to make a fuss about it. For in many ways my father's position seemed to be patriarchal, and most of his clients had a very real affection for him. Creoles, octoroons, half-castes, Spanish Jews whose ancestry had fled before the Inquisition, real Spaniards or real Portuguese,—he moved among them like a friend and very often like a father. He and his had known their parents and their grandparents, had spent long years in the tropical lands whence they were sprung, and he could speak all their languages and write all their languages far better than they could themselves. He had a gift that way, improved by study. I have it myself, but not in like degree.
With the spring, samples of these clients would arrive on almost every mail-boat; and my father took charge of them and led them round the City. At night he brought them home or carried them off to variety shows—they loved the Empire ballets and the Alhambra. Our English theaters they could not understand; but give them girls in tights and they were happy. By day they bought and placed their orders in the warehouses, lunched in the City restaurants, and listened to my father's stories. With them he was again "Don Ricardo," His years fell from him as he sat with them; and he was back again in his early days, when he had sailed the Caribbean, crossed the Isthmus, or worked in the store at Rio. He would tell of earthquakes and niggers, and hurricanes, and a tidal wave that had driven him into the hills; he would sing songs made in a patchwork dialect, picked up in Cuba or in Martinique. From him I caught a glimpse of the real West Indies; quite different from those Islands of the Blest where I had strayed with Eve.
We got on very well together while it lasted. He was astonished at my quickness and my interest. "How did you know that?" he used to say; for, as I have already remarked, the theory of his business was as a child's play to me, who had seen so much of other and more complicated affairs. You gave your customers six months' credit and charged them six per cent. per annum for it; you took a commission of five per cent. upon their purchases; and your manufacturers and agents and warehousemen gave you a private rebate of two and a half or three. So you turned the bulk of your capital over twice a year, and, allowing for bad debts, drew a dividend of about twenty per cent. on it. As my father had several times repeated, it was not a bad business. It was not by any means a bad business.
XIII
Eve and her mother and sister and one or two of the brothers did not come up to town "next month," as she had said they would. The house in Portman Square stood empty until June. I often passed it, longing and wondering; but at last Mrs. Drummond was ready and they moved South.
Through April and May there had been an interchange of letters. I wrote her all about my own affairs, which were mostly confined to what I have just told you. There was our home in St. John's Wood; there was the office; and the two little rooms that I lived in close to a terrace of shops. Not very exciting. And I was still managing with the balance of my Aunt Betty's legacy. There was a good deal of spending in that five hundred pounds—more than I had anticipated—and I suppose, also, it was because I had turned so respectable and nearly always dined at home and often took lunch in the City with my father. I really had no expenses worth mentioning, and my only extravagance was to send Eve a row of dusky gold topazes that matched her hair and a couple of other things which I thought would suit her.
Eve was far more occupied. She had visited friends, gone racing and chasing, played in theatricals, and was now taking up lawn-tennis "seriously"; and in the summer she was off to Switzerland to climb. Would I come with them? It would be such fun!
Poor me!—poor little me! I had to stick fast to business. "That old father of yours," she wrote; "if I ever see him, I'll wring his neck! Why doesn't he make you a partner?"
I explained to her that nobody had made him a partner till he had earned that distinction, and that he took the business far more seriously than we did. I told her about his tall hat and black coat and how particular he was, and that, in all probability he would regard her father—a Leviathan of commerce—as of the same order as himself, but entitled, if anything, to ten black coats and ten tall hats at once.
My father actually did look upon Drummond in some such super-respectful way. Once or twice he questioned me as to my prospects in that particular direction; and in June, when the Drummonds were really come to town and one day, after I had mentioned that I was dining with them and going on to the opera afterward, he spoke to me seriously and told me what was in his mind.
We had lunched together at the Wool Exchange place off Coleman Street, and as we sat a little over our cigars, "I'll tell you what," he began: "you're shaping well—far, far better than I'd expected. If you marry Miss Drummond, you can have the business and I'll get out. I'll let you have my money to run it with: I'll charge you eight per cent. for that, but the other ten or eleven will be enough to start on. Your mother and I began with less; and I dare say a girl like that'll have money of her own. You'd have two or three thousand a year as a beginning; that isn't so bad, is it? I don't think that Mr. Drummond himself would look upon you as a pauper; and, with more capital, the business might be extended. I think my clients would stick to you; they'd sooner do business with my son than go elsewhere. And I'm growing old," he said. "I've often felt that it was about time for me to retire. I'd thought of selling the business—I've had offers—but now you're here there'll be no need."
It all sounded very simple as he had put it; and, really, in his own peculiar way, my father was simple; perhaps more simple than he had any right to be in a pretty complex world.
I have already given you the image he had probably made of old Drummond; a replica of himself, I fancied, but very, very much enlarged. Gigantic, where he himself was merely respectable. Such figures had for him an almost religious significance. For these he had a respect, a deference, that sometimes surprised me. Of the great men in the City of London he would speak as I had been taught to speak of prophets, priests, and kings, though I don't know that he ever took any of these very seriously. Yet a merchant prince, a great banker, would be a manifestation of genius that roused him to the depths. And of Eve herself, so far but a shadow to him, he stood in something the same kind of awe. She might be of the like species as my sister, but so magnified as to be hardly recognizable; and I dare say he credited her with a due sense of her enormous responsibilities, her amazing opportunities; saw her rather starched and inaccessible, surrounded with her father's dignity, his great position, and all those rich accessories which are the material expression of so much power. Deep within him, I've no doubt that he was rather moved and shaken, even by the bare idea that a son of his might marry into such a stable. It was this emotion which had made him speak and now review my present and my past more leniently and even with some indulgence and some weakening. For, at that stage, he would not have minded my taking liberties and even absenting myself for hours at a time from Basinghall Street, did such a course harmonize with a more thorough prosecution of my courtship and help me to the winning of a daughter of the house of Drummond.
XIV
I took no liberties, however; indeed, I was rather strong on that point. Even with Eve in town and showering messages and invitations I had the courage to say, "No." It was my intention to play the game with my own father as well as with hers. She said I was an ass to show so much consideration; but there it was. Still, I did manage, one way or another, to see a good deal of the Drummonds, and, incidentally, of a side of London life that I had missed before. It made sad holes in the balance of my five hundred pounds; but it was worth it.
We had a row or two because I wouldn't chuck the office on a week-day, not even for Eton and Harrow, or Henley, or a day's racing at Ascot; and once or twice because I wouldn't sit up more than half the night. I had to be at my work by nine o'clock each morning, and sometimes at one or two I stole away and went to bed. I couldn't "sit out" on balconies till daybreak at people's dances and keep my end up at the office as well. And then there were my clothes. Clothes were a very important matter in her world. They were less so in mine. She showed no desire to make the acquaintance of my people; nor did I press her. Once on a Saturday we passed my mother and sister driving in the Park—they often hired a carriage to see the show—and Eve was merely curious about them.
"But don't you see I want to get you away from all of that?" she explained. "Why don't you go in for politics or something decent?"
This made me laugh; for, as you may imagine, I was never very much attracted by that game.
At the house, Mrs. Drummond smiled her invariable, benignant smile upon us, indulgent, kindly, gracious. There was the sister who regarded me as a curiosity and the brothers who had their own friends and their own time: they seemed able to do what they liked in it, and I imagine old Drummond was glad they stayed away. They wouldn't have been much use to him, in any case, and he had no sentiment on that subject. Him I never saw in London. He put down his money and stayed up in the North. With July over, Eve went out to Switzerland to "climb," and it had been agreed that on her return something definite might be said about our engagement. My mother had already departed to one of her foreign watering-places, taking my sister with her, and my father and I were left to ourselves in town.
"You'd better come and live at the house," he said, "and it's about time I paid you something for your trouble."
We didn't quarrel over that; and as the various clerks went on their holidays, a fortnight at a time, we were drawn pretty closely together, I doing all kinds of jobs—Mr. Niederer's and Mr. Nairn's, and even Lee's work down below in the packing-room. It made me in a mess, but one of us had to do it.
Eve found me there one day in early September when my father was out. She had just returned, looking brown and bonnie. She was passing through London and she had taken a hansom-cab to Basinghall Street. She wanted to speak to me very, very seriously.
"All right," said I, and led the way upstairs.
Mr. Niederer, Mr. Nairn, and the boy Carter were in the clerks' office. She gave them a look of disapproval.
"What do they talk about—the price of mutton?" she asked.
"Nothing so common," I answered, with a grin. "Mr. Niederer talks about German poetry—Goethe, Heine, Schiller; Mr. Nairn discusses Girls; and the boy goes on walking-tours and has picnics in the streets. He's rather a good performer on one roller-skate."
"They don't look like it," she said.
We were in the little room between the outer office and my father's room. It contained the desk I now occupied, a cabinet full of pigeon-holes where letters were stored away, and a couple of iron safes in which at six o'clock we locked up the firm's books and bills of exchange or any other valuables.
On my desk was a letter I had written in Spanish.
She paused there after I had told her that that was my place; and, "Muy Señor mio y omigo," she read aloud. "What does that mean?"
I told her. "'Dear Sir and friend,'" I translated it, "and we always end with kissing their hands," I added.
"Do you write that?" she asked.
"Among other things."
In my father's room I gave her the best chair. It was the one that clients used, while he remained seated at his roll-top desk. I took his place, sitting down in my shirt-sleeves as I was and a trifle grimy.
She looked round the room.
"He's got a nice carpet," she said; and then she rose to inspect the pictures that hung upon the walls.
These included two colored lithographs sent us by the steamship companies and three large faded photographs that had been here since the beginning. There was the big one in three pieces showing Rio harbor and the two smaller ones with members of my family grouped outside the Lima and the Rio stores.
"Shops?" she said; "I didn't know you were shopkeepers."
I pointed out my father, a beardless young man in a white duck suit, and my uncle and my grandfather and great-uncles—two of them had held some consular office as well. And there were clerks and colored people beside them, and the white glare of the house and the strong shadows, all faded; but I could see them in the mind's eye as we stood together.
"Humph," she said, not with any great enthusiasm.
Next she examined the stand that usually held my father's hats and coats and umbrellas. A panama hat and an alpaca jacket hung from it this morning; for in the summer he always came to the office in a panama hat which he put on again before leaving, and he did his work in the alpaca jacket and not in his wide black coat.
There were some samples of rice on a table and of Swiss embroideries and Nottingham laces and a couple of steel machetes.
"Is this what you sell?" she asked.
"It's what we buy," I answered; "the people out there sell it."
"My God, what a life!" she cried, and went back to her chair.
XV
In that old paneled room, the woodwork on its walls disguised with paint, we sat, I at my father's desk and she on her chair, and talked. The room had the faint smell of very old rooms in very old houses; its windows overlooked the courtyard and the windows of neighboring offices. There was not much sunlight here, nor very much air.
Eve looked a ridiculously fashionable young person, sitting there in a city office, a cigarette stuck in her mouth; and I suppose she was powdered a little and wasn't above displaying a very neat ankle. I wondered what Mr. Niederer thought and Mr. Nairn, who was so strong on Girls.
"I've come up about our engagement," she began; "I've been thinking it over."
I waited for her to continue, though first I rose and closed the door. I didn't shut it quite, but almost. We were more alone now.
"I've tried to stand all this," she pursued, "But I don't think we'd be happy. You don't really like this work, do you?"
"It's not a question of liking," I replied, "is it?"
"And you won't bolt?"
"No, I won't bolt," I answered.
"Father could give you a job."
"It'd be very much like this one."
"So we're cornered," said she; and then quite passionately, "I won't be the wife of any one like this: I've made up my mind!"
Now, that was rather a blow; and there was no answer to it.
"As you like," I said, rising.
"Then it's over!" she cried.
"That's for you to say."
"Well, I've said it."
"You don't think I've enjoyed this, exactly—sitting here from nine till six—do you?" I replied.
"Why should you go on?" she answered. "When we first met you were a man," she continued; "now—" and she looked the rest at me. It was quite enough. "Say you're glad," she pursued. "In your heart of hearts you must be glad!"
And, by Jove, I was! For there were two things going on inside me, the desire for her and the desire for my lost freedom.
"I know you are!" she cried. "What's the use of pretending?"
"Well, in some ways," I admitted.
"Then we're both glad! Let's be brave and finish with it," she added. "I couldn't stick it. I would, Fred, if I could!"
She was just a trifle beyond herself; or, shall we call it a trifle hysterical? For, after that, she rose too and faced me; and then she took my head between her hands and kissed me and kissed me once more and held me to her breast as though her heart would break.
She shook herself free at last, picked up her cigarette, and, after that, she laughed.
"I'm all right now," she cried; and, like the boy she was, "Tuck in your tuppenny!" she yelled, meaning that I should "make a back" for her. I did; and, light as a feather, she vaulted over.
"Now you!" she cried, and next it was my turn; and there we were, playing leap-frog round that confounded office, when my father came in and caught us.
His face—his dear old face!
He was in his tall hat, his black coat, and holding his silk umbrella. I was in my shirts sleeves and a trifle grimy, and Eve had her hat at the back of her head and half a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth— But there stood my father.
"Miss Drummond—" I began. But he never believed me.
"What right," he spluttered, "what right have you to bring your girls up here! If you want to see your girls, you see them outside!"
This was too much for Eve.
She glared at him.
But that made him all the worse.
He turned on his heel. "I'll be back in ten minutes," he cried, "and if she isn't gone by then I'll fetch the police." And, with that, he left us.
"By Jove!" cried Eve. It was a different reception from what she had expected. "Is that man your father?"
"Rather!" said I. "And you've done it—put the kybosh on—he'll never believe me. You were jumping when he came in. A Miss Drummond—daughter of the Drummond—of Drummond's! Do you think he'd believe that of you!"
She put her hat straight, threw her cigarette away, and asked me to take her downstairs to her hansom. It was still waiting in the yard.
"Friends?" she said at the last.
"Of course, kid," said I; and she drove off and I stood in the archway and watched her. So did my father.
He passed me and went through the yard and into the packing-room.
I followed.
"That was Miss Drummond—" I began.
"You seem to think I'm a damned fool," he answered slowly; and to the end of his days he never believed me.
Miss Drummond, to him, was always a correct young person with a chaperon. Nothing could ever change that belief and nothing ever did. And Eve, the real Eve, whom he had seen upstairs, flushed, playing leap-frog, her hat at the back of her head, and a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth, was just my "girl."
XVI
I didn't feel like rows or any further explanations; at least, not for the present. So I finished what I had to do, and when I'd cleaned up I put on my hat and said good-by to Basinghall Street. I knew it was over, that everything I'd hoped and planned in this direction was finished and done with. I had a premonition; and when I reached home that evening—I had dined by myself in a Soho restaurant—my father settled that question for good and all.
I found him waiting up for me when I came in.
"All this story you've told us about a Miss Drummond and you marrying her is a pack of lies," he began; "I always thought it was, from the very first. As though the father of a girl like that would let her marry a rogue like you!"
"You needn't worry your head on that score," I answered. "Good-night, Guv'nor."
I left him standing there and went up to my room. I didn't sleep much all that night; one never does on these occasions.
Next morning I packed my kit and went back to the little bedroom and sitting-room I had occupied in the house close to a terrace of shops. I was done with my family, done with everybody.
The servant girls seemed sorry for me and to know that there had been a row. My father was never very reticent on these occasions. I left a note for my sister—she and my mother were due back in a few days—and meanwhile I was free to do as I pleased in London. It's not a bad place to loaf in for a week. I filled my time quite pleasantly and very much like a foreign tourist; till Netta came round to my rooms in the early half of one morning, looking serious and sisterly and not quite sure.
"What have you done?" she asked, as soon as the woman of the house had gone out and left us. "Father's making a mystery of it—something shocking and horrible—and mother's on his side. And Bob—" this was young Carey-Holt—"doesn't seem to think that you've quite played the game."
"As far as I can see I'm about the only one who has played it," I answered dryly; and then I told her everything, from the beginning right down to the end, and finishing with, "The Guv'nor won't believe it; but how could you expect him to?"
'It is difficult to believe," she reflected; and then, "Are they like that—fast and false and heartless—girls who are really in society?"
"They've got a different way of looking at life; I suppose that explains it."
"But then she oughtn't to have begun it," answered Netta, seriously.
"Out there—on a ship—it's different from England. That's the whole point of it."
She had no answer to this; and I dare say it was a bit outside her range.
"Oh, I forgot," she said; "this came for you yesterday. It's one of the reasons why I've come round"; and she held out a small square package. It was addressed in Eve's large school-boy hand.
I broke the seals and opened it. She had packed it very carefully, and it had come by registered post from Scotland.
There was a note in an envelop:
       I've burnt your letters; burn mine, and if you like you can keep the photographs. I'm keeping yours. Here are your presents. It's usual to send them back. What fools we are!
Eve.
I thought Netta might care to see that, so I passed it across. And next I opened the case that held the dark-gold topazes which matched her hair. These were intact; but with them she had placed a second little note, like a motto in a Christmas cracker:
Unlike we are, unlike, O princely Heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies.
That was all. It struck me then that she was rather overdoing it, and even a bit theatrical. I put the paper aside and handed the case to Netta.
"Do you want these?" I asked.
She looked at them, was even attracted by them; but, "They're no use to me," she said; "I'm not that color."
"Why not take 'em back to the jeweler's and swap them for something else?"
"I'll do that," she said; and off we went together.
We lunched and had a gay afternoon. She was uncommonly decent; and when I took her back to the house, "It's no good coming in," she said. "Mother's against you; she'd believe anything, provided Father shouted. And he's been shouting. I suppose because he knows he's in the wrong."
I said good-by to her there; and next time we came together she was Mrs. Carey-Holt and had a baby. These rather changed her. She was a decent kid.
I went down to the bank next day, drew the balance of my five hundred pounds—it was more like five than a hundred—and then I wandered off to the docks and found a Dane I knew. He had a cargo-boat, the Perm, and its next trip was through the Kiel Canal to Russia. This was good enough.
Before I joined him I had a day or two to go, and I remember I looked in at the Zoo one afternoon, and somehow, I drifted off and found my friend the bison.
He was there, mangy as usual, alone, neglected, and something very like me.
I bought a bag of buns and handed them through to him.
He seemed surprised at this attention.
"Good-by, bison," I said. "I'm off now. The world hasn't much use for us, has it?" And as he chewed and grunted, "We were too strong, too primitive, too simple," I said; "and Eve's father and that fellow on the ship who'd been smashed up were right. Eh, boy? And that's the long and the short of it."
XVII
Vignolles was finished. I remember then that I looked up, expecting more from him; for I hadn't quite realized that he was finished. And when no more came:
"Eve Damer—she's your Eve Drummond?" I asked.
"Yes, she married Damer, who's in politics. She's got what she really wanted; and she's made him go a pretty long way. I've bumped into them once or twice, and she's always cordial. I'm no use to her. But—women! Yes, that's Eve Damer right enough. I wonder why she keeps it up."