"Her smart pals pay pretty dearly for their good times. It will be time to be grateful when she's had enough of you." It escaped him against his will. He knew the futility of such taunts which seemed to betray an anger too senseless to be admitted. He did not care enough to be angry.

"You—you don't understand, old chap. Seems cheek—my saying that to you. But you're not like other people—you don't need the things they have to have to keep going. And, anyhow, she's not responsible for the asses men make of themselves." He was becoming more fuddled as the warmth of the room closed over his wine-heated brain. But his eyes had changed. They had narrowed to two twinkling slits of gay secretiveness. "More things in heaven and earth than you dream of, old chap. But you don't dream, do you? Never did. Got your teeth into facts—diseases—and getting on—and all that. What's a song and a dance to you? But I wish you liked her, all the same. P'raps you do, only you won't own up. She liked you, you know. Fact is, it was she sent me along to dig you out."

At that Stonehouse was caught up sharply out of his indifference. He flushed and thrust his hands into his pockets to prevent them from clenching themselves in absurd resentment.

"What do you mean?"

Cosgrave nodded. But he looked suddenly confused and rather sulky, like a play-tired child who has been shaken out of its sleep to be cross-examined.

"Well—some people would be jolly flattered. There's to be a big beano on her birthday—a supper party behind the scenes—and she said: 'You bring along your nice, sad, little friend—ce pauvre jeune homme.' You know, Stonehouse, it made me laugh, her describing you like that. I said: 'You don't need to be sorry for Robert Stonehouse. He can keep his own end up as well as anybody.' But she said: 'Ce pauvre jeune homme.' I couldn't get her to see you were a damned lucky fellow." He dropped back into the corner of the chesterfield and yawned and stretched himself. "I want you to come too. Do you good. P'raps she's right. P'raps you've had a rotten time in your own way. Though I don't know—I'd be happy enough, if I were you—always seem to come out on top—not to care for any damn thing on earth, except that—not even Francey Wilmot—or even me—just a sort of pug-dog you trailed behind on the end of a string—a sort of mascot."

He was going to sleep. He waggled his arm feebly, groping for Stonehouse. "Say you'll come. I'd be awfully proud—show you off, you know. Always was—awfully proud—have such a pal."

He was the very figure of stupid intoxication as he lay there with his crumpled evening clothes and disordered hair—and yet not ugly either, but in some way innocent and simple. (Robert could see little Rufus Cosgrave, excited and tired out after the chase to the Greatest Show in Europe, peering through the disguise of rowdy manhood.)

Stonehouse threw a rug over him, resigning himself to the inevitable. But when he had switched off the main lights he gave an involuntary glance over the suddenly shadowed room as though to make sure that the darkness had exorcised an alien and detestable presence.

So she was sorry for him. That, at any rate, was amusing. Or perhaps she thought he was afraid of her in the obscure duel that was being fought out between them.

Cosgrave caught hold of him as he passed.

"The end of it all will be that I'll go back to my old swamp and tell the fellows that I've had a first-rate leave. I'll tell 'em about her, and they'll sit round open-mouthed—thinking I'm no end of a dog—and that they'll do the same next time they get a chance. They'll be awfully bucked to hear there's a good time going after all." He pleaded drowsily: "Say you'll come though, Robert. You're such a brick. I'm beastly fond of you, you know."

Robert Stonehouse withdrew his hand sharply from the hot, moist clasp. (How he had run that night! As though the devil had been after him instead of poor breathless little Cosgrave with his innocent confession.)

"Oh, I'll come," he said.



2

After all, nothing changed very much. Grown-up people masqueraded. They pretended to laugh at the young fools they had been and were still behind the elaborate disguise of adult reasonableness and worldly wisdom. For Robert Stonehouse, at any rate, it was ridiculously the old business over again—children whose games he despised and could not play, despising him.

It seemed that she had invited everyone and anyone whose name had come into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy, green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.

Robert Stonehouse stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had prepared him to meet them. He had been accustomed to encounter and master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and aimless pleasure. He knew how to deal with men and women whose sufferings put them in his power or with men of his own profession, but these people with their enigmatic laughter, their Masonic greetings, almost their own language (which was the more troubling since it seemed his very own), threw him from his security. They made him self-conscious and self-distrustful. They might be ten times more worthless than he believed them to be, and he might be ten times a bigger man than the Robert Stonehouse who had made such a good thing of his life. They had still the power to put him in the wrong and to make him an oaf and an outsider. And they knew it. He felt their glances slide over him furtively and a little mockingly. Yet outwardly he conformed to them. He wore his clothes well enough, and his self-control covered over his real distress with a rather repellent arrogance. He was even handsome, as a plain man can become handsome whose mind has dominated from the start over a fine body. And with this air of power went his flagrant youthfulness.

But the girl standing next him dropped him a flippant question with veiled irony and dislike in her stupid eyes, and turned away from him before he answered. She was a vulgar, garish little creature, and he could afford to smile satirically (and perhaps too consciously) at the powdered shoulder which she jerked up at him. And yet he was deeply, miserably shamed.

It was like a play in which he was the only one who did not know his part. Even Cosgrave played up—a little too triumphantly, showing off—as a tried man-of-the-world. And at her given moment the star performer made a dramatic entry into the midst of them, a cloak of pale blue brocade thrown over her scanty dress and her plumes still tossing from the elaborately tousled head.

They greeted her with hand-clapping and laughter, and she held out her thin arms, embracing them as old friends. In her attitude and in her eyes which passed rapidly from one to another, there was good-humoured understanding. She knew probably what the more immaculate among them thought of her, and that they were there to boast about it as English people boast of having visited Montmartre at midnight. It was daring and amusing to be at this woman's notorious dinners. They thought they patronized her, whatever else they knew. But in reality the joke was on her side.

"Allons—to ze feast, friends."

She had seen Robert Stonehouse, and she went straight to him, waving the rest aside like a flock of importunate pigeons, and took his arm. "You and I lead the way, Monsieur le docteur."

He did not answer. He was glad that she had signalled him out. It smoothed his raw pride. And yet he thought: "This is her way of making fun of me." And he hated her and the scented warmth of her slim body as it brushed lightly against his. He hated his own excited triumph. For the first time he became aware of something definitely abnormal in himself, as though a dead skin had been stripped off his senses and he had begun to see and hear with a primitive and stupefying clearness.

The rest followed them noisily along grimy, winding passages and between dusty wedges of improbable landscapes out on to the stage. A long table had been laid in the midst of the stereotyped drawing-room, which formed the scene of her grotesque dancing, and absurdly elaborate waiters in powdered hair and knee-breeches hovered in the wings. They were not real waiters, and from the moment they came out into the footlights the guests themselves became the chorus of a musical comedy. It was difficult to believe in the over-abundant flowers with which the table was strewn or in the champagne lying ostentatiously in wait.

The curtain had been left up, and the dim and dingy auditorium gaped dismally at them. The empty seats were threatening as a silent, starving mob pressed against the windows of a feasting-house. But the woman on Stonehouse's arm waved to them.

"I like it so. I see all my friends there—my old friends who are gone—God knows where. They sit and laugh and clap and nod to one another. They say: 'Voyons, our Gyp still 'aving a good time.' And I kiss my 'and to them all."

She kissed her hand and threw her head back in the familiar movement as though she waited for their applause. And when it was over she looked up into Robert Stonehouse's face.

"Monsieur le docteur is a leetle pale. One is always nervous at one's debut. You never act before, hein?"

"Not in a theatre like this," he said.

And he felt a momentary satisfaction because she knew that his answer had a meaning which she did not understand.

She persisted.

"Monsieur Cosgrave say you would not come. To say you never do nothing—only work and work. Is that true?"

"Yes."

"Don't dance—don't go to the theatre—don't love no one—don't get a leetle drunk sometimes? Never, never?"

"No," he said scornfully.

"Don't want to, hein?"

"I hate that sort of thing."

(But she was making him into a ridiculous prig. She turned the values of life topsy-turvy with that one ironic, good-natured gesture.)

"Eh, bien, it's a good thing for my sort there are not too many of your sort, my friend. But per'aps it is not quite so bad as it seems, for you 'are come after all."

"I had to," he thrust at her.

"'Ow you say—professionally?"

"Yes."

"But I 'ave not get ze tummy-ache—not yet."

"I don't care about you."

"You want to look after your leetle friend, hein?"

"Yes."

She was unruffled—even concerned to satisfy him.

"Well, then, you be policeman. You sit 'ere. It is always better to watch ze thief than ze coffre-fort. You keep an eye on me and see I don't run away with 'im. Voyons, mesdames et messieurs, our friend 'ere 'ave the place of honour. 'E sit next me and see I behave nice. 'E don't like me ver' much. 'E think me a bad woman."

They laughed with her and at him. He felt himself colour up and try to laugh back. (And it was oddly like his attempt to propitiate Form I when it had gibed him on that bitter pilgrimage from desk to desk.) He took his place at her right hand. He could see Cosgrave half-way down the table, and his thin, freckled face with its look of absurd happiness. He was unselfishly overjoyed that his friend should have been thus signalled out for honour. Perhaps he harboured some crazy certainty that after this Stonehouse would understand and even share his infatuation. He caught Robert's eye and smiled and nodded triumphantly.

"Now you see what she's really like, don't you?"

A string band, hidden in the orchestra under a roof of palms, played the first bars of her dance, and then stopped short and waited solemnly. She still stood, glass in hand.

"It is my birthday. God and I alone know which one. I drink to myself. I wish myself good luck. Vive myself. Vive Gyp Labelle and all who 'ave loved 'er and love 'er and shall love 'er!"

She drank her wine to the last drop, and the band began to play again, knitting the broken, noisy congratulations into a kind of triumphal chorus. It was very crude and theatrical and effective. It did not matter, any more than it matters in a well-acted play, that the whole incident had been rehearsed. It was as calculated and as spontaneous as that nightly, irresistible burst of laughter.

Rufus Cosgrave stood up shyly in his place. Had he been dressed a shade less perfectly and resisted the gardenia in his button-hole, he would have been better disguised. As it was, there could be no mistaking a little fellow from the suburbs who had got into bad company. And in spite of the West Africa swamp and its peculiar forms of despairing vice, he was so frightfully innocent that he did not know it,

"And—and we're here to—to wish you luck too—that you go on—as you are—dancing and laughing—making us all laugh and dance with you—however down in the dumps we are—for ever and ever—and to bring you offerings—for you to remember us by."

There must have been a great deal more to it than that. Stonehouse could see the notes clenched in one tense hand, but they had become indecipherable and he let them drop. He came from his place, stumbling over the back of somebody's chair, to where she stood, and laid a small square box done up in tissue paper at her side. She laughed and caught him by the ear, and kissed him on both flaming cheeks.

"A precedent—fair play for all!" the man opposite Stonehouse shouted.

They came then, one after another, treading on each other's heels, and she waited for them, an audacious figure of Pleasure receiving custom, and kissed them, shading her kiss subtly so that each one became a secret little joke out of the past or lying in wait in the future, at which the rest could guess as they chose. Some of the women whom she knew best joined in the stream. They bore her, for the most part, an odd affinity and no ill-will. They had set out on the same road and had failed, and their failure stared out of their crudely painted faces. But perhaps they were grateful to her for not having forgotten them—or for other more obscure reasons. They gave her what they could—extemporary gifts some of them—a tawdry ring or a flower which she stuck jauntily among the outrageous feathers. The significantly small parcels she did not open—either from idle good nature or from sheer indifference. Stonehouse wondered what Cosgrave's little box contained. Probably a year or two of the mosquito-infested swamp to which he would soon return to boast of this night's extravaganza.

"And you, Monsieur le docteur?"

For he had gone on eating and drinking with apparent tranquillity.

"Oh, I have nothing—nothing but admiration," he said smiling.

She shook her head.

"Ca ne va pas. The chief guest. Ah, no! That is not kind. A birthday—c'est une chose bien serieuse, voyons. Who knows? Per'aps you never 'ave another chance—and then you 'ave remorse—'orrible, terrible remorse. Or do you never 'ave remorse either, Monsieur le docteur?"

"No—not yet."

"You must not run ze risk, then."

He thought savagely.

"If I had a diamond stud she would make me give it her."

He took a shilling from his pocket and laid it gravely in the midst of her trophies.

"Is that enough?"

And then before he could draw back she had kissed him between the eyes.

"Quite, then. I keep it for a mascot, and you will remember to-morrow morning, when you are ver' grave and important with some poor frightened patient, that Gyp Labelle kiss you last night, and that you are not different from ze others, after all. And I will take my shilling from under my pillow, and say: 'Poor Gyp, that's what you're worth, my friend!'"

"He doesn't know you yet."

Robert Stonehouse looked up sharply. The interruption had started a new train of thought. Beyond the flushed face of the man opposite him, he could see the empty stalls, row after row of gaunt-ribbed and featureless spectators, watching him. The play had become a nightmare farce in which he had chosen a ludicrous, impossible part. But he had to go on now.

"Except for Cosgrave there, I've known Mademoiselle Labelle longer than any of you. I've known her ever since I was a boy."

He felt rather than saw their expressions change. She too stared with an arrested interest, but he looked away from her to Cosgrave, smiling ironically. If it humiliated her and made her ridiculous too—well, that was what he wanted. He wanted to pay her back—most of all for the excitement boiling in him—the sense of having been toppled out of his serenity into a torrent of noise and colour by that audacious touch of her lips upon his face. And there was Cosgrave—and then again some older score to be paid off—something far off and indistinct that would presently come clear.

"Don't you remember, Rufus?"

"Rather. But I know you a minute longer, Mademoiselle. I saw you before he did."

"That was because Mademoiselle Moretti rode first."

"Ah—the Circus!" She threw her head back, drawing a deep breath through her nostrils as though she savoured some long-lost perfume blown in upon her by a sudden wind. "Now I remember too. Ze good Moretti. She ride old Arabesque. 'E 'ave white spots all over 'im—on 'is chest and what you call 'is paws, and every evening she 'ave to paint 'im like she paint 'er face. Madame Moretti—that was a good sort—bonne enfant—what you say?—domestic—not really of ze Circus at all. She like to wash up and cook leetle bonnes-bouches for supper. She was a German—Fredechen we call 'er—and she could make Sauerkraut—eh bien, I—moi qui vous parle—une bonne Francaise—I make myself sick with 'er Sauerkraut. Afterwards she grow too stout and marry ze proprietaire of what you call it?—a public-'ouse—'Ze Crown and Garter' at some town where we stop a week. By now, I think she 'ave many children and a chin for each."

Cosgrave laughed noisily.

"Didn't I tell you, Robert? A barmaid!"

"Yes—you had better taste." But he was hot with anger. "And then you came at her heels, Mademoiselle. You rode—what was it—a donkey, a fat pony? I forget which. Perhaps I was thinking too much of Madame Moretti. But I remember you were dressed as a page and wore coloured tights that didn't fit very well, and that everybody laughed because of your thin long legs. And you threw kisses to us—even Cosgrave got one, didn't you, Cosgrave? And then I'm afraid I forgot you altogether. You see, there were camels and elephants and a legless Wonder and I don't know what, and it was my first circus."

"It must 'ave been a donkey," she said, narrowing her eyes. "I 'ave ridden so many donkeys."

He saw then that she did not mind at all the fact that she had once been a circus-clown. Rather he had tossed her a memory on which she feasted joyfully, almost greedily. She pushed her plate and glass away from her, and sat with her face between her hands.

"Well—I 'ave 'ad good times always—but per'aps they were ze best of all. Ah, ze good old Circus—ze jolly life—one big family—monkeys and bears and camels and elephants and we poor 'umans, all shapes and sizes, long legs and short legs and no legs—loving and quarrelling—good friends always—Monsieur George with 'is big whip and 'is silly soft 'eart—ze gay dinners after we 'ave 'ad full 'ouse and ze no dinners at all when things go bad—and then ze journeys from town to town—sometimes it rain all day and sometimes it is so hot and the dust rise up and smother us. But always when we come near ze town we brighten up, we pretend we are not tired at all. We make jokes and wonder what it will be like 'ere. Always new faces—new streets—new policemen—and always ze same too—ze long procession and ze torchlights and ze music and ze people running like leetle streams down ze side streets to join up and march along—ze leetle boys and girls with bright eyes—shouting and waving, so glad to see us."

It was not much that she said, and she did not say it to them. She disregarded them all, and yet by some magic, through the medium of the jerky, empty sentences she made them see the vulgar, gaudy thing as she was seeing it. The subdued music, the tinkling of plates and glasses, they themselves made a background for her swift picture. They watched it—the old third-rate circus—trail its cheap glitter and flare and bang out of darkness and across the stage and into darkness again—tawdry and sordid, and yet kindly and gay and gallant-hearted too.

Robert Stonehouse stared heavily in front of him. He had drunk—not much, but too much. He was not accustomed to drinking. The very austerity of his life betrayed him. These people too—these women—half-naked with their feverish, restless eyes—these men with their air of cynical and weary knowledge—were getting on his nerves. He wished he had not come. He wished he had not reminded her of that accursed circus, for it had involved remembering. He had called up a little old tune that would not be easily forgotten, that would go on grinding itself round and round inside his brain, and when he had chased it out would come back, popping out at him, bringing other small, pale ghosts to bear it company. He could see Cosgrave and himself—the little boys with bright eyes—and feel the reverberations of their astonishment, their incredulous delight. For a moment they had held fast to the tail-end of the jolly marching procession, and then it had been ripped out of their feeble hands. But the procession went on. It was always there, round the corner, with its music and fluttering lights, and if one was infirm of purpose like Cosgrave, or like a certain James Stonehouse, one ran to meet it, flung oneself into it, not counting the cost, lying and stealing.

He heard her voice again and pressed his hands to his hot eyes like a man struggling back out of a deep sleep.

"Where are they all now? Dieu sait. Monsieur Georges 'e die. As for me I go 'ome to ze old Folies Bergeres, and for six months I wait—a leetle ugly nobody with long thin legs dancing with ten other ugly leetle nobodies with all sorts of legs be'ind La Jolleta. You don't remember 'er, 'hein! Ah, c'est vieux jeu ca and you are all too young, Mesdames et Messieurs. She was ze passion of your grandpapas. God knows why. Why do you all love me, hein? Une Mystere. Well, she was ver' old then, but she 'ave ze good 'ealth and ze thick skin of ze rhinoceros. And some'ow no one 'ave ze 'eart to tell 'er. It become a sort of joke—'ow long she keep going—ze Boulevards make bets about it. But for me it is no joke. I am in a 'urry, moi, and I know I can do better than she did ever—I 'ave something—'ere—'ere—that she never 'ave. And so one night I put a leetle pinch of something that a good friend of mine give me in La Jolleta's champagne what she drink before she dance, and when ze call-boy come she lie there on ze sofa—'er mouth open—comme ca—snoring—like a pink elephant asleep—'ow you say—squiffy—dead to ze world. Ze manager 'e tear 'is 'air out, and then I come and show 'im and 'e let me go on instead because there is no one else. And the people boo and shriek at me, they are so angry and I make ze long nose at them all—and presently they laugh and laugh."

They could see her. It wouldn't have seemed even impudent. Even then she had been too sure of herself.

"And when I come off ze manager kiss me on both cheeks. Et c'etait fait."

They applauded joyously. Her brutal egotism was a good joke. They expected nothing else from her. She was like an animal whose cruelty and cunning one could observe without moral qualms.

"It was a mean thing to have done," Stonehouse said loudly and truculently—"a treacherous thing."

A shadow was on Cosgrave's face. He leant towards her, almost pleading.

"And La—La—what did you call her? La Jolleta—what became of her?"

She made a graphic gesture.

"She went into the sack, little one—-into the sack. She was old. One should go gracefully."

"You too," Stonehouse said, in a savage undertone.

"I—— Oh, no, jamais, jamais." She lifted the monstrous crest of plumage from her head and set it in the midst of the flowers and rumpled up her hair till she was like the child riding the fat pony. "You see yourself—I never grow old, my friend."

"You are older already," he persisted.

But the man opposite broke in again. He leant towards Stonehouse, his inflamed eye through the staring monocle fixing him with an extraordinary tipsy earnestness.

"No, doctor, you are mis-mistaken. It would be intolerable—you understand—quite intolerable. There are things that—that must not be true—as there are other things that must be true. We've staked our last penny on it, sir, and we've got to win. Mademoiselle here knows all about it, and she'll play the game. A sport, doctor, a sport. Won't let old friends go bankrupt—no—certainly not."

They laughed at him. It seemed unlikely that he himself knew what he was talking about. But he shook his head and remained sunk in solemn meditation, twirling the stem of his glass between thick, unsteady fingers. The girl next him nudged him disgustedly.

"Oh, wake up! You'll be crying in a minute. Talk of something else."

"Tell us the story of the Duke and the Black Opal, Gyp."

She waved them off.

"No—no—that is not discreet. One must not tell tales. That might frighten someone 'ere who loves me."

And she looked at Stonehouse, a little malicious and insolently, childishly sure. He leant towards her, speaking in an undertone, trying to stare her down.

"Do you mean me, Mademoiselle?"

"And why not, Monsieur le docteur? Would it be so strange? You say you love nobody. But it seems you love ze poor fat Moretti—terribly, terribly, no doubt, so that you almost break your small 'eart for 'er. And per'aps someone else too. You say you don't drink—but you are just a leetle drunk already. You are not different from ze rest. I tell you that before—and I know. I am a connoisseur. It is written—'ere in the eyes and in the mouth. It is dangerous, the way you live. Quant a moi—I don't want you, my friend—we two—that would be an eruption—a disaster—I should be afraid."

She pretended to shudder, and a moment later seemed to forget him altogether. She pressed her cigarette out on her plate and went over to the piano, touching Cosgrave lightly on the shoulder as she passed him.

"Come, my latest best-beloved, we 'ave to amuse ze company. We sing our leetle song together."

But first she made a deep low bow to the shadowy theatre. She kissed her fingers to the empty boxes that stared down at her with hollow, mournful eyes. (Were there ghosts there too, Stonehouse wondered bitterly? The unlucky Frederick, perhaps, with the fatal hole gaping above the temple, applauding, leaning towards her!)

She sang worse than usual. She was hoarse, and what voice she had gave way altogether. It did not seem to matter either to her or to anyone else. What she could not sing she danced. There was a chorus and they joined in filling the gloom behind them with sullen, ironic echoes. She reduced them all, Stonehouse thought, to the cabaret from which she sprang.

And it was comic to see Cosgrave with his head thrown back, playing the common, noisy stuff as though inspired.

When it was over he swung round, gaping at them with drunken, confidential earnestness.

"You know, when I was a kid I used to see myself—on a stage like this—playing the Moonlight Sonata."

She rumpled up his thick hair so that it stood on end like Loga's names.

"You play my song ver' nice. And that is much better than playing ze Moonlight Sonata all wrong, my leetle friend."



3

It was a sort of invisible catastrophe.

No one else knew of it. In the day-time he himself did not believe in it—did not, at first, think of it at all. It had all the astonishing unreality of past pain. He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital work. For the hospital had become a fact. It stood equipped and occupied, an unrecognized but actual witness to his tenacity. Other men would get the credit. The Committee who had appointed him consulting surgeon, not without references to his unusual youth and their own daring break with tradition—had no suspicion that even the fund which, in a fit of inexplicable far-seeingness they had allotted to research, had been created under his ceaseless pressure. And not even in his thoughts was he satirical at their expense. They had provided the money and done what he wanted and so served their purpose. Among his old colleagues he bore himself confidently but unobtrusively. He could afford to pay them an apparent deference. He was going farther than they were. His eyes were fixed on a future far beyond the centres of their jealousies and ambitions when he would be freed from the wasteful struggle with petty ailments and petty people, and the last pretence of being concerned with individual life. It was a time of respite and revision. He was young—in his profession extraordinarily young—and he was able to look back, as a mountaineer looks back from his first peep over the weary foothills, knowing that the bitter drudgery is past and that before him lies the true and splendid adventure.

That was in the day-time. But with the dusk, the discreet shutting of doors and the retreating steps of the last patient, a change came. It was like the subtle resistless withdrawal of a tide—a draining away of power. He could do nothing against it. He could only sit motionless, bowed over his papers, striving to keep a hold over the personality that was slipping from him. And then into the emptiness there flowed back slowly, painfully, a strange life—a stream choked and muddied at its source—breaking through.

It was a physical thing. Some sort of nervous reaction. With the dread of that former break-down overshadowing him he yielded deliberately. He would leave the house and walk—anywhere—but always where there were people—down Regent Street, sweeping like a broad river into a fiery, restless lake. There he let go altogether, and the crowds carried him. He eddied with them in the glittering backwaters of the theatres, and studied the pallid, jaded faces that drifted in and out of the lamp-light with the exaggerated attention of a mind on guard against itself. He hated it all. It emphasized and justified his aloofness from the mass of men. These people were sick and ugly—sicklier and uglier in their pleasure-seeking than in their stubborn struggle for survival, which had at least some elemental dignity. It was from their poisoned lives that women like Gyp Labelle sucked their strength. It was their childish perverted instincts that made her possible. They made the very thought of immorality a grisly joke. And yet their nearness, the touch of their ill-grown, ill-cared-for, or grossly over-nurtured bodies against his, the sound of their nasal strident voices brought him relief. He could not shake off their fascination for him. He was like a man hanging round the scene of some conquered, unforgotten vice.

It was one dismal November evening that, turning aimlessly into a Soho side-street, he came upon an old man who stood on a soap-box under a lamp and preached. He held a Bible to the light and read from it, and at intervals leant forward and beat the tattered book with his open hand.

"You hear that, men and women. This is the liar, the tyrant, the self-confessed devil whom you have worshipped from the beginning of your creation. You see for yourselves the sort of beast he is. There isn't a brute amongst us who would do the things he's done. He's made you fight and kill and torture each other for his sake. And all down the ages he has laughed at you—he is laughing now because, after all—he knows the truth—he knows what I tell you here night after night"—and Mr. Ricardo leant forward and pointed a long, dirty finger at the darkness—"that he doesn't exist—that he is a dream—a myth—a hope——"

Someone cheered—perhaps because the last words had a sound of eloquent conclusion—and Mr. Ricardo nodded and took breath. He was like a scarecrow image that had been stuck up by a freakish joker in a London street. The respectability that still clung to him made him the more ludicrous. His clothes were the ruined cast-offs of a middle-class tradesman, and over them he wore his old masters gown. It did not flutter out behind now, but lay dank and heavy along his sides like the wings of a shot bird.

Robert Stonehouse stood back against the shuttered windows of a shop and stared at him. The sea, rushing out in some monstrous tidal wave had left its floor littered with old wreckage, with dead, forgotten people who stirred and lifted themselves. A grotesque, private resurrection. . . .

The crowd around Mr. Ricardo listened in silence, not mocking him. There were wide-eyed, haunted-looking children, and men and women not quite sober who drifted out from the public-houses to gape heavily at this cheaper form of entertainment. Possibly they thought he was some missionary trying to induce them to sign the pledge. Some of them must have known that he was mad. But even they did not laugh at him. Into their own dark and formless thoughts there may have come the dim realization that they, too, were misshapen and outcast. The rain falling in long, slanting lines through the dingy lamplight seemed to merge them into a mournful kinship.

He spoke rapidly, and for the most part the long, involved sentences rolled themselves without meaning. But now and then something struggled clear—a familiar phrase—an ironical echo. Then Robert Stonehouse saw through the disfigurement to the man that had been—the poor maimed and shackled fighter gibing and leering at his fellow-prisoners.

"And now, my delightful and learned young friends——"

And yet he had stood up for little Robert Stonehouse in those days—had armed him, and opened doors, and made himself into a stepping-stone to the freedom he had never known. And had gone under. . . .

"That is all for tonight, men and women. I thank you for your support. You may rest assured that the fight will go on. The end is in sight, and if need be I shall lead the last attack in person."

Then he stepped down from his soap-box and swung it on to his shoulders by means of a cord, and went limping off in a strange and anxious haste.

Stonehouse pushed roughly through the dispersing, purposeless crowd and caught up with him as he was about to lose himself in a dark network of little squalid streets. He felt oddly young and diffident, for the schoolmaster is always the schoolmaster though he be mad and broken.

"Mr. Ricardo—don't you remember me?"

The old man stopped and blinked up uncertainly from under the sodden brim of his hat. His dirty claw-like hands clutched his coat together in an instinctive gesture of concealment. He seemed disturbed and even rather offended at the interruption.

"I—ah—I beg your pardon. No, I'm afraid not. It is—ah—not unnatural. You understand—I have too many supporters."

"Yes—yes—of course. But you knew me years ago when I was a boy. Don't you remember Robert Stonehouse?"

It was evident that the name fanned some faint memory which flickered up for a moment and then went out.

"You will excuse me. It is possible. I have heard the name. But I have long since ceased to concern myself with persons. In a great struggle such as this individuals are submerged."

He walked on again, slip-slopping in his shapeless boots through the slush, his head down to the rain.

"Christine," Robert said, "don't you remember Christine?"

(He himself had not thought of her for years, and now deliberately he had conjured her up.)

Mr. Ricardo hunched his shoulders. He peered round at Stonehouse, frowning suspiciously.

"You are very persistent, sir. Are you God?"

"No."

"It is better to be quite frank with one another. Not an emissary of God?"

"No."

He seemed only half satisfied.

"You will excuse my asking. I have to be very careful. There have been certain signs of late that the enemy is anxious to negotiate—to—ah—reach some compromise. No direct offer, you understand, but various feelers—hints—suggestions—terms of a most unscrupulous and subtle nature—traps into which a man less—ah—wary than myself might well fall. This Christine—yes—yes—I have to be on my guard."

"I have nothing to do with God," Robert said gently. "I'm a friend—on your side. I'd like to help. If I knew where you lived so that I could learn more about your work——"

But Mr. Ricardo shrank away from him.

"I don't like the sound of that. I dare say I do you an injustice, young man, but I can't afford to take risks. My headquarters are my secret."

"Well"—he tried to speak in a matter-of-fact and reasonable way—"at any rate, a general must have munition. I'd like to help financially. You can't refuse me that."

They were almost through the labyrinth of Soho and on the brink of Oxford Street. Mr. Ricardo stopped again with his hand spread out flat upon his breast in a gesture not without power and dignity.

"You think I am a failure, sir, because I go poorly dressed. You are mistaken. In the struggle that I am carrying on, outward and material things are of no account. I might have all the wealth and all the armies of the world, sir, and be further from victory than I am now. The fight is here, sir, in the spirit of man, and the weaker and poorer I become the nearer I am to the final effort. I am a fighter, sir, stripping himself—presently I shall throw off the last hindrance, and if the enemy will not show himself I shall seek him out—I shall force him to stand answer——" He broke off. The chain of white-hot coherency had snapped and left him peering about him vaguely, and a little anxiously, as though he were afraid someone had overheard him.

"It has been very difficult—there were circumstances—so many circumstances——" He sighed and finished on the toneless parrot-note of the street orator: "My next meeting will be at Marble Arch, 3 p.m., on Tuesday. Thank you for your attention, and good-night."

He lifted his hat and bowed to left and right as though to an assembled multitude. The lamp-light threw his shadow on to the grey, wet pavements, and with the soap-box perched on his shoulders it was the shadow of a huge hunchback. Then he shuffled off, and Stonehouse lost sight of him almost at once in the dripping, uncertain darkness.

He walked on mechanically, aimlessly. He was tired out and dejected beyond measure by this tragic encounter. It was not any immediate affection for the old man, who had been no more to him than a strange force driving him on for its own purposes; it was the others he had evoked—and, above all, the sense of common misfortune which no man can avert for ever. For the moment he lost faith in his own power to maintain himself against a patient and faceless Nemesis.

It was morbid—the old terrifying signs of breakdown—the pointing finger.

"Thus far and no further with your brain, Robert Stonehouse."

And then, suddenly, he found that he was in a familiar street, and, stopping short, as though from old custom, to look up. There was the finest house in Harley Street which they were to have decorated with their brass plates. If it had risen straight out of the ground at the behest of his fancy he could not have been more painfully disconcerted. He had never known before that he had avoided it. He knew it now, and the realization was like the opening of a door into a dark and unexplored chamber of his mind. He stood there shivering with cold, and wet, and weariness. Who lived there now, he wondered? The old back-numbers whom they were to have ousted so ruthlessly? Well, he could find out. Someone lived there, at any rate. He could see a light in one of the upper rooms. He crossed over and went up the steps cautiously, like a thief. All the brass plates but one had gone. That one shone brightly in the lamp-light, giving the door a one-eyed, impish look. He could read the letters distinctly, and yet he had to spell them over twice. It was as though she herself had suddenly opened the door and spoken to him.

"Frances Wilmot, M.D."

Then he turned and walked away. But at the next corner he stopped and looked up again at the lighted window. What freakish fancy had possessed her——? Perhaps she was there now. He could see her in the room that had been his enemy. And he had brief vision of himself standing there in the empty street as he had done when he had loved her so desperately, gazing up at that signal of warmth and comfort out of the depths of his own desolateness.

He said "Francey!" under his breath, ironically, as though he had uttered a child's "open-sesame!" to prove that there had never been any magic in the word. But the sound hurt him.

This time he did not look back.

Nor was there any reassurance to be found that night in the concrete justification of his life. He set himself down to work in vain. One ghost called up another. The room with its solemn, bloodless impedimenta became—not a monument to his success, but a Moloch, to whom everything had been sacrificed—the joy of life, its laughter, its colour—and Christine. And not only Christine. He had been sacrificed too.

But he saw Christine most clearly. She sat in the big arm-chair where his patients waited for his verdict. She wore the big, floppy, black hat that she had liked best, and the grey hair hung in the old untidy wisps about her face. The chair was much too big for her. Her little feet hardly touched the ground. Her hands in the darned gloves were folded gravely over the shabby bag. He could see her looking about dimly and hear the clear, small voice.

"How wonderful of you, Robert! How proud your dear father would have been!"

He fidgeted with the papers on his table, rearranging, re-sorting, desperately trying not to suffer. But he would have torn the whole place down in ruins to have remembered that he had given her one day of happiness.

Well, there had been that one day on Francey's hill—the picnic. She had liked that. The wood at the bottom, like a silent, deep, green pool—and Francey's arms about his shoulders, Francey's mouth on his, giving him kiss for kiss.

Ghosts everywhere—and no living soul who cared now whether he failed or won through, whether he suffered or was satisfied. Only Cosgrave perhaps—poor, unlucky little Cosgrave—always hunting for happiness—breaking himself against life—going to the dogs for the sake of a rotten woman.

He fell forward with his face hidden in his arms and lay there shaken by gusts of fever. They weakened gradually, and he fell asleep. And in his sleep his father drew himself up suddenly, showing his terrible white face, and clutched at little Robert Stonehouse, who skirted him and ran screaming down the dark stairs.

"You can't—you can't—you're dead. I'm grown up—I'm free—I'm not like you—you can't—you can't——"

But the next morning he was himself again, sure and cool-headed and cool-hearted. He did not believe that he had suffered or in the recurrence of that terror.



III

1

Probably she had expected him. It must have seemed to her, so Stonehouse reflected as he followed the shrivelled old woman down a passage dim and gorgeous with an expensive and impossible Orientalism, a natural sequel to his enmity. Men did not hate her—or they did so at their peril. Then she would be most dangerous. The luckless Frederick, so the story ran, had snubbed her at a charity bazaar, and had made fun of her dancing. And he had stolen and finally shot himself for her sake. Perhaps she thought there was a sort of inevitability in this programme.

He had to wonder at and even admire the mad splendour of the place. Her taste was as crude and flamboyant as herself, but it too had escaped vulgarity which at its worst is imitative of the best, a stupid second-handness, an aggressive insolent self-distrust. She was not ashamed of what she was. She was herself all through, and she trusted herself absolutely. She wanted colour and there was colour. She wanted Greek columns in a Chinese pagoda and they were there. The house was like a temple built by a crazy architect to a crazy god, and every stick and stone in it was a fanatic's offering.

The old woman jerked her head and stood aside. Her toil-worn face with the melancholy monkey eyes was inscrutable, but Stonehouse guessed at the swift analysis he was undergoing. In his iron temper he could afford to be amused.

"Mademoiselle is within."

The room was a huge square. To make it, two floors at least of the respectable Kensington house must have been sacrificed. The walls were decorated with Egyptian frescoes and Chinese embroideries, and silk divans which might have figured in a cinema producer's idea of a Turkish harem were set haphazard on the mosaic floor. In the centre a stone fountain of the modern-primitive school and banked with flowers splashed noisily. Somehow it offered Kensington the final insult. But she had wanted it, just as she had wanted the Greek columns. There was even a certain magnificence about the room's absurdity. It was so hopelessly wrong that it attained a kind of perfection.

She herself sat on the edge of the fountain and fed a gorgeous macaw who, from his gilded perch, received her offerings with a lofty friendliness. But as Stonehouse entered she sprang up and ran to him, feeling through his pockets like an excited child.

"The poison—the poison!" she demanded.

He had to laugh.

"I forgot it," he said.

"C'est dommage. You 'ave not taken it yourself by any chance?"

"No—I wouldn't do that at any rate."

"C'est vrai. I ask—you 'ave an air un peu souffrant. Well, never mind. It's droll though—I think about you just when you ring up—I 'ave a damn pain—not ze tummy-ache this time—and I say: 'Le pauvre jeune homme, 'ere is a chance for 'im to pay me out for kissing 'im when 'e don't want to be kissed.' You remember—I say I send for you one day. But ze old pain—it 'as gone now. You—'ow do you say?—you conjure it away."

"Your pains don't interest me," he said. "For one thing I don't believe you ever had any. I suppose you think a pain is the best entertainment to offer a doctor. It's thoughtful of you, but I didn't come here to be amused."

"Then I wonder what you want of me," she remarked. She went back to her place on the fountain's edge, sitting amidst the flowers and crushing them under her hands. The pose appealed to him as expressively callous, and yet it was innocent too, the pose of a child or an animal who destroys without knowledge or ill-will.

"Do people usually want things from you?" he asked.

"Always—all ze time."

"And you give so much."

She eyed him seriously.

"I give what I 'ave to give."

"And take what you can get."

"Like you, Monsieur le docteur."

The absoluteness of his hatred made it possible for him to laugh with her.

"My fees are fairly reasonable at any rate. I've helped some people for nothing."

"Because you love them?"

"No."

"C'est dommage aussi. You should love someone. It is much 'ealthier. I love everyone. Per'aps I love too much. I make experiments. You make experiments—and sometimes leetle mistakes. Comme nous autres. 'Ze operation was a grand succes—but ze patient die.' I know. Some of mine die too."

"Prince Frederick, for instance?"

She lifted the long chain of pearls about her neck and considered them dispassionately.

"That canard! You think 'e give me these? Ce pauvre Fredi! 'E couldn't 'ave given me a chain of pink coral. I could 'ave bought 'im and 'is funny little kingdom with my dress-money. 'E shoot 'imself. Well, that was 'is affaire. 'E 'ave no doubt explain 'imself to ze bon Dieu, who is particulaire about that sort of thing. As to ze old pearls—my agent 'e set that story going—pour encourager les autres."

"Cosgrave among them?" he suggested.

"Monsieur Cosgrave? We won't talk about 'im just now, if you please. 'E make me ver' cross. I 'ate to be cross. It is ver' difficult to 'ave a good time with English people. They are so damn thorough. When they want to go to ze devil they want to go ze whole way."

"Perhaps that's why I'm here," he said ironically.

"Voyons—voyons, c'est ennuyeux——" She broke off and gave a little husky, good-natured laugh. "I remember. You think me a bad woman. But I am not a bad woman at all. Ze leetle girls in ze chorus—they are sometimes bad because they want things they 'ave no right to 'ave. They are just leetle girls with nothing to give, and they want to live ze big life and they tumble into ze gutter. They are ze ginger-beer who pretend to be ze champagne. Mais mot—I am ze real champagne. I make things seem jolly that are not jolly at all—ze woman who sit next you at dinner—ze food—ze bills who wait for you at 'ome—life. If you take too much of me you 'ave ze 'eadache. Enfin, ce n'est pas ma faute. I 'ave so much to give. I 'ave so much life. One life—one country—one 'usband is not enough. But I am not bad. If there was any sense in things they would give me an order and a nice long title—Grande Maitresse de la Vie—Princesse de Joie." She lifted her eyebrows at him to see whether he appreciated the joke. "Ah well—no. I talk too much about myself. Tell me instead what you think of my leetle 'ome. C'est joli, n'cest-ce-pas?" She waved towards the Chinese embroideries and added, with a child's absolute content: "I like it."

"I suppose you do," he retorted. "It reminds me of a quaint old custom I read about somewhere. When our early ancestors were building a particularly important house they buried a few of the less important citizens alive under the foundations. It seemed to have a beneficial influence on the building process."

She offered him her cigarette-case. She seemed to be considering his remark carefully. Suddenly she laughed out with an unfeigned enjoyment.

"I see. My victims, hein? You can make leetle jokes too. But why so ver' serious? I'm not burying you, am I?"

"No. You couldn't. And you're not going to bury Cosgrave. Oh—I don't want to waste my time and yours making accusations or appealing to what doesn't exist. I only want to point out to your—your business instinct that Cosgrave isn't worth burying. He's poor and he's unlucky. He won't bring you luck or anything else. Much better to let him go."

"Let 'im go? But I want 'im to go! Yesterday I would not see 'im. I didn't want to see 'im."

"That was a good reason. It's all rather late in the day, though. Two months ago Cosgrave came to England with about 3000 pounds. I know, because he told me. And now that's gone. You know where."

"I make a guess, my friend."

"He bought you presents—outrageous for a man in his position."

"Someone 'ave to buy them," she explained good-humouredly. "I don't ask about positions. It's not polite."

"Now he's at the end of his tether. He's got to go back to his job. Last night he came to my rooms for the first time for weeks. He was—was almost mad. When he first came to England he was very ill. That does not concern you. But what may concern you is that he has become dangerous. He threatened to shoot you."

"Well, before 'e know me 'e threaten to shoot 'imself. Decidedly, 'e is getting better, that young man."

Her shameless, infectious laughter caught him by the throat. He wanted to laugh too, and then thrust her empty, laughing face down into the water of her comic fountain till she died. There were people who were better dead. He had said so and it was true, in spite of Francey Wilmot and her childish sentimentality. Suddenly the woman in the hospital and this riotous houri were definitely merged into one composite figure of a mindless greed and viciousness. He clenched his hands behind his back, hiding them.

"If you would only sit down we should talk so much 'appier," she said regretfully. "You seem so far off—so 'igh up. Please sit down."

"I don't want to."

"Because you're afraid we might get jolly together, hein? Well, you stand up there then, and tell me something. Tell me. You don't love nobody. You are a very big, 'ard young man, who 'ave made 'is way in ze world and know 'ow rotten everybody else is. You 'ave 'ad 'ard times and 'ard times is ver' bad for everyone, except per'aps Jesus Christ, for either they go under and are broken, un'appy people, or they come out on top, and then zey are 'arder than anyone else. Well, you are ze big, 'ard young man. But you run after this leetle Monsieur Rufus as though 'e was your baby brother. Well—'e is a nice leetle fellow—but 'e is just a leetle fellow—with a soft 'eart and a soft 'ead. Not your sort. And, you're not 'is sort. 'E's frightened of you. 'E want someone who pat 'is 'ead and let 'im cry on 'is shoulder. You can't 'elp 'im—and you fuss over 'im—you come 'ere and try to put 'is 'eart affaires in order and it's no use at all. C'est ridicule, enfin."

He looked away from her, so that she should not see that this time she had struck home. She had knocked the weapon out of his hand, and for the moment, in his astonishment and pain, he could not even hate her. It was true. He couldn't help Cosgrave any more. His strength and ability were, as she said, of no use. That was what Cosgrave had meant when he had laughed about the adenoids. He had failed Cosgrave from the moment that Cosgrave had demanded love for himself and human tenderness. He had no tenderness to give. He was a hard young man. He said slowly, and with a curious humility:

"I used to back him up when he was a kid. He trusted me too—and it's got to be a sort of habit. I want him to be happy."

"Because you are so un'appy yourself?"

"I'm all right," he said stubbornly. And then he added, still not looking at her. "Please give him up—so—so that he won't break his heart over it. I'm not a rich man either, but I'll make it worth your while."

She sprang up with a gesture of amused exasperation.

"'Ow stupide you are, my clever friend. You are like ze old father in ze Dame aux Camellias. You make me quite cross. This Rufus—I can't give 'im up. 'E don't belong to me. I never ask for 'im. 'E come into my dressing-room and I like 'im for 'is cheek and I give 'im a good time. Now he is ennuyeux. 'E want to marry me and make an honest woman of me." She patted Stonehouse on the shoulder with so droll a grimace that he bit his lip to avoid a gust of ribald, incredible laughter. It was as though by some trick she changed the whole aspect of things so that they became simply comic—scenes in a jolly, improper French farce. "And now I 'ope you see 'ow funny that is. And please take Monsieur Cosgrave away and keep 'im away. I don't ask no better."

His anger revived against her. And it was a thing apart from Cosgrave altogether—a bitter personal anger.

"It can't be done like that. You can't take drugs away from a drug-fiend at one swoop. Let him down gently—treat him as a friend until he has to go—get him to see reason."

"No," she said. "You don't understand. You 'ave not 'ad my experience. If I let 'im 'ang on 'e get much worse. If I push 'im off—poof!—an explosion! Then 'e find a nice leetle girl who is not like me at all and marry—ver' respectable—and 'ave 'eaps of babies. That is what 'e want. But it is not my affaire—and I won't be bothered. I tell you 'e is too ennuyeux——"

He lashed out at her.

"—and too poor. My God, you're no better than a woman of the streets."

She assented with a certain gravity.

"C'est bien vrai, ca—bien vrai. I was born in ze gutter—I crawl out of ze gutter by myself. I keep out of ze gutter—always. And I don't cry and wring my 'ands when people try to kick me back again. I kick them. I look after myself. Monsieur Cosgrave—and all those others—they must look after themselves too. Do you think they bother about me if I become ennuyeuse—like them—and cry because they don't love me and like some leetle girl in ze chorus better? Not they. They want fun and life from me—and I give them that. When they want more they can—'ow you say?—get out?"

He stared at her in white-hot detestation.

"I see. I've just wasted my time. You're—you're as infamous as they say. You're taking everything he has, and now he can go and hang himself. You're worse than a woman of the streets because you're more clever."

She kissed her fingers at him in good-humoured farewell. "I like you ver' much—quand meme," she said. "Next time I come and call on you, per'aps!"



2

That same night Cosgrave, frustrated at the theatre, tried to force an entrance to the Kensington house, and the old woman, seconded by a Japanese man-servant, flung him out again and into the arms of a policeman who promptly arrested him. Stonehouse went bail for him, and there was a strange, frantic scene in his own rooms.

For this was not the gentle young man who had met Connie Edwards' infidelity with an apathetic resignation. He was violent and indignant. His sense of outrage was a sort of intoxication which gave an extraordinary forcefulness to his whole bearing. He stormed and threatened—the misery that stared out of his haggard blue eyes shrivelling in the heat of an almost animal fury. (And yet he stammered too—which was comically what the other Rufus Cosgrave would have done.)

"I—I love her. I've never loved anyone else. That Connie business—a b-boy and girl affair—a silly flirtation—this—the real thing. I—I'm a m-man now. N-no one's going to play fast and loose with me. No, by God! I'll see her—she's got to have it out with me. I've a right to an explanation at least—and by God I'll have one!"

"For what?" Stonehouse asked.

"She loved me," Cosgrave retorted.

"I don't believe it."

"You d-don't believe it? W-what do you know about it? Didn't she behave as though she did? Didn't she go about with me? Didn't she take things from me—no decent woman would have taken unless she loved me?"

"She doesn't happen to be a decent woman," Stonehouse observed. "To do her justice she doesn't pretend to be one."

Cosgrave advanced upon him as though he would have struck him across the face. But he stopped in time, not from remorse, but as though pulled up by a revelation of maddening absurdity.

"Oh, you—you! You don't understand. You aren't capable of understanding. You're a block—a machine—you don't feel—you g-go about—rolling over p-people and things like—like a damned steam-roller. You're not a man at all. You don't love anyone—not even yourself. What do you know about anything?"

He was grotesque in his scorn, and yet Stonehouse, leaning with an apparent negligence against the mantel-shelf, felt himself go dead white under the attack. He had lost Cosgrave. And he knew now that he needed him desperately—more now than even in his desolate childhood—that unconsciously he had hugged the knowledge of that boyish affection and dependence to him with a secret pride as a talisman against he hardly knew what—utter isolation, a terrifying hardness. He made up his mind to have done now with reserve, to show before it was too late at least some of that dwarfed and suffocated feeling. But he faltered over his first sentence. He had trained himself too long and too carefully to speak with that cold, ironic inflexion. He sounded in his own ears formal—unconvincing.

"You're wrong. I do care. I care for you. You're my friend. I do understand, in part, at any rate. I can prove it. When I saw how unhappy you were I went to her—I tried to reason with her."

He broke off altogether under the amazed stare that greeted this statement. The next instant Cosgrave had tossed his hands to heaven, shouting with a ribald laughter:

"Oh, my Heaven—you poor fish! You think you can cure everything. I can imagine what you said: 'I suggest, Mademoiselle, that you reduce the doses gradually.'"

It was so nearly what he had said that Stonehouse flinched, and suddenly Cosgrave seemed to feel an impatient compassion for him. "Oh, I'm a beast. It was jolly decent of you. You meant well. But you can't help."

And that was what she had said. Stonehouse made no answer. He saw himself as ridiculous and futile. He was sick with disgust at his own pain. If he had lost Cosgrave he wanted to have done with the whole business now—quickly and once and for all.

There was a sense of finality in the shabby room. The invisible bond that had held them through eight years of separation and silence had given way. It was almost a physical thing. It checked and damped down Cosgrave's excitement so that he said almost calmly:

"Well, I shan't attempt to see her again. You'll have that satisfaction. I'll get out of here—back to my jolly old swamp, where there aren't any beastly women—decent or indecent—only mosquitoes."

He waited a moment, as though trying hard to finish on a warmer, more generous note. Perhaps some faint flicker of recollection revived in him. But it could only illuminate a horrifying indifference. He went out without so much as a "good-night."

The morning papers gave the Kensington House incident due prominence. It was one more feather in Mademoiselle Labelle's outrageous head-gear. The Olympic had not so much as standing room for weeks after.

Cosgrave kept his word. He did not see her again, and within a week he had sailed for West Africa—to die. But ten days later Stonehouse received a wireless, and a month later a letter and a photograph of a fair-haired, tender-eyed, slightly bovine-looking girl in evening dress. It appeared that she was a Good Woman and the daughter of wealthy and doting parents, and that in all probability West Africa would see Rufus Cosgrave no more.

So that was the end of their boyhood. Cosgrave had saved himself—or something outside Stonehouse's strength and wisdom had saved him. They would meet again and appear to be old friends. But the chapter of their real friendship, with all its inarticulate romance and tenderness, was closed finally.

Stonehouse kept the photograph on the table of his consulting-room. He believed that it amused him.



3

Still he could not work at night. He resumed his haunted prowlings through the streets. But he took care that he did not pass Francey Wilmot's house again. He knew now that he was afraid. He was ill, too, with a secret, causeless malady that baffled him. There were nights when he suffered the unspeakable torture of a man who feels that the absolute control over all his faculties, which he has taken for granted, is slipping from him, and that his whole personality stands on the verge of disintegration as on the edge of a bottomless pit.

For some weeks he hunted for Mr. Ricardo in vain. He tried all the favoured spots which a considerate country sets aside for its detractors and its lunatics so that they may express themselves freely, without success. Mr. Ricardo seemed to have taken fright and vanished. But one afternoon, returning from the hospital, Stonehouse met him by accident, and followed him. He made no attempt to speak. He meant, this time, to find out where the old man lived, and, if possible, to come to his assistance, and his experience taught him the danger and futility of a direct approach. He followed therefore at a cautious distance that it was not always possible to maintain. Although it was early in the afternoon a dense but drifting fog wrapped the city in its dank folds, and the figure in front of him sometimes loomed up like a distorted shadow and then in a moment plunged into a yellow pocket of obscurity, and was lost. Then Stonehouse could only listen for his footfalls, quick and irregular, echoing with an uncanny loudness in the low vault of the fog.

Mr. Ricardo had evidently been speaking, for he carried the soap-box slung over his shoulder, and he was in a great hurry. It was extraordinary how fast the lame, half-starved old man could walk.

They crossed the park and over to Grosvenor Place. There was no doubt that Mr. Ricardo knew where he was going, but it flashed upon Stonehouse that he was not going home. There was something pressed and sternly in earnest about the way he hurried, as though he had some important appointment to keep and knew that he was already late. Once Stonehouse had to run to keep him within hearing.

They went the whole length of Victoria Street. Stonehouse had been physically tired out when he had started. Now he was not aware of being tired at all. A gradually rising excitement carried him on, unconscious of himself. He had no idea what he expected, but he knew definitely that something deeply significant was about to happen to them both, that they were running into some crisis.

Outside the Abbey the fog became impenetrable. The traffic had stopped, and the lights, patches of opaque rayless crimson, added to the confusion. There were people moving, however, faceless ghosts with loud footfalls, feeling their way hesitatingly, and among them Mr. Ricardo vanished. Almost at once Stonehouse lost his own bearings. In the complete paralysis of all sense of direction which only fog can produce, he crossed the wide street twice without knowing it. Then he came up suddenly under the spread statue of Boadicea and into little knots of people. A policeman was trying to move them on without success. They hung about hopefully like children who cannot be convinced that a show is really over.

"It's no good messing round here. You aren't helping anyone. Better be getting home."

Stonehouse knew what had happened. It was extraordinary how sure he was. It was almost as though he had known all along. But he said mechanically to one slouching shadow:

"What is it?"

A face, dripping and livid in the fog, like the face of a dead man, gaped at him.

"Some old fellow gone over—no, he didn't tumble, I tell yer. You cawn't tumble over a four-foot parapet. Chucked 'isself, and I don't blame 'im. One of them police-launches 'as gone out to fish 'im out. But they won't get 'im. Not now, anyway. Can't see two feet in front of yer, and the tide running out fast."

Stonehouse felt his way to the parapet and peered over. Above the water the fog was pitch-black and moving. It looked a solid mass. He could almost hear it slapping softly against the pillars of the bridge as it flowed seawards. By now Mr. Ricardo had travelled with it a long way. His death did not seem to Stonehouse tragic, but only inevitable and ironical. It was as though someone had played a grave and significant, not unkindly, joke at Mr. Ricardo's expense. Nor did Stonehouse feel remorse, for he knew that he could have done nothing. As Mr. Ricardo had said, it was not material things that had mattered. He had not killed himself because he was starving, but because the long struggle of his spirit with the enigma of life had reached its crisis. He had gone out to meet it with a superb gesture of defiance, which had also been the signal of surrender and acknowledgment.

The crowd had moved on at last. In the muffled silence and darkness Stonehouse's thoughts became shadowy and fantastic. Though he did not grieve he knew that a stone had shifted under the foundations of his mental security. Death took on a new aspect. It seemed unlikely that it was so simply the end.

He found himself wondering how far Mr. Ricardo had travelled on his journey, and whether he had met his enemy, and, face to face with him, had become reconciled.



IV

1

He did not know why he had consented to receive her, unless it was because he knew that they would meet inevitably sooner or later. He felt very able to meet her—cool, and hard and clear-thinking. It was early yet. A wintry sunlight rested on his neatly ordered table, and he could smile at the idea that in a few hours he would begin to be afraid again.

She had made no appointment. Urged by some caprice or other she had driven up to his door and sent up her card with the pencilled inscription "Me voici!" Standing at his window he could just see the long graceful lines of her Rolls-Royce, painted an amazing blue—pale blue was notoriously her colour—and the pale-blue clad figure of her chauffeur. It occurred to him that she had chosen the uniform simply to make the man ridiculous—to show that there were no limits to her audacity and power. She was, he thought, stronger than the men who thought they were ruling the destinies of nations. For she could ride rough-shod over convention and prejudice and human dignity. She was perhaps the last representative of an autocratic egotism in a world in which the individual will had almost ceased to exist. She seemed to him the survival of an eternal evil.

And yet when he saw her he laughed. She was so magnificently impossible. It seemed that she had put on every jewel that she could carry. She was painted more profusely than usual, and her dress was one of those fantastic creations with which producers endeavour to bluff through a peculiarly idiotic revue. But she carried it all without self-consciousness. It was as natural to her as gay plumage to a bird-of-paradise.

She gave him her hand to kiss, and then laughed and shook hands instead with an exaggerated manliness.

"I forget," she said. "It is a bad 'abit. You see. I keep my promise. I make ze return call. And 'ow kind of you to see me."

"It didn't occur to you that I might refuse," he told her.

"No, that's true. I never thought about it. You 'ave a leetle time for me, hein?"

"About ten minutes," he said.

He assumed a very professional attitude on the other side of his table. He wanted to nonplus and disconcert her, if such a thing were possible. Now that his first involuntary amusement was over he felt a return of the old malignant dislike. She had cost him Cosgrave's friendship, and he wanted to hurt her—to get underneath that armour of soulless good-humour. "I knew that you'd turn up one day or other," he said.

She looked at him with a rather wistful surprise.

"'Ow clever of you! You knew? Don't I look well, hein? I feel well—quite all right. But I say to myself: 'Voyons—'alf an hour with nothing to do. I pay that cross doctor a visit.' I would 'ave come before, but I 'ave been so busy. We re'earse 'Mademoiselle Pantalonne,' ze first night to-morrow. You come? I send you a ticket."

"Thanks. That form of entertainment wouldn't entertain me—except pathologically. And if I went to the theatre I'd rather leave my profession outside."

"Path—pathologically," she echoed. "That sounds 'orrid—rather rude. You don't like me still, hein, doctor?"

"Does that surprise you?"

"It surprise me ver' much," she admitted frankly. She picked up the photograph on the table and examined it with an unconscious impertinence. "You like 'er?" she asked. "That sort of woman?"

"I don't know," he said. "I've never met her."

"She is not your wife?"

"She is Cosgrave's wife."

It was evident that although the episode had been concluded less than three months before she had already almost forgotten it.

"Cosgrave? Ah oui, le cher petit Rufus? There now—did I not tell you? Didn't I 'ave reason? Tell me—'ow many babies 'ave 'e got?"

"They were married last month," Stonehouse observed.

"Ah—la la! But 'ow glad I am! I can see she is the right sort for 'im. A nice leetle girl. But first 'e 'ave to 'ave a good time—just to give 'im confidence. Now 'e be a ver' good boy—a leetle dull per'aps, but ver' good and 'appy. I would write and tell 'im 'ow glad I am—but per'aps better not, hein?"

She winked, and there was an irresistible drollery in the grimace that made his lips twitch. And yet she was shameless—abominable.

"The ten minutes are almost up," he said, "and I suppose you came here to consult me."

He knew that she had not. She had come because he was a tantalizing object, because she could not credit his invincibility, which was a challenge to her. She laughed, shrugging her shoulders.

"You are an 'orrible fellow! You think of nothing but diseases and wickedness. I wonder if you 'ave ever 'ad a good time yourself—ever laughed, like I do, from ze 'eart?"

He looked away from her. He felt for a moment oddly uneasy and distressed.

"No, I don't suppose I have."

"Ah, c'est dommage, mon pauvre jeune homme. But you don't like me. What can I do?"

"I don't expect you to do anything."

"Not my business, hein? No one 'ave any business 'ere who 'ave not got an illness. Ver' well. I will 'ave an illness—a ver' leetle one. No, not ze tummy-ache. C'est vieux jeu ca. But a leetle sore throat. You know about throats, hein?"

"My specialty," he said smiling back at her with hard eyes.

"Bien, I 'ave a leetle sore throat—fatigue plutot—'e come and 'e go. I smoke too much. But I 'ave to smoke. It's no good what you say."

"I'm sure of that," he said.

He made her sit down in the white iron chair behind the screen and, adjusting his speculum, switched on the light. He was bitterly angry because she had forced this farce upon him. He felt that she was laughing all over. The pretty pinkness of her open mouth nauseated him. He thought of all the men who had kissed her, and had been ruined by her as though by the touch of a deadly plague. He pressed her tongue down with a deliberate roughness.

"You 'urt," she muttered. But her eyes were still amused.

"A great many people get hurt here," he said contemptuously, "and don't whine about it."



2

Ten minutes later they sat opposite each other by his table. She was coughing and laughing and wiping her eyes.

"C'est abominable," she gasped, "abominable!"

He waited. He could afford to wait. He had the feeling of being carried on the breast of a deep, quiet sea. He could take his time. Her laughter and damnable light-heartedness no longer fretted and exasperated him. Rather it was a kind of bitter spice—a tense screwing up of his exquisite sense of calm power. She was like a tigress sprawling in the sunshine, not knowing that its heart is already covered by a rifle. He prolonged the moment deliberately, savouring it. In that deliberation the woman in the hospital, Francey Wilmot, Cosgrave, and a host of faceless men who had gone under this woman's chariot wheels played their devious, sinister parts. They goaded him on and justified him. He became in his own eyes the figure of the Law, pronouncing sentence, weightily, without heat or passion or pity.

"You do it on purpose," she said, "you make me cough."

He arranged his papers with precise hands.

"I'm sorry—I know you came here as a joke. It isn't—not for you. It's serious." He saw her smile, and though he went on speaking in the same quiet, methodical tone, he felt that he had suddenly lost control of himself. "Medical science isn't an exact science. Doctors are never sure of anything until it has happened. But speaking with that reservation I have to tell you that your case is hopeless—that you have three—at the most four months——"

She had interrupted with a laugh, but the laugh itself had broken in half. She had read his face. After a long interval she asked a question—one word—almost inaudibly—and he nodded.

"If you had come earlier one might have operated," he said. "But even so, it would have been doubtful."

Already many men and women had received their final sentence here in this room, and each had met it in his own way. The women were the quietest. Perhaps their lives had taught them to endure the hideous indignity of a well-ordered death-bed without that galling sense of physical humiliation which tormented men. For the most part they became immersed in practical issues—how the news was to be broken to others, who would look after the house and the children, and how the last scene might be acted with the least possible inconvenience and distress for those who would have to witness it. Some men had raved and stormed and pleaded, as though he had been a judge whose judgment might be revoked: "Not me—others—not me—not to-day—years hence." They had paced his private room for hours, trying to get a hold over themselves, devastated with shame and horror at the breakdown of their confident personalities. Some had risen to an impregnable dignity, finer than their lives. One or two had laughed.

And this woman?

He looked up at last. He thought with a thrill that was not of pity, of a bird hit in full flight and mortally hurt, panting out its life in the heather, its gay plumage limp and dishevelled. The jewels and outrageous dress had become a jest that had turned against her. A shadow of the empty, good-humoured smile still lingered on a painted mouth palsied with fear. She was swaying slightly, rhythmically, backwards and forwards, and rubbing the palms of her hands on the carved arms of her chair, and he could hear her breath, short and broken like the shallow breathing of a sick animal. And yet he became aware that she was thinking—thinking very rapidly—calling up unexpected reserves.

"Trois—mois—trois mois. Well, but I don't feel so ill—I don't feel ill at all—per'aps for a leetle month—just a leetle month."

He had no clue to her thought. She looked about her rather vaguely as though everything had suddenly become unreal. There were tears on her cheeks, but they were the tears of her recent laughter. She rubbed them off on the back of her hand with the unconscious gesture of a street child.

"I suffer much?"

"I'm afraid so. Though, of course, anyone who attends on you will do his best."

"Death so ugly—so sad."

"Not always," he said.

It was true. She had been a beast of prey all her life. Now it was her turn to be overtaken and torn down. Only sentimentalists like Francey Wilmot could see in her a cause for pity or regret.

They sat opposite each other through a long silence. He gave her time. He showed her consideration. He thought of the pale-blue chauffeur waiting in the biting cold of a winter's afternoon. Well, he would be alive after she had become a loathsome fragment of corruption. He was revenged—they were all revenged on her now.

She fumbled with her gold and jewelled bag.

"What do I owe, Monsieur le docteur?"

"Three guineas."

She put the money on the table.

"That is ver' little for so much. I think—when I can't go on any more—I come to your 'ospital. You take me in, hein? I 'ave a fancy."

He made an unwilling movement. It revolted him—this obtuseness that would not see that he hated her.

"I can't prevent your coming if you want to. You would be more in your element in your own home. Even in their private rooms they don't allow the kind of things you're accustomed to. There are regulations. Your friends won't like them."

She looked up at him with a startled intentness.

"Mes pauvres amis—I 'ave so many. They won't understand. They say: 'That's one of Gyp's leetle jokes.' They won't believe it—they won't dare."

She gave him her hand, and he touched it perfunctorily.

"It's as you like, of course. You have only to let me know."

"You are ver' kind."

He showed her to the door, and rang the bell for the servant. From his vantage point he saw the pale-blue chauffeur hold open the door of the pale-blue limousine. A few loiterers gaped. By an ironical chance a barrel-organ in the next street began to grind out the riotous, familiar gallop. It sounded far-off like a jeering echo:

"I'm Gyp Labelle; If you dance with me You dance to my tune. . ."

A danse macabre. He wondered if she had brains or heart enough to appreciate the full bitterness of that chance. He could see her, in his mind's eye, cowering back among the pale-blue cushions.

The next morning he received a note from her and a ticket for the first night of "Mademoiselle Pantalonne"—"with her regards and thanks."



3

He went. In the morning he had tossed the ticket aside, scornful and outraged by such a poor gesture of bravado. But the night brought the old restlessness. He was driven by curiosity that he believed was professional and impersonal. It was natural enough that he should want to see how a woman of her stuff acted under sentence of death. But once in the theatre h e became aware of a black and solitary pride because he alone of all these people could taste the full flavour of her performance. He had become omniscient. He saw behind the scenes. Whilst the orchestra played its jaunty overture he watched her. He saw her stare into her glass and dab on the paint, thicker and thicker, knowing now why she needed so much more, shrinking from the skull that was beginning to peer through the thin mask of flesh and blood. He foresaw the moment, probably before the footlights, when the naked horror of it all would leap out on her and tear her down. Even in that she would no doubt seek the consolation of notoriety. It would be in all the papers. If she had the nerve to carry on people would crowd to see her, as in the Roman days they had crowded to the circus (gloating and stroking themselves secretly, thinking: "It is not I who am dying"). Or she would seek dramatic refuge in her absurd palace and surround herself with tragic glamour, making use of her own death as she had used the death of that infatuated and unhappy prince.

And yet he was sick at heart. In flashes he saw his own attitude as something hideous and abnormal. Then again he justified it, as he had always justified it. He found himself arguing the whole matter out with Francey Wilmot—a cool and reasoned exposition such as he had been incapable of at the crisis of their relationship. ("This woman is a malignant growth. Nature destroys her. Do you pretend to feel regret or pity?") But though he imagined the whole scene—saw himself as authoritative and convincing—he could not re-create Francey Wilmot. She remained herself. Her eyes, fixed on him with that remembered look of candid and questioning tenderness, blazed up into an anger as unexpectedly fierce and uncompromising. And he was not so strong. He had overworked all his life. Starved too often. The ground slipped from under his feet.

It was a poor, vulgar show—a pantomime jerry-built to accommodate her particular talent. She walked through it—the dumb but irresistible model of a French atelier, who made fools of all her lovers, cheated them, sucked them dry and tossed them off with a merry cynicism. When the mood took her she danced and her victims danced behind her, a grotesque ballet, laughing and clapping their hands, as though their cruel sufferings were, after all, a good joke. Neither they nor the audience seemed to be aware that she could not dance at all, and that she was not even beautiful.

It was an old stunt, disguised with an insolent carelessness. The producers had surely grinned to themselves over it. "We know what the public likes. Rubbish, and the older the better. Give it 'em." She even made her familiar entry between the curtains at the back of the stage, standing in the favourite attitude of simple, triumphant expectation, and smiling with that rather foolish friendliness that until now had never shaken her audiences from their frigidity. To them she had always been a spectacle, a strange vital thing with a lurid past and a dubious future, shocking and stimulating. They would never have admitted that they liked her. But tonight they gave her a sort of ashamed welcome. Perhaps it was the dress she wore—the exaggerated peg-top trousers and bonnet of a conventional Quartier Latin which made her look frank and boyish. Perhaps it was something more subtle. Stonehouse himself felt it. But then, he knew. He saw her as God saw her. If there was a God He certainly had His amusing moments.

But he found himself clapping her with the rest, and that made him angry and afraid. It seemed that he could not control his actions any more than his thoughts. The whole business had got an unnatural hold over him. He half got up to go, and then realized that he was trying to escape.

It was jolly music too. That at any rate her producers had toiled at with some zeal. Incredibly stupid and artless and jolly. Anyone could have danced to it. And she was a gutter-urchin, flinging herself about in the sheer joy of life (with death capering at her heels). He watched her, leaning forward, waiting for some sign, the faltering gesture, a twitching grimace of realization. Or was it possible that she was too empty-hearted to feel even her own tragedy, too shallow to suffer, too stupid to foresee? At least he knew with certainty that in that heated, exhausted atmosphere pain had set in.

He became aware that the sweat of it was on his own face—that he himself was labouring under an intolerable physical burden. He knew too much. (If God had His amusing moments he had also to suffer, unless, as Mr. Ricardo had judged, he was a devil.) She was facing what every man and woman in that theatre would have to face sooner or later. How? She at any rate danced as though there were nothing in the world but life. With each act her gestures, her very dress became the clearer expression of an insatiable, uncurbed lust of living. At the end, the orchestra, as though it could not help itself, broke into the old doggerel tune that had helped to make her famous:

"I'm Gyp Labelle."

She waltzed and somersaulted round the stage, and as the curtain fell she stood before the footlights, panting, her thin arms raised triumphantly. He could see the tortured pulse leaping in her throat. He thought he read her lips as they moved in a voiceless exclamation:

"Quand meme—quand meme."

The audience melted away indifferently. They, at any rate, did not know what they had seen.

And the next day he had another little note from her, written in a great sprawling hand. She had made all her arrangements, and she thought she had better reserve rooms in his hospital in about six weeks' time for about a month. After that, no doubt, she would require less accommodation.

A silly, fatuous effort, in execrable taste.



V

1

Robert Stonehouse took a second leave that he could not afford and went back to the grey cottage on the moors, and tramped the hills in haunted solitude. The spring ran beside him, a crude, bitter, young spring, gazing into the future with an earnest, passionate face, full of arrogance and hope, and self-distrust. His own frustrated youth rose in him like a painful sap. He was much younger than the Robert Stonehouse who, proud in his mature strength, had dragged an exhausted, secretively smiling Cosgrave on his relentless pursuit—young and insecure, with odd nameless rushes of emotion and desire and grief that had had no part in his ordered life.

The hills had changed too. They had been the background to his exploits. They had become brooding, mysterious partners whose purpose with him he had not fathomed. The things that ran across his path, the quaint furry hares and scurrying pheasants had ceased to be objects on which he could vent his strength and cunning. They were live things, deeply, secretly related to him and to a dying, very infamous woman, and his levelled gun sank time after time under the pressure of an inexplicable pity. He had stood resolutely aloof from life, and now it was dragging him down into its warmth with invisible, resistless hands. Its values, which he had learnt to judge coldly and dispassionately, weighing one against another, were shifting like sand. He seemed to stand, naked and alone, in a changing, terrifying world.

In those days the papers in their frivolous columns, were full of Gyp Labelle. Her press-agent was working frenziedly. It seemed that she had quarrelled with her manager, torn her contract into shreds, and slapped his face. There were gay doings nightly at the Kensington house—orgies. One paper hinted at a certain South African millionaire.

A last fling—the reckless gesture of a worthless panic-stricken soul, without dignity.

Or perhaps she had found that his diagnosis had been a mistake. Or she would not believe the truth. Or she was drugging herself into forgetfulness. Perhaps she might even have the courage to make an end before the time came when forgetfulness would be impossible.

He returned to town, drawn by an obsession of uncertainty. He found that she had arrived at her rooms in the hospital with the shrivelled old woman and the macaw and a gramophone.

She had signed the register as Marie Dubois.

"It is my real name," she explained, "but you couldn't have a good time with a name like that—voyons! Only one 'usband and 'eaps of babies."

She was much nearer the end than he had supposed possible. The last month had to be paid for. She lay very still under the gorgeous quilt which she had brought with her, and her hand, which she had stretched out to him in friendly welcome, was like the claw of a bird. "Everyone 'ere promise not to tell," she said. "I'm just Marie Dubois. Even ze undertaker—'e must not know. You put on ze stone: 'Marie Dubois, ze beloved daughter of Georges and Marianne Dubois, rag-pickers of Paris.' That will be a last leetle joke, hein?"

"It's as you wish," he said coldly.

He forced back the natural questions that came to him. He had a disordered conviction that he was fighting her for his sanity, for the very ground on which he had built his life, and that he dared not yield by so much as a kindly word. He did what lay in his power for her with a heart shut and barred.

She brought a little of her world and her whole outlook with her. On the last day that she was able to be up she dressed herself in a gay mandarin's coat with a Chinese woman's trousers, and tried to do her dance for the benefit of a shocked and fascinated matron. Every morning she wore a new cap to set off the deepening shadow of dissolution.

By the open fire the old woman embroidered ceaselessly.

"She is making—'ow you call it?—my shroud. You see—with ze blue ribbons. Blue—that's my colour—my lucky colour. As soon as I could speak I ask for blue ribbons in my pinafore."

"I should have thought your mind might be better occupied now," he retorted with brutal commonplaceness.

She winked at him.

"Oh, but I 'ave 'ad my leetle talk with Monsieur le Cure. 'E and I are ze best of friends, though I never met 'im before. 'E understand about ze blue ribbons. But Monsieur Robert is too clever."

"It seems so," he said scornfully.

She questioned him from out of the thickening cloud of morphia. "You don't believe in God?" And then as he shook his head she smiled sleepily. "Well, it is still possible 'e exist, Monsieur—Monsieur le docteur."

She lay quiet so that he thought she had fallen asleep, but the next moment her eyes had opened, widening on him with a startling wakefulness. It was as though her whole personality had leapt to arms, and bursting through the narcotic, stood free with a gay and laughing gesture. "As to God—I don't know about 'im, but I exist—I go on. You bet your 'at on that, my friend. I don't know where I go—but I go somewhere. And I dance. And if St. Peter sit at ze golden gates, like they say in ze fairybook, I say to 'im: ''Ave you ever seen ze Gyp Galop?' And then I dance for 'im and ze angels play for me"—she nodded wickedly—"not 'ymn tunes."

She was serious. She meant it. If she survived she survived as what she was or not at all. And looking down on her wasted, tortured body, Stonehouse had a momentary but extraordinarily vivid conviction that what she had said was true. She would persist. Whatever else happened, Gyp Labelle would go on having a good time. She could not be extinguished. There was in her some virtue altogether apart from the body—a blazing vitality, an unquenchable, burning spirit.