 CHAPTER XIV Take no thought for us. The blood of the forerunners is like the seed which the wise husbandman scatters on the fertile ground. Mrs. Humphrey Ward. So the gods lost flair. The driving of flair. There, take that to your chemist and have it made up, and keep it about you. Don't leave it at home when you are going out reporting, mind. Flair's doctor smiled as he got out of his chair to open the door for her, but there was something behind the smile, an anxiety, a rapid calculation in his long-experienced mind. Should he tell her more? Should he warn her as seriously as he could? He had seen enough of flair to know that if he paralyzed her nerve, he should do exactly the thing he was trying to prevent. Hasten her to a crisis that might lie many years ahead. He reached the door first and stood with his hand on it, looking at her. I suppose there is nothing more to be done, said flair carelessly, except to take ordinary care. Don't overtire and don't rush up and down stairs. What are you smiling at? Well, you see, it doesn't lie in my hands exactly. If I have to be on a report for six hours, say, and a meal snatched anyhow, well, I've got to do it. I'm sorry to have given you all this trouble over me, but I promised a friend of mine that I would ask you. And to tell the truth, I thought you might give me something to stop the pain. I hate and fear pain, said flair candidly. That prescription that I have given you will stop the pain. That is why I don't want you to be without it, said the doctor. Take it at once when you feel the attack coming on, and don't take a six-hours report if you can possibly avoid it. He met the gentle irony in flair's eyes, and his earnestness deepened. Miss Caldecott, you absolutely must be careful. If you don't, you may have a serious illness. Well, that would be the end of me, I expect, said flair lightly. And I don't expect my order of release for many years yet. If you could give it to me, I should call you an angel of mercy. But I suppose there is no such luck. Goodbye, doctor, and thank you. She went out of the consulting room and through the wide hall and into the street, hardly thinking of what he had told her, because she was absorbed by the fact that he had risen to open the door for her. Miss Flair had said her belief in the existence of gentlemen depended at this point in her life upon her publisher and her doctor, and when she felt incredulous she sometimes made errands to go and see them and reassure herself. She was ruthless of their valuable time, but it was quite as much for a mental tonic as for a physical that she called upon her doctor, who charged her nothing by the way, and opened the door for her. Flair had come straight down for her latest interview with him from Fleet Street, where she had been to see the editor of an old and esteemed weekly. This person sat with his hat on behind his table. When she was shown in by the clerk, he did not get up, and he left Flair to stand until she put her hand, with the finest suggestion, on the back of a chair. Then he said, oh yes, will you sit down? And when the business was concluded, he had himself requested her to call upon him. He nodded her at dismissal and sat still while she let herself out of his office. After all, she had no just cause for complaint. He was perfectly civil over the business, and she was only FC the journalist. Flair went on to her doctor and regained her respect for mankind. The little attention from the opposite sex was really as nothing to her. But she reveled in a purely aesthetic sense of the man's own courtesy. Flair always waited with pleasurable anticipation for the close of an interview with him, because she knew that he would shake hands with her and show her out himself. She received the same sort of benefits from her publisher, neither man being in the least aware that it could have been otherwise. Flair had her prescription made up on the way home, and then went round by way of Covent Garden in order to buy fish for R.L. so that she reached her rooms rather late. Whether she were tired or no, she never forgot the cat. Or if she did, would tramp out again to get his supper, and cook it herself on the inevitable Beatrice Stove, the loved of Nuzotra, before she ate her own meal. In R.L.'s interest, Flair had learned many surprising things about the commissariat of her neighborhood, where, for instance, they gave the really good scraps of meat for tuppence, and which fishmonger would sell a cod's head with plenty on it. R.L. had perhaps grown fastidious, but only a stray will eat stale fish, and the fishmongers had begun to know Flair, and to give her wholesome odds and ends. She had no objection to carrying a weighty newspaper parcel down Bedford Street, and as she generally wore a sailor hat and a macintosh on her shopping expeditions. It is probable that the shopkeepers thought that she was shopping for herself. It is certain that they were often good-natured, as they crammed an extra ounce or so into Flair's parcel. And yet they never treated her as one of the harassed women, or thin children, who swarmed round the doors on Saturday nights, waiting for free scraps. Flair had an invaluable manner that was misleading. It was gentle to silkiness, and when Nuzotra wanted an implacable haul porter softened, or a harsh doorkeeper appeased, they always sent Flair to interview him. There was a certain innocent friendliness about her which, taken in conjunction with her published books, was apt to startle people who had not experienced the grim realism lurking behind it. Miss Caldecott has such a soft, sweet manner, you would never think she could write those stories, said one bewildered edetress, who had expected a horny female, with spectacles and a loud voice and did not happen to meet Flair's betraying eyes. The soft, sweet manner had wooed countless fresh haddocks and slices of hake out of the fishmongers accustomed to give only trimmings for catfish, and R.L. flourished, though what he chiefly loved was to share a small rabbit with Flair, or a six-penny pigeon during the shooting season at Hurlingham. For if you go down to Fulham when the pigeon shooting is on, you may sometimes buy pigeons for sixpence. And while Winnie lived at West Kensington, Flair used thriftily to arrange her periodical visits there, so that she gleaned to supper on the homeward route. Perhaps I am seen at my best, she remarked pensively to Alma on one occasion, cutting up a rabbit's head. I assure you that in R.L.'s service I have learned by now exactly how every bone fits in, and where each scrap of meat is to be found. I believe I could make a rabbit almost as well as the Almighty, and I can tell you just how much brain a codfish has, and how to get a flesh on his cheeks. Codfish must be plump old people among their own kind. It is almost impossible to write a Flair without a supplementary history of R.L. because the big black tabby filled all the margin of her life that was left by work, and was the only masculine personality really influencing her. If her doctor had known the real spur to make her as cautious as he wished, he would have hinted that if she were laid up R.L. would be neglected. But he had not had the privilege of meeting R.L. Stephenson in fur and whiskers, and so he misdefined chants of persuasion. The prescription he had given Flair arrived in due course, and she remembered to carry it about with her for three days. On the third she had a threatening of her trouble, the old pain gripping at her heart and making her bend nearly double with the first effort to endure it. But she remembered the mixture and swallowed it, afterwards throwing herself flat on her bed, by which means the difficulty of breathing generally righted itself. The spasm passed off, and Flair congratulated herself on the doctor's remedy, as she had said she was afraid of pain and would have taken anything to avoid it. July had drifted into August and still the heat continued. Flair meant to go away, but she was anxious to finish a heavy pot boiler before she left London, after which she could take a holiday with a clear conscience. She had no attack for a week after taking the doctor's remedy, and it being some ten days since she had seen him, her impression of the necessity for care was wearing off. She had not really been frightened, but the insistence in his mind had communicated itself to her, and she had mechanically done as he told her. Then on this breathless August evening she came in tired, took off her hat, and sat down to her supper in company with R.L. Even the cat did not seem inclined to eat, and after he had satisfied himself he went out of the open window for a stroll among the chimney-pots. Flair left the sash flung up that he might come in when he pleased, and taking up her manuscript and fountain pen she went downstairs to write in the room with packing cases, which being larger than her own and not under the roof was considerably cooler. The story was finished and she was correcting the type. She hauled out a big dictionary for her spelling with shaky, and took that, too. When she reached the committee room where Nuzotra usually met, she remembered that she had left her doctor's prescription, lying on her dressing table when she took off her outdoor things. But it was up six flights of stairs, and on the whole she thought it was worse for her heart to climb all up them again after her supper than to neglect his caution and not carry the remedy. Flair sat down to her corrections on a camp stool which she had brought with her, as well as the dictionary, using the packing case as a table. Outside the wide-flung darkening window the faint sickly smell of the streets came up strongly, heralding rain. It came after some minutes a few blood-like drops as large as half-crowns that pattered on the windowsill, then a quicker rush of a thundershowher and presently the steady, gentle hiss of summer rain, washing the stale streets and mercifully flushing the gutters. Flair looked up for a minute and thought of R.L. But the window of her room upstairs was open, and he would run for shelter as soon as he liked. So she had no need to disturb herself. R.L. had severely practical habits. He disliked a wet coat, and the only result likely to accrue from his outing were muddy paw-marks on Flair's table and her bed. The rain did not seem to decrease the heat, but added a stormy savor to the atmosphere. It was an evil night, as black as midwinter and as hot as the tropics, pulsed through by the heavy whisper of the rain. The depression in the air lay like a leaden weight upon Flair's head, but she had been working for an hour, and was growing stiff and tired when she heard the front doorbell ring, and Mrs. Bonnet's slow step going down the passage. A minute later Frank burst into the room waving a paper and glistening with the wet of the outside world. Flair, have you seen it? Did you know? I thought I must come round to congratulate you, she said breathlessly. Seen what? Know who? said Flair, ungrammatically in her bewilderment. I say, Frank, you are soaking. She remembered with vague discomfort another night that had resembled this, a night when she had been working late and had looked up to find another girl in the room, with dripping clothes and a desperate Flair face to frighten the angels. Never mind, it's a notice of exes on your storybook. My dear, I am so glad. His criticism always means success, however late it comes. Didn't I say the tide was turning? Flair took the paper in silence and read the notice. Her last book of stories had been out some six months, but a great man had only just discovered it, and given her a review which, as experience told her, would probably rouse the public in her favor, her breath came a little uncertain as she read, and her heart beat. Because of less drudgery and monotony, of life being a little easier perhaps, dawn dimly on her horizon, she asked no more. She had grown beyond the mere desire of enjoyment that drives young blood, and for some years now had done her work well, simply for the love of it, and no hope of pleasure or reward. The intense anxiety about bread and butter, and the savage clutch at opportunity, which had at last landed Magda and Flair on the even lines of knowing that they would not starve as long as they went on working, had at the same time dulled the eager perception of life in them. The review that Flair held in her hands was slightly stilted, a little patronizing, but for all that it meant acknowledgment, and what she first recognized was that she might perhaps have to write less pot-boiling fiction in the year, if there were any profits from the book itself. For the acceptance and even the fairly good circulation of a book does not necessarily mean any great pecuniary advantage to the author. Flair calculated to lose on her books, because they took her longer to write by far than a novelette of the same length in paper covers. She lived by rough fiction, technically called slopp, and freelance journalism, and wrote books with an anxious effort, not until now had she even the hope that they would repay her in the present. A book was indeed a speculation that might prove a good advertisement in keeping her name before the eyes of the public. X's review might make it really profitable. That was all. I stayed up in town tonight for a choir practice, explained Frank rapidly, and one of the girls at the extension had seen this and told me, knowing that I knew you, and I bought it. Hadn't you seen it, Deary? No, said Flair, almost vaguely. It's a good notice. I hope it will help me on, Frank. I'm so glad I was the first to tell you. We must all drink your health at the next meeting, as well as Almas and Hilda's. I can't stay a minute, Flair. I only rushed round to bring this. Thanks. Yes. Thanks awfully, said Flair, but still in that vague fashion. Perhaps Frank saw that she wanted to be alone, and has said she could not stay, with a tact that was one reason why her friends loved her. She kissed Flair warmly, told her not to come to the door. It was such a wretched night, and vanished as suddenly as she had come, leaving an impression of her personality, like an unexpected glimpse of the sun at midnight. Flair stood still by the packing-case after she was alone and reread her notice. She sucked it into her innermost comprehension, not only for its praise, but for its blame, for she was, I believe, rather unusual, in that she depended very much on her reviewers for her own improvement. The manner in which Flair studied the lordly remarks of some young man from Oxford, probably her junior in years, and certainly innocent of the long experience and hard work which had trained her to write books, was rather touching. When one of these youthful cockerels crowed out against the length of her stories, she condensed them religiously. When they told her that she was wanting an incident, she denied herself the analysis which was her forte, and crammed in action, whereupon someone else on the same paper reproved her next effort severely for differing from her first. That was the only thing that shook Flair's faith in the critics, the comparison between one reviewer and another, in the same journal. For though she knew as a journalist how rapidly columns become open, and one man is replaced by another, she could not rid herself of the habit of thinking of a big daily as a voice, and regarding it, even in its book reviews, as a consistent critic rather than a series of individual opinions. The only thing on which all reviewers did seem to agree in Flair's case was her style, and as she had not the least idea what they meant, this bewildered her more than all their contradictions. Flair had no conscious aim at literary refinements. She knew that she loved Stevenson and Ruskin and all true poets, and read them from sheer delight in their facility of phrase as well as for that they told her. Pater worried her with his commas until she lost the sense amongst them, and she read most classics for what they said rather than the way they said it. The reason of her acquirement of that mysterious style, if she really had it, must have been by gift of a sensitive ear that could hear the form of a phrase even as she wrote it. Flair had only to read through her own pages to be conscious of the jarring word in the badly hung sentence. After a while she put down the paper with the review, and thought she would write to Alma and tell her, Flair had always told Alma the things that concerned herself rather than the rest of Nuzotra. Perhaps she would cut out the review and enclose it, if she could part with it. She wanted to gloat a little more, to feel herself suddenly and strangely known to one of those far-off beings who spoke to her so constantly and plainly in print, for X was a well-known man of letters, and who had become aware of her existence. Just as if, while looking at the picture of some great and honoured stranger, it should prove alive and nod familiarly from the canvas, claiming an acquaintance, Flair felt herself at the same time one with her world as she had never been before, and yet set apart from it. The murmur of the loveless London beyond her narrow life came up on the hot August air and floated in drowsily through the window, softened by the distance of the little side street leading to her door. The sense of the hard fight by which she earned even a right to exist seemed to press and press her back upon herself. It was a leaden weight, this vast crowd of men and women who were just beginning to listen to her here and there, perhaps. But for so long they had treated her as a stranger and an enemy that she could not get in touch with them. The vast indifference of the great city in which she lived was terrifying. It had cowed her, though she had not known it. For years she had not let herself think of the enormous silence that engulfed such lives as hers, or the impotence of her mere existence. When we come to consider it, almost all of us, before we driven to bay, would fall back upon the thought of another's personality. Some human being in our private world, whose mere presence would at least prevent our going mad with loneliness, it is the sudden removal or death of such factors in our lives that makes us cry out for the relief of hearing our own voices. Flair felt her solitude suddenly and heard the outer world rushing past her, sighing and selling, marrying and being born, heedless of her, and very far away. She turned almost eagerly to Alma's letter, with a desire to forge a link between herself and humanity again, even by a cursory little action. As she wrote the date on the paper, a sudden sense of weariness fell on her, as if the accumulated tire of the whole day attacked her, and made even writing a letter irksome. She was conscious of her own depression and a feeling ill, and with a gleam of ugly humor, she expressed it to Alma after her own method. Knowing that she would be understood, instead of putting the number of the street, she wrote, Hell, and added, please note change of address. Dear Alma, Frank has just rushed in on me, and almost tumbled over herself in the effort to tell me that X has written me a notice of the storybook in his paper. It is a damned good notice. Flair paused suddenly, a change coming over her tired face. The pen went on more slowly, wrote a few stiff words, and then stopped. I was very excited for half an hour, and now the reaction has made me feel awfully ill. She rose abruptly, gasping over the truth of that assertion. The pain was coming on again, and she remembered that the remedy the doctor had given her lay on her table at the top of the house, up six flights of stairs. She stood hesitating a minute while the horror grew on her. She was all alone in the room, practically alone in the house, for Mrs. Bonnet was in her own domains, and shut off from the room with the packing cases. This might be a slight attack like the last, but she knew that she had had a long day to handicap her. The weather was stifling, and the final excitement of the notice had done its work. If she could get upstairs, she might prevent the pain getting to its worst pitch, for it was really the pain that Flair feared rather than any danger. She made a few steps towards the door, but her own nerve failed her, or the movement made her worse. With desperate trembling hands, she flung the dictionary on the floor, and lying down on her back, supported her head on it, to bear the growing agony with closed eyes. For a few minutes she lay quiet, trying not to think of herself, and listening to the insistent sound of the rain falling and falling through the black night. In her mind she saw endless processions of men and women forced to tramp through it. On errands, like her own had often been, their stern efforts at bread-getting rendered harder by the little physical discomforts of walking where others rode, of going out in any weather where others could stay at home, loveless London, a dreary waste where stealthy hands laid snares for the women who walk with clean feet through the streets of experience. Winnie's face looked at her suddenly out of the phantom crowd, a white patch upon the wet night. Then it seemed to her as if the pain gripped her like a physical hand round her heart, until the cramp of which she had spoken made the perspiration hang in beads under her curly hair. Her eyes were still closed, but beneath the brown lashes were blue hollows of grief and the same violet shadow hovered round her mouth. During the paroxysms she could think of nothing but the breathless horror, but as it faded away and left her for the moment half-conscious and almost nervous, it flitted across her mind for the first time that this might mean death. If no one came to help her and the attack wore out her strength another such spasm would surely end it. Must she die like a dog on the floor? She turned her heavy head ever so little and gazed round the half-lip room. There was no sucker there, and she flung up her arms feebly as of appealing to a higher mercy in the attitude of one crucified. Flair had had no fear of death for years. She had spoken truly when she said that it was her order of release and she should look on her doctor as an angel of mercy if he told her she must die there and then. It was not the thing in itself but the method that horrified her. Flair had always been self-indulgent and had loved the flesh-pots of Egypt. She had contemplated dying with stoical indifference and would have met it so, but she had always fancied herself in bed, with Alma there certainly, to look at as a child will a well-loved face before falling asleep and perhaps one or two more of Nuzotra to say goodbye. It would be just like falling asleep. She had always loved her bed and fancied herself lying with relaxed limbs until she fell into a beautiful unconscious slumber with no gray tomorrow to end it. That was the closing scene of her imagination but not this fight between death and life with agony that made her body moist and a sense of swooning rather than peace. To die like a dog on the floor she tried to shift her head again and looked round her with asking eyes that begged dumbly before she could not speak as the inevitable end became clearer to her brain and seemed to draw nearer to her. She might have been resigned but for a last pang that belonged to Earth and hurt her as only Earth's loves can do. It was not Alma over whom she grieved or whom she feared to leave. Alma, after all, could speak, could appeal to humanity, had learned to battle with equal weapons in this hard world, but R.L., the old broken lines she had never finished, came back to her mind to torture her. Of Kurdistan and how he loved the beasts, gods helpless whom he places on the Earth and says to man through those dumb mouths be kind. They tell it in Farisha to this day. She saw him, even the next day, going hungry. She saw him in fancy, wandering about the rooms with his beautiful eyes full of wonder and trouble. Neglected, possibly turned out if Mrs. Bonnet found him a nuisance, left to starve and steal and be ill-treated, as man has always answered God's appeal, be kind. Gods helpless, the passionate pitiful care for dumb things that lay at the root of Flair's very nature, rose up and cried to a providence, whose place she had so often tried to take to them. Oh, surely one of Nuzotra, remembering that she had loved him, would make herself responsible for R.L. They were all so hampered by their circumstances that she dared not think it out in detail. She saw him always in fancy, hustled and frightened, and driven away while he still timidly searched for her and thought she had deserted him again. It took me two years to make him get over having been chivvied and ill-treated as a kitten, panted Flair, trying not to see it all in her fatal imagination. Oh, if only I could make him understand that it wasn't because I wanted to, that I didn't give him up. The spasm in her brain was bringing back the spasm at her heart, and she held her breath. The pain was coming, coming, sweeping over her. She opened her eyes, fever bright with it, and saw that an old horror had become incarnate. Inside the door, corporate, real to her dying eyes, stood the shadow, no longer the shadow, but a living presence. He came towards her where she lay, her hands flung upwards and nailed to an invisible cross of pain. The warmth and breath of his humanity was on her as he bent over her relentless face, and the eyes that looked on her fear had grown material. She was past speech now, but with a last effort she opened her clenched hands as if to show them empty, and made a faint gesture of renunciation. And so she went out into the darkness and the rain.