Chapter V…

Chapter V

“I have a thousand men,” said he, “To wait upon my will, And towers nine upon the Tyne, And three upon the Till.”

“And what care I for you men,” said she, “Or towers from Tyne to Till, “Sith you must go with me,” she said, “To wait upon my will?” --Sir Hoggie and the Fairies

Next morning Torpenhow found Dick sunk in deepest repose of tobacco.

“Well, madman, how d'you feel?”

“I don't know. I'm trying to find out.”

“You had much better do some work.”

“Maybe; but I'm in no hurry. I've made a discovery. Torp, there's too much Ego in my Cosmos.”

“Not really! Is this revelation due to my lectures, or the Nilghai's?”

“It came to me suddenly, all on my own account. Much too much Ego; and now I'm going to work.”

He turned over a few half-finished sketches, drummed on a new canvas, cleaned three brushes, set Binkie to bite the toes of the lay figure, rattled through his collection of arms and accoutrements, and then went out abruptly, declaring that he had done enough for the day.

“This is positively indecent,” said Torpenhow, “and the first time that Dick has ever broken up a light morning. Perhaps he has found out that he has a soul, or an artistic temperament, or something equally valuable. That comes of leaving him alone for a month. Perhaps he has been going out of evenings. I must look to this.” He rang for the bald-headed old housekeeper, whom nothing could astonish or annoy.

“Beeton, did Mr. Heldar dine out at all while I was out of town?”

“Never laid 'is dress-clothes out once, sir, all the time. Mostly 'e dined in; but 'e brought some most remarkable young gentlemen up 'ere after theatres once or twice. Remarkable fancy they was. You gentlemen on the top floor does very much as you likes, but it do seem to me, sir, droppin' a walkin'-stick down five flights o' stairs an' then goin' down four abreast to pick it up again at half-past two in the mornin', singin' 'Bring back the whiskey, Willie darlin','--not once or twice, but scores o' times,--isn't charity to the other tenants. What I say is, 'Do as you would be done by.' That's my motto.”

“Of course! of course! I'm afraid the top floor isn't the quietest in the house.”

“I make no complaints, sir. I have spoke to Mr. Heldar friendly, an' he laughed, an' did me a picture of the missis that is as good as a coloured print. It 'asn't the high shine of a photograph, but what I say is, 'Never look a gift-horse in the mouth.' Mr. Heldar's dress-clothes 'aven't been on him for weeks.”

“Then it's all right,” said Torpenhow to himself. “Orgies are healthy, and Dick has a head of his own, but when it comes to women making eyes I'm not so certain,--Binkie, never you be a man, little dorglums. They're contrary brutes, and they do things without any reason.”

Dick had turned northward across the Park, but he was walking in the spirit on the mud-flats with Maisie. He laughed aloud as he remembered the day when he had decked Amomma's horns with the ham-frills, and Maisie, white with rage, had cuffed him. How long those four years seemed in review, and how closely Maisie was connected with every hour of them! Storm across the sea, and Maisie in a gray dress on the beach, sweeping her drenched hair out of her eyes and laughing at the homeward race of the fishing-smacks; hot sunshine on the mud-flats, and Maisie sniffing scornfully, with her chin in the air; Maisie flying before the wind that threshed the foreshore and drove the sand like small shot about her ears; Maisie, very composed and independent, telling lies to Mrs. Jennett while Dick supported her with coarser perjuries; Maisie picking her way delicately from stone to stone, a pistol in her hand and her teeth firm-set; and Maisie in a gray dress sitting on the grass between the mouth of a cannon and a nodding yellow sea-poppy. The pictures passed before him one by one, and the last stayed the longest.

Dick was perfectly happy with a quiet peace that was as new to his mind as it was foreign to his experiences. It never occurred to him that there might be other calls upon his time than loafing across the Park in the forenoon.

“There's a good working light now,” he said, watching his shadow placidly. “Some poor devil ought to be grateful for this. And there's Maisie.”

She was walking towards him from the Marble Arch, and he saw that no mannerism of her gait had been changed. It was good to find her still Maisie, and, so to speak, his next-door neighbour. No greeting passed between them, because there had been none in the old days.

“What are you doing out of your studio at this hour?” said Dick, as one who was entitled to ask.

“Idling. Just idling. I got angry with a chin and scraped it out. Then I left it in a little heap of paint-chips and came away.”

“I know what palette-knifing means. What was the piccy?”

“A fancy head that wouldn't come right,--horrid thing!”

“I don't like working over scraped paint when I'm doing flesh. The grain comes up woolly as the paint dries.”

“Not if you scrape properly.” Maisie waved her hand to illustrate her methods. There was a dab of paint on the white cuff. Dick laughed.

“You're as untidy as ever.”

“That comes well from you. Look at your own cuff.”

“By Jove, yes! It's worse than yours. I don't think we've much altered in anything. Let's see, though.” He looked at Maisie critically. The pale blue haze of an autumn day crept between the tree-trunks of the Park and made a background for the gray dress, the black velvet toque above the black hair, and the resolute profile.

“No, there's nothing changed. How good it is! D'you remember when I fastened your hair into the snap of a hand-bag?”

Maisie nodded, with a twinkle in her eyes, and turned her full face to Dick.

“Wait a minute,” said he. “That mouth is down at the corners a little. Who's been worrying you, Maisie?”

“No one but myself. I never seem to get on with my work, and yet I try hard enough, and Kami says----”

“'Continuez, mesdemoiselles. Continuez toujours, mes enfants.' Kami is depressing. I beg your pardon.”

“Yes, that's what he says. He told me last summer that I was doing better and he'd let me exhibit this year.”

“Not in this place, surely?”

“Of course not. The Salon.”

“You fly high.”

“I've been beating my wings long enough. Where do you exhibit, Dick?”

“I don't exhibit. I sell.”

“What is your line, then?”

“Haven't you heard?” Dick's eyes opened. Was this thing possible? He cast about for some means of conviction. They were not far from the Marble Arch. “Come up Oxford Street a little and I'll show you.”

A small knot of people stood round a print-shop that Dick knew well.

“Some reproduction of my work inside,” he said, with suppressed triumph. Never before had success tasted so sweet upon the tongue. “You see the sort of things I paint. D'you like it?”

Maisie looked at the wild whirling rush of a field-battery going into action under fire. Two artillery-men stood behind her in the crowd.

“They've chucked the off lead-'orse” said one to the other. “'E's tore up awful, but they're makin' good time with the others. That lead-driver drives better nor you, Tom. See 'ow cunnin' 'e's nursin' 'is 'orse.”

“Number Three'll be off the limber, next jolt,” was the answer.

“No, 'e won't. See 'ow 'is foot's braced against the iron? 'E's all right.”

Dick watched Maisie's face and swelled with joy--fine, rank, vulgar triumph. She was more interested in the little crowd than in the picture.

That was something that she could understand.

“And I wanted it so! Oh, I did want it so!” she said at last, under her breath.

“Me,--all me!” said Dick, placidly. “Look at their faces. It hits 'em. They don't know what makes their eyes and mouths open; but I know. And I know my work's right.”

“Yes. I see. Oh, what a thing to have come to one!”

“Come to one, indeed! I had to go out and look for it. What do you think?”

“I call it success. Tell me how you got it.”

They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman.

From the beginning he told the tale, the I--I--I's flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a hair's-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, “And that gave me some notion of handling colour,” or light, or whatever it might be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless across half the world, speaking as he had never spoken in his life before.

And in the flood-tide of his exaltation there came upon him a great desire to pick up this maiden who nodded her head and said, “I understand. Go on,”--to pick her up and carry her away with him, because she was Maisie, and because she understood, and because she was his right, and a woman to be desired above all women.

Then he checked himself abruptly. “And so I took all I wanted,” he said, “and I had to fight for it. Now you tell.”

Maisie's tale was almost as gray as her dress. It covered years of patient toil backed by savage pride that would not be broken though dealers laughed, and fogs delayed work, and Kami was unkind and even sarcastic, and girls in other studios were painfully polite. It had a few bright spots, in pictures accepted at provincial exhibitions, but it wound up with the oft repeated wail, “And so you see, Dick, I had no success, though I worked so hard.”

Then pity filled Dick. Even thus had Maisie spoken when she could not hit the breakwater, half an hour before she had kissed him. And that had happened yesterday.

“Never mind,” he said. “I'll tell you something, if you'll believe it.” The words were shaping themselves of their own accord. “The whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel, isn't worth one big yellow sea-poppy below Fort Keeling.”

Maisie flushed a little. “It's all very well for you to talk, but you've had the success and I haven't.”

“Let me talk, then. I know you'll understand. Maisie, dear, it sounds a bit absurd, but those ten years never existed, and I've come back again. It really is just the same. Can't you see? You're alone now and I'm alone. What's the use of worrying? Come to me instead, darling.”

Maisie poked the gravel with her parasol. They were sitting on a bench.

“I understand,” she said slowly. “But I've got my work to do, and I must do it.”

“Do it with me, then, dear. I won't interrupt.”

“No, I couldn't. It's my work,--mine,--mine,--mine! I've been alone all my life in myself, and I'm not going to belong to anybody except myself. I remember things as well as you do, but that doesn't count. We were babies then, and we didn't know what was before us. Dick, don't be selfish. I think I see my way to a little success next year. Don't take it away from me.”

“I beg your pardon, darling. It's my fault for speaking stupidly. I can't expect you to throw up all your life just because I'm back. I'll go to my own place and wait a little.”

“But, Dick, I don't want you to--go--out of--my life, now you've just come back.”

“I'm at your orders; forgive me.” Dick devoured the troubled little face with his eyes. There was triumph in them, because he could not conceive that Maisie should refuse sooner or later to love him, since he loved her.

“It's wrong of me,” said Maisie, more slowly than before; “it's wrong and selfish; but, oh, I've been so lonely! No, you misunderstand. Now I've seen you again,--it's absurd, but I want to keep you in my life.”

“Naturally. We belong.”

“We don't; but you always understood me, and there is so much in my work that you could help me in. You know things and the ways of doing things. You must.”

“I do, I fancy, or else I don't know myself. Then you won't care to lose sight of me altogether, and--you want me to help you in your work?”

“Yes; but remember, Dick, nothing will ever come of it. That's why I feel so selfish. Can't things stay as they are? I do want your help.”

“You shall have it. But let's consider. I must see your pics first, and overhaul your sketches, and find out about your tendencies. You should see what the papers say about my tendencies! Then I'll give you good advice, and you shall paint according. Isn't that it, Maisie?”

Again there was triumph in Dick's eye.

“It's too good of you,--much too good. Because you are consoling yourself with what will never happen, and I know that, and yet I want to keep you. Don't blame me later, please.”

“I'm going into the matter with my eyes open. Moreover the Queen can do no wrong. It isn't your selfishness that impresses me. It's your audacity in proposing to make use of me.”

“Pooh! You're only Dick,--and a print-shop.”

“Very good: that's all I am. But, Maisie, you believe, don't you, that I love you? I don't want you to have any false notions about brothers and sisters.”

Maisie looked up for a moment and dropped her eyes.

“It's absurd, but--I believe. I wish I could send you away before you get angry with me. But--but the girl that lives with me is red-haired, and an impressionist, and all our notions clash.”

“So do ours, I think. Never mind. Three months from today we shall be laughing at this together.”

Maisie shook her head mournfully. “I knew you wouldn't understand, and it will only hurt you more when you find out. Look at my face, Dick, and tell me what you see.”

They stood up and faced each other for a moment. The fog was gathering, and it stifled the roar of the traffic of London beyond the railings. Dick brought all his painfully acquired knowledge of faces to bear on the eyes, mouth, and chin underneath the black velvet toque.

“It's the same Maisie, and it's the same me,” he said. “We've both nice little wills of our own, and one or other of us has to be broken. Now about the future. I must come and see your pictures some day,--I suppose when the red-haired girl is on the premises.”

“Sundays are my best times. You must come on Sundays. There are such heaps of things I want to talk about and ask your advice about. Now I must get back to work.”

“Try to find out before next Sunday what I am,” said Dick. “Don't take my word for anything I've told you. Good-bye, darling, and bless you.”

Maisie stole away like a little gray mouse. Dick watched her till she was out of sight, but he did not hear her say to herself, very soberly, “I'm a wretch,--a horrid, selfish wretch. But it's Dick, and Dick will understand.”

No one has yet explained what actually happens when an irresistible force meets the immovable post, though many have thought deeply, even as Dick thought. He tried to assure himself that Maisie would be led in a few weeks by his mere presence and discourse to a better way of thinking. Then he remembered much too distinctly her face and all that was written on it.

“If I know anything of heads,” he said, “there's everything in that face but love. I shall have to put that in myself; and that chin and mouth won't be won for nothing. But she's right. She knows what she wants, and she's going to get it. What insolence! Me! Of all the people in the wide world, to use me! But then she's Maisie. There's no getting over that fact; and it's good to see her again. This business must have been simmering at the back of my head for years.... She'll use me as I used Binat at Port Said. She's quite right. It will hurt a little. I shall have to see her every Sunday,--like a young man courting a housemaid. She's sure to come around; and yet--that mouth isn't a yielding mouth. I shall be wanting to kiss her all the time, and I shall have to look at her pictures,--I don't even know what sort of work she does yet,--and I shall have to talk about Art,--Woman's Art! Therefore, particularly and perpetually, damn all varieties of Art. It did me a good turn once, and now it's in my way. I'll go home and do some Art.”

Half-way to the studio, Dick was smitten with a terrible thought. The figure of a solitary woman in the fog suggested it.

“She's all alone in London, with a red-haired impressionist girl, who probably has the digestion of an ostrich. Most red-haired people have. Maisie's a bilious little body. They'll eat like lone women,--meals at all hours, and tea with all meals. I remember how the students in Paris used to pig along. She may fall ill at any minute, and I shan't be able to help. Whew! this is ten times worse than owning a wife.”

Torpenhow entered the studio at dusk, and looked at Dick with eyes full of the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged at the same oar together and are yoked by custom and use and the intimacies of toil. This is a good love, and, since it allows, and even encourages, strife, recrimination, and brutal sincerity, does not die, but grows, and is proof against any absence and evil conduct.

Dick was silent after he handed Torpenhow the filled pipe of council. He thought of Maisie and her possible needs. It was a new thing to think of anybody but Torpenhow, who could think for himself. Here at last was an outlet for that cash balance. He could adorn Maisie barbarically with jewelry,--a thick gold necklace round that little neck, bracelets upon the rounded arms, and rings of price upon her hands,--the cool, temperate, ringless hands that he had taken between his own. It was an absurd thought, for Maisie would not even allow him to put one ring on one finger, and she would laugh at golden trappings. It would be better to sit with her quietly in the dusk, his arm around her neck and her face on his shoulder, as befitted husband and wife. Torpenhow's boots creaked that night, and his strong voice jarred. Dick's brows contracted and he murmured an evil word because he had taken all his success as a right and part payment for past discomfort, and now he was checked in his stride by a woman who admitted all the success and did not instantly care for him.

“I say, old man,” said Torpenhow, who had made one or two vain attempts at conversation, “I haven't put your back up by anything I've said lately, have I?”

“You! No. How could you?”

“Liver out of order?”

“The truly healthy man doesn't know he has a liver. I'm only a bit worried about things in general. I suppose it's my soul.”

“The truly healthy man doesn't know he has a soul. What business have you with luxuries of that kind?”

“It came of itself. Who's the man that says that we're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding?”

“He's right, whoever he is,--except about the misunderstanding. I don't think we could misunderstand each other.”

The blue smoke curled back from the ceiling in clouds. Then Torpenhow, insinuatingly--“Dick, is it a woman?”

“Be hanged if it's anything remotely resembling a woman; and if you begin to talk like that, I'll hire a red-brick studio with white paint trimmings, and begonias and petunias and blue Hungarias to play among three-and-sixpenny pot-palms, and I'll mount all my pics in aniline-dye plush plasters, and I'll invite every woman who maunders over what her guide-books tell her is Art, and you shall receive 'em, Torp,--in a snuff-brown velvet coat with yellow trousers and an orange tie. You'll like that?”

“Too thin, Dick. A better man than you once denied with cursing and swearing. You've overdone it, just as he did. It's no business of mine, of course, but it's comforting to think that somewhere under the stars there's saving up for you a tremendous thrashing. Whether it'll come from heaven or earth, I don't know, but it's bound to come and break you up a little. You want hammering.”

Dick shivered. “All right,” said he. “When this island is disintegrated, it will call for you.”

“I shall come round the corner and help to disintegrate it some more. We're talking nonsense. Come along to a theatre.”

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Chapter VI

“And you may lead a thousand men, Nor ever draw the rein, But ere ye lead the Faery Queen 'Twill burst your heart in twain.”

He has slipped his foot from the stirrup-bar, The bridle from his hand, And he is bound by hand and foot To the Queen 'o Faery-land. ----Sir Hoggie and the Fairies.

Some weeks later, on a very foggy Sunday, Dick was returning across the Park to his studio. “This,” he said, “is evidently the thrashing that Torp meant. It hurts more than I expected; but the Queen can do no wrong; and she certainly has some notion of drawing.”

He had just finished a Sunday visit to Maisie,--always under the green eyes of the red-haired impressionist girl, whom he learned to hate at sight,--and was tingling with a keen sense of shame. Sunday after Sunday, putting on his best clothes, he had walked over to the untidy house north of the Park, first to see Maisie's pictures, and then to criticise and advise upon them as he realised that they were productions on which advice would not be wasted. Sunday after Sunday, and his love grew with each visit, he had been compelled to cram his heart back from between his lips when it prompted him to kiss Maisie several times and very much indeed. Sunday after Sunday, the head above the heart had warned him that Maisie was not yet attainable, and that it would be better to talk as connectedly as possible upon the mysteries of the craft that was all in all to her. Therefore it was his fate to endure weekly torture in the studio built out over the clammy back garden of a frail stuffy little villa where nothing was ever in its right place and nobody every called,--to endure and to watch Maisie moving to and fro with the teacups. He abhorred tea, but, since it gave him a little longer time in her presence, he drank it devoutly, and the red-haired girl sat in an untidy heap and eyed him without speaking. She was always watching him.

Once, and only once, when she had left the studio, Maisie showed him an album that held a few poor cuttings from provincial papers,--the briefest of hurried notes on some of her pictures sent to outlying exhibitions. Dick stooped and kissed the paint-smudged thumb on the open page. “Oh, my love, my love,” he muttered, “do you value these things? Chuck 'em into the waste-paper basket!”

“Not till I get something better,” said Maisie, shutting the book.

Then Dick, moved by no respect for his public and a very deep regard for the maiden, did deliberately propose, in order to secure more of these coveted cuttings, that he should paint a picture which Maisie should sign.

“That's childish,” said Maisie, “and I didn't think it of you. It must be my work. Mine,--mine,--mine!”

“Go and design decorative medallions for rich brewers' houses. You are thoroughly good at that.” Dick was sick and savage.

“Better things than medallions, Dick,” was the answer, in tones that recalled a gray-eyed atom's fearless speech to Mrs. Jennett. Dick would have abased himself utterly, but that other girl trailed in.

Next Sunday he laid at Maisie's feet small gifts of pencils that could almost draw of themselves and colours in whose permanence he believed, and he was ostentatiously attentive to the work in hand. It demanded, among other things, an exposition of the faith that was in him.

Torpenhow's hair would have stood on end had he heard the fluency with which Dick preached his own gospel of Art.

A month before, Dick would have been equally astonished; but it was Maisie's will and pleasure, and he dragged his words together to make plain to her comprehension all that had been hidden to himself of the whys and wherefores of work. There is not the least difficulty in doing a thing if you only know how to do it; the trouble is to explain your method.

“I could put this right if I had a brush in my hand,” said Dick, despairingly, over the modelling of a chin that Maisie complained would not “look flesh,”--it was the same chin that she had scraped out with the palette knife,--“but I find it almost impossible to teach you. There's a queer grim Dutch touch about your painting that I like; but I've a notion that you're weak in drawing. You foreshorten as though you never used the model, and you've caught Kami's pasty way of dealing with flesh in shadow. Then, again, though you don't know it yourself, you shirk hard work. Suppose you spend some of your time on line lone. Line doesn't allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of flashy, tricky stuff in the corner of a pic sometimes carry a bad thing off,--as I know. That's immoral. Do line-work for a little while, and then I can tell more about your powers, as old Kami used to say.”

Maisie protested; she did not care for the pure line.

“I know,” said Dick. “You want to do your fancy heads with a bunch of flowers at the base of the neck to hide bad modelling.” The red-haired girl laughed a little. “You want to do landscapes with cattle knee-deep in grass to hide bad drawing. You want to do a great deal more than you can do. You have sense of colour, but you want form. Colour's a gift,--put it aside and think no more about it,--but form you can be drilled into. Now, all your fancy heads--and some of them are very good--will keep you exactly where you are. With line you must go forward or backward, and it will show up all your weaknesses.”

“But other people----” began Maisie.

“You mustn't mind what other people do. If their souls were your soul, it would be different. You stand and fall by your own work, remember, and it's waste of time to think of any one else in this battle.”

Dick paused, and the longing that had been so resolutely put away came back into his eyes. He looked at Maisie, and the look asked as plainly as words, Was it not time to leave all this barren wilderness of canvas and counsel and join hands with Life and Love? Maisie assented to the new programme of schooling so adorably that Dick could hardly restrain himself from picking her up then and there and carrying her off to the nearest registrar's office. It was the implicit obedience to the spoken word and the blank indifference to the unspoken desire that baffled and buffeted his soul. He held authority in that house,--authority limited, indeed, to one-half of one afternoon in seven, but very real while it lasted. Maisie had learned to appeal to him on many subjects, from the proper packing of pictures to the condition of a smoky chimney. The red-haired girl never consulted him about anything.

On the other hand, she accepted his appearances without protest, and watched him always. He discovered that the meals of the establishment were irregular and fragmentary. They depended chiefly on tea, pickles, and biscuit, as he had suspected from the beginning. The girls were supposed to market week and week about, but they lived, with the help of a charwoman, as casually as the young ravens. Maisie spent most of her income on models, and the other girl revelled in apparatus as refined as her work was rough. Armed with knowledge, dear-bought from the Docks, Dick warned Maisie that the end of semi-starvation meant the crippling of power to work, which was considerably worse than death.

Maisie took the warning, and gave more thought to what she ate and drank. When his trouble returned upon him, as it generally did in the long winter twilights, the remembrance of that little act of domestic authority and his coercion with a hearth-brush of the smoky drawing-room chimney stung Dick like a whip-lash.

He conceived that this memory would be the extreme of his sufferings, till one Sunday, the red-haired girl announced that she would make a study of Dick's head, and that he would be good enough to sit still, and--quite as an afterthought--look at Maisie. He sat, because he could not well refuse, and for the space of half an hour he reflected on all the people in the past whom he had laid open for the purposes of his own craft. He remembered Binat most distinctly,--that Binat who had once been an artist and talked about degradation.

It was the merest monochrome roughing in of a head, but it presented the dumb waiting, the longing, and, above all, the hopeless enslavement of the man, in a spirit of bitter mockery.

“I'll buy it,” said Dick, promptly, “at your own price.”

“My price is too high, but I dare say you'll be as grateful if----” The wet sketch, fluttered from the girl's hand and fell into the ashes of the studio stove. When she picked it up it was hopelessly smudged.

“Oh, it's all spoiled!” said Maisie. “And I never saw it. Was it like?”

“Thank you,” said Dick under his breath to the red-haired girl, and he removed himself swiftly.

“How that man hates me!” said the girl. “And how he loves you, Maisie!”

“What nonsense? I knew Dick's very fond of me, but he had his work to do, and I have mine.”

“Yes, he is fond of you, and I think he knows there is something in impressionism, after all. Maisie, can't you see?”

“See? See what?”

“Nothing; only, I know that if I could get any man to look at me as that man looks at you, I'd--I don't know what I'd do. But he hates me. Oh, how he hates me!”

She was not altogether correct. Dick's hatred was tempered with gratitude for a few moments, and then he forgot the girl entirely. Only the sense of shame remained, and he was nursing it across the Park in the fog. “There'll be an explosion one of these days,” he said wrathfully. “But it isn't Maisie's fault; she's right, quite right, as far as she knows, and I can't blame her. This business has been going on for three months nearly. Three months!--and it cost me ten years” knocking about to get at the notion, the merest raw notion, of my work. That's true; but then I didn't have pins, drawing-pins, and palette-knives, stuck into me every Sunday.

“Oh, my little darling, if ever I break you, somebody will have a very bad time of it. No, she won't. I'd be as big a fool about her as I am now. I'll poison that red-haired girl on my wedding-day,--she's unwholesome,--and now I'll pass on these present bad times to Torp.”

Torpenhow had been moved to lecture Dick more than once lately on the sin of levity, and Dick and listened and replied not a word. In the weeks between the first few Sundays of his discipline he had flung himself savagely into his work, resolved that Maisie should at least know the full stretch of his powers. Then he had taught Maisie that she must not pay the least attention to any work outside her own, and Maisie had obeyed him all too well. She took his counsels, but was not interested in his pictures.

“Your things smell of tobacco and blood,” she said once. “Can't you do anything except soldiers?”

“I could do a head of you that would startle you,” thought Dick,--this was before the red-haired girl had brought him under the guillotine,--but he only said, “I am very sorry,” and harrowed Torpenhow's soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later, insensibly and to a large extent against his own will, he ceased to interest himself in his own work.

For Maisie's sake, and to soothe the self-respect that it seemed to him he lost each Sunday, he would not consciously turn out bad stuff, but, since Maisie did not care even for his best, it were better not to do anything at all save wait and mark time between Sunday and Sunday. Torpenhow was disgusted as the weeks went by fruitless, and then attacked him one Sunday evening when Dick felt utterly exhausted after three hours' biting self-restraint in Maisie's presence. There was Language, and Torpenhow withdrew to consult the Nilghai, who had come it to talk continental politics.

“Bone-idle, is he? Careless, and touched in the temper?” said the Nilghai. “It isn't worth worrying over. Dick is probably playing the fool with a woman.”

“Isn't that bad enough?”

“No. She may throw him out of gear and knock his work to pieces for a while. She may even turn up here some day and make a scene on the staircase: one never knows. But until Dick speaks of his own accord you had better not touch him. He is no easy-tempered man to handle.”

“No; I wish he were. He is such an aggressive, cocksure, you-be-damned fellow.”

“He'll get that knocked out of him in time. He must learn that he can't storm up and down the world with a box of moist tubes and a slick brush. You're fond of him?”

“I'd take any punishment that's in store for him if I could; but the worst of it is, no man can save his brother.”

“No, and the worser of it is, there is no discharge in this war. Dick must learn his lesson like the rest of us. Talking of war, there'll be trouble in the Balkans in the spring.”

“That trouble is long coming. I wonder if we could drag Dick out there when it comes off?”

Dick entered the room soon afterwards, and the question was put to him.

“Not good enough,” he said shortly. “I'm too comf'y where I am.”

“Surely you aren't taking all the stuff in the papers seriously?” said the Nilghai. “Your vogue will be ended in less than six months,--the public will know your touch and go on to something new,--and where will you be then?”

“Here, in England.”

“When you might be doing decent work among us out there? Nonsense! I shall go, the Keneu will be there, Torp will be there, Cassavetti will be there, and the whole lot of us will be there, and we shall have as much as ever we can do, with unlimited fighting and the chance for you of seeing things that would make the reputation of three Verestchagins.”

“Um!” said Dick, pulling at his pipe.

“You prefer to stay here and imagine that all the world is gaping at your pictures? Just think how full an average man's life is of his own pursuits and pleasures. When twenty thousand of him find time to look up between mouthfuls and grunt something about something they aren't the least interested in, the net result is called fame, reputation, or notoriety, according to the taste and fancy of the speller my lord.”

“I know that as well as you do. Give me credit for a little gumption.”

“Be hanged if I do!”

“Be hanged, then; you probably will be,--for a spy, by excited Turks. Heigh-ho! I'm weary, dead weary, and virtue has gone out of me.” Dick dropped into a chair, and was fast asleep in a minute.

“That's a bad sign,” said the Nilghai, in an undertone.

Torpenhow picked the pipe from the waistcoat where it was beginning to burn, and put a pillow behind the head. “We can't help; we can't help,” he said. “It's a good ugly sort of old cocoanut, and I'm fond of it. There's the scar of the wipe he got when he was cut over in the square.”

“Shouldn't wonder if that has made him a trifle mad.”

“I should. He's a most businesslike madman.”

Then Dick began to snore furiously.

“Oh, here, no affection can stand this sort of thing. Wake up, Dick, and go and sleep somewhere else, if you intend to make a noise about it.”

“When a cat has been out on the tiles all night,” said the Nilghai, in his beard, “I notice that she usually sleeps all day. This is natural history.”

Dick staggered away rubbing his eyes and yawning. In the night-watches he was overtaken with an idea, so simple and so luminous that he wondered he had never conceived it before. It was full of craft. He would seek Maisie on a week-day,--would suggest an excursion, and would take her by train to Fort Keeling, over the very ground that they two had trodden together ten years ago.

“As a general rule,” he explained to his chin-lathered reflection in the morning, “it isn't safe to cross an old trail twice. Things remind one of things, and a cold wind gets up, and you feel sad; but this is an exception to every rule that ever was. I'll go to Maisie at once.”

Fortunately, the red-haired girl was out shopping when he arrived, and Maisie in a paint-spattered blouse was warring with her canvas. She was not pleased to see him; for week-day visits were a stretch of the bond; and it needed all his courage to explain his errand.

“I know you've been working too hard,” he concluded, with an air of authority. “If you do that, you'll break down. You had much better come.”

“Where?” said Maisie, wearily. She had been standing before her easel too long, and was very tired.

“Anywhere you please. We'll take a train tomorrow and see where it stops. We'll have lunch somewhere, and I'll bring you back in the evening.”

“If there's a good working light tomorrow, I lose a day.” Maisie balanced the heavy white chestnut palette irresolutely.

Dick bit back an oath that was hurrying to his lips. He had not yet learned patience with the maiden to whom her work was all in all.

“You'll lose ever so many more, dear, if you use every hour of working light. Overwork's only murderous idleness. Don't be unreasonable. I'll call for you tomorrow after breakfast early.”

“But surely you are going to ask----”

“No, I am not. I want you and nobody else. Besides, she hates me as much as I hate her. She won't care to come. Tomorrow, then; and pray that we get sunshine.”

Dick went away delighted, and by consequence did no work whatever.

He strangled a wild desire to order a special train, but bought a great gray kangaroo cloak lined with glossy black marten, and then retired into himself to consider things.

“I'm going out for the day tomorrow with Dick,” said Maisie to the red-haired girl when the latter returned, tired, from marketing in the Edgware road.

“He deserves it. I shall have the studio floor thoroughly scrubbed while you're away. It's very dirty.”

Maisie had enjoyed no sort of holiday for months and looked forward to the little excitement, but not without misgivings.

“There's nobody nicer than Dick when he talks sensibly,” she thought, “but I'm sure he'll be silly and worry me, and I'm sure I can't tell him anything he'd like to hear. If he'd only be sensible, I should like him so much better.”

Dick's eyes were full of joy when he made his appearance next morning and saw Maisie, gray-ulstered and black-velvet-hatted, standing in the hallway. Palaces of marble, and not sordid imitation of grained wood, were surely the fittest background for such a divinity. The red-haired girl drew her into the studio for a moment and kissed her hurriedly.

Maisie's eyebrows climbed to the top of her forehead; she was altogether unused to these demonstrations. “Mind my hat,” she said, hurrying away, and ran down the steps to Dick waiting by the hansom.

“Are you quite warm enough! Are you sure you wouldn't like some more breakfast? Put the cloak over your knees.”

“I'm quite comf'y, thanks. Where are we going, Dick? Oh, do stop singing like that. People will think we're mad.”

“Let 'em think,--if the exertion doesn't kill them. They don't know who we are, and I'm sure I don't care who they are. My faith, Maisie, you're looking lovely!”

Maisie stared directly in front of her and did not reply. The wind of a keen clear winter morning had put colour into her cheeks. Overhead, the creamy-yellow smoke-clouds were thinning away one by one against a pale-blue sky, and the improvident sparrows broke off from water-spout committees and cab-rank cabals to clamour of the coming of spring.

“It will be lovely weather in the country,” said Dick.

“But where are we going?”

“Wait and see.”

The stopped at Victoria, and Dick sought tickets. For less than half the fraction of an instant it occurred to Maisie, comfortably settled by the waiting-room fire, that it was much more pleasant to send a man to the booking-office than to elbow one's own way through the crowd. Dick put her into a Pullman,--solely on account of the warmth there; and she regarded the extravagance with grave scandalised eyes as the train moved out into the country.

“I wish I knew where we are going,” she repeated for the twentieth time.

The name of a well-remembered station flashed by, towards the end of the run, and Maisie was delighted.

“Oh, Dick, you villain!”

“Well, I thought you might like to see the place again. You haven't been here since the old times, have you?”

“No. I never cared to see Mrs. Jennett again; and she was all that was ever there.”

“Not quite. Look out a minute. There's the windmill above the potato-fields; they haven't built villas there yet; d'you remember when I shut you up in it?”

“Yes. How she beat you for it! I never told it was you.”

“She guessed. I jammed a stick under the door and told you that I was burying Amomma alive in the potatoes, and you believed me. You had a trusting nature in those days.”

They laughed and leaned to look out, identifying ancient landmarks with many reminiscences. Dick fixed his weather eye on the curve of Maisie's cheek, very near his own, and watched the blood rise under the clear skin. He congratulated himself upon his cunning, and looked that the evening would bring him a great reward.

When the train stopped they went out to look at an old town with new eyes. First, but from a distance, they regarded the house of Mrs. Jennett.

“Suppose she should come out now, what would you do?” said Dick, with mock terror.

“I should make a face.”

“Show, then,” said Dick, dropping into the speech of childhood.

Maisie made that face in the direction of the mean little villa, and Dick laughed.

“'This is disgraceful,'” said Maisie, mimicking Mrs. Jennett's tone. “'Maisie, you run in at once, and learn the collect, gospel, and epistle for the next three Sundays. After all I've taught you, too, and three helps every Sunday at dinner! Dick's always leading you into mischief. If you aren't a gentleman, Dick, you might at least...'”

The sentence ended abruptly. Maisie remembered when it had last been used.

“'Try to behave like one,'” said Dick, promptly. “Quite right. Now we'll get some lunch and go on to Fort Keeling,--unless you'd rather drive there?”

“We must walk, out of respect to the place. How little changed it all is!”

They turned in the direction of the sea through unaltered streets, and the influence of old things lay upon them. Presently they passed a confectioner's shop much considered in the days when their joint pocket-money amounted to a shilling a week.

“Dick, have you any pennies?” said Maisie, half to herself.

“Only three; and if you think you're going to have two of 'em to buy peppermints with, you're wrong. She says peppermints aren't ladylike.”

Again they laughed, and again the colour came into Maisie's cheeks as the blood boiled through Dick's heart. After a large lunch they went down to the beach and to Fort Keeling across the waste, wind-bitten land that no builder had thought it worth his while to defile. The winter breeze came in from the sea and sang about their ears.

“Maisie,” said Dick, “your nose is getting a crude Prussian blue at the tip. I'll race you as far as you please for as much as you please.”

She looked round cautiously, and with a laugh set off, swiftly as the ulster allowed, till she was out of breath.

“We used to run miles,” she panted. “It's absurd that we can't run now.”

“Old age, dear. This it is to get fat and sleek in town. When I wished to pull your hair you generally ran for three miles, shrieking at the top of your voice. I ought to know, because those shrieks of yours were meant to call up Mrs. Jennett with a cane and----”

“Dick, I never got you a beating on purpose in my life.”

“No, of course you never did. Good heavens! look at the sea.”

“Why, it's the same as ever!” said Maisie.

Torpenhow had gathered from Mr. Beeton that Dick, properly dressed and shaved, had left the house at half-past eight in the morning with a travelling-rug over his arm. The Nilghai rolled in at mid-day for chess and polite conversation.

“It's worse than anything I imagined,” said Torpenhow.

“Oh, the everlasting Dick, I suppose! You fuss over him like a hen with one chick. Let him run riot if he thinks it'll amuse him. You can whip a young pup off feather, but you can't whip a young man.”

“It isn't a woman. It's one woman; and it's a girl.”

“Where's your proof?”

“He got up and went out at eight this morning,--got up in the middle of the night, by Jove! a thing he never does except when he's on service. Even then, remember, we had to kick him out of his blankets before the fight began at El-Maghrib. It's disgusting.”

“It looks odd; but maybe he's decided to buy a horse at last. He might get up for that, mightn't he?”

“Buy a blazing wheelbarrow! He'd have told us if there was a horse in the wind. It's a girl.”

“Don't be certain. Perhaps it's only a married woman.”

“Dick has some sense of humour, if you haven't. Who gets up in the gray dawn to call on another man's wife? It's a girl.”

“Let it be a girl, then. She may teach him that there's somebody else in the world besides himself.”

“She'll spoil his hand. She'll waste his time, and she'll marry him, and ruin his work for ever. He'll be a respectable married man before we can stop him, and--he'll ever go on the long trail again.”

“All quite possible, but the earth won't spin the other way when that happens.... No! ho! I'd give something to see Dick 'go wooing with the boys.' Don't worry about it. These things be with Allah, and we can only look on. Get the chessmen.”

The red-haired girl was lying down in her own room, staring at the ceiling. The footsteps of people on the pavement sounded, as they grew indistinct in the distance, like a many-times-repeated kiss that was all one long kiss. Her hands were by her side, and they opened and shut savagely from time to time.

The charwoman in charge of the scrubbing of the studio knocked at her door: “Beg y' pardon, miss, but in cleanin' of a floor there's two, not to say three, kind of soap, which is yaller, an' mottled, an' disinfectink. Now, jist before I took my pail into the passage I though it would be pre'aps jest as well if I was to come up 'ere an' ask you what sort of soap you was wishful that I should use on them boards. The yaller soap, miss----”

There was nothing in the speech to have caused the paroxysm of fury that drove the red-haired girl into the middle of the room, almost shouting--“Do you suppose I care what you use? Any kind will do!--any kind!”

The woman fled, and the red-haired girl looked at her own reflection in the glass for an instant and covered her face with her hands. It was as though she had shouted some shameless secret aloud.

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Chapter VII

Roses red and roses white Plucked I for my love's delight.

She would none of all my posies,-- Bade me gather her blue roses.

Half the world I wandered through, Seeking where such flowers grew; Half the world unto my quest Answered but with laugh and jest.

It may be beyond the grave She shall find what she would have.

Mine was but an idle quest,-- Roses white and red are best! ----Blue Roses

Indeed the sea had not changed. Its waters were low on the mud-banks, and the Marazion Bell-buoy clanked and swung in the tide-way. On the white beach-sand dried stumps of sea-poppy shivered and chattered.

“I don't see the old breakwater,” said Maisie, under her breath.

“Let's be thankful that we have as much as we have. I don't believe they've mounted a single new gun on the fort since we were here. Come and look.”

They came to the glacis of Fort Keeling, and sat down in a nook sheltered from the wind under the tarred throat of a forty-pounder cannon.

“Now, if Ammoma were only here!” said Maisie.

For a long time both were silent. Then Dick took Maisie's hand and called her by her name.

She shook her head and looked out to sea.

“Maisie, darling, doesn't it make any difference?”

“No!” between clenched teeth. “I'd--I'd tell you if it did; but it doesn't. Oh, Dick, please be sensible.”

“Don't you think that it ever will?”

“No, I'm sure it won't.”

“Why?”

Maisie rested her chin on her hand, and, still regarding the sea, spoke hurriedly--“I know what you want perfectly well, but I can't give it to you, Dick. It isn't my fault; indeed, it isn't. If I felt that I could care for any one----But I don't feel that I care. I simply don't understand what the feeling means.”

“Is that true, dear?”

“You've been very good to me, Dickie; and the only way I can pay you back is by speaking the truth. I daren't tell a fib. I despise myself quite enough as it is.”

“What in the world for?”

“Because--because I take everything that you give me and I give you nothing in return. It's mean and selfish of me, and whenever I think of it it worries me.”

“Understand once for all, then, that I can manage my own affairs, and if I choose to do anything you aren't to blame. You haven't a single thing to reproach yourself with, darling.”

“Yes, I have, and talking only makes it worse.”

“Then don't talk about it.”

“How can I help myself? If you find me alone for a minute you are always talking about it; and when you aren't you look it. You don't know how I despise myself sometimes.”

“Great goodness!” said Dick, nearly jumping to his feet. “Speak the truth now, Maisie, if you never speak it again! Do I--does this worrying bore you?”

“No. It does not.”

“You'd tell me if it did?”

“I should let you know, I think.”

“Thank you. The other thing is fatal. But you must learn to forgive a man when he's in love. He's always a nuisance. You must have known that?”

Maisie did not consider the last question worth answering, and Dick was forced to repeat it.

“There were other men, of course. They always worried just when I was in the middle of my work, and wanted me to listen to them.”

“Did you listen?”

“At first; and they couldn't understand why I didn't care. And they used to praise my pictures; and I thought they meant it. I used to be proud of the praise, and tell Kami, and--I shall never forget--once Kami laughed at me.”

“You don't like being laughed at, Maisie, do you?”

“I hate it. I never laugh at other people unless--unless they do bad work. Dick, tell me honestly what you think of my pictures generally,--of everything of mine that you've seen.”

“'Honest, honest, and honest over!'” quoted Dick from a catchword of long ago. “Tell me what Kami always says.”

Maisie hesitated. “He--he says that there is feeling in them.”

“How dare you tell me a fib like that? Remember, I was under Kami for two years. I know exactly what he says.”

“It isn't a fib.”

“It's worse; it's a half-truth. Kami says, when he puts his head on one side,--so, 'Il y a du sentiment, mais il n'y a pas de parti pris.'” He rolled the r threateningly, as Kami used to do.

“Yes, that is what he says; and I'm beginning to think that he is right.”

“Certainly he is.” Dick admitted that two people in the world could do and say no wrong. Kami was the man.

“And now you say the same thing. It's so disheartening.”

“I'm sorry, but you asked me to speak the truth. Besides, I love you too much to pretend about your work. It's strong, it's patient sometimes,--not always,--and sometimes there's power in it, but there's no special reason why it should be done at all. At least, that's how it strikes me.”

“There's no special reason why anything in the world should ever be done. You know that as well as I do. I only want success.”

“You're going the wrong way to get it, then. Hasn't Kami ever told you so?”

“Don't quote Kami to me. I want to know what you think. My work's bad, to begin with.”

“I didn't say that, and I don't think it.”

“It's amateurish, then.”

“That it most certainly is not. You're a work-woman, darling, to your boot-heels, and I respect you for that.”

“You don't laugh at me behind my back?”

“No, dear. You see, you are more to me than any one else. Put this cloak thing round you, or you'll get chilled.”

Maisie wrapped herself in the soft marten skins, turning the gray kangaroo fur to the outside. “This is delicious,” she said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully along the fur.

“Well? Why am I wrong in trying to get a little success?”

“Just because you try. Don't you understand, darling? Good work has nothing to do with--doesn't belong to--the person who does it. It's put into him or her from outside.”

“But how does that affect----”

“Wait a minute. All we can do is to learn how to do our work, to be masters of our materials instead of servants, and never to be afraid of anything.”

“I understand that.”

“Everything else comes from outside ourselves. Very good. If we sit down quietly to work out notions that are sent to us, we may or we may not do something that isn't bad. A great deal depends on being master of the bricks and mortar of the trade. But the instant we begin to think about success and the effect of our work--to play with one eye on the gallery--we lose power and touch and everything else. At least that's how I have found it. Instead of being quiet and giving every power you possess to your work, you're fretting over something which you can neither help no hinder by a minute. See?”

“It's so easy for you to talk in that way. People like what you do. Don't you ever think about the gallery?”

“Much too often; but I'm always punished for it by loss of power. It's as simple as the Rule of Three. If we make light of our work by using it for our own ends, our work will make light of us, and, as we're the weaker, we shall suffer.”

“I don't treat my work lightly. You know that it's everything to me.”

“Of course; but, whether you realise it or not, you give two strokes for yourself to one for your work. It isn't your fault, darling. I do exactly the same thing, and know that I'm doing it. Most of the French schools, and all the schools here, drive the students to work for their own credit, and for the sake of their pride. I was told that all the world was interested in my work, and everybody at Kami's talked turpentine, and I honestly believed that the world needed elevating and influencing, and all manner of impertinences, by my brushes. By Jove, I actually believed that! When my little head was bursting with a notion that I couldn't handle because I hadn't sufficient knowledge of my craft, I used to run about wondering at my own magnificence and getting ready to astonish the world.”

“But surely one can do that sometimes?”

“Very seldom with malice aforethought, darling. And when it's done it's such a tiny thing, and the world's so big, and all but a millionth part of it doesn't care. Maisie, come with me and I'll show you something of the size of the world. One can no more avoid working than eating,--that goes on by itself,--but try to see what you are working for. I know such little heavens that I could take you to,--islands tucked away under the Line. You sight them after weeks of crashing through water as black as black marble because it's so deep, and you sit in the fore-chains day after day and see the sun rise almost afraid because the sea's so lonely.”

“Who is afraid?--you, or the sun?”

“The sun, of course. And there are noises under the sea, and sounds overhead in a clear sky. Then you find your island alive with hot moist orchids that make mouths at you and can do everything except talk. There's a waterfall in it three hundred feet high, just like a sliver of green jade laced with silver; and millions of wild bees live up in the rocks; and you can hear the fat cocoanuts falling from the palms; and you order an ivory-white servant to sling you a long yellow hammock with tassels on it like ripe maize, and you put up your feet and hear the bees hum and the water fall till you go to sleep.”

“Can one work there?”

“Certainly. One must do something always. You hang your canvas up in a palm tree and let the parrots criticise. When the scuffle you heave a ripe custard-apple at them, and it bursts in a lather of cream. There are hundreds of places. Come and see them.”

“I don't quite like that place. It sounds lazy. Tell me another.”

“What do you think of a big, red, dead city built of red sandstone, with raw green aloes growing between the stones, lying out neglected on honey-coloured sands? There are forty dead kings there, Maisie, each in a gorgeous tomb finer than all the others. You look at the palaces and streets and shops and tanks, and think that men must live there, till you find a wee gray squirrel rubbing its nose all alone in the market-place, and a jewelled peacock struts out of a carved doorway and spreads its tail against a marble screen as fine pierced as point-lace. Then a monkey--a little black monkey--walks through the main square to get a drink from a tank forty feet deep. He slides down the creepers to the water's edge, and a friend holds him by the tail, in case he should fall in.”

“Is that all true?”

“I have been there and seen. Then evening comes, and the lights change till it's just as though you stood in the heart of a king-opal. A little before sundown, as punctually as clockwork, a big bristly wild boar, with all his family following, trots through the city gate, churning the foam on his tusks. You climb on the shoulder of a blind black stone god and watch that pig choose himself a palace for the night and stump in wagging his tail. Then the night-wind gets up, and the sands move, and you hear the desert outside the city singing, 'Now I lay me down to sleep,' and everything is dark till the moon rises. Maisie, darling, come with me and see what the world is really like. It's very lovely, and it's very horrible,--but I won't let you see anything horrid,--and it doesn't care your life or mine for pictures or anything else except doing its own work and making love. Come, and I'll show you how to brew sangaree, and sling a hammock, and--oh, thousands of things, and you'll see for yourself what colour means, and we'll find out together what love means, and then, maybe, we shall be allowed to do some good work. Come away!”

“Why?” said Maisie.

“How can you do anything until you have seen everything, or as much as you can? And besides, darling, I love you. Come along with me. You have no business here; you don't belong to this place; you're half a gipsy,--your face tells that; and I--even the smell of open water makes me restless. Come across the sea and be happy!”

He had risen to his feet, and stood in the shadow of the gun, looking down at the girl. The very short winter afternoon had worn away, and, before they knew, the winter moon was walking the untroubled sea. Long ruled lines of silver showed where a ripple of the rising tide was turning over the mud-banks. The wind had dropped, and in the intense stillness they could hear a donkey cropping the frosty grass many yards away. A faint beating, like that of a muffled drum, came out of the moon-haze.

“What's that?” said Maisie, quickly. “It sounds like a heart beating. Where is it?”

Dick was so angry at this sudden wrench to his pleadings that he could not trust himself to speak, and in this silence caught the sound. Maisie from her seat under the gun watched him with a certain amount of fear.

She wished so much that he would be sensible and cease to worry her with over-sea emotion that she both could and could not understand. She was not prepared, however, for the change in his face as he listened.

“It's a steamer,” he said,--“a twin-screw steamer, by the beat. I can't make her out, but she must be standing very close inshore. Ah!” as the red of a rocket streaked the haze, “she's standing in to signal before she clears the Channel.”

“Is it a wreck?” said Maisie, to whom these words were as Greek.

Dick's eyes were turned to the sea. “Wreck! What nonsense! She's only reporting herself. Red rocket forward--there's a green light aft now, and two red rockets from the bridge.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's the signal of the Cross Keys Line running to Australia. I wonder which steamer it is.” The note of his voice had changed; he seemed to be talking to himself, and Maisie did not approve of it. The moonlight broke the haze for a moment, touching the black sides of a long steamer working down Channel. “Four masts and three funnels--she's in deep draught, too. That must be the Barralong, or the Bhutia. No, the Bhutia has a clipper bow. It's the Barralong, to Australia. She'll lift the Southern Cross in a week,--lucky old tub!--oh, lucky old tub!”

He stared intently, and moved up the slope of the fort to get a better view, but the mist on the sea thickened again, and the beating of the screws grew fainter. Maisie called to him a little angrily, and he returned, still keeping his eyes to seaward. “Have you ever seen the Southern Cross blazing right over your head?” he asked. “It's superb!”

“No,” she said shortly, “and I don't want to. If you think it's so lovely, why don't you go and see it yourself?”

She raised her face from the soft blackness of the marten skins about her throat, and her eyes shone like diamonds. The moonlight on the gray kangaroo fur turned it to frosted silver of the coldest.

“By Jove, Maisie, you look like a little heathen idol tucked up there.” The eyes showed that they did not appreciate the compliment. “I'm sorry,” he continued. “The Southern Cross isn't worth looking at unless someone helps you to see. That steamer's out of hearing.”

“Dick,” she said quietly, “suppose I were to come to you now,--be quiet a minute,--just as I am, and caring for you just as much as I do.”

“Not as a brother, though. You said you didn't--in the Park.”

“I never had a brother. Suppose I said, 'Take me to those places, and in time, perhaps, I might really care for you,' what would you do?”

“Send you straight back to where you came from, in a cab. No, I wouldn't; I'd let you walk. But you couldn't do it, dear. And I wouldn't run the risk. You're worth waiting for till you can come without reservation.”

“Do you honestly believe that?”

“I have a hazy sort of idea that I do. Has it never struck you in that light?”

“Ye--es. I feel so wicked about it.”

“Wickeder than usual?”

“You don't know all I think. It's almost too awful to tell.”

“Never mind. You promised to tell me the truth--at least.”

“It's so ungrateful of me, but--but, though I know you care for me, and I like to have you with me, I'd--I'd even sacrifice you, if that would bring me what I want.”

“My poor little darling! I know that state of mind. It doesn't lead to good work.”

“You aren't angry? Remember, I do despise myself.”

“I'm not exactly flattered,--I had guessed as much before,--but I'm not angry. I'm sorry for you. Surely you ought to have left a littleness like that behind you, years ago.”

“You've no right to patronise me! I only want what I have worked for so long. It came to you without any trouble, and--and I don't think it's fair.”

“What can I do? I'd give ten years of my life to get you what you want. But I can't help you; even I can't help.”

A murmur of dissent from Maisie. He went on--“And I know by what you have just said that you're on the wrong road to success. It isn't got at by sacrificing other people,--I've had that much knocked into me; you must sacrifice yourself, and live under orders, and never think for yourself, and never have real satisfaction in your work except just at the beginning, when you're reaching out after a notion.”

“How can you believe all that?”

“There's no question of belief or disbelief. That's the law, and you take it or refuse it as you please. I try to obey, but I can't, and then my work turns bad on my hands. Under any circumstances, remember, four-fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.”

“Isn't it nice to get credit even for bad work?”

“It's much too nice. But----May I tell you something? It isn't a pretty tale, but you're so like a man that I forget when I'm talking to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Once when I was out in the Soudan I went over some ground that we had been fighting on for three days. There were twelve hundred dead; and we hadn't time to bury them.”

“How ghastly!”

“I had been at work on a big double-sheet sketch, and I was wondering what people would think of it at home. The sight of that field taught me a good deal. It looked just like a bed of horrible toadstools in all colours, and--I'd never seen men in bulk go back to their beginnings before. So I began to understand that men and women were only material to work with, and that what they said or did was of no consequence. See? Strictly speaking, you might just as well put your ear down to the palette to catch what your colours are saying.”

“Dick, that's disgraceful!”

“Wait a minute. I said, strictly speaking. Unfortunately, everybody must be either a man or a woman.”

“I'm glad you allow that much.”

“In your case I don't. You aren't a woman. But ordinary people, Maisie, must behave and work as such. That's what makes me so savage.” He hurled a pebble towards the sea as he spoke. “I know that it is outside my business to care what people say; I can see that it spoils my output if I listen to 'em; and yet, confound it all,”--another pebble flew seaward,--“I can't help purring when I'm rubbed the right way. Even when I can see on a man's forehead that he is lying his way through a clump of pretty speeches, those lies make me happy and play the mischief with my hand.”

“And when he doesn't say pretty things?”

“Then, belovedest,”--Dick grinned,--“I forget that I am the steward of these gifts, and I want to make that man love and appreciate my work with a thick stick. It's too humiliating altogether; but I suppose even if one were an angel and painted humans altogether from outside, one would lose in touch what one gained in grip.”

Maisie laughed at the idea of Dick as an angel.

“But you seem to think,” she said, “that everything nice spoils your hand.”

“I don't think. It's the law,--just the same as it was at Mrs. Jennett's. Everything that is nice does spoil your hand. I'm glad you see so clearly.”

“I don't like the view.”

“Nor I. But--have got orders: what can do? Are you strong enough to face it alone?”

“I suppose I must.”

“Let me help, darling. We can hold each other very tight and try to walk straight. We shall blunder horribly, but it will be better than stumbling apart. Maisie, can't you see reason?”

“I don't think we should get on together. We should be two of a trade, so we should never agree.”

“How I should like to meet the man who made that proverb! He lived in a cave and ate raw bear, I fancy. I'd make him chew his own arrow-heads. Well?”

“I should be only half married to you. I should worry and fuss about my work, as I do now. Four days out of the seven I'm not fit to speak to.”

“You talk as if no one else in the world had ever used a brush. D'you suppose that I don't know the feeling of worry and bother and can't-get-at-ness? You're lucky if you only have it four days out of the seven. What difference would that make?”

“A great deal--if you had it too.”

“Yes, but I could respect it. Another man might not. He might laugh at you. But there's no use talking about it. If you can think in that way you can't care for me--yet.”

The tide had nearly covered the mud-banks and twenty little ripples broke on the beach before Maisie chose to speak.

“Dick,” she said slowly, “I believe very much that you are better than I am.”

“This doesn't seem to bear on the argument--but in what way?”

“I don't quite know, but in what you said about work and things; and then you're so patient. Yes, you're better than I am.”

Dick considered rapidly the murkiness of an average man's life. There was nothing in the review to fill him with a sense of virtue. He lifted the hem of the cloak to his lips.

“Why,” said Maisie, making as though she had not noticed, “can you see things that I can't? I don't believe what you believe; but you're right, I believe.”

“If I've seen anything, God knows I couldn't have seen it but for you, and I know that I couldn't have said it except to you. You seemed to make everything clear for a minute; but I don't practice what I preach. You would help me... There are only us two in the world for all purposes, and--and you like to have me with you?”

“Of course I do. I wonder if you can realise how utterly lonely I am!”

“Darling, I think I can.”

“Two years ago, when I first took the little house, I used to walk up and down the back-garden trying to cry. I never can cry. Can you?”

“It's some time since I tried. What was the trouble? Overwork?”

“I don't know; but I used to dream that I had broken down, and had no money, and was starving in London. I thought about it all day, and it frightened me--oh, how it frightened me!”

“I know that fear. It's the most terrible of all. It wakes me up in the night sometimes. You oughtn't to know anything about it.”

“How do you know?”

“Never mind. Is your three hundred a year safe?”

“It's in Consols.”

“Very well. If any one comes to you and recommends a better investment,--even if I should come to you,--don't you listen. Never shift the money for a minute, and never lend a penny of it,--even to the red-haired girl.”

“Don't scold me so! I'm not likely to be foolish.”

“The earth is full of men who'd sell their souls for three hundred a year; and women come and talk, and borrow a five-pound note here and a ten-pound note there; and a woman has no conscience in a money debt. Stick to your money, Maisie, for there's nothing more ghastly in the world than poverty in London. It's scared me. By Jove, it put the fear into me! And one oughtn't to be afraid of anything.”

To each man is appointed his particular dread,--the terror that, if he does not fight against it, must cow him even to the loss of his manhood. Dick's experience of the sordid misery of want had entered into the deeps of him, and, lest he might find virtue too easy, that memory stood behind him, tempting to shame, when dealers came to buy his wares. As the Nilghai quaked against his will at the still green water of a lake or a mill-dam, as Torpenhow flinched before any white arm that could cut or stab and loathed himself for flinching, Dick feared the poverty he had once tasted half in jest. His burden was heavier than the burdens of his companions.

Maisie watched the face working in the moonlight.

“You've plenty of pennies now,” she said soothingly.

“I shall never have enough,” he began, with vicious emphasis. Then, laughing, “I shall always be three-pence short in my accounts.”

“Why threepence?”

“I carried a man's bag once from Liverpool Street Station to Blackfriar's Bridge. It was a sixpenny job,--you needn't laugh; indeed it was,--and I wanted the money desperately. He only gave me threepence; and he hadn't even the decency to pay in silver. Whatever money I make, I shall never get that odd threepence out of the world.”

This was not language befitting the man who had preached of the sanctity of work. It jarred on Maisie, who preferred her payment in applause, which, since all men desire it, must be of the right. She hunted for her little purse and gravely took out a threepenny bit.

“There it is,” she said. “I'll pay you, Dickie; and don't worry any more; it isn't worth while. Are you paid?”

“I am,” said the very human apostle of fair craft, taking the coin. “I'm paid a thousand times, and we'll close that account. It shall live on my watch-chain; and you're an angel, Maisie.”

“I'm very cramped, and I'm feeling a little cold. Good gracious! the cloak is all white, and so is your moustache! I never knew it was so chilly.”

A light frost lay white on the shoulder of Dick's ulster. He, too, had forgotten the state of the weather. They laughed together, and with that laugh ended all serious discourse.

They ran inland across the waste to warm themselves, then turned to look at the glory of the full tide under the moonlight and the intense black shadows of the furze bushes. It was an additional joy to Dick that Maisie could see colour even as he saw it,--could see the blue in the white of the mist, the violet that is in gray palings, and all things else as they are,--not of one hue, but a thousand. And the moonlight came into Maisie's soul, so that she, usually reserved, chattered of herself and of the things she took interest in,--of Kami, wisest of teachers, and of the girls in the studio,--of the Poles, who will kill themselves with overwork if they are not checked; of the French, who talk at great length of much more than they will ever accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil hopelessly and cannot understand that inclination does not imply power; of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell the girls ghost-stories till the girls shriek; of stolid Germans, who come to learn one thing, and, having mastered that much, stolidly go away and copy pictures for evermore. Dick listened enraptured because it was Maisie who spoke. He knew the old life.

“It hasn't changed much,” he said. “Do they still steal colours at lunch-time?”

“Not steal. Attract is the word. Of course they do. I'm good--I only attract ultramarine; but there are students who'd attract flake-white.”

“I've done it myself. You can't help it when the palettes are hung up. Every colour is common property once it runs down,--even though you do start it with a drop of oil. It teaches people not to waste their tubes.”

“I should like to attract some of your colours, Dick. Perhaps I might catch your success with them.”

“I mustn't say a bad word, but I should like to. What in the world, which you've just missed a lovely chance of seeing, does success or want of success, or a three-storied success, matter compared with----No, I won't open that question again. It's time to go back to town.”

“I'm sorry, Dick, but----”

“You're much more interested in that than you are in me.”

“I don't know, I don't think I am.”

“What will you give me if I tell you a sure short-cut to everything you want,--the trouble and the fuss and the tangle and all the rest? Will you promise to obey me?”

“Of course.”

“In the first place, you must never forget a meal because you happen to be at work. You forgot your lunch twice last week,” said Dick, at a venture, for he knew with whom he was dealing.

“No, no,--only once, really.”

“That's bad enough. And you mustn't take a cup of tea and a biscuit in place of a regular dinner, because dinner happens to be a trouble.”

“You're making fun of me!”

“I never was more in earnest in my life. Oh, my love, my love, hasn't it dawned on you yet what you are to me? Here's the whole earth in a conspiracy to give you a chill, or run over you, or drench you to the skin, or cheat you out of your money, or let you die of overwork and underfeeding, and I haven't the mere right to look after you. Why, I don't even know if you have sense enough to put on warm things when the weather's cold.”

“Dick, you're the most awful boy to talk to--really! How do you suppose I managed when you were away?”

“I wasn't here, and I didn't know. But now I'm back I'd give everything I have for the right of telling you to come in out of the rain.”

“Your success too?”

This time it cost Dick a severe struggle to refrain from bad words.

“As Mrs. Jennett used to say, you're a trial, Maisie! You've been cooped up in the schools too long, and you think every one is looking at you. There aren't twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don't care. Remember, I've seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It's only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn't care a tinker's--doesn't care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of his own.”

“Poor Maisie!”

“Poor Dick, I think. Do you believe while he's fighting for what's dearer than his life he wants to look at a picture? And even if he did, and if all the world did, and a thousand million people rose up and shouted hymns to my honour and glory, would that make up to me for the knowledge that you were out shopping in the Edgware Road on a rainy day without an umbrella? Now we'll go to the station.”

“But you said on the beach----” persisted Maisie, with a certain fear.

Dick groaned aloud: “Yes, I know what I said. My work is everything I have, or am, or hope to be, to me, and I believe I've learnt the law that governs it; but I've some lingering sense of fun left,--though you've nearly knocked it out of me. I can just see that it isn't everything to all the world. Do what I say, and not what I do.”

Maisie was careful not to reopen debatable matters, and they returned to London joyously. The terminus stopped Dick in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the beauties of exercise. He would buy Maisie a horse,--such a horse as never yet bowed head to bit,--would stable it, with a companion, some twenty miles from London, and Maisie, solely for her health's sake should ride with him twice or thrice a week.

“That's absurd,” said she. “It wouldn't be proper.”

“Now, who in all London tonight would have sufficient interest or audacity to call us two to account for anything we chose to do?”

Maisie looked at the lamps, the fog, and the hideous turmoil. Dick was right; but horseflesh did not make for Art as she understood it.

“You're very nice sometimes, but you're very foolish more times. I'm not going to let you give me horses, or take you out of your way tonight. I'll go home by myself. Only I want you to promise me something. You won't think any more about that extra threepence, will you? Remember, you've been paid; and I won't allow you to be spiteful and do bad work for a little thing like that. You can be so big that you mustn't be tiny.”

This was turning the tables with a vengeance. There remained only to put Maisie into her hansom.

“Goodbye,” she said simply. “You'll come on Sunday. It has been a beautiful day, Dick. Why can't it be like this always?”

“Because love's like line-work: you must go forward or backward; you can't stand still. By the way, go on with your line-work. Good night, and, for my--for my sake, take care of yourself.”

He turned to walk home, meditating. The day had brought him nothing that he hoped for, but--surely this was worth many days--it had brought him nearer to Maisie. The end was only a question of time now, and the prize well worth the waiting. By instinct, once more, he turned to the river.

“And she understood at once,” he said, looking at the water. “She found out my pet besetting sin on the spot, and paid it off. My God, how she understood! And she said I was better than she was! Better than she was!” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. “I wonder if girls guess at one-half a man's life. They can't, or--they wouldn't marry us.” He took her gift out of his pocket, and considered it in the light of a miracle and a pledge of the comprehension that, one day, would lead to perfect happiness. Meantime, Maisie was alone in London, with none to save her from danger. And the packed wilderness was very full of danger.

Dick made his prayer to Fate disjointedly after the manner of the heathen as he threw the piece of silver into the river. If any evil were to befal, let him bear the burden and let Maisie go unscathed, since the threepenny piece was dearest to him of all his possessions. It was a small coin in itself, but Maisie had given it, and the Thames held it, and surely the Fates would be bribed for this once.

The drowning of the coin seemed to cut him free from thought of Maisie for the moment. He took himself off the bridge and went whistling to his chambers with a strong yearning for some man-talk and tobacco after his first experience of an entire day spent in the society of a woman. There was a stronger desire at his heart when there rose before him an unsolicited vision of the Barralong dipping deep and sailing free for the Southern Cross.

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Chapter VIII

And these two, as I have told you, Were the friends of Hiawatha, Chibiabos, the musician, And the very strong man, Kwasind. --Hiawatha

Torpenhow was paging the last sheets of some manuscript, while the Nilghai, who had come for chess and remained to talk tactics, was reading through the first part, commenting scornfully the while.

“It's picturesque enough and it's sketchy,” said he; “but as a serious consideration of affairs in Eastern Europe, it's not worth much.”

“It's off my hands at any rate.... Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine slips altogether, aren't there? That should make between eleven and twelve pages of valuable misinformation. Heigh-ho!” Torpenhow shuffled the writing together and hummed--

'Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell, If I'd as much money as I could tell, I never would cry, Young lambs to sell!'”

Dick entered, self-conscious and a little defiant, but in the best of tempers with all the world.

“Back at last?” said Torpenhow.

“More or less. What have you been doing?”

“Work. Dickie, you behave as though the Bank of England were behind you. Here's Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday gone and you haven't done a line. It's scandalous.”

“The notions come and go, my children--they come and go like our 'baccy,” he answered, filling his pipe. “Moreover,” he stooped to thrust a spill into the grate, “Apollo does not always stretch his----Oh, confound your clumsy jests, Nilghai!”

“This is not the place to preach the theory of direct inspiration,” said the Nilghai, returning Torpenhow's large and workmanlike bellows to their nail on the wall. “We believe in cobblers' wax. La!--where you sit down.”

“If you weren't so big and fat,” said Dick, looking round for a weapon, “I'd----”

“No skylarking in my rooms. You two smashed half my furniture last time you threw the cushions about. You might have the decency to say How d'you do? to Binkie. Look at him.”

Binkie had jumped down from the sofa and was fawning round Dick's knee, and scratching at his boots.

“Dear man!” said Dick, snatching him up, and kissing him on the black patch above his right eye. “Did ums was, Binks? Did that ugly Nilghai turn you off the sofa? Bite him, Mr. Binkie.” He pitched him on the Nilghai's stomach, as the big man lay at ease, and Binkie pretended to destroy the Nilghai inch by inch, till a sofa cushion extinguished him, and panting he stuck out his tongue at the company.

“The Binkie-boy went for a walk this morning before you were up, Torp. I saw him making love to the butcher at the corner when the shutters were being taken down--just as if he hadn't enough to eat in his own proper house,” said Dick.

“Binks, is that a true bill?” said Torpenhow, severely. The little dog retreated under the sofa cushion, and showed by the fat white back of him that he really had no further interest in the discussion.

“Strikes me that another disreputable dog went for a walk, too,” said the Nilghai. “What made you get up so early? Torp said you might be buying a horse.”

“He knows it would need three of us for a serious business like that. No, I felt lonesome and unhappy, so I went out to look at the sea, and watch the pretty ships go by.”

“Where did you go?”

“Somewhere on the Channel. Progly or Snigly, or some watering-place was its name; I've forgotten; but it was only two hours' run from London and the ships went by.”

“Did you see anything you knew?”

“Only the Barralong outwards to Australia, and an Odessa grain-boat loaded down by the head. It was a thick day, but the sea smelt good.”

“Wherefore put on one's best trousers to see the Barralong?” said Torpenhow, pointing.

“Because I've nothing except these things and my painting duds. Besides, I wanted to do honour to the sea.”

“Did She make you feel restless?” asked the Nilghai, keenly.

“Crazy. Don't speak of it. I'm sorry I went.”

Torpenhow and the Nilghai exchanged a look as Dick, stooping, busied himself among the former's boots and trees.

“These will do,” he said at last; “I can't say I think much of your taste in slippers, but the fit's the thing.” He slipped his feet into a pair of sock-like sambhur-skin foot coverings, found a long chair, and lay at length.

“They're my own pet pair,” Torpenhow said. “I was just going to put them on myself.”

“All your reprehensible selfishness. Just because you see me happy for a minute, you want to worry me and stir me up. Find another pair.”

“Good for you that Dick can't wear your clothes, Torp. You two live communistically,” said the Nilghai.

“Dick never has anything that I can wear. He's only useful to sponge upon.”

“Confound you, have you been rummaging round among my clothes, then?” said Dick. “I put a sovereign in the tobacco-jar yesterday. How do you expect a man to keep his accounts properly if you----”

Here the Nilghai began to laugh, and Torpenhow joined him.

“Hid a sovereign yesterday! You're no sort of financier. You lent me a fiver about a month back. Do you remember?” Torpenhow said.

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you remember that I paid it you ten days later, and you put it at the bottom of the tobacco?”

“By Jove, did I? I thought it was in one of my colour-boxes.”

“You thought! About a week ago I went into your studio to get some 'baccy and found it.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Took the Nilghai to a theatre and fed him.”

“You couldn't feed the Nilghai under twice the money--not though you gave him Army beef. Well, I suppose I should have found it out sooner or later. What is there to laugh at?”

“You're a most amazing cuckoo in many directions,” said the Nilghai, still chuckling over the thought of the dinner. “Never mind. We had both been working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we spent, and as you're only a loafer it didn't matter.”

“That's pleasant--from the man who is bursting with my meat, too. I'll get that dinner back one of these days. Suppose we go to a theatre now.”

“Put our boots on,--and dress,--and wash?” The Nilghai spoke very lazily.

“I withdraw the motion.”

“Suppose, just for a change--as a startling variety, you know--we, that is to say we, get our charcoal and our canvas and go on with our work.”

Torpenhow spoke pointedly, but Dick only wriggled his toes inside the soft leather moccasins.

“What a one-ideaed clucker that is! If I had any unfinished figures on hand, I haven't any model; if I had my model, I haven't any spray, and I never leave charcoal unfixed overnight; and if I had my spray and twenty photographs of backgrounds, I couldn't do anything tonight. I don't feel that way.”

“Binkie-dog, he's a lazy hog, isn't he?” said the Nilghai.

“Very good, I will do some work,” said Dick, rising swiftly. “I'll fetch the Nungapunga Book, and we'll add another picture to the Nilghai Saga.”

“Aren't you worrying him a little too much?” asked the Nilghai, when Dick had left the room.

“Perhaps, but I know what he can turn out if he likes. It makes me savage to hear him praised for past work when I know what he ought to do. You and I are arranged for----”

“By Kismet and our own powers, more's the pity. I have dreamed of a good deal.”

“So have I, but we know our limitations now. I'm dashed if I know what Dick's may be when he gives himself to his work. That's what makes me so keen about him.”

“And when all's said and done, you will be put aside--quite rightly--for a female girl.”

“I wonder... Where do you think he has been today?”

“To the sea. Didn't you see the look in his eyes when he talked about her? He's as restless as a swallow in autumn.”

“Yes; but did he go alone?”

“I don't know, and I don't care, but he has the beginnings of the go-fever upon him. He wants to up-stakes and move out. There's no mistaking the signs. Whatever he may have said before, he has the call upon him now.”

“It might be his salvation,” Torpenhow said.

“Perhaps--if you care to take the responsibility of being a saviour.”

Dick returned with the big clasped sketch-book that the Nilghai knew well and did not love too much. In it Dick had drawn all manner of moving incidents, experienced by himself or related to him by the others, of all the four corners of the earth. But the wider range of the Nilghai's body and life attracted him most. When truth failed he fell back on fiction of the wildest, and represented incidents in the Nilghai's career that were unseemly,--his marriages with many African princesses, his shameless betrayal, for Arab wives, of an army corps to the Mahdi, his tattooment by skilled operators in Burmah, his interview (and his fears) with the yellow headsman in the blood-stained execution-ground of Canton, and finally, the passings of his spirit into the bodies of whales, elephants, and toucans. Torpenhow from time to time had added rhymed descriptions, and the whole was a curious piece of art, because Dick decided, having regard to the name of the book which being interpreted means “naked,” that it would be wrong to draw the Nilghai with any clothes on, under any circumstances. Consequently the last sketch, representing that much-enduring man calling on the War Office to press his claims to the Egyptian medal, was hardly delicate. He settled himself comfortably on Torpenhow's table and turned over the pages.

“What a fortune you would have been to Blake, Nilghai!” he said. “There's a succulent pinkness about some of these sketches that's more than life-like. 'The Nilghai surrounded while bathing by the Mahdieh'--that was founded on fact, eh?”

“It was very nearly my last bath, you irreverent dauber. Has Binkie come into the Saga yet?”

“No; the Binkie-boy hasn't done anything except eat and kill cats. Let's see. Here you are as a stained-glass saint in a church. Deuced decorative lines about your anatomy; you ought to be grateful for being handed down to posterity in this way. Fifty years hence you'll exist in rare and curious facsimiles at ten guineas each. What shall I try this time? The domestic life of the Nilghai?”

“Hasn't got any.”

“The undomestic life of the Nilghai, then. Of course. Mass-meeting of his wives in Trafalgar Square. That's it. They came from the ends of the earth to attend Nilghai's wedding to an English bride. This shall be an epic. It's a sweet material to work with.”

“It's a scandalous waste of time,” said Torpenhow.

“Don't worry; it keeps one's hand in--specially when you begin without the pencil.” He set to work rapidly. “That's Nelson's Column. Presently the Nilghai will appear shinning up it.”

“Give him some clothes this time.”

“Certainly--a veil and an orange-wreath, because he's been married.”

“Gad, that's clever enough!” said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as Dick brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.

“Just imagine,” Dick continued, “if we could publish a few of these dear little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.”

“Well, you'll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that kind. I know I can't hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance----”

“No-o--one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of the wall-paper--you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder's out of drawing. I must literally throw a veil over that. Where's my pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan?”

“I only gave him his riding-orders to--to lambast you on general principles for not producing work that will last.”

“Whereupon that young fool,”--Dick threw back his head and shut one eye as he shifted the page under his hand,--“being left alone with an ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for the business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp?”

“How the deuce do three dabs and two scratches make the stuff stand away from the body as it does?” said Torpenhow, to whom Dick's methods were always new.

“It just depends on where you put 'em. If Maclagan had know that much about his business he might have done better.”

“Why don't you put the damned dabs into something that will stay, then?” insisted the Nilghai, who had really taken considerable trouble in hiring for Dick's benefit the pen of a young gentleman who devoted most of his waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and ends of Art, which, he wrote, was one and indivisible.

“Wait a minute till I see how I am going to manage my procession of wives. You seem to have married extensively, and I must rough 'em in with the pencil--Medes, Parthians, Edomites.... Now, setting aside the weakness and the wickedness and--and the fat-headedness of deliberately trying to do work that will live, as they call it, I'm content with the knowledge that I've done my best up to date, and I shan't do anything like it again for some hours at least--probably years. Most probably never.”

“What! any stuff you have in stock your best work?” said Torpenhow.

“Anything you've sold?” said the Nilghai.

“Oh no. It isn't here and it isn't sold. Better than that, it can't be sold, and I don't think any one knows where it is. I'm sure I don't.... And yet more and more wives, on the north side of the square. Observe the virtuous horror of the lions!”

“You may as well explain,” said Torpenhow, and Dick lifted his head from the paper.

“The sea reminded me of it,” he said slowly. “I wish it hadn't. It weighs some few thousand tons--unless you cut it out with a cold chisel.”

“Don't be an idiot. You can't pose with us here,” said the Nilghai.

“There's no pose in the matter at all. It's a fact. I was loafing from Lima to Auckland in a big, old, condemned passenger-ship turned into a cargo-boat and owned by a second-hand Italian firm. She was a crazy basket. We were cut down to fifteen ton of coal a day, and we thought ourselves lucky when we kicked seven knots an hour out of her. Then we used to stop and let the bearings cool down, and wonder whether the crack in the shaft was spreading.”

“Were you a steward or a stoker in those days?”

“I was flush for the time being, so I was a passenger, or else I should have been a steward, I think,” said Dick, with perfect gravity, returning to the procession of angry wives. “I was the only other passenger from Lima, and the ship was half empty, and full of rats and cockroaches and scorpions.”

“But what has this to do with the picture?”

“Wait a minute. She had been in the China passenger trade and her lower decks had bunks for two thousand pigtails. Those were all taken down, and she was empty up to her nose, and the lights came through the port holes--most annoying lights to work in till you got used to them. I hadn't anything to do for weeks. The ship's charts were in pieces and our skipper daren't run south for fear of catching a storm. So he did his best to knock all the Society Islands out of the water one by one, and I went into the lower deck, and did my picture on the port side as far forward in her as I could go. There was some brown paint and some green paint that they used for the boats, and some black paint for ironwork, and that was all I had.”

“The passengers must have thought you mad.”

“There was only one, and it was a woman; but it gave me the notion of my picture.”

“What was she like?” said Torpenhow.

“She was a sort of Negroid-Jewess-Cuban; with morals to match. She couldn't read or write, and she didn't want to, but she used to come down and watch me paint, and the skipper didn't like it, because he was paying her passage and had to be on the bridge occasionally.”

“I see. That must have been cheerful.”

“It was the best time I ever had. To begin with, we didn't know whether we should go up or go down any minute when there was a sea on; and when it was calm it was paradise; and the woman used to mix the paints and talk broken English, and the skipper used to steal down every few minutes to the lower deck, because he said he was afraid of fire. So, you see, we could never tell when we might be caught, and I had a splendid notion to work out in only three keys of colour.”

“What was the notion?”

“Two lines in Poe--

'Neither the angels in Heaven above nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee.'

It came out of the sea--all by itself. I drew that fight, fought out in green water over the naked, choking soul, and the woman served as the model for the devils and the angels both--sea-devils and sea-angels, and the soul half drowned between them. It doesn't sound much, but when there was a good light on the lower deck it looked very fine and creepy. It was seven by fourteen feet, all done in shifting light for shifting light.”

“Did the woman inspire you much?” said Torpenhow.

“She and the sea between them--immensely. There was a heap of bad drawing in that picture. I remember I went out of my way to foreshorten for sheer delight of doing it, and I foreshortened damnably, but for all that it's the best thing I've ever done; and now I suppose the ship's broken up or gone down. Whew! What a time that was!”

“What happened after all?”

“It all ended. They were loading her with wool when I left the ship, but even the stevedores kept the picture clear to the last. The eyes of the demons scared them, I honestly believe.”

“And the woman?”

“She was scared too when it was finished. She used to cross herself before she went down to look at it. Just three colours and no chance of getting any more, and the sea outside and unlimited love-making inside, and the fear of death atop of everything else, O Lord!” He had ceased to look at the sketch, but was staring straight in front of him across the room.

“Why don't you try something of the same kind now?” said the Nilghai.

“Because those things come not by fasting and prayer. When I find a cargo-boat and a Jewess-Cuban and another notion and the same old life, I may.”

“You won't find them here,” said the Nilghai.

“No, I shall not.” Dick shut the sketch-book with a bang. “This room's as hot as an oven. Open the window, some one.”

He leaned into the darkness, watching the greater darkness of London below him. The chambers stood much higher than the other houses, commanding a hundred chimneys--crooked cowls that looked like sitting cats as they swung round, and other uncouth brick and zinc mysteries supported by iron stanchions and clamped by 8-pieces. Northward the lights of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square threw a copper-coloured glare above the black roofs, and southward by all the orderly lights of the Thames. A train rolled out across one of the railway bridges, and its thunder drowned for a minute the dull roar of the streets. The Nilghai looked at his watch and said shortly, “That's the Paris night-mail. You can book from here to St. Petersburg if you choose.”

Dick crammed head and shoulders out of the window and looked across the river. Torpenhow came to his side, while the Nilghai passed over quietly to the piano and opened it. Binkie, making himself as large as possible, spread out upon the sofa with the air of one who is not to be lightly disturbed.

“Well,” said the Nilghai to the two pairs of shoulders, “have you never seen this place before?”

A steam-tug on the river hooted as she towed her barges to wharf. Then the boom of the traffic came into the room. Torpenhow nudged Dick.

“Good place to bank in--bad place to bunk in, Dickie, isn't it?”

Dick's chin was in his hand as he answered, in the words of a general not without fame, still looking out on the darkness--“'My God, what a city to loot!'”

Binkie found the night air tickling his whiskers and sneezed plaintively.

“We shall give the Binkie-dog a cold,” said Torpenhow. “Come in,” and they withdrew their heads. “You'll be buried in Kensal Green, Dick, one of these days, if it isn't closed by the time you want to go there--buried within two feet of some one else, his wife and his family.”

“Allah forbid! I shall get away before that time comes. Give a man room to stretch his legs, Mr. Binkie.” Dick flung himself down on the sofa and tweaked Binkie's velvet ears, yawning heavily the while.

“You'll find that wardrobe-case very much out of tune,” Torpenhow said to the Nilghai. “It's never touched except by you.”

“A piece of gross extravagance,” Dick grunted. “The Nilghai only comes when I'm out.”

“That's because you're always out. Howl, Nilghai, and let him hear.”

“The life of the Nilghai is fraud and slaughter, His writings are watered Dickens and water; But the voice of the Nilghai raised on high Makes even the Mahdieh glad to die!”

Dick quoted from Torpenhow's letterpress in the Nungapunga Book.

“How do they call moose in Canada, Nilghai?”

The man laughed. Singing was his one polite accomplishment, as many Press-tents in far-off lands had known.

“What shall I sing?” said he, turning in the chair.

“'Moll Roe in the Morning,'” said Torpenhow, at a venture.

“No,” said Dick, sharply, and the Nilghai opened his eyes. The old chanty whereof he, among a very few, possessed all the words was not a pretty one, but Dick had heard it many times before without wincing. Without prelude he launched into that stately tune that calls together and troubles the hearts of the gipsies of the sea--

“Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies, Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain.”

Dick turned uneasily on the sofa, for he could hear the bows of the Barralong crashing into the green seas on her way to the Southern Cross.

Then came the chorus--

“We'll rant and we'll roar like true British sailors, We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas, Until we take soundings in the Channel of Old England From Ushant to Scilly 'tis forty-five leagues.”

“Thirty-five-thirty-five,” said Dick, petulantly. “Don't tamper with Holy Writ. Go on, Nilghai.”

“The first land we made it was called the Deadman,” and they sang to the end very vigourously.

“That would be a better song if her head were turned the other way--to the Ushant light, for instance,” said the Nilghai.

“Flinging his arms about like a mad windmill,” said Torpenhow. “Give us something else, Nilghai. You're in fine fog-horn form tonight.”

“Give us the 'Ganges Pilot'; you sang that in the square the night before El-Maghrib. By the way, I wonder how many of the chorus are alive tonight,” said Dick.

Torpenhow considered for a minute. “By Jove! I believe only you and I. Raynor, Vicery, and Deenes--all dead; Vincent caught smallpox in Cairo, carried it here and died of it. Yes, only you and I and the Nilghai.”

“Umph! And yet the men here who've done their work in a well-warmed studio all their lives, with a policeman at each corner, say that I charge too much for my pictures.”

“They are buying your work, not your insurance policies, dear child,” said the Nilghai.

“I gambled with one to get at the other. Don't preach. Go on with the 'Pilot.' Where in the world did you get that song?”

“On a tombstone,” said the Nilghai. “On a tombstone in a distant land. I made it an accompaniment with heaps of base chords.”

“Oh, Vanity! Begin.” And the Nilghai began--

“I have slipped my cable, messmates, I'm drifting down with the tide, I have my sailing orders, while yet at anchor ride. And never on fair June morning have I put out to sea With clearer conscience or better hope, or a heart more light and free.

“Shoulder to shoulder, Joe, my boy, into the crowd like a wedge. Strike with the hangers, messmates, but do not cut with the edge.” Cries Charnock, “Scatter the faggots, double that Brahmin in two, The tall pale widow for me, Joe, the little brown girl for you!”

“Young Joe (you're nearing sixty), why is your hide so dark? Katie has soft fair blue eyes, who blackened yours?--Why, hark!”

They were all singing now, Dick with the roar of the wind of the open sea about his ears as the deep bass voice let itself go.

“The morning gun--Ho, steady! the arquebuses to me! I ha' sounded the Dutch High Admiral's heart as my lead doth sound the sea.

“Sounding, sounding the Ganges, floating down with the tide, Moore me close to Charnock, next to my nut-brown bride. My blessing to Kate at Fairlight--Holwell, my thanks to you; Steady! We steer for heaven, through sand-drifts cold and blue.”

“Now what is there in that nonsense to make a man restless?” said Dick, hauling Binkie from his feet to his chest.

“It depends on the man,” said Torpenhow.

“The man who has been down to look at the sea,” said the Nilghai.

“I didn't know she was going to upset me in this fashion.”

“That's what men say when they go to say good-bye to a woman. It's more easy though to get rid of three women than a piece of one's life and surroundings.”

“But a woman can be----” began Dick, unguardedly.

“A piece of one's life,” continued Torpenhow. “No, she can't.” His face darkened for a moment. “She says she wants to sympathise with you and help you in your work, and everything else that clearly a man must do for himself. Then she sends round five notes a day to ask why the dickens you haven't been wasting your time with her.”

“Don't generalise,” said the Nilghai. “By the time you arrive at five notes a day you must have gone through a good deal and behaved accordingly. Shouldn't begin these things, my son.”

“I shouldn't have gone down to the sea,” said Dick, just a little anxious to change the conversation. “And you shouldn't have sung.”

“The sea isn't sending you five notes a day,” said the Nilghai.

“No, but I'm fatally compromised. She's an enduring old hag, and I'm sorry I ever met her. Why wasn't I born and bred and dead in a three-pair back?”

“Hear him blaspheming his first love! Why in the world shouldn't you listen to her?” said Torpenhow.

Before Dick could reply the Nilghai lifted up his voice with a shout that shook the windows, in “The Men of the Sea,” that begins, as all know, “The sea is a wicked old woman,” and after wading through eight lines whose imagery is truthful, ends in a refrain, slow as the clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars where the men sweat and tramp in the shingle.

“'Ye that bore us, O restore us! She is kinder than ye; For the call is on our heart-strings!' Said The Men of the Sea.”

The Nilghai sang that verse twice, with simple cunning, intending that Dick should hear. But Dick was waiting for the farewell of the men to their wives.

“'Ye that love us, can ye move us? She is dearer than ye; And your sleep will be the sweeter,' Said The Men of the Sea.”

The rough words beat like the blows of the waves on the bows of the rickety boat from Lima in the days when Dick was mixing paints, making love, drawing devils and angels in the half dark, and wondering whether the next minute would put the Italian captain's knife between his shoulder-blades. And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors' diseases, waked and raged, urging him who loved Maisie beyond anything in the world, to go away and taste the old hot, unregenerate life again,--to scuffle, swear, gamble, and love light loves with his fellows; to take ship and know the sea once more, and by her beget pictures; to talk to Binat among the sands of Port Said while Yellow Tina mixed the drinks; to hear the crackle of musketry, and see the smoke roll outward, thin and thicken again till the shining black faces came through, and in that hell every man was strictly responsible for his own head, and his own alone, and struck with an unfettered arm. It was impossible, utterly impossible, but--

“'Oh, our fathers in the churchyard, She is older than ye, And our graves will be the greener,' Said The Men of the Sea.”

“What is there to hinder?” said Torpenhow, in the long hush that followed the song.

“You said a little time since that you wouldn't come for a walk round the world, Torp.”

“That was months ago, and I only objected to your making money for travelling expenses. You've shot your bolt here and it has gone home. Go away and do some work, and see some things.”

“Get some of the fat off you; you're disgracefully out of condition,” said the Nilghai, making a plunge from the chair and grasping a handful of Dick generally over the right ribs. “Soft as putty--pure tallow born of over-feeding. Train it off, Dickie.”

“We're all equally gross, Nilghai. Next time you have to take the field you'll sit down, wink your eyes, gasp, and die in a fit.”

“Never mind. You go away on a ship. Go to Lima again, or to Brazil. There's always trouble in South America.”

“Do you suppose I want to be told where to go? Great Heavens, the only difficulty is to know where I'm to stop. But I shall stay here, as I told you before.”

“Then you'll be buried in Kensal Green and turn into adipocere with the others,” said Torpenhow. “Are you thinking of commissions in hand? Pay forfeit and go. You've money enough to travel as a king if you please.”

“You've the grisliest notions of amusement, Torp. I think I see myself shipping first class on a six-thousand-ton hotel, and asking the third engineer what makes the engines go round, and whether it isn't very warm in the stokehold. Ho! ho! I should ship as a loafer if ever I shipped at all, which I'm not going to do. I shall compromise, and go for a small trip to begin with.”

“That's something at any rate. Where will you go?” said Torpenhow. “It would do you all the good in the world, old man.”

The Nilghai saw the twinkle in Dick's eye, and refrained from speech.

“I shall go in the first place to Rathray's stable, where I shall hire one horse, and take him very carefully as far as Richmond Hill. Then I shall walk him back again, in case he should accidentally burst into a lather and make Rathray angry. I shall do that tomorrow, for the sake of air and exercise.”

“Bah!” Dick had barely time to throw up his arm and ward off the cushion that the disgusted Torpenhow heaved at his head.

“Air and exercise indeed,” said the Nilghai, sitting down heavily on Dick.

“Let's give him a little of both. Get the bellows, Torp.”

At this point the conference broke up in disorder, because Dick would not open his mouth till the Nilghai held his nose fast, and there was some trouble in forcing the nozzle of the bellows between his teeth; and even when it was there he weakly tried to puff against the force of the blast, and his cheeks blew up with a great explosion; and the enemy becoming helpless with laughter he so beat them over the head with a soft sofa cushion that became unsewn and distributed its feathers, and Binkie, interfering in Torpenhow's interests, was bundled into the half-empty bag and advised to scratch his way out, which he did after a while, travelling rapidly up and down the floor in the shape of an agitated green haggis, and when he came out looking for satisfaction, the three pillars of his world were picking feathers out of their hair.

“A prophet has no honour in his own country,” said Dick, ruefully, dusting his knees. “This filthy fluff will never brush off my legs.”

“It was all for your own good,” said the Nilghai. “Nothing like air and exercise.”

“All for your good,” said Torpenhow, not in the least with reference to past clowning. “It would let you focus things at their proper worth and prevent your becoming slack in this hothouse of a town. Indeed it would, old man. I shouldn't have spoken if I hadn't thought so. Only, you make a joke of everything.”

“Before God I do no such thing,” said Dick, quickly and earnestly. “You don't know me if you think that.”

“I don't think it,” said the Nilghai.

“How can fellows like ourselves, who know what life and death really mean, dare to make a joke of anything? I know we pretend it, to save ourselves from breaking down or going to the other extreme. Can't I see, old man, how you're always anxious about me, and try to advise me to make my work better? Do you suppose I don't think about that myself? But you can't help me--you can't help me--not even you. I must play my own hand alone in my own way.”

“Hear, hear,” from the Nilghai.

“What's the one thing in the Nilghai Saga that I've never drawn in the Nungapunga Book?” Dick continued to Torpenhow, who was a little astonished at the outburst.

Now there was one blank page in the book given over to the sketch that Dick had not drawn of the crowning exploit in the Nilghai's life; when that man, being young and forgetting that his body and bones belonged to the paper that employed him, had ridden over sunburned slippery grass in the rear of Bredow's brigade on the day that the troopers flung themselves at Caurobert's artillery, and for aught they knew twenty battalions in front, to save the battered 24th German Infantry, to give time to decide the fate of Vionville, and to learn ere their remnant came back to Flavigay that cavalry can attack and crumple and break unshaken infantry. Whenever he was inclined to think over a life that might have been better, an income that might have been larger, and a soul that might have been considerably cleaner, the Nilghai would comfort himself with the thought, “I rode with Bredow's brigade at Vionville,” and take heart for any lesser battle the next day might bring.

“I know,” he said very gravely. “I was always glad that you left it out.”

“I left it out because Nilghai taught me what the Germany army learned then, and what Schmidt taught their cavalry. I don't know German. What is it? 'Take care of the time and the dressing will take care of itself.' I must ride my own line to my own beat, old man.”

“Tempe ist richtung. You've learned your lesson well,” said the Nilghai.

“He must go alone. He speaks truth, Torp.”

“Maybe I'm as wrong as I can be--hideously wrong. I must find that out for myself, as I have to think things out for myself, but I daren't turn my head to dress by the next man. It hurts me a great deal more than you know not to be able to go, but I cannot, that's all. I must do my own work and live my own life in my own way, because I'm responsible for both. Only don't think I frivol about it, Torp. I have my own matches and sulphur, and I'll make my own hell, thanks.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. Then Torpenhow said blandly, “What did the Governor of North Carolina say to the Governor of South Carolina?”

“Excellent notion. It is a long time between drinks. There are the makings of a very fine prig in you, Dick,” said the Nilghai.

“I've liberated my mind, estimable Binkie, with the feathers in his mouth.” Dick picked up the still indignant one and shook him tenderly. “You're tied up in a sack and made to run about blind, Binkie-wee, without any reason, and it has hurt your little feelings. Never mind. Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas, and don't sneeze in my eye because I talk Latin. Good night.”

He went out of the room.

“That's distinctly one for you,” said the Nilghai. “I told you it was hopeless to meddle with him. He's not pleased.”

“He'd swear at me if he weren't. I can't make it out. He has the go-fever upon him and he won't go. I only hope that he mayn't have to go some day when he doesn't want to,” said Torpenhow.

* * * * *

In his own room Dick was settling a question with himself--and the question was whether all the world, and all that was therein, and a burning desire to exploit both, was worth one threepenny piece thrown into the Thames.

“It came of seeing the sea, and I'm a cur to think about it,” he decided. “After all, the honeymoon will be that tour--with reservations; only... only I didn't realise that the sea was so strong. I didn't feel it so much when I was with Maisie. These damnable songs did it. He's beginning again.”

But it was only Herrick's Nightpiece to Julia that the Nilghai sang, and before it was ended Dick reappeared on the threshold, not altogether clothed indeed, but in his right mind, thirsty and at peace.

The mood had come and gone with the rising and the falling of the tide by Fort Keeling.

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Chapter IX

“If I have taken the common clay And wrought it cunningly In the shape of a god that was digged a clod, The greater honour to me.”

“If thou hast taken the common clay, And thy hands be not free From the taint of the soil, thou hast made thy spoil The greater shame to thee.” --The Two Potters

HE DID no work of any kind for the rest of the week. Then came another Sunday. He dreaded and longed for the day always, but since the red-haired girl had sketched him there was rather more dread than desire in his mind.

He found that Maisie had entirely neglected his suggestions about line-work. She had gone off at score filed with some absurd notion for a “fancy head.” It cost Dick something to command his temper.

“What's the good of suggesting anything?” he said pointedly.

“Ah, but this will be a picture,--a real picture; and I know that Kami will let me send it to the Salon. You don't mind, do you?”

“I suppose not. But you won't have time for the Salon.”

Maisie hesitated a little. She even felt uncomfortable.

“We're going over to France a month sooner because of it. I shall get the idea sketched out here and work it up at Kami's.”

Dick's heart stood still, and he came very near to being disgusted with his queen who could do no wrong. “Just when I thought I had made some headway, she goes off chasing butterflies. It's too maddening!”

There was no possibility of arguing, for the red-haired girl was in the studio. Dick could only look unutterable reproach.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “and I think you make a mistake. But what's the idea of your new picture?”

“I took it from a book.”

“That's bad, to begin with. Books aren't the places for pictures. And----”

“It's this,” said the red-haired girl behind him. “I was reading it to Maisie the other day from The City of Dreadful Night. D'you know the book?”

“A little. I am sorry I spoke. There are pictures in it. What has taken her fancy?”

“The description of the Melancolia--

'Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle, But all too impotent to lift the regal Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride.

And here again. (Maisie, get the tea, dear.)

'The forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams, The household bunch of keys, the housewife's gown, Voluminous indented, and yet rigid As though a shell of burnished metal frigid, Her feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down.”

There was no attempt to conceal the scorn of the lazy voice. Dick winced.

“But that has been done already by an obscure artist by the name of Durer,” said he. “How does the poem run?--

'Three centuries and threescore years ago, With phantasies of his peculiar thought.'

You might as well try to rewrite Hamlet. It will be a waste of time.”

“No, it won't,” said Maisie, putting down the teacups with a clatter to reassure herself. “And I mean to do it. Can't you see what a beautiful thing it would make?”

“How in perdition can one do work when one hasn't had the proper training? Any fool can get a notion. It needs training to drive the thing through,--training and conviction; not rushing after the first fancy.” Dick spoke between his teeth.

“You don't understand,” said Maisie. “I think I can do it.”

Again the voice of the girl behind him--

“Baffled and beaten back, she works on still; Weary and sick of soul, she works the more.

Sustained by her indomitable will, The hands shall fashion, and the brain shall pore, And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour----

I fancy Maisie means to embody herself in the picture.”

“Sitting on a throne of rejected pictures? No, I shan't, dear. The notion in itself has fascinated me.--Of course you don't care for fancy heads, Dick. I don't think you could do them. You like blood and bones.”

“That's a direct challenge. If you can do a Melancolia that isn't merely a sorrowful female head, I can do a better one; and I will, too. What d'you know about Melacolias?” Dick firmly believed that he was even then tasting three-quarters of all the sorrow in the world.

“She was a woman,” said Maisie, “and she suffered a great deal,--till she could suffer no more. Then she began to laugh at it all, and then I painted her and sent her to the Salon.”

The red-haired girl rose up and left the room, laughing.

Dick looked at Maisie humbly and hopelessly.

“Never mind about the picture,” he said. “Are you really going back to Kami's for a month before your time?”

“I must, if I want to get the picture done.”

“And that's all you want?”

“Of course. Don't be stupid, Dick.”

“You haven't the power. You have only the ideas--the ideas and the little cheap impulses. How you could have kept at your work for ten years steadily is a mystery to me. So you are really going,--a month before you need?”

“I must do my work.”

“Your work--bah!... No, I didn't mean that. It's all right, dear. Of course you must do your work, and--I think I'll say goodbye for this week.”

“Won't you even stay for tea?”

“No, thank you. Have I your leave to go, dear? There's nothing more you particularly want me to do, and the line-work doesn't matter.”

“I wish you could stay, and then we could talk over my picture. If only one single picture's a success, it draws attention to all the others. I know some of my work is good, if only people could see. And you needn't have been so rude about it.”

“I'm sorry. We'll talk the Melancolia over some one of the other Sundays. There are four more--yes, one, two, three, four--before you go. Goodbye, Maisie.”

Maisie stood by the studio window, thinking, till the red-haired girl returned, a little white at the corners of her lips.

“Dick's gone off,” said Maisie. “Just when I wanted to talk about the picture. Isn't it selfish of him?”

Her companion opened her lips as if to speak, shut them again, and went on reading The City of Dreadful Night.

Dick was in the Park, walking round and round a tree that he had chosen as his confidante for many Sundays past. He was swearing audibly, and when he found that the infirmities of the English tongue hemmed in his rage, he sought consolation in Arabic, which is expressly designed for the use of the afflicted. He was not pleased with the reward of his patient service; nor was he pleased with himself; and it was long before he arrived at the proposition that the queen could do no wrong.

“It's a losing game,” he said. “I'm worth nothing when a whim of hers is in question. But in a losing game at Port Said we used to double the stakes and go on. She do a Melancolia! She hasn't the power, or the insight, or the training. Only the desire. She's cursed with the curse of Reuben. She won't do line-work, because it means real work; and yet she's stronger than I am. I'll make her understand that I can beat her on her own Melancolia. Even then she wouldn't care. She says I can only do blood and bones. I don't believe she has blood in her veins. All the same I lover her; and I must go on loving her; and if I can humble her inordinate vanity I will. I'll do a Melancolia that shall be something like a Melancolia 'the Melancolia that transcends all wit.' I'll do it at once, con--bless her.”

He discovered that the notion would not come to order, and that he could not free his mind for an hour from the thought of Maisie's departure. He took very small interest in her rough studies for the Melancolia when she showed them next week. The Sundays were racing past, and the time was at hand when all the church bells in London could not ring Maisie back to him. Once or twice he said something to Binkie about 'hermaphroditic futilities,' but the little dog received so many confidences both from Torpenhow and Dick that he did not trouble his tulip-ears to listen.

Dick was permitted to see the girls off. They were going by the Dover night-boat; and they hoped to return in August. It was then February, and Dick felt that he was being hardly used. Maisie was so busy stripping the small house across the Park, and packing her canvases, that she had not time for thought. Dick went down to Dover and wasted a day there fretting over a wonderful possibility. Would Maisie at the very last allow him one small kiss? He reflected that he might capture her by the strong arm, as he had seem women captured in the Southern Soudan, and lead her away; but Maisie would never be led. She would turn her gray eyes upon him and say, “Dick, how selfish you are!” Then his courage would fail him. It would be better, after all, to beg for that kiss.

Maisie looked more than usually kissable as she stepped from the night-mail on to the windy pier, in a gray waterproof and a little gray cloth travelling-cap. The red-haired girl was not so lovely. Her green eyes were hollow and her lips were dry. Dick saw the trunks aboard, and went to Maisie's side in the darkness under the bridge. The mail-bags were thundering into the forehold, and the red-haired girl was watching them.

“You'll have a rough passage tonight,” said Dick. “It's blowing outside. I suppose I may come over and see you if I'm good?”

“You mustn't. I shall be busy. At least, if I want you I'll send for you. But I shall write from Vitry-sur-Marne. I shall have heaps of things to consult you about. Oh, Dick, you have been so good to me!--so good to me!”

“Thank you for that, dear. It hasn't made any difference, has it?”

“I can't tell a fib. It hasn't--in that way. But don't think I'm not grateful.”

“Damn the gratitude!” said Dick, huskily, to the paddle-box.

“What's the use of worrying? You know I should ruin your life, and you'd ruin mine, as things are now. You remember what you said when you were so angry that day in the Park? One of us has to be broken. Can't you wait till that day comes?”

“No, love. I want you unbroken--all to myself.”

Maisie shook her head. “My poor Dick, what can I say!”

“Don't say anything. Give me a kiss. Only one kiss, Maisie. I'll swear I won't take any more. You might as well, and then I can be sure you're grateful.”

Maisie put her cheek forward, and Dick took his reward in the darkness.

It was only one kiss, but, since there was no time-limit specified, it was a long one. Maisie wrenched herself free angrily, and Dick stood abashed and tingling from head to toe.

“Goodbye, darling. I didn't mean to scare you. I'm sorry. Only--keep well and do good work,--specially the Melancolia. I'm going to do one, too. Remember me to Kami, and be careful what you drink. Country drinking-water is bad everywhere, but it's worse in France. Write to me if you want anything, and good-bye. Say good-bye to the whatever-you-call-um girl, and--can't I have another kiss? No. You're quite right. Goodbye.”

A shout told him that it was not seemly to charge of the mail-bag incline. He reached the pier as the steamer began to move off, and he followed her with his heart.

“And there's nothing--nothing in the wide world--to keep us apart except her obstinacy. These Calais night-boats are much too small. I'll get Torp to write to the papers about it. She's beginning to pitch already.”

Maisie stood where Dick had left her till she heard a little gasping cough at her elbow. The red-haired girl's eyes were alight with cold flame.

“He kissed you!” she said. “How could you let him, when he wasn't anything to you? How dared you to take a kiss from him? Oh, Maisie, let's go to the ladies' cabin. I'm sick,--deadly sick.”

“We aren't into open water yet. Go down, dear, and I'll stay here. I don't like the smell of the engines.... Poor Dick! He deserved one,--only one. But I didn't think he'd frighten me so.”

Dick returned to town next day just in time for lunch, for which he had telegraphed. To his disgust, there were only empty plates in the studio.

He lifted up his voice like the bears in the fairy-tale, and Torpenhow entered, looking guilty.

“H'sh!” said he. “Don't make such a noise. I took it. Come into my rooms, and I'll show you why.”

Dick paused amazed at the threshold, for on Torpenhow's sofa lay a girl asleep and breathing heavily. The little cheap sailor-hat, the blue-and-white dress, fitter for June than for February, dabbled with mud at the skirts, the jacket trimmed with imitation Astrakhan and ripped at the shoulder-seams, the one-and-elevenpenny umbrella, and, above all, the disgraceful condition of the kid-topped boots, declared all things.

“Oh, I say, old man, this is too bad! You mustn't bring this sort up here. They steal things from the rooms.”

“It looks bad, I admit, but I was coming in after lunch, and she staggered into the hall. I thought she was drunk at first, but it was collapse. I couldn't leave her as she was, so I brought her up here and gave her your lunch. She was fainting from want of food. She went fast asleep the minute she had finished.”

“I know something of that complaint. She's been living on sausages, I suppose. Torp, you should have handed her over to a policeman for presuming to faint in a respectable house. Poor little wretch! Look at the face! There isn't an ounce of immorality in it. Only folly,--slack, fatuous, feeble, futile folly. It's a typical head. D'you notice how the skull begins to show through the flesh padding on the face and cheek-bone?”

“What a cold-blooded barbarian it is! Don't hit a woman when she's down. Can't we do anything? She was simply dropping with starvation. She almost fell into my arms, and when she got to the food she ate like a wild beast. It was horrible.”

“I can give her money, which she would probably spend in drinks. Is she going to sleep for ever?”

The girl opened her eyes and glared at the men between terror and effrontery.

“Feeling better?” said Torpenhow.

“Yes. Thank you. There aren't many gentlemen that are as kind as you are. Thank you.”

“When did you leave service?” said Dick, who had been watching the scarred and chapped hands.

“How did you know I was in service? I was. General servant. I didn't like it.”

“And how do you like being your own mistress?”

“Do I look as if I liked it?”

“I suppose not. One moment. Would you be good enough to turn your face to the window?”

The girl obeyed, and Dick watched her face keenly,--so keenly that she made as if to hide behind Torpenhow.

“The eyes have it,” said Dick, walking up and down. “They are superb eyes for my business. And, after all, every head depends on the eyes. This has been sent from heaven to make up for--what was taken away. Now the weekly strain's off my shoulders, I can get to work in earnest. Evidently sent from heaven. Yes. Raise your chin a little, please.”

“Gently, old man, gently. You're scaring somebody out of her wits,” said Torpenhow, who could see the girl trembling.

“Don't let him hit me! Oh, please don't let him hit me! I've been hit cruel today because I spoke to a man. Don't let him look at me like that! He's reg'lar wicked, that one. Don't let him look at me like that, neither! Oh, I feel as if I hadn't nothing on when he looks at me like that!”

The overstrained nerves in the frail body gave way, and the girl wept like a little child and began to scream. Dick threw open the window, and Torpenhow flung the door back.

“There you are,” said Dick, soothingly. “My friend here can call for a policeman, and you can run through that door. Nobody is going to hurt you.”

The girl sobbed convulsively for a few minutes, and then tried to laugh.

“Nothing in the world to hurt you. Now listen to me for a minute. I'm what they call an artist by profession. You know what artists do?”

“They draw the things in red and black ink on the pop-shop labels.”

“I dare say. I haven't risen to pop-shop labels yet. Those are done by the Academicians. I want to draw your head.”

“What for?”

“Because it's pretty. That is why you will come to the room across the landing three times a week at eleven in the morning, and I'll give you three quid a week just for sitting still and being drawn. And there's a quid on account.”

“For nothing? Oh, my!” The girl turned the sovereign in her hand, and with more foolish tears, “Ain't neither 'o you two gentlemen afraid of my bilking you?”

“No. Only ugly girls do that. Try and remember this place. And, by the way, what's your name?”

“I'm Bessie,--Bessie----It's no use giving the rest. Bessie Broke,--Stone-broke, if you like. What's your names? But there,--no one ever gives the real ones.”

Dick consulted Torpenhow with his eyes.

“My name's Heldar, and my friend's called Torpenhow; and you must be sure to come here. Where do you live?”

“South-the-water,--one room,--five and sixpence a week. Aren't you making fun of me about that three quid?”

“You'll see later on. And, Bessie, next time you come, remember, you needn't wear that paint. It's bad for the skin, and I have all the colours you'll be likely to need.”

Bessie withdrew, scrubbing her cheek with a ragged pocket-handkerchief. The two men looked at each other.

“You're a man,” said Torpenhow.

“I'm afraid I've been a fool. It isn't our business to run about the earth reforming Bessie Brokes. And a woman of any kind has no right on this landing.”

“Perhaps she won't come back.”

“She will if she thinks she can get food and warmth here. I know she will, worse luck. But remember, old man, she isn't a woman; she's my model; and be careful.”

“The idea! She's a dissolute little scarecrow,--a gutter-snippet and nothing more.”

“So you think. Wait till she has been fed a little and freed from fear. That fair type recovers itself very quickly. You won't know her in a week or two, when that abject fear has died out of her eyes. She'll be too happy and smiling for my purposes.”

“But surely you're not taking her out of charity?--to please me?”

“I am not in the habit of playing with hot coals to please anybody. She has been sent from heaven, as I may have remarked before, to help me with my Melancolia.”

“Never heard a word about the lady before.”

“What's the use of having a friend, if you must sling your notions at him in words? You ought to know what I'm thinking about. You've heard me grunt lately?”

“Even so; but grunts mean anything in your language, from bad 'baccy to wicked dealers. And I don't think I've been much in your confidence for some time.”

“It was a high and soulful grunt. You ought to have understood that it meant the Melancolia.” Dick walked Torpenhow up and down the room, keeping silence. Then he smote him in the ribs, “Now don't you see it? Bessie's abject futility, and the terror in her eyes, welded on to one or two details in the way of sorrow that have come under my experience lately. Likewise some orange and black,--two keys of each. But I can't explain on an empty stomach.”

“It sounds mad enough. You'd better stick to your soldiers, Dick, instead of maundering about heads and eyes and experiences.”

“Think so?” Dick began to dance on his heels, singing--

“They're as proud as a turkey when they hold the ready cash, You ought to 'ear the way they laugh an' joke; They are tricky an' they're funny when they've got the ready money,--Ow! but see 'em when they're all stone-broke.”

Then he sat down to pour out his heart to Maisie in a four-sheet letter of counsel and encouragement, and registered an oath that he would get to work with an undivided heart as soon as Bessie should reappear.

The girl kept her appointment unpainted and unadorned, afraid and overbold by turns. When she found that she was merely expected to sit still, she grew calmer, and criticised the appointments of the studio with freedom and some point. She liked the warmth and the comfort and the release from fear of physical pain. Dick made two or three studies of her head in monochrome, but the actual notion of the Melancolia would not arrive.

“What a mess you keep your things in!” said Bessie, some days later, when she felt herself thoroughly at home. “I s'pose your clothes are just as bad. Gentlemen never think what buttons and tape are made for.”

“I buy things to wear, and wear 'em till they go to pieces. I don't know what Torpenhow does.”

Bessie made diligent inquiry in the latter's room, and unearthed a bale of disreputable socks. “Some of these I'll mend now,” she said, “and some I'll take home. D'you know, I sit all day long at home doing nothing, just like a lady, and no more noticing them other girls in the house than if they was so many flies. I don't have any unnecessary words, but I put 'em down quick, I can tell you, when they talk to me. No; it's quite nice these days. I lock my door, and they can only call me names through the keyhole, and I sit inside, just like a lady, mending socks. Mr. Torpenhow wears his socks out both ends at once.”

“Three quid a week from me, and the delights of my society. No socks mended. Nothing from Torp except a nod on the landing now and again, and all his socks mended. Bessie is very much a woman,” thought Dick; and he looked at her between half-shut eyes. Food and rest had transformed the girl, as Dick knew they would.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” she said quickly. “Don't. You look reg'lar bad when you look that way. You don't think much o' me, do you?”

“That depends on how you behave.”

Bessie behaved beautifully. Only it was difficult at the end of a sitting to bid her go out into the gray streets. She very much preferred the studio and a big chair by the stove, with some socks in her lap as an excuse for delay. Then Torpenhow would come in, and Bessie would be moved to tell strange and wonderful stories of her past, and still stranger ones of her present improved circumstances. She would make them tea as though she had a right to make it; and once or twice on these occasions Dick caught Torpenhow's eyes fixed on the trim little figure, and because Bessie's flittings about the room made Dick ardently long for Maisie, he realised whither Torpenhow's thoughts were tending. And Bessie was exceedingly careful of the condition of Torpenhow's linen. She spoke very little to him, but sometimes they talked together on the landing.

“I was a great fool,” Dick said to himself. “I know what red firelight looks like when a man's tramping through a strange town; and ours is a lonely, selfish sort of life at the best. I wonder Maisie doesn't feel that sometimes. But I can't order Bessie away. That's the worst of beginning things. One never knows where they stop.”

One evening, after a sitting prolonged to the last limit of the light, Dick was roused from a nap by a broken voice in Torpenhow's room. He jumped to his feet. “Now what ought I to do? It looks foolish to go in.--Oh, bless you, Binkie!” The little terrier thrust Torpenhow's door open with his nose and came out to take possession of Dick's chair. The door swung wide unheeded, and Dick across the landing could see Bessie in the half-light making her little supplication to Torpenhow. She was kneeling by his side, and her hands were clasped across his knee.

“I know,--I know,” she said thickly. “'Tisn't right 'o me to do this, but I can't help it; and you were so kind,--so kind; and you never took any notice 'o me. And I've mended all your things so carefully,--I did. Oh, please, 'tisn't as if I was asking you to marry me. I wouldn't think of it. But you--couldn't you take and live with me till Miss Right comes along? I'm only Miss Wrong, I know, but I'd work my hands to the bare bone for you. And I'm not ugly to look at. Say you will!”

Dick hardly recognised Torpenhow's voice in reply--“But look here. It's no use. I'm liable to be ordered off anywhere at a minute's notice if a war breaks out. At a minute's notice--dear.”

“What does that matter? Until you go, then. Until you go. 'Tisn't much I'm asking, and--you don't know how good I can cook.” She had put an arm round his neck and was drawing his head down.

“Until--I--go, then.”

“Torp,” said Dick, across the landing. He could hardly steady his voice.

“Come here a minute, old man. I'm in trouble”--

“Heaven send he'll listen to me!” There was something very like an oath from Bessie's lips. She was afraid of Dick, and disappeared down the staircase in panic, but it seemed an age before Torpenhow entered the studio. He went to the mantelpiece, buried his head on his arms, and groaned like a wounded bull.

“What the devil right have you to interfere?” he said, at last.

“Who's interfering with which? Your own sense told you long ago you couldn't be such a fool. It was a tough rack, St. Anthony, but you're all right now.”

“I oughtn't to have seen her moving about these rooms as if they belonged to her. That's what upset me. It gives a lonely man a sort of hankering, doesn't it?” said Torpenhow, piteously.

“Now you talk sense. It does. But, since you aren't in a condition to discuss the disadvantages of double housekeeping, do you know what you're going to do?”

“I don't. I wish I did.”

“You're going away for a season on a brilliant tour to regain tone. You're going to Brighton, or Scarborough, or Prawle Point, to see the ships go by. And you're going at once. Isn't it odd? I'll take care of Binkie, but out you go immediately. Never resist the devil. He holds the bank. Fly from him. Pack your things and go.”

“I believe you're right. Where shall I go?”

“And you call yourself a special correspondent! Pack first and inquire afterwards.”

An hour later Torpenhow was despatched into the night for a hansom.

“You'll probably think of some place to go to while you're moving,” said Dick. “On to Euston, to begin with, and--oh yes--get drunk tonight.”

He returned to the studio, and lighted more candles, for he found the room very dark.

“Oh, you Jezebel! you futile little Jezebel! Won't you hate me tomorrow!--Binkie, come here.”

Binkie turned over on his back on the hearth-rug, and Dick stirred him with a meditative foot.

“I said she was not immoral. I was wrong. She said she could cook. That showed premeditated sin. Oh, Binkie, if you are a man you will go to perdition; but if you are a woman, and say that you can cook, you will go to a much worse place.”

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Chapter X

What's you that follows at my side?-- The foe that ye must fight, my lord.-- That hirples swift as I can ride?-- The shadow of the night, my lord.-- Then wheel my horse against the foe!-- He's down and overpast, my lord.

Ye war against the sunset glow; The darkness gathers fast, my lord. ----The Fight of Heriot's Ford

“This is a cheerful life,” said Dick, some days later. “Torp's away; Bessie hates me; I can't get at the notion of the Melancolia; Maisie's letters are scrappy; and I believe I have indigestion. What give a man pains across the head and spots before his eyes, Binkie? Shall us take some liver pills?”

Dick had just gone through a lively scene with Bessie. She had for the fiftieth time reproached him for sending Torpenhow away. She explained her enduring hatred for Dick, and made it clear to him that she only sat for the sake of his money. “And Mr. Torpenhow's ten times a better man than you,” she concluded.

“He is. That's why he went away. I should have stayed and made love to you.”

The girl sat with her chin on her hand, scowling. “To me! I'd like to catch you! If I wasn't afraid 'o being hung I'd kill you. That's what I'd do. D'you believe me?”

Dick smiled wearily. It is not pleasant to live in the company of a notion that will not work out, a fox-terrier that cannot talk, and a woman who talks too much. He would have answered, but at that moment there unrolled itself from one corner of the studio a veil, as it were, of the flimsiest gauze. He rubbed his eyes, but the gray haze would not go.

“This is disgraceful indigestion. Binkie, we will go to a medicine-man. We can't have our eyes interfered with, for by these we get our bread; also mutton-chop bones for little dogs.”

The doctor was an affable local practitioner with white hair, and he said nothing till Dick began to describe the gray film in the studio.

“We all want a little patching and repairing from time to time,” he chirped. “Like a ship, my dear sir,--exactly like a ship. Sometimes the hull is out of order, and we consult the surgeon; sometimes the rigging, and then I advise; sometimes the engines, and we go to the brain-specialist; sometimes the look-out on the bridge is tired, and then we see an oculist. I should recommend you to see an oculist. A little patching and repairing from time to time is all we want. An oculist, by all means.”

Dick sought an oculist,--the best in London. He was certain that the local practitioner did not know anything about his trade, and more certain that Maisie would laugh at him if he were forced to wear spectacles.

“I've neglected the warnings of my lord the stomach too long. Hence these spots before the eyes, Binkie. I can see as well as I ever could.”

As he entered the dark hall that led to the consulting-room a man cannoned against him. Dick saw the face as it hurried out into the street.

“That's the writer-type. He has the same modelling of the forehead as Torp. He looks very sick. Probably heard something he didn't like.”

Even as he thought, a great fear came upon Dick, a fear that made him hold his breath as he walked into the oculist's waiting room, with the heavy carved furniture, the dark-green paper, and the sober-hued prints on the wall. He recognised a reproduction of one of his own sketches.

Many people were waiting their turn before him. His eye was caught by a flaming red-and-gold Christmas-carol book. Little children came to that eye-doctor, and they needed large-type amusement.

“That's idolatrous bad Art,” he said, drawing the book towards himself.

“From the anatomy of the angels, it has been made in Germany.” He opened in mechanically, and there leaped to his eyes a verse printed in red ink--

The next good joy that Mary had, It was the joy of three, To see her good Son Jesus Christ Making the blind to see; Making the blind to see, good Lord, And happy we may be. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost To all eternity!

Dick read and re-read the verse till his turn came, and the doctor was bending above him seated in an arm-chair. The blaze of the gas-microscope in his eyes made him wince. The doctor's hand touched the scar of the sword-cut on Dick's head, and Dick explained briefly how he had come by it. When the flame was removed, Dick saw the doctor's face, and the fear came upon him again. The doctor wrapped himself in a mist of words. Dick caught allusions to “scar,” “frontal bone,” “optic nerve,” “extreme caution,” and the “avoidance of mental anxiety.”

“Verdict?” he said faintly. “My business is painting, and I daren't waste time. What do you make of it?”

Again the whirl of words, but this time they conveyed a meaning.

“Can you give me anything to drink?”

Many sentences were pronounced in that darkened room, and the prisoners often needed cheering. Dick found a glass of liqueur brandy in his hand.

“As far as I can gather,” he said, coughing above the spirit, “you call it decay of the optic nerve, or something, and therefore hopeless. What is my time-limit, avoiding all strain and worry?”

“Perhaps one year.”

“My God! And if I don't take care of myself?”

“I really could not say. One cannot ascertain the exact amount of injury inflicted by the sword-cut. The scar is an old one, and--exposure to the strong light of the desert, did you say?--with excessive application to fine work? I really could not say?”

“I beg your pardon, but it has come without any warning. If you will let me, I'll sit here for a minute, and then I'll go. You have been very good in telling me the truth. Without any warning; without any warning. Thanks.”

Dick went into the street, and was rapturously received by Binkie.

“We've got it very badly, little dog! Just as badly as we can get it. We'll go to the Park to think it out.”

They headed for a certain tree that Dick knew well, and they sat down to think, because his legs were trembling under him and there was cold fear at the pit of his stomach.

“How could it have come without any warning? It's as sudden as being shot. It's the living death, Binkie. We're to be shut up in the dark in one year if we're careful, and we shan't see anybody, and we shall never have anything we want, not though we live to be a hundred!” Binkie wagged his tail joyously. “Binkie, we must think. Let's see how it feels to be blind.” Dick shut his eyes, and flaming commas and Catherine-wheels floated inside the lids. Yet when he looked across the Park the scope of his vision was not contracted. He could see perfectly, until a procession of slow-wheeling fireworks defiled across his eyeballs.

“Little dorglums, we aren't at all well. Let's go home. If only Torp were back, now!”

But Torpenhow was in the south of England, inspecting dockyards in the company of the Nilghai. His letters were brief and full of mystery.

Dick had never asked anybody to help him in his joys or his sorrows. He argued, in the loneliness of his studio, henceforward to be decorated with a film of gray gauze in one corner, that, if his fate were blindness, all the Torpenhows in the world could not save him. “I can't call him off his trip to sit down and sympathise with me. I must pull through this business alone,” he said. He was lying on the sofa, eating his moustache and wondering what the darkness of the night would be like. Then came to his mind the memory of a quaint scene in the Soudan. A soldier had been nearly hacked in two by a broad-bladed Arab spear. For one instant the man felt no pain. Looking down, he saw that his life-blood was going from him. The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he pitched grunting at their feet. Dick laughed again, remembering the horror. It seemed so exactly like his own case.

“But I have a little more time allowed me,” he said. He paced up and down the room, quietly at first, but afterwards with the hurried feet of fear. It was as though a black shadow stood at his elbow and urged him to go forward; and there were only weaving circles and floating pin-dots before his eyes.

“We need to be calm, Binkie; we must be calm.” He talked aloud for the sake of distraction. “This isn't nice at all. What shall we do? We must do something. Our time is short. I shouldn't have believed that this morning; but now things are different. Binkie, where was Moses when the light went out?”

Binkie smiled from ear to ear, as a well-bred terrier should, but made no suggestion.

“'Were there but world enough and time, This coyness, Binkie, were not crime.... But at my back I always hear----'” He wiped his forehead, which was unpleasantly damp. “What can I do? What can I do? I haven't any notions left, and I can't think connectedly, but I must do something, or I shall go off my head.”

The hurried walk recommenced, Dick stopping every now and again to drag forth long-neglected canvases and old note-books; for he turned to his work by instinct, as a thing that could not fail. “You won't do, and you won't do,” he said, at each inspection. “No more soldiers. I couldn't paint 'em. Sudden death comes home too nearly, and this is battle and murder for me.”

The day was failing, and Dick thought for a moment that the twilight of the blind had come upon him unaware. “Allah Almighty!” he cried despairingly, “help me through the time of waiting, and I won't whine when my punishment comes. What can I do now, before the light goes?”

There was no answer. Dick waited till he could regain some sort of control over himself. His hands were shaking, and he prided himself on their steadiness; he could feel that his lips were quivering, and the sweat was running down his face. He was lashed by fear, driven forward by the desire to get to work at once and accomplish something, and maddened by the refusal of his brain to do more than repeat the news that he was about to go blind. “It's a humiliating exhibition,” he thought, “and I'm glad Torp isn't here to see. The doctor said I was to avoid mental worry. Come here and let me pet you, Binkie.”

The little dog yelped because Dick nearly squeezed the bark out of him.

Then he heard the man speaking in the twilight, and, doglike, understood that his trouble stood off from him--“Allah is good, Binkie. Not quite so gentle as we could wish, but we'll discuss that later. I think I see my way to it now. All those studies of Bessie's head were nonsense, and they nearly brought your master into a scrape. I hold the notion now as clear as crystal, 'the Melancolia that transcends all wit.' There shall be Maisie in that head, because I shall never get Maisie; and Bess, of course, because she knows all about Melancolia, though she doesn't know she knows; and there shall be some drawing in it, and it shall all end up with a laugh. That's for myself. Shall she giggle or grin? No, she shall laugh right out of the canvas, and every man and woman that ever had a sorrow of their own shall--what is it the poem says?-- 'Understand the speech and feel a stir Of fellowship in all disastrous fight.'

“'In all disastrous fight'? That's better than painting the thing merely to pique Maisie. I can do it now because I have it inside me. Binkie, I'm going to hold you up by your tail. You're an omen. Come here.”

Binkie swung head downward for a moment without speaking.

“Rather like holding a guinea-pig; but you're a brave little dog, and you don't yelp when you're hung up. It is an omen.”

Binkie went to his own chair, and as often as he looked saw Dick walking up and down, rubbing his hands and chuckling. That night Dick wrote a letter to Maisie full of the tenderest regard for her health, but saying very little about his own, and dreamed of the Melancolia to be born. Not till morning did he remember that something might happen to him in the future.

He fell to work, whistling softly, and was swallowed up in the clean, clear joy of creation, which does not come to man too often, lest he should consider himself the equal of his God, and so refuse to die at the appointed time. He forgot Maisie, Torpenhow, and Binkie at his feet, but remembered to stir Bessie, who needed very little stirring, into a tremendous rage, that he might watch the smouldering lights in her eyes.

He threw himself without reservation into his work, and did not think of the doom that was to overtake him, for he was possessed with his notion, and the things of this world had no power upon him.

“You're pleased today,” said Bessie.

Dick waved his mahl-stick in mystic circles and went to the sideboard for a drink. In the evening, when the exaltation of the day had died down, he went to the sideboard again, and after some visits became convinced that the eye-doctor was a liar, since he could still see everything very clearly.

He was of opinion that he would even make a home for Maisie, and that whether she liked it or not she should be his wife. The mood passed next morning, but the sideboard and all upon it remained for his comfort.

Again he set to work, and his eyes troubled him with spots and dashes and blurs till he had taken counsel with the sideboard, and the Melancolia both on the canvas and in his own mind appeared lovelier than ever. There was a delightful sense of irresponsibility upon him, such as they feel who walking among their fellow-men know that the death-sentence of disease is upon them, and, seeing that fear is but waste of the little time left, are riotously happy. The days passed without event.

Bessie arrived punctually always, and, though her voice seemed to Dick to come from a distance, her face was always very near. The Melancolia began to flame on the canvas, in the likeness of a woman who had known all the sorrow in the world and was laughing at it. It was true that the corners of the studio draped themselves in gray film and retired into the darkness, that the spots in his eyes and the pains across his head were very troublesome, and that Maisie's letters were hard to read and harder still to answer. He could not tell her of his trouble, and he could not laugh at her accounts of her own Melancolia which was always going to be finished. But the furious days of toil and the nights of wild dreams made amends for all, and the sideboard was his best friend on earth.

Bessie was singularly dull. She used to shriek with rage when Dick stared at her between half-closed eyes. Now she sulked, or watched him with disgust, saying very little.

Torpenhow had been absent for six weeks. An incoherent note heralded his return. “News! great news!” he wrote. “The Nilghai knows, and so does the Keneu. We're all back on Thursday. Get lunch and clean your accoutrements.”

Dick showed Bessie the letter, and she abused him for that he had ever sent Torpenhow away and ruined her life.

“Well,” said Dick, brutally, “you're better as you are, instead of making love to some drunken beast in the street.” He felt that he had rescued Torpenhow from great temptation.

“I don't know if that's any worse than sitting to a drunken beast in a studio. You haven't been sober for three weeks. You've been soaking the whole time; and yet you pretend you're better than me!”

“What d'you mean?” said Dick.

“Mean! You'll see when Mr. Torpenhow comes back.”

It was not long to wait. Torpenhow met Bessie on the staircase without a sign of feeling. He had news that was more to him than many Bessies, and the Keneu and the Nilghai were trampling behind him, calling for Dick.

“Drinking like a fish,” Bessie whispered. “He's been at it for nearly a month.” She followed the men stealthily to hear judgment done.

They came into the studio, rejoicing, to be welcomed over effusively by a drawn, lined, shrunken, haggard wreck,--unshaven, blue-white about the nostrils, stooping in the shoulders, and peering under his eyebrows nervously. The drink had been at work as steadily as Dick.

“Is this you?” said Torpenhow.

“All that's left of me. Sit down. Binkie's quite well, and I've been doing some good work.” He reeled where he stood.

“You've done some of the worst work you've ever done in your life. Man alive, you're----”

Torpenhow turned to his companions appealingly, and they left the room to find lunch elsewhere. Then he spoke; but, since the reproof of a friend is much too sacred and intimate a thing to be printed, and since Torpenhow used figures and metaphors which were unseemly, and contempt untranslatable, it will never be known what was actually said to Dick, who blinked and winked and picked at his hands. After a time the culprit began to feel the need of a little self-respect. He was quite sure that he had not in any way departed from virtue, and there were reasons, too, of which Torpenhow knew nothing. He would explain.

He rose, tried to straighten his shoulders, and spoke to the face he could hardly see.

“You are right,” he said. “But I am right, too. After you went away I had some trouble with my eyes. So I went to an oculist, and he turned a gasogene--I mean a gas-engine--into my eye. That was very long ago. He said, 'Scar on the head,--sword-cut and optic nerve.' Make a note of that. So I am going blind. I have some work to do before I go blind, and I suppose that I must do it. I cannot see much now, but I can see best when I am drunk. I did not know I was drunk till I was told, but I must go on with my work. If you want to see it, there it is.” He pointed to the all but finished Melancolia and looked for applause.

Torpenhow said nothing, and Dick began to whimper feebly, for joy at seeing Torpenhow again, for grief at misdeeds--if indeed they were misdeeds--that made Torpenhow remote and unsympathetic, and for childish vanity hurt, since Torpenhow had not given a word of praise to his wonderful picture.

Bessie looked through the keyhole after a long pause, and saw the two walking up and down as usual, Torpenhow's hand on Dick's shoulder.

Hereat she said something so improper that it shocked even Binkie, who was dribbling patiently on the landing with the hope of seeing his master again.

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Chapter XI

The lark will make her hymn to God, The partridge call her brood, While I forget the heath I trod, The fields wherein I stood.

'Tis dule to know not night from morn, But deeper dule to know I can but hear the hunter's horn That once I used to blow. --The Only Son

IT WAS the third day after Torpenhow's return, and his heart was heavy.

“Do you mean to tell me that you can't see to work without whiskey? It's generally the other way about.”

“Can a drunkard swear on his honour?” said Dick.

“Yes, if he has been as good a man as you.”

“Then I give you my word of honour,” said Dick, speaking hurriedly through parched lips. “Old man, I can hardly see your face now. You've kept me sober for two days,--if I ever was drunk,--and I've done no work. Don't keep me back any more. I don't know when my eyes may give out. The spots and dots and the pains and things are crowding worse than ever. I swear I can see all right when I'm--when I'm moderately screwed, as you say. Give me three more sittings from Bessie and all--the stuff I want, and the picture will be done. I can't kill myself in three days. It only means a touch of D. T. at the worst.”

“If I give you three days more will you promise me to stop work and--the other thing, whether the picture's finished or not?”

“I can't. You don't know what that picture means to me. But surely you could get the Nilghai to help you, and knock me down and tie me up. I shouldn't fight for the whiskey, but I should for the work.”

“Go on, then. I give you three days; but you're nearly breaking my heart.”

Dick returned to his work, toiling as one possessed; and the yellow devil of whiskey stood by him and chased away the spots in his eyes. The Melancolia was nearly finished, and was all or nearly all that he had hoped she would be. Dick jested with Bessie, who reminded him that he was “a drunken beast”; but the reproof did not move him.

“You can't understand, Bess. We are in sight of land now, and soon we shall lie back and think about what we've done. I'll give you three months' pay when the picture's finished, and next time I have any more work in hand--but that doesn't matter. Won't three months' pay make you hate me less?”

“No, it won't! I hate you, and I'll go on hating you. Mr. Torpenhow won't speak to me any more. He's always looking at maps.”

Bessie did not say that she had again laid siege to Torpenhow, or that at the end of our passionate pleading he had picked her up, given her a kiss, and put her outside the door with the recommendation not to be a little fool. He spent most of his time in the company of the Nilghai, and their talk was of war in the near future, the hiring of transports, and secret preparations among the dockyards. He did not wish to see Dick till the picture was finished.

“He's doing first-class work,” he said to the Nilghai, “and it's quite out of his regular line. But, for the matter of that, so's his infernal soaking.”

“Never mind. Leave him alone. When he has come to his senses again we'll carry him off from this place and let him breathe clean air. Poor Dick! I don't envy you, Torp, when his eyes fail.”

“Yes, it will be a case of 'God help the man who's chained to our Davie.' The worst is that we don't know when it will happen, and I believe the uncertainty and the waiting have sent Dick to the whiskey more than anything else.”

“How the Arab who cut his head open would grin if he knew!”

“He's at perfect liberty to grin if he can. He's dead. That's poor consolation now.”

In the afternoon of the third day Torpenhow heard Dick calling for him.

“All finished!” he shouted. “I've done it! Come in! Isn't she a beauty? Isn't she a darling? I've been down to hell to get her; but isn't she worth it?”

Torpenhow looked at the head of a woman who laughed,--a full-lipped, hollow-eyed woman who laughed from out of the canvas as Dick had intended she would.

“Who taught you how to do it?” said Torpenhow. “The touch and notion have nothing to do with your regular work. What a face it is! What eyes, and what insolence!” Unconsciously he threw back his head and laughed with her. “She's seen the game played out,--I don't think she had a good time of it,--and now she doesn't care. Isn't that the idea?”

“Exactly.”

“Where did you get the mouth and chin from? They don't belong to Bess.”

“They're--some one else's. But isn't it good? Isn't it thundering good? Wasn't it worth the whiskey? I did it. Alone I did it, and it's the best I can do.” He drew his breath sharply, and whispered, “Just God! what could I not do ten years hence, if I can do this now!--By the way, what do you think of it, Bess?”

The girl was biting her lips. She loathed Torpenhow because he had taken no notice of her.

“I think it's just the horridest, beastliest thing I ever saw,” she answered, and turned away.

“More than you will be of that way of thinking, young woman.--Dick, there's a sort of murderous, viperine suggestion in the poise of the head that I don't understand,” said Torpenhow.

“That's trick-work,” said Dick, chuckling with delight at being completely understood. “I couldn't resist one little bit of sheer swagger. It's a French trick, and you wouldn't understand; but it's got at by slewing round the head a trifle, and a tiny, tiny foreshortening of one side of the face from the angle of the chin to the top of the left ear. That, and deepening the shadow under the lobe of the ear. It was flagrant trick-work; but, having the notion fixed, I felt entitled to play with it,--Oh, you beauty!”

“Amen! She is a beauty. I can feel it.”

“So will every man who has any sorrow of his own,” said Dick, slapping his thigh. “He shall see his trouble there, and, by the Lord Harry, just when he's feeling properly sorry for himself he shall throw back his head and laugh,--as she is laughing. I've put the life of my heart and the light of my eyes into her, and I don't care what comes.... I'm tired,--awfully tired. I think I'll get to sleep. Take away the whiskey, it has served its turn, and give Bessie thirty-six quid, and three over for luck. Cover the picture.”

He dropped asleep in the long chair, hid face white and haggard, almost before he had finished the sentence. Bessie tried to take Torpenhow's hand. “Aren't you never going to speak to me any more?” she said; but Torpenhow was looking at Dick.

“What a stock of vanity the man has! I'll take him in hand tomorrow and make much of him. He deserves it.--Eh! what was that, Bess?”

“Nothing. I'll put things tidy here a little, and then I'll go. You couldn't give Me that three months' pay now, could you? He said you were to.”

Torpenhow gave her a check and went to his own rooms. Bessie faithfully tidied up the studio, set the door ajar for flight, emptied half a bottle of turpentine on a duster, and began to scrub the face of the Melancolia viciously. The paint did not smudge quickly enough. She took a palette-knife and scraped, following each stroke with the wet duster. In five minutes the picture was a formless, scarred muddle of colours. She threw the paint-stained duster into the studio stove, stuck out her tongue at the sleeper, and whispered, “Bilked!” as she turned to run down the staircase. She would never see Torpenhow any more, but she had at least done harm to the man who had come between her and her desire and who used to make fun of her. Cashing the check was the very cream of the jest to Bessie. Then the little privateer sailed across the Thames, to be swallowed up in the gray wilderness of South-the-Water.

Dick slept till late in the evening, when Torpenhow dragged him off to bed. His eyes were as bright as his voice was hoarse. “Let's have another look at the picture,” he said, insistently as a child.

“You--go--to--bed,” said Torpenhow. “You aren't at all well, though you mayn't know it. You're as jumpy as a cat.”

“I reform tomorrow. Good night.”

As he repassed through the studio, Torpenhow lifted the cloth above the picture, and almost betrayed himself by outcries: “Wiped out!--scraped out and turped out! He's on the verge of jumps as it is. That's Bess,--the little fiend! Only a woman could have done that!--with the ink not dry on the check, too! Dick will be raving mad tomorrow. It was all my fault for trying to help gutter-devils. Oh, my poor Dick, the Lord is hitting you very hard!”

Dick could not sleep that night, partly for pure joy, and partly because the well-known Catherine-wheels inside his eyes had given place to crackling volcanoes of many-coloured fire. “Spout away,” he said aloud.

“I've done my work, and now you can do what you please.” He lay still, staring at the ceiling, the long-pent-up delirium of drink in his veins, his brain on fire with racing thoughts that would not stay to be considered, and his hands crisped and dry. He had just discovered that he was painting the face of the Melancolia on a revolving dome ribbed with millions of lights, and that all his wondrous thoughts stood embodied hundreds of feet below his tiny swinging plank, shouting together in his honour, when something cracked inside his temples like an overstrained bowstring, the glittering dome broke inward, and he was alone in the thick night.

“I'll go to sleep. The room's very dark. Let's light a lamp and see how the Melancolia looks. There ought to have been a moon.”

It was then that Torpenhow heard his name called by a voice that he did not know,--in the rattling accents of deadly fear.

“He's looked at the picture,” was his first thought, as he hurried into the bedroom and found Dick sitting up and beating the air with his hands.

“Torp! Torp! where are you? For pity's sake, come to me!”

“What's the matter?”

Dick clutched at his shoulder. “Matter! I've been lying here for hours in the dark, and you never heard me. Torp, old man, don't go away. I'm all in the dark. In the dark, I tell you!”

Torpenhow held the candle within a foot of Dick's eyes, but there was no light in those eyes. He lit the gas, and Dick heard the flame catch. The grip of his fingers on Torpenhow's shoulder made Torpenhow wince.

“Don't leave me. You wouldn't leave me alone now, would you? I can't see. D'you understand? It's black,--quite black,--and I feel as if I was falling through it all.”

“Steady does it.” Torpenhow put his arm round Dick and began to rock him gently to and fro.

“That's good. Now don't talk. If I keep very quiet for a while, this darkness will lift. It seems just on the point of breaking. H'sh!” Dick knit his brows and stared desperately in front of him. The night air was chilling Torpenhow's toes.

“Can you stay like that a minute?” he said. “I'll get my dressing-gown and some slippers.”

Dick clutched the bed-head with both hands and waited for the darkness to clear away. “What a time you've been!” he cried, when Torpenhow returned. “It's as black as ever. What are you banging about in the door-way?”

“Long chair,--horse-blanket,--pillow. Going to sleep by you. Lie down now; you'll be better in the morning.”

“I shan't!” The voice rose to a wail. “My God! I'm blind! I'm blind, and the darkness will never go away.” He made as if to leap from the bed, but Torpenhow's arms were round him, and Torpenhow's chin was on his shoulder, and his breath was squeezed out of him. He could only gasp, “Blind!” and wriggle feebly.

“Steady, Dickie, steady!” said the deep voice in his ear, and the grip tightened. “Bite on the bullet, old man, and don't let them think you're afraid.” The grip could draw no closer. Both men were breathing heavily.

Dick threw his head from side to side and groaned.

“Let me go,” he panted. “You're cracking my ribs. We--we mustn't let them think we're afraid, must we,--all the powers of darkness and that lot?”

“Lie down. It's all over now.”

“Yes,” said Dick, obediently. “But would you mind letting me hold your hand? I feel as if I wanted something to hold on to. One drops through the dark so.”

Torpenhow thrust out a large and hairy paw from the long chair. Dick clutched it tightly, and in half an hour had fallen asleep. Torpenhow withdrew his hand, and, stooping over Dick, kissed him lightly on the forehead, as men do sometimes kiss a wounded comrade in the hour of death, to ease his departure.

In the gray dawn Torpenhow heard Dick talking to himself. He was adrift on the shoreless tides of delirium, speaking very quickly--“It's a pity,--a great pity; but it's helped, and it must be eaten, Master George. Sufficient unto the day is the blindness thereof, and, further, putting aside all Melancolias and false humours, it is of obvious notoriety--such as mine was--that the queen can do no wrong. Torp doesn't know that. I'll tell him when we're a little farther into the desert.

“What a bungle those boatmen are making of the steamer-ropes! They'll have that four-inch hawser chafed through in a minute. I told you so--there she goes! White foam on green water, and the steamer slewing round. How good that looks! I'll sketch it. No, I can't. I'm afflicted with ophthalmia. That was one of the ten plagues of Egypt, and it extends up the Nile in the shape of cataract. Ha! that's a joke, Torp. Laugh, you graven image, and stand clear of the hawser.... It'll knock you into the water and make your dress all dirty, Maisie dear.”

“Oh!” said Torpenhow. “This happened before. That night on the river.”

“She'll be sure to say it's my fault if you get muddy, and you're quite near enough to the breakwater. Maisie, that's not fair. Ah! I knew you'd miss. Low and to the left, dear. But you've no conviction. Don't be angry, darling. I'd cut my hand off if it would give you anything more than obstinacy. My right hand, if it would serve.”

“Now we mustn't listen. Here's an island shouting across seas of misunderstanding with a vengeance. But it's shouting truth, I fancy,” said Torpenhow.

The babble continued. It all bore upon Maisie. Sometimes Dick lectured at length on his craft, then he cursed himself for his folly in being enslaved. He pleaded to Maisie for a kiss--only one kiss--before she went away, and called to her to come back from Vitry-sur-Marne, if she would; but through all his ravings he bade heaven and earth witness that the queen could do no wrong.

Torpenhow listened attentively, and learned every detail of Dick's life that had been hidden from him. For three days Dick raved through the past, and then a natural sleep. “What a strain he has been running under, poor chap!” said Torpenhow. “Dick, of all men, handing himself over like a dog! And I was lecturing him on arrogance! I ought to have known that it was no use to judge a man. But I did it. What a demon that girl must be! Dick's given her his life,--confound him!--and she's given him one kiss apparently.”

“Torp,” said Dick, from the bed, “go out for a walk. You've been here too long. I'll get up. Hi! This is annoying. I can't dress myself. Oh, it's too absurd!”

Torpenhow helped him into his clothes and led him to the big chair in the studio. He sat quietly waiting under strained nerves for the darkness to lift. It did not lift that day, nor the next. Dick adventured on a voyage round the walls. He hit his shins against the stove, and this suggested to him that it would be better to crawl on all fours, one hand in front of him. Torpenhow found him on the floor.

“I'm trying to get the geography of my new possessions,” said he. “D'you remember that nigger you gouged in the square? Pity you didn't keep the odd eye. It would have been useful. Any letters for me? Give me all the ones in fat gray envelopes with a sort of crown thing outside. They're of no importance.”

Torpenhow gave him a letter with a black M. on the envelope flap. Dick put it into his pocket. There was nothing in it that Torpenhow might not have read, but it belonged to himself and to Maisie, who would never belong to him.

“When she finds that I don't write, she'll stop writing. It's better so. I couldn't be any use to her now,” Dick argued, and the tempter suggested that he should make known his condition. Every nerve in him revolted. “I have fallen low enough already. I'm not going to beg for pity. Besides, it would be cruel to her.” He strove to put Maisie out of his thoughts; but the blind have many opportunities for thinking, and as the tides of his strength came back to him in the long employless days of dead darkness, Dick's soul was troubled to the core. Another letter, and another, came from Maisie. Then there was silence, and Dick sat by the window, the pulse of summer in the air, and pictured her being won by another man, stronger than himself. His imagination, the keener for the dark background it worked against, spared him no single detail that might send him raging up and down the studio, to stumble over the stove that seemed to be in four places at once. Worst of all, tobacco would not taste in the darkness. The arrogance of the man had disappeared, and in its place were settled despair that Torpenhow knew, and blind passion that Dick confided to his pillow at night. The intervals between the paroxysms were filled with intolerable waiting and the weight of intolerable darkness.

“Come out into the Park,” said Torpenhow. “You haven't stirred out since the beginning of things.”

“What's the use? There's no movement in the dark; and, besides,”--he paused irresolutely at the head of the stairs,--“something will run over me.”

“Not if I'm with you. Proceed gingerly.”

The roar of the streets filled Dick with nervous terror, and he clung to Torpenhow's arm. “Fancy having to feel for a gutter with your foot!” he said petulantly, as he turned into the Park. “Let's curse God and die.”

“Sentries are forbidden to pay unauthorised compliments. By Jove, there are the Guards!”

Dick's figure straightened. “Let's get near 'em. Let's go in and look. Let's get on the grass and run. I can smell the trees.”

“Mind the low railing. That's all right!” Torpenhow kicked out a tuft of grass with his heel. “Smell that,” he said. “Isn't it good?” Dick sniffed luxuriously. “Now pick up your feet and run.” They approached as near to the regiment as was possible. The clank of bayonets being unfixed made Dick's nostrils quiver.

“Let's get nearer. They're in column, aren't they?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Felt it. Oh, my men!--my beautiful men!” He edged forward as though he could see. “I could draw those chaps once. Who'll draw 'em now?”

“They'll move off in a minute. Don't jump when the band begins.”

“Huh! I'm not a new charger. It's the silences that hurt. Nearer, Torp!--nearer! Oh, my God, what wouldn't I give to see 'em for a minute!--one half-minute!”

He could hear the armed life almost within reach of him, could hear the slings tighten across the bandsman's chest as he heaved the big drum from the ground.

“Sticks crossed above his head,” whispered Torpenhow.

“I know. I know! Who should know if I don't? H'sh!”

The drum-sticks fell with a boom, and the men swung forward to the crash of the band. Dick felt the wind of the massed movement in his face, heard the maddening tramp of feet and the friction of the pouches on the belts. The big drum pounded out the tune. It was a music-hall refrain that made a perfect quickstep--

“He must be a man of decent height, He must be a man of weight, He must come home on a Saturday night In a thoroughly sober state; He must know how to love me, And he must know how to kiss; And if he's enough to keep us both I can't refuse him bliss.”

“What's the matter?” said Torpenhow, as he saw Dick's head fall when the last of the regiment had departed.

“Nothing. I feel a little bit out of the running,--that's all. Torp, take me back. Why did you bring me out?”

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Chapter XII

There were three friends that buried the fourth, The mould in his mouth and the dust in his eyes And they went south and east, and north,-- The strong man fights, but the sick man dies.

There were three friends that spoke of the dead,-- The strong man fights, but the sick man dies.-- “And would he were with us now,” they said, “The sun in our face and the wind in our eyes.” --Ballad.

The Nilghai was angry with Torpenhow. Dick had been sent to bed,--blind men are ever under the orders of those who can see,--and since he had returned from the Park had fluently sworn at Torpenhow because he was alive, and all the world because it was alive and could see, while he, Dick, was dead in the death of the blind, who, at the best, are only burdens upon their associates. Torpenhow had said something about a Mrs. Gummidge, and Dick had retired in a black fury to handle and re-handle three unopened letters from Maisie.

The Nilghai, fat, burly, and aggressive, was in Torpenhow's rooms.

Behind him sat the Keneu, the Great War Eagle, and between them lay a large map embellished with black-and-white-headed pins.

“I was wrong about the Balkans,” said the Nilghai. “But I'm not wrong about this business. The whole of our work in the Southern Soudan must be done over again. The public doesn't care, of course, but the government does, and they are making their arrangements quietly. You know that as well as I do.”

“I remember how the people cursed us when our troops withdrew from Omdurman. It was bound to crop up sooner or later. But I can't go,” said Torpenhow. He pointed through the open door; it was a hot night. “Can you blame me?”

The Keneu purred above his pipe like a large and very happy cat--“Don't blame you in the least. It's uncommonly good of you, and all the rest of it, but every man--even you, Torp--must consider his work. I know it sounds brutal, but Dick's out of the race,--down,--gastados expended, finished, done for. He has a little money of his own. He won't starve, and you can't pull out of your slide for his sake. Think of your own reputation.”

“Dick's was five times bigger than mine and yours put together.”

“That was because he signed his name to everything he did. It's all ended now. You must hold yourself in readiness to move out. You can command your own prices, and you do better work than any three of us.”

“Don't tell me how tempting it is. I'll stay here to look after Dick for a while. He's as cheerful as a bear with a sore head, but I think he likes to have me near him.”

The Nilghai said something uncomplimentary about soft-headed fools who throw away their careers for other fools. Torpenhow flushed angrily. The constant strain of attendance on Dick had worn his nerves thin.

“There remains a third fate,” said the Keneu, thoughtfully. “Consider this, and be not larger fools than necessary. Dick is--or rather was--an able-bodied man of moderate attractions and a certain amount of audacity.”

“Oho!” said the Nilghai, who remembered an affair at Cairo. “I begin to see,--Torp, I'm sorry.”

Torpenhow nodded forgiveness: “You were more sorry when he cut you out, though.--Go on, Keneu.”

“I've often thought, when I've seen men die out in the desert, that if the news could be sent through the world, and the means of transport were quick enough, there would be one woman at least at each man's bedside.”

“There would be some mighty quaint revelations. Let us be grateful things are as they are,” said the Nilghai.

“Let us rather reverently consider whether Torp's three-cornered ministrations are exactly what Dick needs just now.--What do you think yourself, Torp?”

“I know they aren't. But what can I do?”

“Lay the matter before the board. We are all Dick's friends here. You've been most in his life.”

“But I picked it up when he was off his head.”

“The greater chance of its being true. I thought we should arrive. Who is she?”

Then Torpenhow told a tale in plain words, as a special correspondent who knows how to make a verbal precis should tell it. The men listened without interruption.

“Is it possible that a man can come back across the years to his calf-love?”

said the Keneu. “Is it possible?”

“I give the facts. He says nothing about it now, but he sits fumbling three letters from her when he thinks I'm not looking. What am I to do?”

“Speak to him,” said the Nilghai.

“Oh yes! Write to her,--I don't know her full name, remember,--and ask her to accept him out of pity. I believe you once told Dick you were sorry for him, Nilghai. You remember what happened, eh? Go into the bedroom and suggest full confession and an appeal to this Maisie girl, whoever she is. I honestly believe he'd try to kill you; and the blindness has made him rather muscular.”

“Torpenhow's course is perfectly clear,” said the Keneu. “He will go to Vitry-sur-Marne, which is on the Bezieres-Landes Railway,--single track from Tourgas. The Prussians shelled it out in '70 because there was a poplar on the top of a hill eighteen hundred yards from the church spire. There's a squadron of cavalry quartered there,--or ought to be. Where this studio Torp spoke about may be I cannot tell. That is Torp's business. I have given him his route. He will dispassionately explain the situation to the girl, and she will come back to Dick,--the more especially because, to use Dick's words, 'there is nothing but her damned obstinacy to keep them apart.'”

“And they have four hundred and twenty pounds a year between 'em.”

Dick never lost his head for figures, even in his delirium. “You haven't the shadow of an excuse for not going,” said the Nilghai.

Torpenhow looked very uncomfortable. “But it's absurd and impossible. I can't drag her back by the hair.”

“Our business--the business for which we draw our money--is to do absurd and impossible things,--generally with no reason whatever except to amuse the public. Here we have a reason. The rest doesn't matter. I shall share these rooms with the Nilghai till Torpenhow returns. There will be a batch of unbridled 'specials' coming to town in a little while, and these will serve as their headquarters. Another reason for sending Torpenhow away. Thus Providence helps those who help others, and”--here the Keneu dropped his measured speech--“we can't have you tied by the leg to Dick when the trouble begins. It's your only chance of getting away; and Dick will be grateful.”

“He will,--worse luck! I can but go and try. I can't conceive a woman in her senses refusing Dick.”

“Talk that out with the girl. I have seen you wheedle an angry Mahdieh woman into giving you dates. This won't be a tithe as difficult. You had better not be here tomorrow afternoon, because the Nilghai and I will be in possession. It is an order. Obey.”

“Dick,” said Torpenhow, next morning, “can I do anything for you?”

“No! Leave me alone. How often must I remind you that I'm blind?”

“Nothing I could go for to fetch for to carry for to bring?”

“No. Take those infernal creaking boots of yours away.”

“Poor chap!” said Torpenhow to himself. “I must have been sitting on his nerves lately. He wants a lighter step.” Then, aloud, “Very well. Since you're so independent, I'm going off for four or five days. Say goodbye at least. The housekeeper will look after you, and Keneu has my rooms.”

Dick's face fell. “You won't be longer than a week at the outside? I know I'm touched in the temper, but I can't get on without you.”

“Can't you? You'll have to do without me in a little time, and you'll be glad I'm gone.”

Dick felt his way back to the big chair, and wondered what these things might mean. He did not wish to be tended by the housekeeper, and yet Torpenhow's constant tenderness jarred on him. He did not exactly know what he wanted. The darkness would not lift, and Maisie's unopened letters felt worn and old from much handling. He could never read them for himself as long as life endured; but Maisie might have sent him some fresh ones to play with. The Nilghai entered with a gift,--a piece of red modelling-wax. He fancied that Dick might find interest in using his hands. Dick poked and patted the stuff for a few minutes, and, “Is it like anything in the world?” he said drearily. “Take it away. I may get the touch of the blind in fifty years. Do you know where Torpenhow has gone?”

The Nilghai knew nothing. “We're staying in his rooms till he comes back. Can we do anything for you?”

“I'd like to be left alone, please. Don't think I'm ungrateful; but I'm best alone.”

The Nilghai chuckled, and Dick resumed his drowsy brooding and sullen rebellion against fate. He had long since ceased to think about the work he had done in the old days, and the desire to do more work had departed from him. He was exceedingly sorry for himself, and the completeness of his tender grief soothed him. But his soul and his body cried for Maisie--Maisie who would understand. His mind pointed out that Maisie, having her own work to do, would not care. His experience had taught him that when money was exhausted women went away, and that when a man was knocked out of the race the others trampled on him. “Then at the least,” said Dick, in reply, “she could use me as I used Binat,--for some sort of a study. I wouldn't ask more than to be near her again, even though I knew that another man was making love to her. Ugh! what a dog I am!”

A voice on the staircase began to sing joyfully--

“When we go--go--go away from here, Our creditors will weep and they will wail, Our absence much regretting when they find that we've been getting Out of England by next Tuesday's Indian mail.”

Following the trampling of feet, slamming of Torpenhow's door, and the sound of voices in strenuous debate, some one squeaked, “And see, you good fellows, I have found a new water-bottle--firs'-class patent--eh, how you say? Open himself inside out.”

Dick sprang to his feet. He knew the voice well. “That's Cassavetti, come back from the Continent. Now I know why Torp went away. There's a row somewhere, and--I'm out of it!”

The Nilghai commanded silence in vain. “That's for my sake,” Dick said bitterly. “The birds are getting ready to fly, and they wouldn't tell me. I can hear Morten-Sutherland and Mackaye. Half the War Correspondents in London are there;--and I'm out of it.”

He stumbled across the landing and plunged into Torpenhow's room. He could feel that it was full of men. “Where's the trouble?” said he. “In the Balkans at last? Why didn't some one tell me?”

“We thought you wouldn't be interested,” said the Nilghai, shamefacedly.

“It's in the Soudan, as usual.”

“You lucky dogs! Let me sit here while you talk. I shan't be a skeleton at the feast.--Cassavetti, where are you? Your English is as bad as ever.”

Dick was led into a chair. He heard the rustle of the maps, and the talk swept forward, carrying him with it. Everybody spoke at once, discussing press censorships, railway-routes, transport, water-supply, the capacities of generals,--these in language that would have horrified a trusting public,--ranting, asserting, denouncing, and laughing at the top of their voices. There was the glorious certainty of war in the Soudan at any moment. The Nilghai said so, and it was well to be in readiness. The Keneu had telegraphed to Cairo for horses; Cassavetti had stolen a perfectly inaccurate list of troops that would be ordered forward, and was reading it out amid profane interruptions, and the Keneu introduced to Dick some man unknown who would be employed as war artist by the Central Southern Syndicate. “It's his first outing,” said the Keneu. “Give him some tips--about riding camels.”

“Oh, those camels!” groaned Cassavetti. “I shall learn to ride him again, and now I am so much all soft! Listen, you good fellows. I know your military arrangement very well. There will go the Royal Argalshire Sutherlanders. So it was read to me upon best authority.”

A roar of laughter interrupted him.

“Sit down,” said the Nilghai. “The lists aren't even made out in the War Office.”

“Will there be any force at Suakin?” said a voice.

Then the outcries redoubled, and grew mixed, thus: “How many Egyptian troops will they use?--God help the Fellaheen!--There's a railway in Plumstead marshes doing duty as a fives-court.--We shall have the Suakin-Berber line built at last.--Canadian voyageurs are too careful. Give me a half-drunk Krooman in a whale-boat.--Who commands the Desert column?--No, they never blew up the big rock in the Ghineh bend. We shall have to be hauled up, as usual.--Somebody tell me if there's an Indian contingent, or I'll break everybody's head.--Don't tear the map in two.--It's a war of occupation, I tell you, to connect with the African companies in the South.--There's Guinea-worm in most of the wells on that route.” Then the Nilghai, despairing of peace, bellowed like a fog-horn and beat upon the table with both hands.

“But what becomes of Torpenhow?” said Dick, in the silence that followed.

“Torp's in abeyance just now. He's off love-making somewhere, I suppose,” said the Nilghai.

“He said he was going to stay at home,” said the Keneu.

“Is he?” said Dick, with an oath. “He won't. I'm not much good now, but if you and the Nilghai hold him down I'll engage to trample on him till he sees reason. He'll stay behind, indeed! He's the best of you all. There'll be some tough work by Omdurman. We shall come there to stay, this time.

“But I forgot. I wish I were going with you.”

“So do we all, Dickie,” said the Keneu.

“And I most of all,” said the new artist of the Central Southern Syndicate.

“Could you tell me----”

“I'll give you one piece of advice,” Dick answered, moving towards the door. “If you happen to be cut over the head in a scrimmage, don't guard. Tell the man to go on cutting. You'll find it cheapest in the end. Thanks for letting me look in.”

“There's grit in Dick,” said the Nilghai, an hour later, when the room was emptied of all save the Keneu.

“It was the sacred call of the war-trumpet. Did you notice how he answered to it? Poor fellow! Let's look at him,” said the Keneu.

The excitement of the talk had died away. Dick was sitting by the studio table, with his head on his arms, when the men came in. He did not change his position.

“It hurts,” he moaned. “God forgive me, but it hurts cruelly; and yet, y'know, the world has a knack of spinning round all by itself. Shall I see Torp before he goes?”

“Oh, yes. You'll see him,” said the Nilghai.

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