 CHAPTER 11 The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had buried Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us. His mother had been put into a train that would carry her to the quiet country cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her sorrow. The despair still lay in the valley of the shadow, unconscious, perhaps fortunately, of the stealthy footsteps of muffled sounds that strike a note of agony through a house of death. And it was many days before she awoke to knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed with her. We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria, and appointing Geoffrey and myself joint executors and trustees for his wife and the child that was to come, among his private papers in the Louis Carr's cabinet in the drawing-room. We had consulted his bankers and put matters in a solicitor's hands with a view to probate. Everything was in order. We found his own personal bills and receipts, filed, his old letters tied up in bundles and labelled, his contracts, his publishers' returns, his lease, his various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk of a careful businessman, rather than that of our old unmethodical Adrian. For a few things more painful than to pry into the intermisses of those we have loved, and Geoffrey and I had to pry alone, because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search from impertinence, lay herself on the borderland. All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs had been found in the cabinet. On the list of assets for probate we placed the manuscript to the new book, its value estimated on the sales of the diamond gate. We had not as yet examined the safe in the study, knowing that it held nothing but the manuscript, and indeed we had not entered the forbidding-room in which our poor friend had died. We kept it locked, out of half foolish and half affectionate deference to his unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women, who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion, hated the door of the study to be left to jar, and, when it was closed, professed relief from an inexplicable macabre obsession, and being an inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous strain. But all else having been done for the dead and for the living, the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the safe and hand it over to the publisher. Before one dark morning, Geoffrey and I unlocked the study-door and entered the gloom-filled barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating yellow. It was bitterly gold. The fire had not been laid since the morning of the tragedy, and the grate was littered with dim grey ash. The stale smell of the week's fog hung about the place. I turned on the electric light. With its white, distempered, picturesque walls and its scanty office furniture, the room looked inexpressibly dreary. We went to the library-table. A quill-pen lay on the blotting-pad its point in the midst of a couple of square inches of idle arabesques. On three different parts of the pad marked by singularly little blotted matter the quill had scrawled, God, a novel by Adrian Baldero. On a brass ashtray I noticed three cigarettes, of each of which only about an eighth of an inch had been smoked. Jeffrey, who had the key that used to hang at the end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its heavy door swung back and revealed its contents. Three shelves crammed from bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript. Pretty kind of hay, growled Jeffrey, surveyed with a perplexed look. We'll have our work cut out. It'll be all right, said I, lived out the top shelf as carefully as you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of method. Onto the cleared library-table Jeffrey deposited three loose ragged piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of the sheets unnumbered, unconnected, one with the other, were pages of definite manuscript. These we put aside. Others contained jottings, notes, fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible memoranda of incidents. Of the latter, one has stuck in my memory. Lancelot Sinlow seduces Grenovier the false immaculata and Jehovah steps in. Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking over his work, and arabesques such as we had found on the blotting-pad. What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jeffrey, his fingers and his beard. I can't make it out, said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We were turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I explained to Adrian's whimsy. What a funny devil the poor old shirt was, said Jeffrey, with a laugh at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. Well, clear the rubbish away, and we'll look at the second shelf. The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There were more pages of consecutive composition. Of such we sorted out perhaps a couple of hundred. But the rest were filled with the same incoherent scribble, with the same drawings and with bits of scenarios of a dozen stories. Old damn thing seems to be waste-paper-basket, said Jeffrey, standing over me. There was but one chair in the room, Adrian's famous wooden writing-chair with the leaven pad for which Barbara had pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting in it as I sorted the manuscript which rose in masses on the table. There's quite a lot of completed pages, said I, putting together those found on the two shelves. Let us see what we can make of them. We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor and examined the salvage. We could make nothing of it. Jeffrey rankled a hopeless brow. It lay weeks to fix it up. What licks me, said I, is the difference between this and the old-made-ish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow, let us go on. In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the beginning of the next. But rarely could we obtain more than three or four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a dozen headed Chapter One. There's another shelf, anyhow, said Jeffrey, turning away. I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the more I examined, the more did my brain real. I could not find the nucleus of a coherent story. A great shout from Jeffrey made me start in my chair. Hooray! At last I've got it. Here it is!" He came, with three thick trumps of manuscript, neatly pinned together in brown paper wrappers, and dumped them with a bang in front of me. There, he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile. Thank God! said I. He removed his hand. Then as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet with a screech like a woman's, for there, staring me in the face on a white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written inscription, The Darman Gate, a novel, by Thomas Carlson. Look! I cried, pointing. And Jeffrey looked. And for a second or two we both stood, stock still. The writing was Tom Carlson's, and the writing of the script hastily flung open by Jeffrey was Tom Carlson's. Tom Carlson, the one genius of our boyish brotherhood who died on his voyage to Australia. There was no mistake. The great square virile hand was only too familiar, as different from Adrian's precise, academical writing as Tom Carlson from Adrian. Then our eyes met, and we realized the sin that had been committed. There was the original manuscript of The Darman Gate. The Darman Gate was the work not of Adrian Baldero, but of Tom Carlson. Adrian had stolen The Darman Gate from a dead man. Not only from a dead man, but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him. We stared at each other, open-mythed. At last Jeffrey threw up his hands, and without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There were times when words too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. Apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. A game we examined it. A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into an awful certainty. The great e-pop-making novel did not exist. It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived it would have had no possibility of existing. What in God's name had he been playing at? cried Jeffrey in his great horse-space. God knows, said I. But even as I spoke, I knew. I looked round the room which Barbara had once called for condemned to sell. The ghastly truth of her presence shook me, and I began to shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold. I was chilled to the bone. Jeffrey put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me kindly. Go and get warm, said he. But this I pointed to the litter. I'll see to it, and join you in a minute. He pushed me outside the door, and I went into the drawing-room where I crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and benumbed feet and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint term for the better that morning, and Barbara had run down to Northlands for the day. It was just as well she had gone, I thought. I should have a few hours to compose some story in mitigation of the tragedy. Soon Jeffrey returned for the glass of brandy, which I drank. He sat down on a load-chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his shoulders hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer tricks with the shadows on his bearded face, making him look old and seemed with coarse and innurable furrows. But for the blaze the room was filled with the yellow darkness that was thickening outside. Yet we did not think of turning on the lights. "'What have you done?' I asked. "'A lot of the stuff up again,' he replied. "'This afternoon I'll bring a pork mantel and take it away.' "'What are you going to do with it?' "'Leave that to me,' said he. What was in his mind I did not know, but for the moment I was very glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself with a reflection that Jeffrey was a specialist in crises. It was his job, as he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he conducted himself like an overgrown child. In time of catatism he was a professional demigod. He reassured me further. "'That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more.' "'All right,' said I. And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire. Presently he broke the silence. "'What was the poor devil playing at?' he repeated. "'What in God's name?' and then I told him. He took a long time. I was still in the cold grip of the horror of that condemned cell, and my count was none too consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up side-tracks which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to speak of aging in terms that did not tear our hearts. As a dispoiler of the dead his offence was rank. But we had loved him, and we still loved him, and he had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture. Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrien, but did not. Least of all did I know my Adrien then as I sat paralyzed by the revelation of his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things more or less in perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrien. With all his faults, his poses, his superficialities, his secreces, his ectisms, I never dreamed of him as what put a loyal and honorable gentleman. When I think of him, I tremble before the awful isolation of the human soul. What does one man know of his brother? Yes, the coldest of poets was right. We mortal millions live alone. It is only the unconquerable faith in humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast with conjecture, before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel them part of our very selves. Adrien was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the first place made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain warped his moral sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom Castleton had put the manuscript of the Diamond Gate into his hands, and doubtedly he was to arrange for its publication. Adrien's appointment to the professorship in Australia had been a sudden matter, as I will remember, necessitating a feverish scramble to get his affairs in order before he sailed. Why did not Adrien, in the affectionate glow of parting, send the manuscript straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a question of dispatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were not parcel and letter sent? They threw the sheer indolence that was characteristic of Adrien. Then came the news of Castleton's death. From that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work. For years in his easy way he struggled against it, until perhaps desperate for Doria he succumbed. What script, type-written or hand-written, he sensed to fit a kind, the publisher of the Diamond Gate, I did not learn till later. But why did he not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript? That was what Jaffrey could not understand. Yet any one familiar with morbid psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim, relentless force, compelling the hair-shirt of penitence. That is the only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can explain the sustained act of folly. And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, had he accepted it gay and debonair? What could have been the state of that man's soul? I remembered, with a shiver, that look on Adrien's face at Mr. Jornicroft's dinner-party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and the snapping of the stem of the wine-glass. In the light of knowledge I looked back and recognized the feverishness of a demeanour that had been merely gay before. Well, he had been swept off his feet. If any man ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrien loved Doria. For what it may be worth, put that to his credit. He sinned for love of a woman. And the rest? The tragic rest? His undertaking to write another novel? Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless, casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set himself to do here to fall, he had done. As I have said, he had got his first class at Cambridge to the stupifaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar examination, he doth nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse the darman-gate, I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his capacity. When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled with the cloud of guilt. He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's work, the beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that was Adrien Bordero. And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm, must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to practice, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious secret room. The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an intellectual blue-beard's chamber who sanctity he knew his all-stricken wife would respect. It developed into a bleak prison, and finally into the condemned cell. As I said to Geoffrey on that morning of fog and farlight, in the midst of Adrien's artificial French lorries and penates, dimly seen, like spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a few precious essays and a few scraggie poems, who had never schemed out a novel before, not even as far as I am aware, a short story, who would never in any way test its imaginative capacity, setting out in insane self-conceit to write not merely a commercial work of fiction, but a novel which would out-rival a universally proclaimed work of genius, and he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially critical. And the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man. All critics are clever men. If they were just a little more, or just a little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrien was, by a barley-corn, a little more. But he had a blind spot in his brain which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if you or I have not the remotest notion of how to draw a man on horseback correctly, were to try to paint a Velazquez portrait. It did not seem to enter the poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble away, no matter how infinitesimal the vid-invisible grain of muse may be, must have the special, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you like, but the essential quality of the artist. And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room for all those months, whipping in intolerable agony a static imagination. He never began to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme, such as all novelists must do. He grasped for one elusive vision of life after another. His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy and tragedy of human things. The more confused, the more universal became the poor limited vision. The whole of illimitable life he had told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation was to be captured in this wondrous book. The pity of it. How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand that it to say, if he had retained it, the hypothesis of madness comforted. I would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If he had deceived himself, God would be merciful. But if not, if he had sat down day after day with the appalling consciousness of his impotence, there had been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted out in this world greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he would have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep, no wonder he drank in secret. The horror who had gone through the household accounts had already been staggered by the wine-merchant spills for whiskey. Had he stupified himself day after day, night after night, for the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At any rate, God was merciful at last. He killed him. Jeffrey threw a couple of logs on the far. The ship logs that Adrian loved, and the sea salts, barium, strontium, and whatnot, gave green and crimson and lavender flames. I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living, he said. A war correspondent does. He sees samples of every conceivable sort of hell. But this sample I haven't struck before, and it's the worst of the lot. My God! And any of the day before yesterday I took him to be married. It was fifteen months ago, Jeff, and since then you've plucked hairs out of Prestor John's beard or been entertained by a viceroy of China, which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying he had no idea of time or space. He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest. It was the day before yesterday. Now he's dead, and the child's still born. I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had smitten me. That of his words in September, and of the queer slanting look in his eyes. They'll both be born together. I told Jeffrey. Or there ever such a ghastly prophecy, I said, both still born together. The more one goes into the matter the more shudderingly awful it is. Jeffrey nodded and stirred into the fire. And she at the point of death took complete the tragedy. He said below his breath. Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog. I would give the soul out of my body to save her. He cried with a startling quaver in his deep voice. I know you love her dearly, old man, said I. But is life the best thing you can wish for her? Why not? Isn't it obvious? She recovers. She will most probably recover, Jefferson said so this morning. She comes back to life to find what? The shattering of her idol. That'll kill her. My dear old Jeff, it's better that she should die now. He did lines that I'd never seen before came into his brow and his eyes blazed. What do you mean shattering of idols? She's bound to learn the truth. He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty grasp so that I winced with pain. She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any dim suspicion of the truth. By God, I could anybody, even you, who told her. She's not to know. She must never know. In his sudden fit of passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with clenched fists. The sputtering flames casting a weird, broken shadow on wall and ceiling of the fog-darkened room. I shrank into my chair, for he seemed not a man, but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the same deep, shaken voice, Hedwin is dead, the child is dead, but the book lives. You understand? His great fist touched my face. The book lives. You have seen it. Very well, said I. I've seen it. You swear you've seen it? Yes, said I, in some bewilderment. He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through his hair. I walked for a little about the room. I'm sorry, illyrial chapter of lost control of myself. It's a matter of life and death. I'm all right now. Do you understand clearly what I mean? Certainly I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend myself to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present, but it can't last forever. Geoffrey thrust both hands in his pocket and bent and fixed the steel of his eyes on me. I should not like to be Geoffrey's enemy. It can, and is going to. I'll see to that. What do you mean, I ask? There's no book. We can't conjure something out of nothing. There is a book, damn you!" He roared fiercely. And you've seen it, and I've got it, and I'm responsible for it. And what the hell does it matter to you what becomes of it? Very well, said I. If you insist, I can wash my hands of the whole matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor and trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for you? Yes, and I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not responsible. I can burn the damn thing if I like. Do anything I choose. But you've seen the outside of it. He went to the writing-table by the gloomy window and scribbled a memorandum and duplicate which we both signed. Each pocketed a copy. Then he turned on me. I didn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a human soul of what you've seen this day. I faced him and looked into his eyes. What you take me for? But you're forgetting. There is one human soul who must know. He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted smile, You and Barbara are one, said he. Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper from his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top sheep of the blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice. God! A novel by Adrian Baldero. We'd better burn this, said he. And he threw it into the fire. End of Chapter 11. CHAPTER XII. The slow weeks passed. Fogg gave way to long rain, and rain to a touch of frost and timid spring sunshine. And it was only then that Doria emerged from the valley of the shadow. The first time they allowed me to visit her, I stood for a fraction of a second, almost in search of a human occupant of the room. Lying in the bed she looked such a pitiful scrap, all hair and eyes. She smiled and held droopily out to me the most fragile thing in hands I have ever seen. I'm going to live, after all, they tell me. Of course you are, I answered cheerily. It's the season for things to find they're going to live. The crocuses and aconite have already made the discovery. She sighed. The garden at Northland's will soon be beautiful. I love it in the spring. The dancing daffodils. We'll have you down to dance with them, said I. It's strange that I wanted to live, she remarked after a pause. At first I longed to die. That was why my recovery was so slow, but now odd, isn't it? Life means infinitely more than one's own sorrow, no matter how great it is. I replied gently. Yes, she assented. I can live now for Adrian's memory. I suppose most people in Dory's position would have said much the same. In ordinary circumstances one approves the pious aspiration. If he gives them temporary comfort, wine heaven's name shouldn't they have it. But in Dory's case its utterance gave me a kind of stab in the heart. By way of reply I patted her poor little wrist sympathetically. When will the book be out? She asked. I'm afraid I don't quite know, said I. I suppose they're busy printing it. A jaffrey's in charge, I replied, according to instructions. He must get it out at once. The early spring's the best time. It won't do to wait too long. Will you tell him? I will, said I. I don't think I've ever loathed to think so wholly as that confounded ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought in the poor child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it. It formed the subject of nearly her first question to me. I force all trouble. I could not plead bland ignorance for ever, though for the present I did not know the nature of jaffrey's scheme. Anyhow I redeemed my promise and gave him Dory's message. He received it with a grumpy nod and said nothing. It become somewhat grumpy of late, even when I did not broach the disastrous topic, and made excuses for not coming down to Northlands. I attributed the unusual morocanist to London in vile weather. At the best of times jaffrey grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town, yet there he was, week after week, staying in a pokie-set of furnished chambers in Victoria Street, and doing nothing in particular, as far as I could make out, save riding on the tops of motor omnibuses without an overcoat. After his silent acknowledgement of the message, he stuffed his pipe thoughtfully. We were in the smoking-room of a club, not the Athenaeum, to which we both belonged, and then he roared out, Do you think she could bear the sight of me? What do you mean? I asked. Well, he grinned a little. I am not exactly a kind of sick-room flower. I think you ought to see her. You are as much trustee and executor as I am. You might also save Barbara and myself from nerve-wracking questions. All right, I'll go, he said. The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the book would be published as soon as possible. When will that be? she asked. Jeffrey seemed to be as vague as myself. Is it in the printer's hand? Not yet. Why? He explained that Adrien had practically finished the novel, but here and there it needed the little trimming and tacking together, which Adrien would have done had he lived to revise the manuscript. He himself was engaged on this necessary, though purely mechanical, task of revision. I quite agree, said Doria to this, that Adrien's work could not be given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very much to do, so why are you taking all this time over it? I'm afraid I've been rather busy, said he. Which tactless, though admit unavoidable, reply did not greatly please Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related this conversation, she complained of Jeffrey's unfeeling conduct. He had no right to hang up Adrien's great novel on account of his own wretched business. Letting the latter slide would have been a tribute to his dead friend. Barbara did her best to soothe her, but we agree that Jeffrey had made a bad start. A short while afterwards I was in the club again, and there I came across our Bathnot, the manager of Jeffrey's newspaper, whom I'd known for some years, originally I think through Jeffrey. I accepted the offer of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men will, we began to discuss our common friend. I wonder what has come over him lately, said he, after a while. Have you noticed any difference? I was startled. Yes, can't make him out. Poor Adrien Baudere's death was a great shock. I quite say our Bathnot has sent it, but Jaff Jane, when he gets a shock, is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of the wilderness and roars. But here he is in London, and won't be persuaded to leave it. What do you mean? I asked. We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We had to send young Brady instead, we won't do the work half as well. All this is news to me, said I, and it was a first-ars business with armed escorts, caravans, wild tribes, a matter of great danger under subtle politics, fairways, finance, the whole hang of the international situation, the internal conditions, the big scoop, everything that usually is butter and honey to Jaff Jane, an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed up with scurry wagging all over the place, he wanted a season in town. Had the idea of Jaffrey yearning to play the Society Butterfly, I could not help laughing. Jaffrey, lounging down Bond Street in Immaculate Vesture, Jaffrey sipping tea at afternoon at home, Jaffrey dancing till three o'clock in the morning. It was all very comic, unabath not, seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too. But on the other hand it was all very incomprehensible. To Jaffrey a job was a sacred affair, the meaning of his existence. He was a Mercury who took himself seriously. The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission, the more he liked it. He never spared himself. He'd been a model special correspondent to ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task after his own heart, and, as I gather from our bath-not, of the greatest political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and honourable position on the paper. If it had been any other man alive who'd turned his down like that, said our bath-not, we'd have chucked him altogether. In fact, we didn't tell him that we wouldn't. It was very mysterious, all the more so because Jaffrey had never been a man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If it occurred to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffrey's Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my unawakened condition, I did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or two looking up something in the British Museum, stopped at the boot-makers to give an order concerning Susan's riding-boots, Vido Dari, and drove home to dinner to a comfortable chat with Barbara, during which I gave her an account of the day's doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the contented and inoffensive man. A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffrey again. Happening to be in Westminster in the forenoon, I'd come up to the town on business. I mounted to his cheerless eerie in Victoria Street and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress-suit on transient duty admitted me, and I found Jaffrey collarless and minus-jacket of waistcoat smaking a pipe in front of the far. It wasn't even a good coal far. Some austere former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once comfort-giving grate. But Jaffrey did not seem to mind. The remains of breakfast were on the table, which the dingy servitor began to clear. Jaffrey rose from the depths of his easy chair like an agile mammoth. Hello! Hello! Hello! His usual greeting. We shook hands and commended the weather. When the alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London. As a whole for sick dogs, not for sound men, he loathed its abominable suffocation. Then why the deuce do you stay in it? He shrugged his shoulders. I can't do anything else. This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity. I understood you could have gone to Persia. He frowned and tugged his red beard. How did you know that? Our bath-not, I began. Our bath-not? He boomed angrily. What the blazes does he mean by telling you about my affairs? I'll punch his damned head. Don't, said I. Your hands are so big and he's so small you might hurt him. I'd like to hurt him. Why can't he keep his infernal tongue quiet? He proceeded to wither up the sole of our bath-not with awful anathema. Then in his infantile way he shouted, I didn't want any of you to know anything about it. Why, I asked, because I didn't. But I suppose you wanted to go to Persia. He paused in his lumbering walk about the little room and collecting a litter of books and papers and a hat or two and a digging from a sofa pitched it into a corner. Yeah, sit down. I'd been warming my back at the fire, hitherto, and surveying the half-formal, half-unkempt sitting-room. It was by no means the comfortable home from Harrod's stores that Barbara had prescribed, and he had not attempted to furnish it in slap-up style with the heads of game and skins and modern weapons which lay in the London repository. There was the impersonal abode of the male bird of passage. Sit down, did he, and have a drink. I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded country gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at half-past eleven in the morning, except under the stress of peculiar circumstances. I'm going to have one, anyway. He disappeared, and presently re-entered with a battered two-handled silver-caught pot, bearing defaced arms and inscription, a rowing trophy of Cambridge days which he always carried about with him on no matter what lightly equipped expedition. It is always a matter of regrets to me that Jaffrey, as I've mentioned before, missed his seat in the Cambridge boat. But when one despoils a proctor of his square cap, and it is found the central feature of one's rooms beneath a glass shade such as used to protect wax-flage from the dust, what come I expect from the priggish judgment of university authority? He re-entered with this vessel full of beer. He nodded, drank a huge draught, and wiped his moustache with his hand. But, Absam, I've got a cask in the bedroom. Good God! said I, aghast! What else do you keep there? A side of bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck? I just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in his bedroom. He laughed, and took another swig, and called me a long, lean, puny-gutted insect, which was not polite, but I was glad to hear the deep ho-ho-ho that followed his vituperation. All the same, said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and lighting a cigarette, I should like to know why you missed one of the chances of your life in not going out to Persia. He took for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard, and turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife and Susan my child, and I myself and an inconsiderable human not evilly disposed towards him. He apparently decided not to annihilate me. It was hell, Hillary Elchop to a-chut the Persian proposition! said he, his hands in his trouser-pocket, looking out of the window the infinitely-reaching landscape of the chimney-pots of South London, their gray smoke making London's unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of the marge sky. Just howl! he muttered in his bass-whisper, and, craning ramanic, I could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which was very wistful, and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of the London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert. Away and away beyond the shimmering sand gleamed the frosted town with white walls, white domes, white minarets against the horizon-band of topares and amethystine vapours. And in his nostrils was the immemorable smell of the east, and in his ears the startling jingle of the harness and the pad of the camels and the guttural cries of the drivers, and in his heart the certainty of plucking out the secret from the soul of this strange land, at last he swung round and, throwing himself into the armchair, inquire politely after the health of Barbara and Susan. As far as the Persian journey was concerned the Palava was ended. He did not intend to give me his reasons for staying in England, and I could not demand them more insistently. At any rate I had discovered the cause of his grumpiness. What creature of Jaffer's temperament could be contented with a soft bed in the centre of civilisation when he had the chance of sleeping in verminous caravan series with a saddle for pillow? In spite of his amazing predilections Jaffer was very human. He would not make a great sacrifice without hesitation, but the consequences of the sacrifice would cause him to go about like a bear with a sore head. And the cause of the sacrifice? Obviously Doria. Once having been admitted to her bedside he went there every day. Flowers and fruit he had sent from the very beginning an absurd profusion. A grape for Doria failed in advocacy unless it was the size of a pumpkin. Now he brought the offerings personally an embarrassing bulk. One offering was a gramophone which nearly drove her mad. Even in its present state of development it offends the sensitivity of her, but in its early days it was an instrument of torturing cacophony. And Jaffer, thinking the brightened strains and music of the spheres, would turn on the hideous engine when he came to see her, and would grin and roar and expect her to show evidence of ravished senses. She did her best poor child, out of politeness and recognition of his desire to alleviate her lot, but I don't think the gramophone conveyed to her heart the poor dear fellow's unspoken message. But gently criticising the banality of the tunes, the thing played, and sending him forth in quest of records of recondite and unrecorded music, she succeeded in mitigating the terror. To the present moment, however, I don't think Jaffer has realised that she had a higher aesthetic equipment than the hypnotised fox terrier in the advertisement. Jaffer also bought her puzzles and funny penny-pavement toys and gallons of Otak alone, which came in useful, and expensive scent, which she abominated, and stacks of new novels, and a fearsome machine of wood and brass and universal joints, by means of which an invalide could read and breakfast and write and shave all at the same time. The only thing he did not give her, the thing she craved more than all, was a fresh-bound copy of Adrian's book. Obviously, as I have remarked, it was Dorian that kept him out of Persia. But I could not help thinking that this same Persian journey might have afforded a solution of the whole difficulty. Dispatched suddenly to that vaguely known country, he could have taken the mythical manuscript to revise on the journey. The convoy could have been attacked by a horde of curds or such like desperados. All could have been slain, save a fortune at handful, and the manuscript could have been looted as an important political document and carried off into eternity. Dorian would have hated Jaffrey for ever after. But his chivalrous aim would have been accomplished. Adrian's honour would have been safe. But this simple way out never occurred to him. Apparently he thought it wiser to sacrifice his career and remain in London, so as to boy Dorian up with false hope. All the time, praying God to burn down some Quentin's mansions, where he lived, an agent portmanteau of rubbish and himself, all together. Suddenly as soon as Dorian could be moved, Mr. Jonikrov stepped in and carried her to the south of France. Barbara and Jaffrey and myself saw her off by the afternoon train at Charing Cross. She was to rest in Paris for the night and the next day, and proceed the following night to Nice. She looked the fraydest thing under the sun. Her face was startling ivory beneath her widow's headgear. She had scarcely strength to lift her head. Mr. Jonikrov had made luxurious arrangements for her comfort, an ambulance carriage from St. John's Wood, the special Inverley compartment of the train, but at the station, as at Dorian's wedding, Jaffrey took command. It was his great arms that lifted her featherweight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness from the carriage, her across the platform, and deposited her tenderly on the couch in the compartment. Touched by his attitude, she thanked him with much graciousness. He bent over her. We were standing at the door and could not choose but here. Don't you remember what I said the first day I met you? Yes. It stands, my dear, and more than that. He paused for a second and took her thin hand. And don't you worry about that book. You get well and strong. He kissed her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her shoulder—half her little body, it seemed, to be—and emerging from the compartment joined us on the platform. He put a great finger on the arm of the rubricant, thick-set, black-moustached Jonikrov. I think I'll come with you as far as Paris," said he. I'll get into a smoker somewhere or the other. But my dear sir," exclaimed Mr. Jonikrov in some amazement, it's awfully kind, but why should you? Mrs. Balderra's got to be carried up. I didn't realise it, but she can't put her feet to the ground. Someone has got to lift her at every stage of the journey. I'm not going to let any damned clumsy fellow-handler. I'll see her into the niece's train to-morrow night. Perhaps I'll go on to the niece with you and fix her up at the hotel. As a matter of fact, I will. I shall worry, you won't see me except at the right time. Don't be afraid." Mr. Jonikrov to most methodical of Britain's gasped. So I must confess to Barbara and I. When Geoffrey met us at the station he had no more intention of escorting Doria to niece than we had ourselves. I can't permit it. It's too kind. There's no necessity. We'll get on all right." Spluttered Mr. Jonikrov. You won't. She has got to be carried. You're not going to take any risks. But my dear fellow-tip's absurd. I think we haven't any luggage. He looked at Mr. Jonikrov as if he had suggested the impossibility of going abroad without a motor-vail or the encyclopedia of Britannica. What the blazes has luggage got to do with it? His roar could be a-heard above the din of the hurrying station. I don't want luggage. The humour of the proposition appealed to him so mightily that he went off into one of his reverberating explosions of mirth. Then recovering. Don't you worry about that. But have you enough on your expensive journey? Of course I should be most happy." Geoffrey stepped back and scanned the length of the platform and beckoned to an official who came hurrying towards him. It was the stationmaster. Have you ever seen me before, Mr. Winter? The official laughed. Put you off on Mr. Jonikrov. Do you think I could get from here to Nice without buying a ticket now? Why, of course, our agent at Boulogne would arrange it if I send him a wire. Right, Geoffrey, please do so, Mr. Winter. I am crossing now and going to Nice by the coat as you are expressed to-morrow night. See after a seat for me, will you? Our reserve of compartment is possible, Mr. Jain." The stationmaster raised his hat and departed. Geoffrey, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, beamed upon us like a mountainous child. We were all impressed by his lordly command of the railway systems of Europe. It was a question of credit, of course, but neither Mr. Jonikrov, the solid man that he was, nor myself, could have undertaken that journey without a few loose shillings in his possession. For the first time since the agent's death I saw Geoffrey really enjoying himself. And that is how Geoffrey, without money or luggage or even an overcoat, travelled from London to Nice, for no other purpose, to save Doria's sacred little body from being profaned by the touch of rudder hands. Having carried her at every stage, beginning with the transfer from train to steamer at Folkestone, and ending with a triumphant march up the stairs to the third floor of the Simeoise Hotel, he took the first train back straight through to London. He returned the same gold-grinning giant without a shadow of grumpiness on his jolly face. CHAPTER XIII About this time a bolt came from the blue, or a bomb fell at our feet. The metaphor doesn't matter, so long as it conveys a sense of an unlooked-for phenomenon. True in relation to cosmic forces it was but a trumpery-bolt or a scrib-like bomb, but it started us all the same. The admirable Mrs. Constantine got married. A retard warrior, a recent widower, but a celibate of twenty years standing, owing to the fact that his late wife and himself had occupied separate continents, on avait fait continu de appart, as the French might say, during that period. A major general, fresh from India, and old flame and Constantine corresponded, had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in Queensgate, and in swash-buckling fashion had abducted the aborable and unresisting lady. It was a matter of special license. An off-went that tardily happy pair to Margate, before we had finished rubbing our eyes. It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs. Constantine, said Barbara. She thought her no, perhaps she didn't think her. God alone knows the conclusions of feminine mental processes, but she proclaimed her anyhow an unscrupulous woman. There's Lyosha, she said, left alone in that boarding-house. My dear, said I, Mrs. Jupp, I admit its deplorable taste to change a name of such gentility as Constantine for that of Jupp, but it isn't unscrupulous. Mrs. Jupp did not happen to be charged with a mission from on high to dry nurse Lyosha for the rest of her life. That's where you're wrong, Barbara retorted. She was. She was the one person in the world who could look after Lyosha. See what she's done for her. It was her duty to stick to Lyosha. As for those two old faggots marrying, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. Whether they were ashamed of themselves or not didn't matter. Lyosha remained alone in the boarding-house. Not all Barbara's indignation could turn Mrs. Jupp into the admirable Mrs. Constantine and bring her back to Queen's Gate. What was to be done? We consulted Jaffrey, who, as Lyosha's trustee, ought to have consulted us. Jaffrey pulled along face and smiled ruefully. For the first time he realized, in spite of tragic happenings, the comedy aspect of his position as the legal guardian of two young, well-to-do and attractive widows. He was the last man in the world to whom one would have expected such a fate to befall. He too swore, lustily, of the defaulting duena. I thought it was all fixed up nicely for ever! he growled. Everything is transitory in this life, my dear fellow, said I. Everything except a trustee-ship, that goes on for ever. That's the devil of it! he growled. You must get used to it, said I. You'll have lots more to look after before you're done with this existence. His look heartened and seemed to say, if you go and die and saddle me with Barbara, I'll punch your head. He turned his back on me, and, jerking a thumb, addressed Barbara. Why'd you take him out without a muzzle? Now you've got scent. What shall I do? Then Lyosha, superb and smiling, sailed into the room. I ought to have mentioned that Barbara had convened this meeting out of the boarding-house. The room into which Lyosha sailed was the elegant bombardier of a chamber known as the Boudoir. There was a great deal of ribbon and frill and photograph frame and artful feminine touch about it, which Lyosha, and doubtless many other inmates, fought mightily refined. Lyosha kissed Barbara and shook hands with Geoffrey and me, bet us besieged, and put us at our ease with a social grace which could not have been excelled by the admirable Mrs. Constantine, nudge-up, herself. That maligned lady had performed her duties during the past two years with characteristic ability. Paranthetically, I may remark that Lyosha's table manners and formal demeanor were now irreproachable. Mrs. Constantine had also taken up the Western education of the Child of 12, at the point at which it had been arrested, and had brought Lyosha's information as to history, geography, politics, and the world in general, to the standard of that of the average schoolgirl of fifteen. Again she had developed in our fair Barbarian a natural taste in dress, curbing on her emergence from mourning a fierce desire for apparel in primary colours, and leading her onward to an appreciation of suave harmonies. Again she had run her tactful hand over Lyosha's stock-yard vocabulary, erasing words and expressions that might offend Queensgate and substituting others that might charm. And she had done it with a touch of humour, not lost on Lyosha, who'd retained the sense of values in which no child born and bred in Chicago can be deficient. I suppose you're all fussed to death about this marriage, she said pleasantly, while I couldn't help it. Of course not, dear, said Barbara. He might have given us a hint as to what was going on, said Jeffrey. What good could you have done in Albania if the general had interfered with your plans you might have shot him from behind a stone, and everyone who sent Mrs. Constantine would have been happy. But I've been taught you don't do things like that in South Kensington. Whoever wanted to shoot the chap? I, for one, said Barbara. What are we to do now? Find another dragon, said Jeffrey. But supposing I don't want another dragon. Oh, that doesn't matter at the least. You've got to have one. Say, Jeff chain, cried Lyosha, do you think I can't look after myself by this time? What do you take me for? I interposed. Rather a lonely young woman, that's all. Jeffrey, in his tactless way, by using the absurd term dragon, has missed the point altogether. You want a companion, if only to go about with, say, to restaurants and theatres. I guess I can get heaps of those, said Lyosha, a smile in her eyes. Don't you worry. All the more reason for a dragon. If you mean somebody who's going to sit on my back every time I talk to a man, I decidedly object. Mrs. Constantine was different, and you're not going to find another like her in a hurry. Besides, I had sense enough to see that she was going to teach me things. But I don't want to be taught any more. I've learned enough. But it's just a woman companion that we want to give you, dear, said Barbara. Her mere presence about you is a protection against, well, any pretty young woman living alone is larval to chance, impertinence and annoyance. Lyosha's dark eyes flash. I'd like to see any man try to annoy me. He wouldn't try twice. You ask Mrs. Jardine. Mrs. Jardine was the keeper of the boarding-house. She'll tell you a thing or two about my being able to keep men up from annoying me. Barbara did afterwards ask Mrs. Jardine and obtained a few sidelights on Lyosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in subtlety they made up in physical effectiveness. There were not many spruce young gentlemen who, after a week's residence in that establishment, did not adopt a peculiarly deferential attitude towards Lyosha. Still, said Geoffrey, I think you ought to have somebody, you know. If you're so keen on a dragon, replied Lyosha defiantly, why not take on the job yourself? Hi! Good Lord! Ha-ha-ha! Geoffrey rose to his feet and roared with laughter. It was a fine joke. There's a lot in Lyosha's suggestion, said Barbara, with an air of seriousness. You don't expect me to come and live here! He cried, waving a hand to the thrills and ribbons. Wouldn't be a bad idea, said I. You get all the advantages and refining influences of a first-class English home. He piffed it round. Oh, you be— Hush! said Barbara. I think you ought to stay here and look after Lyosha more than you do. He protested. Wasn't he always looking after her? Didn't he write? Didn't he drop in now and then to see how she was getting on? Have you ever taken the porch oiled out to dinner? Barbara asked sternly. He stood before her in the confusion of a schoolboy detected in her laps from Grace, stammering explanations. Then Lyosha rose, and I noticed just the faintest little twitching of her lip. I don't want Geoffrey to be made to take me out to dinner against his will. But, God, bless my soul, I should love to take you out. I never thought of it because I'd never take anybody out. I'm a barbarian, my dear gold, just like yourself. You wanted to be taken out. Why on earth didn't you say so? Lyosha regarded him steadily. I rather cut my tongue out. Geoffrey returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away, puzzled. There seemed to be an unnecessary vehement in Lyosha's tone. He turned again and approached her with a smiling face. I only meant that I didn't know you care for that sort of thing, Lyosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the carton this evening, and do a theatre afterwards. No, I won't, cried Lyosha. You insult me." Her cheeks paled, and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked magnificent. Geoffrey frowned. I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all. I recalled a scene of nearly two years before, when he had frowned and spoken thus roughly, and she had invited him to chastise her with a tweak. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob arose in her throat, and she marched to the door, and at the door turned splendidly, quivering. I'm not going to have you or anyone else for a dragon. And, alas for the superficiality of Mrs. Constantine's training, I'm going to do as I damn well like. Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I exchanged at glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could convey a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Geoffrey pulled out a pouch and a pipe, and shook his head. "'Woman is a remarkable phenomenon,' said he. "'A more remarkable phenomenon still,' said I, is the dunderheaded male. "'I did nothing to cause these heroics.' "'You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner?' "'I didn't,' he protested. I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had done so. Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed savagely. "'I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in proper subjection. There's no worry about them there.' "'Isn't there?' said I. "'You just ask the next cannibal you meet. He is confronted with a great conundrum, even as we are.' "'He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head.' "'Quite so,' said I. "'But do you think the poor fellow does it for pleasure?' "'No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it.' "'Well, that specious rot and patitudinous rubbish, just as any soft idiot who's been glued all his life to an armchair, can reel off by the mile. I know better. A couple of years ago, Lyosha would have eaten out of my hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the canton. It's all this infernal civilisation that's spoiled her.' "'You began this argument,' said I, with a proposition that women was a remarkable phenomenon. A generalization which includes women in fig leaves and women in diamonds.' "'Oh, dry up,' said Geoffrey, and tell me what I ought to do. I didn't want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact, I'm rather fond of her. She appears to me as something big and primitive.' Long ago, if it hadn't been that poor old Prescott—you know what I mean—I gave up thinking of her in that way at once, and now I just want to be friends. We have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and if I had thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. But I can't stand these modern neurotics.' "'You call them heretics?' "'Oh, all the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by every modern woman.' Instead of thinking in a straight line, they're taught it's correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where to have them.' "'That's their awfulness,' said I. Who can blame them?' Meanwhile, Leosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom where she burst into a passion of tears. Geoff Chains, she wailed, had always treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had stuck pigs in the stockyards, but he was of an old Albanian family, quite as good a family as Geoff Chains. He had numbered princes and great chieftains, the majority of whom would be most gloriously slain in warfare. She liked to know which of Geoff Chains' ancestors had died out of their feather beds. "'His grandfather,' said Barbara, was killed in the Indian mutiny, and his father in the Zulu War.' Leosha didn't care. That only proved inequality. Geoff Chains had no right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a female policeman over her. She was a free woman. She would go out to dinner with Geoff Chains for a thousand pounds. Oh, she hated him!' At which renewed declaration she burst into fresh weeping, and which she were dead. As a guardian of young and beautiful widows, Geoffrey did not seem to be a success. Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the paraphernalia on the dressing-table for Odick alone, and such other lotions, as would remove the stain of tears. Seeing these in front of Leosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she waited till the fit had subsided. Then she spoke. "'You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Leosha, going on like a silly, skilled girl, instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder you didn't announce your intention of assassinating Geoffrey.' "'Have a good mind, too,' replied Leosha, nursing her grievance. "'Well, why don't you do it?' Barbara whipped up a murderous-looking knife that lay on a little table. It was the same weapon that she had lent to the Swiss waiter. "'Here's a dagger,' she threw it on the girl's lap. "'I'll ring the bell and send a message from Mr. Chain to come up. As soon as he enters, you can stick it into him. Then you can stick it into me. Then if you like, you can go downstairs and stick it into Hillary. And having destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to you, you'll feel a silly-ass, such a silly-ass that you'll forget to stick it into yourself.' Leosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a neat little chip out of a chair-back. "'What do you want me to do?' "'Lean your face,' said Barbara, and presented the materials. Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror, Leosha obeyed meekly. Barbara brought the powder-puff. Now your nose—there!' For the first time Barbara smiled. "'Now you look better.' "'Oh, my dear girl,' she cried, seating herself beside Leosha, and putting an arm round her waist. "'That's not the way to deal with men. You must learn. They're only overgrown babies. Listen!' And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning, and all the serpents-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. She said neither I nor any of the sons of men are ever likely to know. But so proud of belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her sex conceit did she render, Leosha, that when they entered the little private sitting-room next door, with her, according to the instructions conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, I had dragged her softly swearing Jaffrey. She marched up to him and said, Sreenry, "'If you really do want me to dine with you, I'll come with pleasure. The next time you ask me, please do it in a decent way.' I saw mischief lurking in my wife's eye, and shook my head at her rebukingly. But Jaffrey stared at Leosha, and gasped. It was all very well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the wrong. They were daughters of a subtle civilisation. But here was Leosha, who once asked him to beat her, doing the same. Woman was a more curious phenomenon than ever. "'I'm sorry if my manners are not as they should be,' said he, with a touch of irony. I'll try to mend them. Anyway, it's awfully good of you to come.' She smiled and bowed, not the deep bar of Albania, but the delicate little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was healed, the incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi at a quarter to seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we must be going. We rose to take our leave. Maliciously, I said, "'But we've said nothing about a rom-placonte for Mrs. Constantine.' "'I guess we've settled everything,' Leosha replied sweetly. "'No one can replace Mrs. Constantine.' I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently, Jaffrey's theory of primitive woman had been knocked end-ways, and, to judge by the faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily conscious of a mission unfulfilled. Leosha had gained her independence. Our friends carried out the evening's program. Leosha behaved with extreme propriety, modelling her output demeanour upon that of Mrs. Constantine, and her attitude towards Jaffrey on a literal interpretation of Barbara's reprehensible precepts. She was so dignified that Jaffrey, lest he should offend, was afraid to open his mouth, except for the purpose of shoveling in food, which he did in astounding quantity. Some which both of us gathered afterwards, and leafily we compared notes, they were vastly polite to each other. He might have been entertaining the decorous wife of a Dutch colonial governor from whom he desired facilities of travel. The simple eve, travesty and guile, took him in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an overgrown baby, and mould him to her fancy, and twist him round on a finger, and lead him with her so ever she will, making him feel all the time that he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to begin. She sat tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite, which was a pity, for the maître to her tell, given a free hand by her barbarously ignorant host, had composed a royal menu. As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than a chit of sixteen. Over the quails a great silence reigned. Hers she could not touch, but she watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one after the other, whole, down his throat. And she adored him for it. It was her idea of manly gusto. She nearly wept into her fraise diane, vast craggy strawberries, in march, rising from a drift of snow, impregnated by all the distillations of all the flowers, of all the summers, of all the hills. Because she would have given her soul to sit beside him on the table, with the bowl on her lap, and feed him with a tablespoon, and for her, share of it, licked the spoon after his every mouthful. But it had been drummed into her that she was a woman of the world, the fashionable and all but incomprehensible world, the English world. She looked around and saw a hundred of her sex practising the well-bred deportment that Mrs. Constantine had preached. She reflected that to all of those women gently nurtured in this queer-induced civilisation, equally remote from armour's stockyards and from her Albanian fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few hours before was but their ABC of life in their dealings with their male companions. She also reflected, and for the reflection not Mrs. Constantine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was responsible, that to the man whom she yearned to feed with great tablespoon sorts of delight, she counted no more than a pig or a cow, her instinctive simile, as you must remember, were pastoral, or that peculiar damn fool of a sister of his, Euphemia. When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite to one another in the fashionable restaurant, trying to behave like super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling, they were both so thoroughly in earnest, and they bore themselves and each other so dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of silence, and then they talked of the things that did not interest them in the least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk being essential to the polite atmosphere, and, of course, Geoffrey played host in the orthodox manner, and Yosha acknowledged attentions with the courtesy equally orthodox. But how much happier they both would have been on a bleak mountainside, eating stew out of a pot? Even champagne and old brandy failed to exercise mellowing influences. The Twain were petrified in their own awful correctitude. Perhaps if they had proceeded to a musical comedy, or a farce, or a variety entertainment, where Geoffrey could have expanded his lungs in laughter, their evening as a whole might have been less dismal. But a misapprehension as to the nature of the play had caused Geoffrey to book seats for a gloomy drama with an ironical title which stupefied them with depression. When they waited for the front door of the house in Queensgate to open to their ring, Yosha, in her best manner, thanked him for a most enjoyable evening. Most enjoyable indeed, said Geoffrey. We must have another, if you will do me the honour. What do you say to this day week? I shall be delighted, said Yosha. So that day week they repeated this extraordinary performance, and the week after that, and so on until it became a grim and terrifying fixture. And while Geoffrey, in a fog of theory as to the eternal feminine, was trying to do his duty, Yosha struggled hard to smother her own tumultuous feelings and to carry out Barbara's prescription for the treatment of overgrown babies. But the use of it was that though in her eyes Geoffrey was pleasantly overgrown, she could not but for the life of him regard him as a baby. So he came to pass that an unnatural pair continued to meet and mystify and misunderstand each other to the great content of the High Gods and of one unimportant human philosopher who looked on. I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her? Geoffrey growled one day. She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get anything out of her. That's a pity, said I. There it is. He reflected for a moment, and the more so because she looked so stunning in her evening gowns. She wipes the floor with all the other women. I smiled. You can get a lot of quiet amusement out of your friends if you know how to set to work. End of Chapter 13. Chapter 14 of Geoffrey by William John Locke. It was a gorgeous April day, one of those days when young spring in madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of summer. She could assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, but through all the travesty peeped her laughing youth, the little tender leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom of the lilac. The swelling of the hawthorn buds. The pathetic immature barrenness of the walnuts. And even the leapless walnuts were full of alien life, for in their hollow bowls chippering starlings made furtive nests, and in their topmost forks jackdaws worked with clamorous zeal. A pale butterfly here and there accomplished its early day, and queen wasps awakened from their winter slumber in cosy crevices, the tiniest winter palaces in the world. It seemed like golden arrow-tips to and from the homes they had to build alone for the swarms that were to come. The flower-beds shone gay with tulips and hastens. In the long grass, beyond the lawn and under the trees, danced a thousand daffodils, and by their side warmly wrapped up in furs laid Doria on a long cane chair. She could not literally dance with the daffodils, as I prophesied, for her full strength did not yet return. But there she was among them, and she smiled at them sympathetically as though they were dancing in her honour. She was, however, restored to health. The great circles beneath her eyes had disappeared, and a tinge of colour showed beneath her ivory cheek. Beside her, in the first sun-monet of the air, sat Susan, a prim monkey of nine. Lord! it's guessed he seemed two years since Geoffrey came from Albania, and tossed the seven-year-old up in his arms, I must strike all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So thought I, looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty yards away. And once again, pleasant self-repetition of history, Geoffrey was expected. Doria, fresh from Nice, had spent a night at her father's house, and had come down to us the evening before to complete her convalescence. She had wanted to go straight to the flat in St. John's Wood, and begin her life anew with Adrian's beloved ghost, and she'd issued orders to servants to have everything in redness for her arrival. But Barbara had intervened, and so had Mr. Jolicroft, a man of limited sympathies and brutal common sense. All of us, including Geoffrey, who seemed to regard a Vice to Doria as a presumption only equaled by that of a pilgrim on his road to Mecca, giving hints to Allah as to the way to run the universe, had urged her to give up the abode of tragic memories, and find a haven of quietude elsewhere. But she had indignantly refused. The home of her wondrous married life was the home of her widowhood. If she gave it up, how could she live in peace with the consciousness ever in her brain, for the holy of holies in which Adrian had worked and died was being profaned by vulgar tread? Our suggestions were callous, monstrous, everything that could arise from earth by a non-precipience of sacred things. We could only prevail upon her to postpone her return to the flat until such time as she was physically strong enough to grapple with changed conditions. The pink sunbonnet was very near the dark head. Both were bending over a book on Doria's knees. Limala de Sophie, which Susan, proud of her French scholarship, had proposed to read to Doria, who, having just returned from France, was supposed to be the latest authority on the language. I noticed that the severity of this intellectual communion was mitigated by Susan's favourite black kitten, who, sitting on his little haunches, seemed to be turning over pages rather rapidly. Then all of a sudden, from nowhere in particular, they stepped into the landscape, framed, you must remember, by the jams of my door, a huge and familiar figure carrying a great suitcase. He put this on the ground, rushed up to Doria, shook her by both hands, swung Susan in the air and kissed her, and was still laughing and making the wilking ring, that is to say, making a thundering noise, when I, having sped across the lawn, joined the group. "'Hello,' said I, how did you get here?' "'Walk from the station,' said Geoffrey. "'Came down by an earlier train, no good staying in town on such a morning. Besides,' he glanced at Doria, insignificant aposio pieces. "'And you lug that infernal thing a mile and a half,' I asked, pointed to the suitcase, which must have weighed half a ton. "'Why didn't you leave it to be called for?' "'This is little sachet!' he lifted it up by one finger and grinned. Susan regarded the feet all stricken. "'Oh, Uncle Geoff, you are strong!' Doria smiled at him amarringly, and declared she couldn't lift the thing an inch from the ground with both her hands. "'Do you know,' she laughed, when he used to carry me about, I felt as if I had been picked up by an iron crane.' Geoffrey beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his physical strength. A colleague of his once told me that he had seen Geoffrey in a nasty row in Caracas during a revolution, bend from his saddle, and wrench up two murderous villains by the armpits, one in each hand, and dash their heads together over his horse's neck. But that is the sort of story that Geoffrey himself never told. Barbara, who, flitting about the house on domestic duty, had caught sight of him through a window, came out to greet him. "'Isn't it glorious to have her back?' he cried, waving his great hand toward Doria, and looking so bonny, nothing like the south, the sunshine gets into your blood. By, Geoff, what a difference, eh? Remember when we started for Nice?' He stood legs apart and hands on hips, looking down on her with as much pride as if he had wrought the miracle himself. "'Get some more chairs, dear,' said Barbara. "'By good fortune, seeing one of the gardeners in the near distance, I hailed him and shouted the necessary orders. That is the one disadvantage of summer. During the whole of that otherwise happy season, Barbara expects me to be something between a seed-shifter and a furniture-removing van. The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer-house, and we settled down. Geoffrey lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very wistful look. He held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand very gently on hers. "'I know what you're thinking of,' he said, with an arresting tenderness in his deep voice. He won't have to wait much longer. "'Is it at the printers?' "'It's printed.' Barbara and I each gave a little start. We looked at Geoffrey, who was taking no notice of us, and then questionately at each other. What on earth did the man mean?' From to-morrow onwards, till publication, the press will be flooded with paragraphs about Adrian Baldero's new book. "'I fixed it up with Wittigand. It was a sort of welcome home to you.' "'That was very kind, Geoffrey,' said Doria. "'But was it necessary? I mean, couldn't Wittigand have done it before?' "'It was necessary in a way,' said Geoffrey. "'We wanted you to pass the proofs.' Doria smiled proudly. "'Pass Adrian's proofs? I? I wouldn't presume to do such a thing.' "'Well, here they are, anyway,' said Geoffrey. And to the bewilderment of Barbara and myself he snapped open the hasps of his suitcase, and drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs fastened by a tip at the left-hand top corner, which he deposited on Doria's lap. She closed her eyes, and her eyelids fluttered as she fingered the precious thing. For a moment we thought she was going to faint. There was breathless silence. Even Susan, who had been left out in the cold, let the black kitten leap from her knee, and aware that something out of the ordinary was happening, fixed her wandering eyes on Doria. Her mother and I wondered even more than Susan, for we had more reason. Of what manuscript in Heaven's name were these the printed proofs? Was it possible that I had been mistaken, and that Geoffrey, in the aciduity of love, had made coherence out of agents for rago of despair? Geoffrey touched Doria's hand with his fingertips. She opened her eyes and smiled only, and looked at the front slip of long proofs. At once she sat bolt upright. The great Aunt Doria, but that wasn't agent's title. His title was God. Who would have stared to change it? Her eyes flashed, her little body quivered. She flamed an incarnate impugnation. For some reason or other she turned accusingly on me. I knew nothing of the change, said I, but I'm very glad to hear of it now. Many times before had I been forced to disclaim knowledge of what Geoffrey had been doing with the book. Whitkin wouldn't have the old title, said Geoffrey eagerly. The public are very narrow-minded, and he felt that in certain quarters it might be misunderstood. Whitkin told dear agent that he thought it a perfect title. Our dear agent, said I, pacifically, was a man of enormous willpower, and perhaps Whitkin hadn't the strength to stand up against him. Of course he hadn't, exclaimed Doria. Of course he hadn't when agent was alive. Now agent's dead he thinks he's going to do just as he chooses. He isn't. Not while I live, he isn't. Geoffrey looked at me from beneath bent brows, and his eyes were turned to cold blue steel. "'Hillary,' said he, "'would you kindly tell Doria what we found on agent's blotting-pad?' The last words he ever wrote." What he desired me to say was obvious. Written three or four times, said I, we found the words, The Great at Glory, a novel by Agent Baldero. "'What has become of the blotting-pad?' "'Oh, the sheet seemed to be of no value, so we destroyed it with a lot of other unimportant papers.' "'And I came across further evidence,' said Geoffrey, of his intention to rename the novel.' Doria's anger died away. She looked past us into the void. "'I should like to have had Agent's last words,' she whispered. Then, bringing herself back to earth, she begged Geoffrey's pardon very touchingly. Agent's implied intention was a command. She, too, approved the change. "'But I'm so jealous,' she said with a catch in her voice, "'of my dear husband's work. You must forgive me. I'm sure you've done everything that was right and good, Geoffrey.' She held out the great bundle, and smiled. I passed the proofs.' Geoffrey took the bundle, and laid it again on her lap. "'It's awfully good of you to say that. I appreciate it tremendously. But you can keep this said. I've got another with the corrections in duplicate.' She looked at the proofs wistfully, turned over the long strips in a timid, reverent way, and abruptly handed them back. "'I can't read it. I dare not read it. If Agent had lived, I shouldn't have seen it before it was published. He would have given me the final bound book, an advanced copy. These things, you know, it's the same to me as if he were living.' The tears started. She rose, and we all did the same. "'I must go indoors for a little. No, no, Barbara, dear. I'd rather be alone.' She put her arm round my small daughter. Perhaps Susan will see I don't break my neck across the lawn.' Her voice ended in a queer little sob, and wholly onto to Susan, who was mighty proud of being selected as an escort, walked slowly towards the house. Susan afterwards reported that, dismissed at the bedroom door, she had lingered for a moment outside, and had heard Aunt Adoria crying like anything. Barbara, who had said absolutely nothing since the miraculous draught of proofs, advanced a female David up to Goliath, Jaffrey. "'Look here, my friend, I'm not accustomed to sit still like a graven image and be mystified in my own house. Would you have the goodness to explain?' Jaffrey looked down on her, his head on one side. "'Explain what?' "'That!' she pointed to the proofs at which I had possessed myself, and was eagerly scanning. Unblenching, he met her gaze. "'That is the posthumous novel of Adrian Baldero, which I, as his literary executor, have revised for the press. Hilary saw the rough manuscript, but he had no time to read it. They looked at one another for quite a long time.' "'Is that all you're going to tell me?' "'That's all.' "'And all you're going to tell Hilary?' "'Well, telling Hilary is the same as telling you.' "'Naturally.' "'And telling you is the same as telling Hilary?' "'By no manner of means,' said Barbara, tartly. She took him by the sleeve. Come and explain.' "'I've explained already,' said Jaffrey. Barbara eyed him like a siren of the cornfield. "'I'm going to dress a crab for lunch—a very big crab.'" Jaffrey's face was transfigured into a vast, hairy smile. Barbara could dress a crab like no one else in the world. She herself disliked the taste of crab. I, a carefully-trained gastronominist, adored it, but a puckish digestion forbade by consuming one single shred of the ambrosial preparation. Doria would pass it by through sheer unhappiness. And it was not fit food for Susan's tender years. Old Jaff knew this—one gigantic crab-shell filled with Barbara's juicy witchery, and flanked by cool pink meaty claws, would be there for his own individual delectation. Several times before had he taken the dish with a, one man, one crab, and had left nothing but clean shells. "'I'm going to dress this crab,' said Barbara, for the sake of the servants. But you find I've put poison in it, don't blame me.'" She left us, her little head indignantly in the air. Doria laughed, sank into a chair, and tugged at his pipe. "'I wish Doria could be persuaded to read the thing,' said he. "'Why?' I asked, looking up from the proofs. It's not quite up to the standard of the Darman Gate.' "'I shouldn't suppose it was,' said I, dryly. "'Villican's delighted anyhow. A different genre, but he says that's all the better.' Susan emerged from my study-door onto the terrace. "'My good fellow,' said I, yonder is the daughter of the house evidently at a loose end. Go and entertain her. I'm going to read this wonderful novel, and don't want it to be disturbed till lunch.' The good-humoured giant lumbered away, and Susan, finding herself in undisputed possession, took him off to remote recesses of the kitchen-garden, far from casual intruders. Meanwhile, I went on reading, very much puzzled. Naturally, the style was not that of the Darman Gate, which was the style of Tom Carston, a knot of Adrian Baldero. But was what I read, the style of Adrian Baldero, this vivid, virile opening, this scene of the two derelicts who hated one another, fortuitously meeting on the old tramp steamer, this cunning evocation of smells, jute, bilge-water, the warm oils of the engine-room, this expert knowledge so careless to display to the various parts of a ship. How had Adrian, man of luxury, who'd ever been on a tramp steamer in his life, gained the knowledge? The people, too, were lusterly drawn. They had a flavour of the sea and the breeziness of wide spaces, a deep lung to folk. Said that I should not be interrupted, I wandered off to a secluded nook of the garden down the drive, away from the house, and gave myself up to the story. From the first it went with a rare swing, incident following incident. Every trait of character presented objectively in fine scorn of analysis. There were little pen-pictures of grim scenes, faultless of their definition and restraint. There was a girl in it, a wild, clean-limbed woodland thing, who especially moved my admiration. The more I read, the more fascinated did I become. And the more did I doubt whether a single line in it had been written by Adrian Baldero. After a long spell I took up my watch. It was twenty past one. We lunched at half-past. I rose, went toward the house, came upon Geoffrey and Susan. The latter I dispatched peremptorily to her ablutions. Alone with Geoffrey I challenged him. You hulking baby, said I, what's the good of pretending with me? Why didn't you tell me at once that you'd written it yourself? He looked at me anxiously. What makes you think so? The simple intelligence possessed by the average adult. First, I continued as he made no reply, but stood staring at me in ingenuous discomfort. You couldn't have got this out of poor Adrian's mush. Secondly, Adrian had the experience of life to have written it. Thirdly, I have read many brilliant descriptive articles in the Daily Gazette, and have little difficulty in recognizing the hand of Geoffrey Chain. Good Lord! said he. It isn't as obvious as all that. I laughed. Then you did write it? Of course, he growled. But I didn't want you to know. I tried to get as near Tom Castleton as I could. Look here! he gripped my shoulder. If it's such a transparent fraud, what the places is going to happen? To some extent I reassured him. I was in a peculiar position having peculiar knowledge. Save Barbara, no other soul in the world had the faintest suspicion of Adrian's tragedy. The forthcoming book would be received without shadow of question as the work of the author of The Diamond Gate. The difference of style and treatment would be attributed to the marvellous versatility of the dead genius. Geoffrey's brow began to tear. What do you think of it as far as you've gone? My enthusiastic answer expressed the sincerity of my appreciation. He positively blushed and looked at me rather guiltily, like a schoolboy detected in the act of helping an old woman across the road. His awful cheek, said he. But I was up against it. The only alternative was to say the damn thing had been lost or burnt and take the consequences. Somehow I thought of this. I'd written about half of it all in bits and pieces about three or four years ago and put it aside. It wasn't my job. Then I pulled it out one day and read it and it seemed rather good. So, having the story in my head, I set to work. And that's why you didn't go to Persia. How the devil could I go to Persia? I couldn't write a novel on the back of a beastly camel. He walked a few steps in silence. Then he said with a rumble of a laugh. I had an awful fright about that time. I suddenly dried up, couldn't get along. I must have spent a week, night after night, staring at a blank sheet of paper. I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew, was going the way of Adrian. By George it taught me something of the Hades the poor fellow must have passed through. I've been in pretty tight corners in my day and I know what it is to have the cold fear creeping down my spine. But that week gave me the fright of my life. I wish you'd told me, said I. I might have helped. Why didn't you? Oh, I didn't like to. You see, this idea hadn't come off. I should have looked such a stupendous ass. That's a reason, I admitted. And I didn't tell you at first, because you would have thought I was going off my chump. I don't look the sort of chap that could write a novel, do I? You would have said I was attempting the impossible, like Adrian. You and Barbara would have been scared to death and you would have put me off. Franklin came from the house. Luncheon was on the table. We hurried to the dining-room. Jeffery sat down before a gigantic crab. Is it all right? he asked. Dora has interceded for you, said Barbara. You owe her your life. Dora smiled. It's the least I could do for you. Jeffery grinned by way of delicate rejoinder and immersed himself in crab. From its depths, as it seemed, he said. Hillary has read half the book. What do you think of it? Barbara asked. I repeated my diathorambic eulogy. Doria's eyes shone. How do you wish you could see your way to read it? said Jeffery. I would give my heart to, said Doria, but I've told you why I can't. Circumstances alter cases, said I, platitudinously. In happier circumstances you would have been presented with the novelist's fine, finished product. As it happens, Jeffery has had to fill up little gaps, make bridges here and there. I'm sure of you being well enough," I added with a touch of malice, for I had not quite forgiven his leaving me in the dark. Jeffery would have consulted you on many points. I was very anxious to see what impression the book would make upon her. Although I had reassured Jeffery, I could scarcely conceive the possibility of the book being taken as the work of Adrian. Of course I would, said Jeffery eagerly, but that's just it. You weren't equal to the worry. Now you're all right, and I agree with Hillary. You ought to read it. You see, some of the bridges are so jolly clumsy. Doria turned to my wife. Do you think I would be justified? Decidedly, said Barbara, you ought to read it at once. Say it came to pass that, after lunch, Doria came into my study and demanded to the set of proofs. She took them up to her bedroom, where she remained all the afternoon. I was greatly relieved. It was right that she should know what was going to be published under Adrian's name. In Jeffery's presence I disclosed to Barbara the identity of the author. He said to her much the same as he had said to me before lunch, with perhaps a little more shame-facedness. Were it not for reiteration upon reiteration of the same things in talk, life would be a stark silence broken only by staccato announcement of facts. At last Barbara's eyes grew uncomfortably moist. Impulsively she flew to Jeffery and put her arms round his vast shoulders. He was sitting, otherwise she could not have done it, and hugged him. You're a blessed, blessed dear, she said, and ashamed of this exhibition of sentiment. She built it from the room. Jeffery, looking very shy and uncomfortable, suggested a game of billiards. To Barbara and myself are waiting our guests in the drawing-room before dinner. The first to come was Doria, whom we hadn't seen since lunch. An arresting figure in her low evening dress. You can imagine a Tanangra figure in black and white ivory. Her face, however, was a passion of excitement. It's wonderful, she cried, more than wonderful. Even if I didn't know till to-day what a great genius Adria was. All these things he describes, he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my God, if only he had lived to finish it. She put her two hands before her eyes and dashed them swiftly away. Jeffery has done his best, poor fellow. But, oh, the bridges he speaks of, they're so crude, so crude. I could see every one. The murder, you remember? It occurred in the first part of the novel. I had read it. Three or four splashes of blood on the page instead of ink, and the thing was done. Abrable. The instinctive highlight of the artist. I thought it one of the best things in the book, said I. Oh! she waved a gesture of disgust. How can you say so? It's horrible. It isn't, Adrien. I could see the point where he left it to the imagination. Jeffery, with no imagination, has come in and spoiled it. And then the scene on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco where Fenton finds Eleanor Ray, the broken-down star of London musical comedy. Adrien never wrote it. It's a sort of claptrap he hated. He's often told me so. Jeffery thought it was necessary to explain Eleanor in the next chapter, and so in his dull way he stuck it in. That scene also, I had I read. It was a little flaming cameo of a low dive on the Barbary Coast, and a presentation of the thing seemed somewhat journalistic, I admit, but such as very few journalists could give. Oh! that's pure, Adrien, said I, brazenly. It isn't. There are disgusting little details that only a man that had been there could have mentioned. Oh! do you suppose I don't know the difference between Adrien's work and that of a penier liner like Jeffery? The door opened and Jeffery appeared. Dory went up to him and took him by the lapels of his dress-coat. I've read it. It's a work of genius. But oh, Jeffery, I do want it to be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear. I know you've done all that mortal man could do for Adrien and for me. But it isn't your fault if you're not a professional novelist or an imaginative writer. And you yourself said the bridges were clumsy. Couldn't you? Oh! I loathe hurting you, Jeffery. But it's all the world, all eternity to be. Couldn't you get one of Adrien's colleagues, one of the famous people? She rattled off a few names to look through the proofs and revise them, just in honour of Adrien's memory. Couldn't you, dear Jeffery? She tugged convulsively at the poor old John's coat. You're one of the best and noblest men who ever lived, or I couldn't say this to you. But you understand, don't you? Jeffery's ruddy face turned as white as chalk. She might have slapped it physically and it would have worn the same dazed, paralyzed lack of expression. My life, said he, in a queer-toned voice that wasn't Jeffery's at all. My life is only an expression of your wishes. I'll do as you say. It's for Adrien's sake, dear Jeffery, said Doria. Jeffery passed his great glazed hand over his stricken face, from the roots of his hair to the point of his beard, and seemed to wipe there from all traces of day-infesting cares, revealing the sunny Rubens-like features that we all loved. But apart from my amateur joining of the flats, you think the books worthy of Adrien? Oh, I do, she cried passionately. I do. It's a work of genius. It's Adrien in all his maturity, in all his greatness. The door opened. A dinner is served, madam, said Franklin. EDD OF CHAPTER XIV