If it were necessary to epitomize our attitude towards Mr. Carville during that lunch, it might perhaps be discovered in the word "doubt." Without accusing him of intentional deception, he had certainly led us to believe that he would explain to us the many points of interest which his previous history had raised. We had felt quite sure that in the course of the morning we should learn of his meeting with his wife and the reasons which led them to make their home in the United States. We expected to have the mystery of the prodigal brother co-ordinated with the painter-cousin's story. We—but of what avail was it to grumble? He had set out to tell his tale in his own way and it was only right that we should permit him to do so.

In one thing I agreed with Bill and differed from Mac—the question of "Gladys."

"So her name's 'Gladys'?" said he, when he had brought Miss Fraenkel's knowledge up to date.

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Bill. "Oh, no!"

"He said so," persisted her husband.

"No," I said, "so far he has not mentioned Mrs. Carville."

He came round to our view in the end, when I reminded him of the scaldino. Personally, the idea was incredible. When I thought of Mrs. Carville bending over the brazier, of her dark, noble face with its large tragic eyes, and then of the smart convent-bred miss who was called Gladys—absurd!

Miss Fraenkel remained faithful to her mission throughout the meal, and enlisted our sympathy by recounting the struggles of Mrs. Wederslen to capture the league for her own social purposes. It was an old story, this of the ambition of Mrs. Wederslen. Mrs. Wederslen seemed to think that in a community of artists the art-critic's wife is queen. Mrs. Williams had rebelled against this, and there was tension between them. Mrs. Wederslen had even made the insane experiment of trying to patronize Bill. There had been a meeting, a few words on each side, and the rest was silence. Without any definite verbal information on the point, Mac and I knew that Bill's tongue would be stilled in death ere she would speak charitably of Mrs. Wederslen. And here were Miss Fraenkel's piquant features aglow with a flush of indignation and her hazel eyes aflame with ladylike resentment, because that imperious woman was endeavouring to assert her sovereignty over the league. In the great problems thus raised it seemed likely that the smaller matter of Mrs. Carville's allegiance might be swamped. I endeavoured to bring this discussion into alignment with my own imaginings, a common human weakness.

"But perhaps she's like me, hasn't got a vote," said Bill.

"Well," said Miss Fraenkel, "she may have some day. And anyhow, the great thing is to spread the light in dark places. We want every woman to know her power. Mrs. Wederslen——"

She began again. Mrs. Wederslen had done the one thing needful to rouse Miss Fraenkel's feelings towards her to the temperature of Bill's: she had expressed her opinion that civil servants should be debarred from political activity. In spite of my efforts, the conversation became sectional. Mac motioned me to join him on the porch for a smoke.

"What do you think?" he said, when he had lighted up.

"The time is past for imaginative forecast," I replied. "It is obvious that Mr. Carville, having been tremendously interested in his own life, is determined to tell us all about it. Before lunch I hardly knew what to think, but now I feel fairly certain that he will bring us safely to the conclusion."

"There never is a conclusion to stories in real life," said he.

"Well, you know what I mean. He'll account for the facts as we see them, anyhow. His wife, his brother, his living here, and so on."

"And Gladys," added Mac.

"Ah! I expect we've heard the last of Gladys. She was evidently an early flame, since gone out." I struck a match.

"I say, old man."

"What?"

"What a tale his brother could tell, eh?"

"Possibly; but perhaps his brother has not the faculty," I said.

"No. Here he comes!"

Mr. Carville appeared on the sidewalk, his Derby hat on his head, his corn-cob in his mouth. For a moment he turned, and, looking back, flung out his hand with a gesture expressive of petulance and dismissal towards an invisible person at his door. And then he came towards us sedately, caressing his pipe, eyes on the ground, and seated himself in the Fourth Chair in silence.

"I was wondering," he said at last, "if after all you'd just as soon I didn't tell you all this about myself and got right on to my married life. Eh?"

"Speaking for myself," I said, hastily, "no! Please tell your story as you have it in your mind. Don't edit it. I'll do that."

He gave me one of his quick looks and smiled.

"Right!" he said, and shook himself straight in his chair. "I'll get busy. I've got to get the five o'clock train, and the wife—she said she'd have a bit of tea ready for me at four."

He sat at the far end of the verandah, the furled hammock tickling his ears, and he shifted the chair so that he faced north, looking towards his own house. As he opened his mouth to replace his pipe, Bill opened the door and led Miss Fraenkel out to be introduced.

It was a ceremonious bow with which Mr. Carville greeted her as he rose. He did not offer to shake hands, as middle-class people generally do, to their credit. He gave her one square look and then dropped his eyes, and I couldn't detect him even glancing at her again. He seemed to have made a brief examination and then dismissed her from his memory.

The problem of chairs was instantly solved by Bill. She opened the window and she and Miss Fraenkel sat inside. Mr. Carville studied the toe of his plain serviceable boot while these arrangements were being carried out. He sat motionless in the Fourth Chair, and I could not help feeling that the business of transferring Miss Fraenkel established Mr. Carville's inalienable right to his seat.

"Full speed ahead!" said Mac, jocularly.

"I ought to explain," said Mr. Carville, "that as the years had gone by, my mother and I had ceased to have very much sympathy with each other's way of thinking. We had lived together, as was natural, but we had gradually lost sight of the career my father had outlined for me. And when I had lost my job in Victoria Street, really that was the last link that snapped. I had no fancy for living in Oakleigh Park, especially after what had happened to Gladys. You can understand that.

"Another thing. I had become in a small way an author. Don't imagine that I'm setting up myself with you, sir. Not at all. I understand, I hope, now, the difference between writing a book and being an author. It was this way. To me, breaking into sea-life so sharp and suddenlike, there were many things I noted that most men would never heed. I don't heed them myself now. But then I did. And in port on Sundays, and sometimes at sea when I couldn't sleep on the middle-watch, I'd jot down little thumb-nail sketches, you might call them, of the things I saw. 'Cameos of the Sea,' I'd put on the top. The whole thing wasn't as long as some of the chapters in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' and, to tell you the truth, I had no great opinion of them. I only mention them because of what happened. I had the sheets tied up in brown paper in my sailor-bag.

"Well, I told my mother I wanted to live in London awhile, and as I needed to be within reach of the Board of Trade Offices until I had passed my exam., she saw no good reason for objecting. The next day, as I was walking up the Strand, one of those streets in London that I've never seen anywhere else, I caught sight of an old gateway at the end of a passage. There was a date, 1570 or something as old, on the arch, and as I strolled in I remembered I'd called on an architect who lived there in the old days, when I was in Victoria Street. It was Clifford's Inn. I was looking round at the old houses and wondering if I could hire a room or so there, when a girl came down one of the staircases.

"Well, I didn't recognize her at first. I remember wondering why she jumped back when she caught sight of me. 'Hullo!' I said, 'what are you doing here?' 'I live here,' she said; and sure enough there was her name on the wall, bracketed with another one: Miss Gladys Sanders and Miss Octavia Flagg.

"'You!' I said. 'You live here?' She nodded and asked me if I would come up. We went up the dusty old stairs to the top floor, and she took a key from her purse and opened the door. I felt there was something pretty brazen about all this. This wasn't the sort of thing to appeal to Oakleigh Park, I was quite sure, and said so. 'Oh, I've done with Oakleigh Park,' she said, 'and they've done with me.' And then her friend, Miss Flagg, came in, a thin woman of about thirty-five, with a green dress and rather untidy hair. I said thin, but so was Gladys. It almost seemed to me, when I'd seen them a few times, that there was some fierce fire inside of those women, wearing them thin and showing through. Neither of them was beautiful; they didn't try to be. They just lived for—what do you think? I'll tell you in a minute.

"At first I was all abroad at the sudden meeting. A minute before Gladys came down that staircase, if you'd asked me whether I cared for her I'd have said no; it was all burned up long ago. But now I'd seen her again, thin and sallow and changed as she was, it had all come back with a rush. Do you know that kind of love? It's because of the way it rushes back on you, knocks you down and tramples on you, makes you feel mean and degraded and ashamed, that I pray God it may never happen on me again. I like to think a man may never have it but for one woman. Sometimes, away out East, when I've been drowsing in a hammock listening to the sweat dripping on the deck and watching the blue hills in the distance, it has come upon me. Sometimes in dreams I've seen her face clearer than I ever saw it in life.... You know them, perhaps?... Dreams so vivid that one's brain and body ache with the pain of it? Ah!"

He paused and none offered to speak. I sat facing him in some astonishment. There was to me something fundamentally shocking in a man making such a confession. If it had been dark so that the words floated to us invisibly; but in broad day! Perhaps more convincingly than anything else did this impress upon my mind Mr. Carville's deliberate intention to fashion for us a tale from the agony of his life, to give us, with such art as he possessed, a picture of an obscure and alien romance.

"Miss Flagg, it seems, was a journalist, and Gladys—well, she was a journalist too, I suppose. From what she told me I gathered she did translations for different agencies, and earned a little that way. When I told them what I'd come in for, they said there was a flat in Serjeant's Inn just around the corner, which was to be let furnished. I told them I was going in for an exam. and afterwards I was going to take my little papers to a publisher. Miss Flagg lit up like a bonfire at this, and says she, 'I'm a literary agent. Do let me read it; I may be able to place it.'

"I looked at her. To my mind she didn't seem the sort of woman who would understand the things I'd been writing about; old Croasan and the Chief with the glass eye, the firemen and all the rest of them. However, I said I'd let her have it if she liked. Gladys looked at me when I came out as an author. She'd never had any opinion of me, you see. She liked clever people, people with flash and glitter, who could dance and talk with a spatter about everything—like my brother. You can believe I wanted to know why she'd left him, if she'd ever gone to him. I said, 'I thought you were going out when I saw you,' and she took the hint. We went down again and out into the Strand.

"'Is it any use?' I said, and the big Law Courts' clock boomed out over our heads. It sounded like NO in my ears.

"She shook her head. 'Quite impossible,' she said. 'Well, where's Frank?' I asked her.

"She didn't know. He'd dropped her just the same as he dropped anything else he had no use for, without a word. And I think it was shame more than because she didn't care for me that made her say it was impossible. I don't know—what is a woman's pride, anyhow? See how he'd treated her; worse than I'd treat my dog. And yet when he came back, flush with money and with flash friends, and he lifted his hand, she ran to him, ran! Explain it if you can. I can't.

"That was later. I got my flat and passed my exam all right, and my uncle in Fenchurch Street said I could have a job as soon as I liked. But I thought I'd wait a bit. I was seeing London from a fresh angle, you might say; seeing it as an outsider, as an alien. I had about a hundred pounds to spend, and in a modest quiet way I enjoyed myself. The razzle-dazzle of London doesn't appeal to a man much, when he's been on the bend in sea-ports. Humph!

"And Miss Flagg took my manuscript and went crazy about it. She said she sat up all night to read it. Knowing what I do of women now, I think she was a liar. Besides, anyone could read it in two or three hours. The point is she told the publisher that lie, and he believed it. Her enthusiasm was contagious. He said it was fine, and gave me ten pounds for it. Miss Flagg said it was a generous offer and raked off a sovereign for her commission. I often wonder how authors bear up under such generosity. But of course I know nothing about the business side of it. Only for a short time did I get bitten about the idea of being an author. I found I had nothing to say. Miss Flagg told me she knew a man who 'did fiction' at the rate of twenty thousand words a week. She might have lied, but then, how do I know? Anyway, I saw it wasn't in my line—'fiction.'

"You see, when I went to their flat and met their literary friends and heard them talking about their work, I felt out of it. I was an alien in their world. I had no interest in the details of book-writing. I'd just put down what happened to come into my mind. I wondered what they wrote about. Love I suppose. I'd sit and look about me and try to imagine what those people would have thought of the old Corydon's engine-room. Humph! Do you know what those thin, half-fed men and women thought the most important thing in the world? Not husbands and wives and children, not war, nor even courage; not books nor pictures; nothing of this. No; they were wearing their souls out clamouring for a Vote!"

We sat very still. You could have heard a pin drop.

"There was Gladys. She was only nineteen, and ought to have been helping her mother at home; but no, she was emancipated, as she called it. Her experience with my brother taught her that the Vote was necessary. Miss Flagg told me that unless women got the Vote England would drop behind. They all said that. To me it was amazing. It showed me how far I'd travelled away from the old ideas. It angered me to see women acting like that, spoiling themselves, making themselves ridiculous and ugly, all for that!

"I'd been home a couple of months, not more, when I began to get restless. My mother asked me why I didn't get a job on shore. But I couldn't see myself going to Victoria Street every day, clean collar and umbrella, sitting at a desk dictating silly little letters to silly little people. Those who wanted it let them do it. I went to my uncle and asked for a job. His eyes twinkled when he said, 'Well, the Corydon's chartered for the Mediterranean, and they want a Second.'

"'When shall I join?' I said.

"'Oh, I was only joking,' says he. 'We'll get you a better ship than that now.'

"'No,' I said, 'I'll go back to the Corydon. I know her and she knows me. When shall I join?'"

Again Mr. Carville paused, and appeared to be lost in thought, oblivious of our presence. An expression of gentle earnestness had settled upon his face, almost melancholy. I imagined for a moment that he was endeavouring to arrange his thoughts.

"I do hope," he remarked, without looking at us, "I do hope that anything I've said hasn't given offence." He turned to us with a slight smile. "I mix up so little with genteel people nowadays—you see?"

I nodded vaguely, and he relapsed into thought again.

"I was thinking," he observed presently, "as you are so quiet, I might have said something. I remember that was the way they signified dissent, so to speak. And—I wouldn't like to offend—anybody."

"Pray go on," I said. "We are not genteel in that sense of the word."

It was plain that, apart from any scruples concerning our gentility, he had some difficulty in picking up the thread of his story. It was a relief when he began to speak.

"I come now," he said, "to a time that I hardly know how to describe. The next few years, taken together, were my WanderjÄhre. You know Wilhelm Meister, of course? My apprenticeship was over, but I wasn't a man yet for all that. There's an intermediate stage, what we engineers call being 'an improver,' in a man's life. It seems strange that I should speak of myself so at twenty-seven, but there it is; I was late maturing. Again, I like to think that the Dutch are right when they use the same word for husband and man. Until he is married a Dutchman is not a 'Man.' That's how I looked at it!

"When I rejoined the Corydon, the Chief said the Second was going to stay on one more trip, but old Croasan was clearing out and I could go Third. I wouldn't mention these details, only they are important, because—well, you'll see.

"Old Croasan was going ashore when I joined. Didn't even shake hands with the Chief! I thought he was going home to the bonny Scotland he always shouted about when he was canned, but the Second says, 'Na, na. He'll never go back to Grangemouth,' and Chief says, 'He'll get a job all right, all right.' Well, I was busy enough with my own concerns, and, as usual, there was a-plenty to do on the Corydon; but one evening I was up at Cully's Hotel talking to Miss Bevan, when in walks a smart, tidy-looking man of, say, forty-five, and calls for a bottle of Bass. I wouldn't have given him more than a passing glance if he hadn't looked me in the eye. 'Eh, lad,' says he. 'Will ye have a drink?' 'Croasan?' I said. 'Ah, it's me,' says he. 'Ah'm away the morn in yon big turret.'

"I was that astonished I couldn't reply, and he drank up his beer and went out with a wave of the hand. Miss Bevan asked me if I knew him. 'Sure,' I said, 'but he was old and grey three days ago.' It was my first experience of a sea-faker. He'd been up to Cardiff, had a Turkish bath, hair-cut and shave, and the barber had dyed his hair and moustache. Then he'd gone round to the offices and eventually got a job. Of course, the first green sea that went over him would add twenty years to his age, but he'd be signed on then. The Chief laughed when I told him. 'And you'll see him in Genoa,' he says; 'yon turret steamer's goin' there too,' I did see him. In a way, he introduced me to my wife."

Mr. Carville paused and struck a match. Bill's head appeared at the window.

"Oh!" she said, "I thought you were never coming to it!"

He proceeded, carefully putting the burnt match on the window-sill and blowing great clouds.

"The run to Genoa from the Tyne," he said, "takes a fortnight. It was during that voyage that I began to see how I stood with regard to Gladys. I suppose you read Ibsen? I used to, on the Corydon, and one of the most remarkable of his plays, in my opinion, is Love's Comedy. You remember the moral of that play was that a man should never marry a girl he is madly in love with. It sounds wicked if you put it that way, but old Ibsen was right. He knew, as I knew, that a young man may be in love with a girl who is not suited to him. He knew that there isn't much difference between that sort of love and hate. He knew that you can have a contempt for a girl and her ideals and yet love her. That sort of love is like those big thin bowls they showed me in Japan—beautiful, expensive and awful frail—no use at all for domestic purposes. I thought this out on the voyage to Genoa, and put Gladys, so to speak, on a shelf, where she is now. And as I thought it out, I saw how I stood. I saw I was not only an alien wherever I went, but I was alone. I began to be afraid. I used to look ahead and tried to see myself in twenty years' time, alone. It is not good for a man to be alone. That's how I felt when we reached Genoa.

"Those who know best often say that sailormen know less about foreign countries than many people who have never travelled. I daresay that is true of many of us. It is very likely true of any uneducated people who go abroad. Most men who go to sea have very little education. They have no knowledge of their own country, let alone others. To a certain extent I was different. I had always wanted to see Italy. Years before, when I was in Victoria Street, I had read about her history and art. I had even learned a little of the language. And so, when we came into Genoa, and I saw that beautiful city, with her white palaces and green domes and fort-crowned hills, when I remembered what she'd been, and saw what she was, I could hardly wait till nightfall to go ashore and see it all at once!

"Since then I've been to nearly every port in the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Smyrna and from Marseilles to Tunis, but I never experienced anything like that first night ashore in Genoa. The next day the Chief asked me where I'd been, and I told him. 'Why,' he says, 'didn't you go into the "Isle o' Man" or the "American"?' No, I hadn't been in any of those places. He said they'd have to show me round.

"That night I went with them, leaving the new Fourth in charge, and I learned why sailormen know so little of foreign places. All along the Front, as they call it, were scores of dirty little bars with English names. I wouldn't mention them at all, only it is necessary in a way, as you'll see. We went into several and had a drink, and the Chief was known in them all. Finally the Chief says, 'Let's get on to the "Isle o' Man,"' and we went out and walked along the Via Milano a little further. The 'Isle o' Man' was rather bigger than most of these places, and had a very comfortable room with plush settees and marble tables shut off from the main cafÉ. It was kept by a big, heavy, red-haired woman, about fifty years old, who came in and sat down by the Chief and talked about old times. I found she was married to a steward in the Hamburg-American Line, who ran this show on the side. It was a mixed company in there, skippers of all nations sitting round and drinking; and a tall young chap, with a velvet coat and long hair, was playing a piano and singing songs. After every song he would come round with a tin saucer and collect pennies from us. I remember thinking how strange he looked. He had a noble face, I should call it; he looked like a gentleman and spoke like one, and there he was, collecting pennies! I was watching him coming round to our table when a girl came in, a tall, dark young girl, with a tray of glasses. 'Hello!' says the Chief, 'that's not Rosa, is it?' The old woman nods and says, 'That's Rosa all right, Chief.' And he called out to the girl to come over to us.

"She came at once. 'Here's a friend o' yours, Rosa,' says the old woman, and the girl looks at the Chief and smiles a little. 'Why, she was only so high last time I was here,' says the Chief. 'She has shot up.' 'Yes,' says the old woman, who was called Rebecca, 'she'll be a fine woman one o' these days.'

"They told me about her as we went back to the ship. No one knew who her parents were. She had always been at the 'Isle o' Man,' and sailormen had petted her because she was a nice little thing and would rap out a bit of slang without knowing in the least what it meant. But now, as the Chief said, it was a different matter. She was 'too big to kiss now.' One point in her history I was very interested in, and that was the fact that neither the Chief nor anyone else I ever heard speak of her ever suggested that she wasn't straight. I liked that. There she was, living among all the draggled, dirty seaport crowd, and yet the seafaring men that took their drinks from her believed she was straight.

"I was coming down from the theatre one night about a week later, and I thought I'd look in at the 'Isle o' Man' for a drink before going aboard. There was a good few in there, Greek and Norwegian skippers; and a Belgian engineer was sitting across from me with old Croasan. The piano was going with Little Dolly Daydream, Pride of Idaho, when in comes Rosa with her tray. To get past she had to squeeze between old Croasan's table and the piano, and I saw him take hold of her waist. She was hampered by the tray, and he was pulling her down on his knee.

"I don't think it was all gallantry that made me do what I did. I'd never been a whale on that sort of thing. I'm not built on those lines. I think it was a feeling that has always possessed me very strongly when I see an old man with a young woman—disgust. To me it is a horrible sight, the lust of an old man. You can argue as long as you like, but that is one of my fixed eternal prejudices. I feel sick when I see an old man giving way to it. I feel that somehow or other he is debasing humanity. That was the real reason why I jumped up and went over to Croasan.

"He looked up at me as I stood over the table. I could see the crease in his cheeks, the sag under his eyes, and the grey roots of his dyed moustache. He looked up at me as I raised my hand. 'Let her go,' I said, shouting at him above the jangle of the piano, 'let her go, Mr. Croasan.' He was holding her down on his knee.

"'Mind your own affairs!' he says to me, showing his teeth, great dirty yellow fangs; 'Is she yours?' he says. The Belgian engineer sitting near him laughed at this and looked up sneering at me. 'Let her go,' I said again. 'Rosa's a friend of mine,' says he, still holding her. Just then I saw Rebecca's head over the piano, and as I looked down again I saw a peculiar expression on Rosa's face. Her eyes were on me and she seemed to be thinking 'What are you waiting for?' It all happened, you know, in two or three seconds. I waited no more. I put the flat of my hand across Croasan's mouth, hard. He jerked back to avoid it, and the tray that Rosa was trying to set down on the table, so that she could get at him with her nails, went all over him. The old woman came round the piano and saw him. Croasan started up and I hit him again, and he fell over the Belgian.

"At first I thought I was in for a big row. But Croasan had more experience than I had. He'd been in rows before. When he started up it was not to hit me, but to get out. He crawled under the table between the Belgian's legs and ran to the door. The others were crowding all round me, arguing and shouting. The young chap at the piano was standing up and looking over the top, and Rebecca was trying to calm them. 'Easy, gentlemen!' she kept on calling. Rosa had disappeared. Then the Belgian jumped up and shouted, 'Ee interfere wis my frien'!' pointing at me, and marching out.

"When we got quiet again I began to explain to Rebecca what had happened. Do you know, I thought that was the real danger. I thought she would be the one to get on to me for interfering. Rebecca was a woman who looked more evil than she really was. She sat down at my table, and while I told her and the piano jangled away again, she kept patting my arm and saying, 'Yes, yes, I know.' What did she know? Why, the simple fact that Rosa was no longer a little girl to be petted, but a grown-up girl to be insulted. I learned a similar thing had happened once or twice in the last few months. You see, the girl was neither in one class nor the other. A young Genoese will not look at a girl who lives in those houses along the Front. He thinks they are all rotten bad. As for the foreigners she met in the 'Isle o' Man,' I needn't tell you what an average Englishman thinks of foreign women.

"I told the Chief about it next day, and he looked up sharp from his plate when I mentioned Croasan. He said hard things of Croasan. 'Think of that?' says he. 'An old chap wi' married daughters!' 'Huh!' says the Second. 'They're aye the wurrs't. But I'm glad ye punched him, mister,' he says. 'Many a time I'd ha' done the same, only we were on articles. Rosa, too!'

"'Ay,' says the Chief, 'but Rosa'll have to put up with men clawin' her now.'

"It was my intention, to avoid trouble and talk, to keep away from the 'Isle o' Man' for the future, but it turned out otherwise. I'd got leave from the Chief on Thursday afternoon to go up to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo to see the Holy Grail. They keep it in the Treasury there and show it on Thursdays for a franc. Most Englishmen laugh at these tales of the Church, and even Catholics I have met tell me they don't believe in miracles. I don't know why; I'm interested in them. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the state of mind in which they are reasonable and necessary things. The more we learn the less we know. They say that saints, because they led good lives and kept away from evil, were able to perform miracles. Why should a statement like that annoy anybody? Good is a power and evil is a power. Why deny it? I read a book the other day in which the author, a German with a name like a lady's sneeze, denies the existence of good and evil. Humph! It's a long time since I read Hegel, but I don't think he was ever as mad as that!

"I was coming through the church after quitting the sacristan, when I caught sight of a girl kneeling on the steps of the Chapel of St. John. I suppose you know that the Precursor is buried in this church? They show you a silver box with a chain round it, the chain that bound him in prison. There were other women in the church, but this girl was not in the chapel, only kneeling on the step outside. Women, you see, are not allowed to enter that chapel; on account of Salome, I suppose. I saw this girl kneeling on the step and crossed over to see what she was doing. It was Rosa, saying her prayers. There is a difference between a Catholic and a Protestant praying. You may have noticed it. A Protestant shuts his eyes and thinks hard about the money he's making or the automobile he's going to buy. A Catholic plays about with his beads and chatters all the time while he's thinking of religion. Protestants are scandalized when they see how Catholics make a sort of rough-house playground of their churches—children playing on the floor during service even. They can't understand how Catholics manage to reverence a thing and yet not hate it. Englishmen always draw wrong conclusions about an Italian's relations with God. You see, most Englishmen feel about God as they used to feel about Queen Victoria. They respected her and felt she was necessary, but all the same they felt exasperated with her for being so particular at times! Humph!

"Well, Rosa looked up and recognized me, smiled and went on praying as fast as she could. I bowed. Of course I had my hat in my hand, so I had to bow. I saw her go red, and I thought I'd done something she disapproved of. I stood there hardly knowing what to do, and she bent her head to finish her prayer. She told me afterwards that it was the first time anyone had ever bowed to her. She turned red because she thought I was mocking her, and then, I suppose, with pleasure. That was the beginning of our courtship.

"Of course, in one sense, it was an unusual courtship. It happened to come about by a number of accidents. If I hadn't hit old Croasan she would never have looked at me, for I'm not a very conspicuous figure at any time. If I hadn't met her in the church just as she was praying for my soul, because I'd acted kindly towards her, I might never have seen her again. And so on, if—if—if. It was in that sense unusual. But in another sense I don't suppose there was ever a more commonplace affair than this of Rosa and me. If we'd lived in Brixton we couldn't have been more respectable!

"For some mysterious reason or other Rebecca took a fancy to me. Mind, I was only third engineer of the oldest tramp in Genoa. If I'd been Chief, then I could have understood her making a fuss of me. But I was Third. I have an idea Rebecca had seen better days. Now and again she dropped hints that pointed that way. She had a manner too, when she was sober, and had been cleaned up. The men who drank in her bar little knew how she was transformed when she dressed herself to go up town. They little knew, either, how very like the house upstairs was to houses in Brixton or Hartlepool or the Paisley Road. Middle-class people are the same all the world over. I expect they have fringes on their curtains even in Honolulu! Rebecca had, anyhow.

"The news made a bit of stir among the ships for a while as might be expected, and gradually spread right through the Merchant Service. 'Rosa of Rebecca's was engaged to the Third of the Corydon!' By George, that was a morsel of gossip. Miss Bevan had heard about it in Barry; Polly Loo in Singapore heard it, the girls in the Little Wooden Hut at Las Palmas heard it. It went round the world, that Rosa of Rebecca's was engaged.

"For three years we traded as regularly as a mail boat to Genoa with coal, then across to Cartagena in Spain for iron ore and back to the Tyne. I was Second, of course, and I passed for Chief when my time was all in, just taking a few days off to go to Shields for the examination. I might have got another ship, but I was pretty comfortable by now, I knew my Chief and my engines, and I naturally wanted to keep on the Genoa trade as long as I could. In those days they took weeks to discharge, and so I used to have quite a spell with Rosa. She was never bothered with 'men clawin' her,' as the Chief expressed it. I used to take her up to the Giardino D'Italia to listen to the band and to see the movies, or we'd take the Funicular up to Castellaccio and have a bit of dinner at a little trattoria near the Righi, where you can look out across the sea, I learned to speak the language pretty well, and it was my intention at first to settle in Italy. But Rosa would not hear of it. She wanted to get away from the associations of her childhood.

"Perhaps it was because of this desire of hers that we so often went up and sat on the bastions of Castellaccio and looked out across the sea. And it was here, one evening, that I spoke of a matter which had been in my mind for some little time. We'd had Christmas together that year, and it was a clear, cold, windless afternoon in January that we rode up out of the city noise, and looked over the roofs and domes and hanging gardens, and saw the orange trees heavy with snow, and the ripe fruit glowing like globes of fire on the laden branches. You must not think that the romantic surroundings had inflamed my imagination, and that I was apprehensive of a lurid story. Not at all. I had turned the matter over, in my prosaic way, for several voyages, and I put the question to Rosa in a direct and simple form. I asked her who she was. It is all very well, in novels, for shy damsels to run into the arms of some casual Prince Charming, or for heroic clean-cut young college-men with over-developed jaw-bones to marry strange girls for, I suppose, heroic reasons. All very well in novels. But you try that sort of thing in real life, and see where you land. I don't mean externals—parents, social sets or legal tarradiddles. Such things are very slight obstacles. I mean the tremendous obstacles inside you: the mass of your inherited shrinkings and shynesses and delicacy; a whole quickset hedge of brambles and nettles and thistles, behind which your naked soul is hiding in a sort of terror; and you can't do it! I was in that position, because, so far, Rosa had made no reference to her birth except to say that, although Rebecca wasn't her mother, she was as good as one.

"And Rebecca, when I had mentioned the matter to her one day, had said, with her chin resting on her knuckles, 'Ask Rosa.' I said.

"'Ask her what?'

"'Ask her if she wants you to know all about it.'

"'Why,' I said, 'is there so much to know?'

"'Little enough,' said she, 'but Rosa made Oscar and me promise to say nothing unless she gave us the word.'

"'So Oscar knows it as well,' I said. Oscar was the steward Rebecca had married a few years before, a Dutchman, who was nearly always at sea when I was in Genoa, so I saw very little of him.

"'Of course, Oscar knows,' said Rebecca. 'He knows a good deal of it first hand.'

"'All right, I'll speak to Rosa,' I said.

"And I did, as I was telling you. I asked her who she was.

"'You have a good right to know,' she said, looking up to where a sentry's head and bayonet were sliding to and fro above the wall. 'I have meant to tell you, but I know very little. So little!'

"I said I left the matter in her hands entirely.

"The sentry stopped above us, presented arms, grounded, looked round, and then took a peep at us over the corner. A pair of lovers! His yellow, livid face cracked a smile as I caught his eye. For another second or so we grinned at each other, and then he put on his professional mask again, as though he had drawn down a vizor, shouldered his rifle and thumped along his little gangway. Rosa waited until he had passed the further turret and then turned to me.

"'It isn't easy to say it, though, after all,' she said. 'I was a little baby at Aunt Rebecca's, then a little girl and now a big girl. Before that, there was my mother who was dead. My father, dead too, a soldier like him'—she nodded towards the head and bayonet sliding backwards and forwards—'in Abyssinia, you know.'

"'Ah!' I said. 'Yes. But why don't you know your——' Rosa interrupted me.

"'That is just it,' she said. 'Now you come to it. I can't tell you all about it. I don't know the words. There are people in Genova who know. Uncle Oscar knows. He can tell you ... if you ask him.'

"Now it was perfectly obvious to me that my girl was not trying to hide some shameful secret from me, but rather that, her speech in our tongue running for the most part on the material details of life, she simply hadn't the words, as she put it, to relate a story in a higher key. I own I was interested, because it was a point which had struck me very much in the study of languages. You must have noticed how you can go along smoothly enough, learning vocabularies, verbs, adjectives, idioms, and so on, reading newspapers and books, filling in what you don't know with a guess or a skip, asking for things at the table, giving orders to a tailor or a barber; and when anybody asks you if you know that language, you say yes, and I suppose you are justified in a way. But just try to express the fundamental and secret things of your life, something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one. Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen. Ours, you may say, was for the most part a silent courtship.

"Well, I did what she suggested. By good chance Oscar Hank's ship, the Prinz Karl, was due in from New York at the time, and when I saw her two big yellow funnels and top-heavy passenger decks blocking the view of the Principe, I went over. Mr. Hank, Signore Hank, was a man who had seen the best of his life before he married Rebecca. He was a tall, spare-ribbed man with high shoulders and thin hair brushed across an ivory patch of bald scalp. His face was strong enough, but worn. He had prominent eyes and sharp cheek-bones accentuated by the hollows in his cheeks, and a sharp, thin nose jutted out over one of those heavy grey moustaches that get into the soup and make the owner look like a hungry walrus. He might have been rich, as they said he was, and he might have been clever in days gone by; but as I knew him he was a faded, soiled ghost of a man, a man preoccupied with the dirty pickings of life, just as his wife, strong character as I knew her to be, was only a drunken parody of her real self, a shrewd, calculating, good-hearted, bad-principled old failure.

"Mr. Hank sat in his cabin, talking to a young fellow in American clothes and French boots, who was, I could see, one of those shady characters who tout for ship-chandlers, whose business makes them toadies, sycophants and pandars. There is something detestable about the ship-chandlering trade, somehow. You see them lick-spittling the old man, taking him ashore if he is a stranger, bringing boxes of candy for his wife if he has her on board, sending a boat every day, for his convenience, and so on, and then, when the ship's stores are rushed on board at the last moment, and you put to sea, the stuff turns out to be bad or short. The flour is damp and won't rise, the potatoes are a scratch lot, the meat poor and the fruit rotten. And the Old Man says nothing, the steward says nothing, because they've been squared, and after all it's only the crew who really suffer, because the captain has his own private stock, which Mister steward shares, you may be sure. It is a dirty business and the sight of those sleek, cunning, pimple-faced young men, in their fancy vests and dirty cuffs, always sickens me, because I know the knavery in their hearts.

"'Come in, come in,' said Mr. Hank, as I turned away from his door.

"'No,' I said. 'I'll wait till you are through, Mr. Hank.'

"'Nonsense, come in,' said he. 'This is only Mr. Sachs, representing Babbolini's. He won't eat you,' he said.

"I came back at this, and stood at the door to let a crowd of bedroom stewards with sheets go by. 'It would take a better man than him to eat me, Mr. Hank.'

"Mr. Sachs smiled politely and made room for me on the settee, evidently having no cannibal intentions at the time, or at any rate disguising them. Offered me a cigarette, which I never smoke. Said it was a fine day.

"'It was a private matter I wanted to speak about,' I said to Hank, who looked at me with an expression of eternal anxiety in his prominent eyes.

"'I know,' he said. 'I know. I was ashore this morning.'

"'We won't discuss it here, Mr. Hank,' I said, hastily. 'If you don't mind, I'll see you ashore, since you're busy.'

"Mr. Hank, Signore Hank, was a man I would never be very intimate with, however well I knew him. I'm not saying he was so bad, or that I was so virtuous myself, at all. It was simply, I suppose, a matter of temperament. To me it always seemed as though he had so many mysterious things in his mind that he was borne down by them; that the outward and visible world, in which I saw him and spoke to him, was only a thin mask behind which his real existence was concealed. I may have been wrong. It doesn't matter, for Signore Hank is dead now, his long life of ingenious peculation is over, and the good and the ill of it, we'll hope, have balanced, anyway. But I couldn't possibly discuss Rosa with him, let alone have that smooth, dissipated little bounder of a Sachs sit by and hear it all. I had to call a halt. I was making up my mind to leave the mud alone and not stir it up at all, when Mr. Hank, sitting asprawl in his swivel chair at his roll-top desk, his big chin and nose and moustache buried in his hand, and staring at me with his hard-boiled eyes, remarked abruptly:

"'Do you know the Hotel Robinson?'

"'Certainly,' I said. 'What about it?'

"'What you want to do is to go to the Hotel Robinson and ask for Doctor West. He's the man. He'll tell you all about it. You know Doctor West? Tall, big black beard, pale face. Flag's letter P. You know him?'

"'I've seen him some time or other, I dare say,' I said. 'Hotel Robinson, you say. All right and thank you.'

"'Just a minute,' sang out little Sachs as I made to go. 'I'll go with you. I know Doctor West. I'll introduce you.' And he went on discussing a paper he had, with Mr. Hank.

"I felt a little indignant and walked off, walked in the wrong direction, of course, and lost myself in interminable alleyways of passenger-cabins, hustled by stewards and stewardesses who were polishing brass-work, rolling up carpets, washing floors and so on. All about was that curious odour that seems inseparable from the corridors of steamers, hospitals, workhouses and the like—an odour which is a compound of cleanliness, antiseptic and cold enamelled iron. Such surroundings depressed me. I felt, more acutely than ever before, the distance between Rosa's environment and what I would have had it. I felt dissatisfied with Signore Hank, and with myself too, if the truth be told. I had not taken hold of the situation. I had allowed him to impose on me. I suppose you have had the experience, when someone for whom you have no esteem, imposes his pinchbeck personality upon you. Save for the story which this Doctor West of the Hotel Robinson might spin, I would have gone back to the Corydon and forgotten it. I wandered about a good bit, when a bell-hop showed me an unexpected way out, and there was Mister Sachs at the gangway, looking about for me.

"'Why, where 'ave you been?' he asked. 'I thought you'd gone.'

"'Well, you needn't bother to wait if you're in a hurry,' I answered, testily, going down the shrouded gangway.

"Oh, that's not what I meant,' he said, coming after me smartly, buttoning up his coat and taking out his gloves. 'Fact is, Mister,' he went on, 'I'd take it as a favour—this is the quickest way up to Hotel Robinson—if you'd give me an introduction to your captain.'

"I looked at him astounded, all at sea.

"'Representing Babbolini's,' he added, feeling in his pocket for a card. 'Course, any business done's between ourselves. We have a big connection and can always give satisfaction.'

"So you see how the mere contact of these people contaminates. He was trying to make me his tout to the Corydon, me, the once future Prime Minister of England, the child of many prayers! You may say, how were the mighty fallen! Indeed, I was ashamed. I said nothing.

"'Of course,' said little Sachs, his pimpled, dough-coloured face close to mine. 'Of course, if you don't care to speak to the Captain, the Chief Steward....'

"There was a trolley car station just outside the gates of the Dogana, and I halted there and said to him:

"'Look here, don't you worry to come any farther with me. You've got business to attend to, I dare say. Run right along and attend to it. Good morning.'

"I was none the better for this encounter when I finally reached the Hotel Robinson and stood in an entrance-hall that was high and dark and as cold as an ice box. I felt humiliated as well as depressed. They say people take a man at his own valuation. People don't. They average their own experience, and the answer is never very high.

"The Hotel Robinson was one of those rather shabby, half-hotel, half-pension affairs which seem to hang on year after year with any visible means of support. I say 'seem.' As a matter of fact it was a steady, prosperous establishment with a steady, prosperous connection. It never advertised, never cleaned up, nor modernized, nor did anything, as far as I could ever see, except exist and prosper. I don't know who owned it—Robinson perhaps—whether it was a company, or anything else about it. I had stayed in it once or twice, and a four-poster bed in a sort of giant crypt, with plenty of comfort so long as you didn't step on the flags in your bare feet, a quiet, well-cooked breakfast, and moderate charges were my chief memories of the establishment. You would never find it if you went to Genoa. You and other tourists would be in the Bristol or the Savoy or the Miramare up on the heights above the railroad terminal. You would never find the Hotel Robinsons of Europe. They are like a mirage to the tourists, those quiet, clean, cheap hotels. You hear of them and perhaps catch a glimpse of them in the distance, and you press on, and find they have vanished. They have become dear, and noisy, and flashy, and are waiting for you at the station with a brand-new motor omnibus! Humph!

"A woman came out of a little glazed office, a woman dressed in black plush, as it seemed to me, with list slippers on her feet and a mangy old fur wrap over her arms and across the small of her back. Perhaps it was the unusual state of mind I was in; but to me she had the appearance of a discontented Sibyl, a Sibyl who had been waiting for years for somebody to make an offer for her books. Nobody, apparently, had ever come, and she had to put up with me, who only wanted Doctor West. I was just asking about him when we tumbled back into the Twentieth Century. The telephone bell rang in the office.

"The Hotel Robinson had once been a palace, a marble palace with marble walls a couple of feet thick and staircases like a stonecutter's nightmare. The place was feudal. A coat-of-arms and a hat, in marble, still balanced themselves over the portico—Robinson's perhaps. I suppose the little glazed office was the sentry-box in the old days, where mendicants got their doles and tall freelances from Germany applied for a situation. May be. I looked through the glass partition and saw the woman bending forward, the telephone to her ear, her hand held out over a little charcoal brazier, her lips moving inaudibly, her eyes nearly closed, as though she were weaving a spell.

"I was beginning to feel cold when she rang off and came out again. 'Doctor West? I've just spoken to him,' she said. 'He is at his office in the harbour. He returns at eleven.'

"'I want to see him on a private matter,' I said.

"'To consult him?' she queried.

"'Not professionally, you understand, signora, but on a personal affair.'

"'Then come in the evening. He dines at seven. He is always in until ten. Will you leave your name?'

"I left my card and wrote on the back of it that I wished to see him about the relatives of Signorina Rosa Cairola. The woman read it, looked at me, shivered, murmured 'All right,' and went back to her brazier in the office.

"It was more cheerful in that marble tunnel in the evening. There were lights and people about. Not many, but enough to make the place less like a tomb. Perhaps the gloom of the morning was in myself. The Sibyl had put a flower in her hair by way of evening dress and was ordering servants about. I have often wondered who exactly she was. It is the fate of us who wander over the earth to leave so many by-ways unexplored. We can only glimpse and conjecture and, generally, forget. Life for us is like a walk along the broad, modern streets of an Italian city. Every little while we pass narrow alleys, mere slots in the mass of marble architecture, which dive down into darkness and mystery. Every little while we pass low-lying ramps and odd little causeways, where lighted windows give one sudden vivid pictures of heads and faces and arms, sudden snatches of gesture and conversation flung out at us as we pass. We want—I want—to investigate them all, to see what's round the corner, as they say. And we can't. We've got to go on to our destinations, and try and find our fun when we get there. But it wasn't just the vague, generalized appetite for odd characters which made me contemplate that fusty manageress with interest. It was the sudden fleeting reflection that, but for me, but for a chance accident, there was Rosa in years to come, faded, obscure, efficient, querulous and a failure. And in Hank I saw myself in years to come, only not so successful, not so rich, not quite so shady, I hope. I watched her moving about in her funereal draperies, the flower flopping as she shuffled and gesticulated. Presently she saw me and beckoned, and then I was shown up those ponderous stone stairs, the marble balustrade covered with red-baize for fear people might be frozen to it on the way, no doubt. A pair of vast double doors bore a microscopic inscription of the Doctor's name, together with an almost invisible pimple that was the bell, and before those sombre and enigmatic portals I was left to my fate. For once in a way, I was going to see what was round the corner.

"One leaf of the door opened and remained so for a second before a head appeared, a head of grey, upstanding hair and a dark, bushy beard. You don't often meet with doors that open in that fashion at home. You know the English fashion—six inches and a face peering at you suspiciously, or a wide fling open and the servant standing right up to you and blocking the way with a paralyzing stare. On the continent there is the porter below and the door opens to let you in, not just to see what you want. So in I walked, the door closed and I found myself in the ante-room of Doctor West's apartment, faced by Doctor West himself, and watched by a mummy-case standing close to the wall, a mummy-case painted with a strange, anxious face. Its gold eyes had luminous whites and strong black brows. That bizarre curiosity was the key of the Doctor's furnishing scheme, and it had for me another significance. I knew then that I had heard of him with some certainty. I connected him at last with various stories I had vaguely picked up, snatches of conversation on the bridge-deck or in the mess-room. I recalled the Chief telling me once of some doctor who had come, years ago, to stay at some hotel and who had never left it since except to spend a month every year in Egypt. Great student of mummies, the Chief said. Yes, I remembered it all. Perhaps, if I had not had Rosa, I might have fastened more securely to the story in the first place. Now Rosa had brought me to him. I told him who I was. He nodded and showed me into his front room.

"It is difficult to convey the sense of overwhelming vastness which oppresses men in such chambers. You might not feel it so. My quarters are limited, as you may imagine. Even a millionaire-passenger gets no more than a cottager ashore. And Rebecca's place had small rooms full of plush furniture and ship-models in bottles and catamarans in glass-cases, assegais and Japanese junk. Ugly and comfortable. But this room of Doctor West's was terrifying to me. I couldn't see the ceiling at all save that, just above where his reading lamp glowed green on an immense table, there floated some far-off drapery and a plunging knee—a fresco lost in the gloom. The walls were painted, on stucco, into panels and each panel had a bunch of flowers tied with interminable ribbons in the centre. You don't like that sort of thing? Well, it is indigenous there, anyway, and you can't put shiny dadoes and humorous borders on a forty-foot wall, can you?

"And yet, you know, I saw in a moment, before I had opened my mouth, what lay at the back of all this. I could see that was only a variation of the traditional hermit's cave, a modern hole in a marble cliff. This tall, high-shouldered man with his spade-shaped beard and ragged smoking jacket, the cotton wool oozing from the quilting and the pockets burst at the corners, had recluse written all over him. He walked over the half dozen rugs that lay between the door and his encampment behind the table and left me forlorn, twiddling my hat and pulling at my coat, somewhere in outer darkness. He was nervous, yet anxious to show he was at ease. I had disturbed him. Once he looked behind him at a door with a black curtain before it, as though he contemplated flight to his bedroom. Suddenly he started off on a journey into the darkness and returned with a chair, a gilt thing with a rounded knob of upholstery for a seat. And he asked me gently to sit down.

"A recluse! I had that idea in my mind all the time I was telling him my story, as I am telling it to you, as far as it concerned my girl, and I watched him with a certain abstract curiosity, as well as a very lively anxiety. For I couldn't think how he came into it. In rapid succession I thought of the possibilities. In a novel, no doubt, he would be her father or a wicked uncle. Or perhaps he had, in a professional capacity, we may say, concocted some villainy! But then his flag wouldn't be P or any other letter. Villains don't carry on the humdrum business of attending ships in port for a lump sum down. Yes, as I told him my story I was wondering what his was. And I was conscious also that I was increasing my experience. Here was a recluse. They do not grow on bushes. It stands to reason a young man will not come across many. A young man grows so accustomed to reading about things nowadays that he may quite possibly never miss the actual experience. I could not do that. I have always had some sort of touchstone by which I could keep a hold on the difference between reality and mere imagination. There were many things, common things if you like, which I had never experienced, and I meant to experience them. Nothing dismayed me. I had in me at that time a singular passion for life. No doubt this showed in my face, as I have seen it in others—a thirsty look, with a rather over-confident manner. And Doctor West seemed almost to draw back from me as though I were dangerous, explosive. I dare say I was to him. He had left all that, had sunk into a sort of intellectual torpor, insulated, as one may say, from the great dynamos of human life.

"'But why,' he repeated, after looking at me nervously for a long time and listening to my words. 'Why do you wish to marry her?'

"'Well,' I said, 'I suppose it's because we are in love.'

"'But do you realize the risks?' he asked gently, moving his papers and books about. 'I'm assuming, of course, that you are a gentleman,' he went on. 'Always best to marry in one's own class, don't you think?' He studied my card for a while and looked up suddenly.

"'But suppose I've considered all that,' I suggested. 'Suppose it isn't so easy to know one's class, as you call it.'

"'Oh,' said he, getting up and walking off into the darkness. 'Oh, if one is a gentleman ...' His voice tailed off.

"'But,' I persisted, 'I'm not sure I am a gentleman. Really I'm not.'

"'What!' The solitary word came to me out of the shadows with startling distinctness. I nodded. I sat there on that spindley, gim-crack chair and stared contemptuously at the paraphernalia of learning and refinement on the great table, at the silver cigarette box, the bronze inkstand, the sphinxes and scarabs and cenotaphs, the bits of papyrus under glass, the books and magnifying glasses. Stared at them and defied them. I nodded.

"'It is a fact,' I said. 'I have been brought up in a genteel position and I don't consider the whole business to amount to a heap of beans.'

"I could hear him walking to and fro, and presently, as my eyes grew accustomed, I made him out, a tall phantom moving in front of other motionless phantoms. I became aware, too, of a warmth coming from that quarter and saw him stoop and open the damper of a closed stove, a studio stove, I think it was.

"'Then what can it matter to you what her parents were?' he demanded, straightening up and coming into the light.

"'I didn't say I wasn't respectable,' I told him, 'as well as curious. Anybody would be that.'

"He admitted that was so, and came and sat down.

"'The girl was born at sea, on a ship,' he observed slowly.

"'Well,' I said, 'what of that? So was I.'

"'Oh, is that so?' He looked at me again in his nervous way. Lit a cigarette and contemplated the smoke.

"'Born at sea, on a ship,' he repeated. 'Her mother came from somewhere up the Adriatic coast, Loreto, if I remember rightly. A lady's maid. She and her mistress joined the mail-boat at Port Said. They had been living at Cairo. On the voyage she died in giving birth to a child. There was some trouble, which I never fathomed, about the mistress, the Honourable Mrs. James. She did not know her maid was married when she engaged her at Venice. Letters were found in her pockets from a Sergeant Cairola. Just about this time the Italian Army was severely defeated in Abyssinia, and as far as could be ascertained the sergeant, who had married the girl at Ancona on the very point of embarking, was killed. Mrs. James was not in a condition, nor was she, I imagine, of a temperament to interest herself in the case. The girl, of course, was buried at sea, several days before we arrived here. As the vessel was British, the disposal of an Italian child was complicated. Not born on Italian soil, she was not eligible for the state institutions for orphans. I really forget the details. I had to make a declaration, of course, being the surgeon, but the captain and purser saw the authorities. On our return voyage we learned that they had found foster parents for the child, who received a grant out of the pension due to the widow had she lived. Since then, on only one occasion, a very painful one for me, I may say, have I had anything to do with the case.'

"So that I was really no forrader than before, you see. Rosa herself had told me about all of importance that was known. She had been a baby at Rebecca's, then a little girl and then a big girl. And the story, though Rosa had no part in it, the story spread. I had seen around the corner, and there were so many things I wanted to know! Things I had no right to know, come to that, if I was a gentleman. No right to ask anyway. I got up to go.

"'Thank you, doctor,' I said. 'I suppose I'll have to be satisfied with what you've given me. It won't make any difference to us, I'm glad to say. But I should have thought you would have been interested in the case, even if Mrs. James wasn't.' He shrugged his shoulders and moved his papers about, plainly anxious for me to be gone.

"'Remember, I did not settle here until some time had elapsed. I should have forgotten the whole affair but for the occasion I spoke of.'

"'I see,' I said. 'Well, good-night and thank you.'

"'Good-night,' he said nervously. 'Excuse me if I don't go down with you. I am rather busy.'

"'Literary work, I presume?' I said politely, and he nodded.

"'Yes,' he replied. 'I'm engaged on the Book of the Dead. I go to Egypt every year—next month, in fact—and I am behind in my notes.'

"I stood with my hand on the door, looking across the great chamber, and saw him hastily picking up the threads my intrusion had broken. All around the vague walls stood the painted mummy-cases of the dead, like sentinels, watching him with their brilliant, unwinking, expectant eyes. On a shelf close to me stood cats in dissipated attitudes, mere yellow bundles of swathings and fustiness. On trestles behind the door was a long packing case containing a slender shape. There was no casing here, no painted visage, only a vague impression. The sharp frontal bones had shorn clean through the rotted fabrics and I could see the snarling teeth. The small head seemed thrown back, the eyes closed, in enjoyment of some frightful joke. I looked back again and saw him writing, his head in his left hand, writing, no doubt, something in the Book of the Dead.

"Curious, wasn't it? Curious, I mean, the sort of people who had crossed one another's paths at the moment of my girl's coming so forlornly into the world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated, well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the English woman, the honourable creature whose temperament unfitted her to take any interest in an orphan whose mother had died in her service and whose father had perished on the field of battle. Impossible, say you. It isn't at all impossible. Rich people—I mean the rich who are forever rushing about the world or hiding in Mediterranean villas or in yachts on the Dalmatian coast—are very curious people. The very nature of their mode of existence makes them monsters of selfishness. They are the logical outcome of our predatory social system. They are like the insects which we are told will some day triumph over other forms of life. At least, I think of them as such when I encounter them rushing thither and yon over the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through the air, their shiny wing-cases flashing in the sun and the sound of their progress making a buzz in the newspapers. Well! as I said, it was curious. Curious I should have found my girl in such surroundings, growing there like a straight, healthy plant, just blooming in a bed among all those old decayed and discarded people of the world. Curious, too, I thought, that these people, like old Croasan, had rejected life. Though they were, if anything, less estimable than he was, for he defied life, in his silly, senile, drunken way, while they seemed simply scared of it.

"But we weren't. We had, you may say, nothing in common, but we were not afraid of life, and that is the great thing. To me it was wonderful, the experience of courage and curiosity, because I had been brought up to shrink from contact with reality, to keep myself unspotted from the world. It may be, therefore, that I am only describing to you perfectly normal emotions. It may be that I had profited nothing by my long probation. It may be: I cannot tell. I am not a believer in a vicarious existence, living by proxy and tallying each minute, each crisis, by something in a book. Nobody could love literature more than I; but I am sure at the same time that, while life may chance to be literature, literature is not life. It can't be. There was the doctor with his Book of the Dead. Do I judge him? Not I. It may be he was a great genius who will be immortal as we count immortality. To him I was, possibly, a mere annoyance, an impertinent interlude in his entrancing studies of his mouldy mummies, indecorously calling his attention to the existence of a modern effete civilization. I don't know. I never took the trouble to find out. He never materialized again. He moved back into the shadows; a name, tall, pale and with a black beard, passing in his little launch, at the call of the code-flag P.

"Well, there it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness of their posthumous fame, and I—I doubt. There is a tinge of theatricality about it all. I doubt. It is not so much that I regret my own failure to copy their example, but rather that the stories don't tally with my own experience. Often, when I tire of a novel, I ask myself why? And the answer is, This isn't the way at all! People aren't like that. Love isn't like that either. While as for hate, there is very little of it in the world, I fancy, but rather ill-temper and selfishness and indifference. These make for futility, just as our uncertainty of ambition does. We grope.

"You may imagine that I was not justified in saying in so many words that I was no gentleman, that I was prejudicing myself in that man's eyes, wantonly. I don't defend it altogether, I was eager at the time, full of the radical philosophy of the period, anxious to stand on my own feet. I saw men in the flat, so to speak. Men and women. They were decorative forms rather than souls like myself. My girl had been like that, too, when I first saw her, a decorative form, exquisite, pathetic, entrancing. But the magic of the business was that slowly she was emerging from among those figures of two dimensions and coming to sit beside me, a companion. I had never had one before. There might never have been such a thing happen before to anybody, it seemed so strange and so astonishingly fortunate! For years I didn't get used to it. And if I am, in a way, accustomed to the idea now, it is only the occasional veiling of a vision, a breathing on the glass, as it were. At sea it will come upon me like a dream of misfortune—if we had never met, if—if—if! Who can tell?

"Mr. Hank and Rebecca were sitting in the little room upstairs one evening when I came in for Rosa and I told them my adventures at the Hotel Robinson. They were drinking whisky, I remember, and talking together in a low tone, like conspirators. Rebecca laughed.

"'Ah!' said she. 'I scared him that time, eh, Oscar?'

"'You!' he answered in good-humoured contempt. 'You made a big mistake there, my dear.'

"'Well,' she retorted. 'And who was it gave me the tip? Who was it said that English doctor was worth trying, eh?'

"'I did,' said Oscar, looking at me and winking, 'but I didn't tell you to go and make a fool of yourself and spoil the game.'

"'Easy to say that after,' she grumbled, and became aware of me looking at both of them in great perplexity.

"'Non capisce', she added to her husband.

"'The doctor mentioned a painful incident,' I remarked.

"'The devil he did!' they ejaculated, looking at me in astonishment, and Rebecca went on. 'It was nothing at all, you know. I thought he was a man. There was me sitting in the tramcar with Rosa on my lap, three or four years old, and he comes in by-and-bye and sits down opposite. And Rosetta—you know how little girls will take a fancy to a gentleman—Rosetta holds out her hands and smiles at him like a little angel. He was leaning his hands on his stick and she reached out and took hold of it and says 'la-la!' And I says 'see the nice gentleman's stick,' and she gurgles 'la-la!' again. Cunning! What a bird she was! And you'd think any human-made man 'ud give the duck a penny and say how pretty she was. Not he. He sat there like a stone until I caught his eye and bowed to him.'

"'Fancy that!' said Mr. Hank in some contempt. 'Because I told her he was the doctor of the ship when Rosa was born, she thinks he's the father and goes up to the Hotel Robinson and wants money. Clever woman!'

"'Well,' said Rebecca, 'you didn't have any more luck with your Mrs. James. You got a flea in your ear there, didn't you? You had a great idea she was Rosa's mother.'

"'If you'd listened to what I told you, you'd never have run away with the idea there was any money in the doctor for you. There was some sense in what I did, because it would have cut both ways. But you would interfere. You look surprised, Mister,' he said to me, chuckling.

"Of course, I was surprised. I sat there open-mouthed. It is extraordinary how a man may become suddenly aware of unsuspected heights and depths in human life. It may be that I have always been less sophisticated than most. I am continually overlooking the shabbiness and rascality of the world, I find, in spite of the early apprenticeship which I served among business friends. I have often envied men this alertness of mind, this ever-present consciousness of the obliquity of human nature. And yet, I am not certain it is an enviable quality. I have a suspicion that those who have it envy us who lack it. They seem to have for us a half-contemptuous, half-respectful liking. So with Rebecca. She patted my arm and said to her husband:

"'Let him alone. He's all right, is Rosa's sweetheart.'

"At that moment Rosa came in dressed to go out with me. She had a white boa, I remember, and a white felt hat with a broad brim. She looked from one to the other and then back at me. 'What's the matter?' she said.

"'Nothing; only saying we ought to think about getting settled soon,' I said, laughing, and we all laughed. And then, as we two passed into the narrow, twisted staircase to go down to the street, I heard Rebecca say quietly, 'Did you hear what he said, Oscar? Did you, eh?'

"But, you know, I wanted to get clear of it all. I was more than ever set upon it. I understood better than ever Rosa's vague dislike of a life spent among the people she had known. It was nothing to me that Rebecca and her husband were potential blackmailers or that little Mr. Sachs, 'representing Babbolini's,' also represented a possible life-long neighbour if we lived at Sampierdarena. It was Rosa who felt the impossibility of it, and the subtle antagonisms of her environment. She knew, though she had no words for it, that there was a fuller life for us somewhere else. She would read an Italian translation of some English book, Barnaby Rudge or The Old Curiosity Shop, and when I came back to her she would ask me about my country. I was often astonished to find how little I knew about it! What I did know was out of books. Humph!

"And what little I had known was fading voyage by voyage. Only rarely was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all. Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb cathedral—they were no kin of the men who built it or the men who prayed and worshipped in it either. Indeed, you can often find the cathedral empty and a sheet-iron shack round the corner near the railroad full of men and women shouting their heads off. And the rich people who lived in the castles had not much in common with the men who built them. It wasn't, mind you, that I was envying these people or even quarrelling with them. It wasn't that they were not orderly and hard-working and conscientious. They were all that. No, it was a curious impression they gave me of being only half alive. I used to watch them in church, in saloons, in theatres, and they seemed oppressed by some malign invisible fate standing over them and taking much of the sparkle out of their souls. I was oppressed, too, by the same influence. I used to wonder what it was. Only at the football matches did it seem to lift at all. I always enjoyed the football. It was there you could catch in their faces the light of battle and the lust of conflict. There their features were sharpened to the tenseness you find hardened into a type here in America, men who are alive! But most of the time each class was oppressed by the one above it. Away at the top was the great shipowning peer, the colossus of that particular part of the country, an ominous and omnipotent figure. Below him were other shipowners, smaller fry, living in fine houses where they had made their money, connected by marriage with the next below, still smaller shipowners and men who had built up successful repair-shops and ship-stores. Next came the retired ship-masters, living in villas named after their last commands, and skippers still at sea, their wives watching each other like cats at church on Sunday. Then, in tiny semi-detached brick boxes up narrow streets behind all these you would find mates and engineers packed like sardines. Their families, I mean. I often used to think of the abstract folly of these men calling such places 'home' when they sometimes were away years on end. Our chief mate took pity on me one week-end and invited me over to his house at Hartlepool. I forget which Hartlepool it was, it doesn't matter now. I remember, however, that we had to make several connections on branch lines to get there, and it was a continuous stampede from saloon to junction and from junction to saloon. I couldn't understand it at first, for the mate was a decent, wide-open sort of chap, and fairly sober considering he had once been master and so had an inducement to drown dull care. But I discovered that his wife wouldn't have it in the house, and he was fortifying himself against a 'dry week-end.' It certainly was dry to me. The house, partly paid for when he had a collision and lost his job in the Fort Line, was still called Fort William after his ship, and I could see that the name-plate had been carved out of teak by the carpenter to please 'the old man.' How were the mighty fallen! You know, there was something pathetic to me in that man's drop from master to mate. To him it was more than pathetic, it was the next thing to the end of the world. He was just an average seaman. He had no culture, no art, no religion, no philosophy to support him or act as a substitute in such a misfortune. Even his children did not seem to compensate him. Rather they aggravated the case. They could no longer be referred to as Captain Tateham's children. He was only plain Mr. Tateham now, Fred to us; and when the Corydon was going out through the dock-gates to make the tide, anybody who wanted might see Mr. Tateham on her forecastle head, standing glumly in the rain amid a tangle of ropes and half-boozed sailors and wisps of steam from the windlass. Here was the same thing over again as occurred in our own case. The root of it all was pride, the cursed pride that makes each class ape and envy the one above it, and stamp on the faces of the one below. Here it was, and it was England. This man had a grand little wife and three beautiful clever children winning scholarships at the grammar-school. He had a microscopic home partly paid for and a safe-enough competency. Yet, because he had slipped a cog he was damnably unhappy. His pride was bruised. Fate had given him a nasty knock. He shook his head when I spoke hopefully of him getting a command in our company. His wife said nothing. Of course, although I didn't know it then, for, as I have said, I do not naturally suspect men, the fact was she knew and the owners knew and the underwriters knew why he had had a collision. She had her reasons for keeping liquor out of the house. It was not a very happy week-end for me, for the sight of those two straight, intelligent lads and their charming, golden-haired sister turning and turning inside that tiny house just because it was Sunday and a visitor was present, got on my mind. I saw away ahead, and wondered if they would have any luck in their fight with gentility! Humph!

"No, I was not enamoured of what I saw of England. And I found I was reluctant to go to my own home. I suppose it had so many regrettable memories. Anyhow, voyage after voyage I put off my visit, and so one trip, coming home to Tyne Dock, I found I had put it off once too often. My mother, who had been living at Brighton, was dead. It is curious how the sea seems to sterilize the emotions in some natures. Perhaps I am wrong, and judge the general from the particular. Perhaps we are deficient in power to express grief. Perhaps we don't feel it. I don't know. I have known men at sea who raved about their parents' perfections and I was unable to sympathize and regale them with anecdotes about my 'old lady.' I couldn't. I don't remember ever talking to anybody about my mother. That isn't to say for a single instant, however, that I didn't esteem her. We simply were not designed to fit into the same scheme. We were of different generations. We were of cross-grained stuff, if I may say so, dour and tough and ill to match with common deal, and our roots were sunk in the restless, estranging sea.

"And so once more I came to London, a wanderer, noting what had been built and what pulled down. London! Never for a single day will they let it alone. It is like some vast cellular organism asprawl on the Thames mud, forever heaving and sweating and rotting and growing. A fungus, a sponge, sucking in the produce of continents, sending out the wealth of empires. I used to stand on London Bridge and watch the steamers loading and discharging from the grimy overhanging warehouses. A busman's holiday, you say. But there didn't seem anything else to do while I was waiting for a ship. I found my old British Museum Reading Room pass among my papers at home and I used it one day to look in upon my bygone haunts. It gave me a shock to see some of the same old grey-haired men and women reading out of the same silly old tomes. Yes! I was almost ready to swear one old girl was at the same page as I left her years before. And the suggestions in the manuscript complaint book! Good Lord! I glanced at it as I wandered round, for it had often amused me in the past to see the weird and wonderful volumes the authorities were asked to procure. And here I found some crazy soul had demanded the first volume of the Chinese Zetetic Society's proceedings. Another complained of a lack of text-books treating of secret societies in the Tenth Century. And the world was going round outside all the time! I looked at them, these men and women—their shoulders humped as they scratched with their absurd quill-pens, their faces pallid with the light reflected from the pages. Some few, as though to show what a farce the whole business could be, had got out a perfect library of books, bastions of them, and lay back in their chairs, snoring. I couldn't bear it. I had to get out. The air was stifling me after the open sea, so I left that subsidized lunatic asylum and took the steamboat up the river to Hammersmith. It was spring, late spring, and there was a whisper in the air that meant, if I read it rightly, love and romance and youth. It was all round me as I walked out to Ealing. It was in the orchards as I rode on that old horse-omnibus that used to run between Ealing and Brentford. And next day I left the hotel and went out to where we used to live, on the Northern Heights, Gentility's last ditch before they succumbed to the onward rush of the street car and the realty agent! Spring was whispering there too, creepers were growing over new villas, new streets were scored across our old cricket and tennis ground by the church, an old tavern had been rebuilt in the very latest Mile-End-Road style. Our old house had a motor garage built on one side of it, a green-roofed shack. Many of our neighbours had For Sale boards over their gates. Some had gone. A couple of brick pillars with stone pineapples on top of them had been put up at the entrance to a farm on the other side of the railway and a board said it was the site of Ashbolton Park, a high class residential estate. Some residents, I observed, were making a stand. One old lady, who had lived all her life on the Great North Road, and who was resolved to die there, had built a brick wall right round her little estate, a brick wall with a high, narrow iron gate in the middle, through which you could see the sullen Georgian house crouching at the back, like a surly old bear. Must have been a joyous household. I looked for my old sweetheart's home. It was there, but strangers lived in it. A servant I spoke to on her way to the post told me they had been moved to Chislehurst some time. The last ditch! In a way I felt it, this crumbling and withering of the old order, the order of which my parents had vainly tried to become companions. For it was typical of England. I felt it most when I walked out on the Great North Road through Barnet and saw the huge notice-boards up over the walls of princely domains, telling me how this desirable property and that magnificent country seat was to be sold at auction at Tokenhouse Yard on such and such a date. It was hitting the seats of the mighty, you might say, this insidious growth and crumble and decay. Nothing could stand against it. The strong, stark virtues, the high courage and honour and fine courtesy, the patronage of arts and letters and religion which was the spirit of that old order, were all gone, and now the very shell and imitation of it was going, and we must prepare for the new people and their new ways. A new world. Only the road, the Great North Roman Road, seemed never to alter. A few inches more metalling, perhaps, another generation of menders, and so on. The traffic, of course, was different, for the traffic is the world. Indeed, when you stop and reflect, you will see that a great road like this one I was walking on that warm spring day, is a pulsing artery. London, that immense heart, with its systole and diastole, its ebb and flow and putrefying growth, lay beating behind me. Ahead lay that grey, brooding North, that vast coal-field whose output had made us masters of the world. Take it how you will, you must have roads. That is America's need to day—roads. Without roads no art, no literature, no real progress. No canals or railroads will do. Canals are too slow, railroads too fast. It is true they have brought trade and prosperity to the Great North West and the Great South West and the Great Middle West and all the other wests; but you cannot build up a great civilization on railroads. You must have roads, with pilgrims, or hoboes if you like, and artists and poets on foot, and taverns and talk. Railroads are the tentacles of plutocracy. Roads are democratic things.

"I was thinking very much on these lines that day and I was in the little hollow just beyond the Kingmaker's obelisk. The sun had gone down behind Mill Hill and the evening was full of blue shadows, full of the odour of smoke and sap, full of mysteriously comfortable silences. For a few moments that particular rod, pole or perch of the great road was empty save for me and a lamplighter on a bicycle, who was coming towards me, riding one hand, his torch over his shoulder, a sort of elderly Mercury illuminating an empty world. On the left the great trees stood up close to the road, great shafts, the children of those who had stood there when the legions came up out of the Thames valley and marched north into the jungle. On the right the meadows rolled away eastward towards Enfield and Cheshunt and Broxbourne, meadow and copse and cornland. The lamplighter passed me with a soft buzz and click of sprocket wheels, and looking back at him idly, I caught the sound of the church-clock at Barnet striking the hour. The chime focussed my thoughts on the great peace of the land. Here at any rate, I thought, man has topped the rise. He has accomplished all he set out to do and the result is peace and happiness. I was sentimentalizing, no doubt, for I have never been able to live in the country. But as I stood there, looking back, the spell was broken. I heard a roar of a horn, one of those ear-shattering inventions that paralyze one's faculties, a grinding of gears and a slither of rubber tyres, and then the yell of a human voice. As I turned to jump I was nearly blinded by two enormous headlights. And the voice that had yelled, a half-familiar voice, shouted, 'What the blazes do you go to sleep in the middle of the bally road for, eh?' I couldn't see anything at all until I had reached the grass at the side of the road, when I made out a long automobile standing askew across the road and panting. There was a low, semicircular seat with a man in it behind a large steering wheel, a seat so slanted that its occupant was practically recumbent. He had ear-flaps and monstrous goggles. I had a momentary mental picture of him as some Roman staff-officer rushing back to the base in his chariot. He had an imperious air as he glared at me and backed his machine with one hand to straighten it. I found my voice. I said, 'I have as much right to the road as you.' 'What?' he said, in a high note. 'To stand in the middle and block the traffic. What are you? An escaped lunatic? Have you made your will, hey?' 'Oh,' I retorted, 'If you've bought the road, or the earth, I'll get off it, of course. I should have said you were the escaped lunatic going along at that pace.' He laughed, a high, reedy cackle that seemed familiar, rose stiffly out of his place and stepped down as though he had cramp. 'Ouch!' he said, bending and straightening to unlimber himself. 'Where are we, hey? Barnet? Taking an evening stroll after the office?' And he took off his goggles and I saw my young brother's bright dark eyes and high-bridged nose and sarcastic mouth. He shouted with laughter, went off again into his reedy cry, and screamed, ''Pon my soul, it's Charley! Well, I'm ... Where in the wide, wide world did you spring from? Revisiting the glimpses of the moon? Good heavens!' And he gripped my shoulder.

"That was how we met in after years. He was at his ease at once. I was bewildered. 'By Jove, I nearly did for you that time. Nobody but a madman would stand in the middle of the Great North Road to admire the scenery, old chap. It's suicide. An amateur would have had you in mince-meat.' He stooped to examine his brake. 'Charred, by Jove! And I expect some of the gears are stripped too. Get in.'

"'Get in!' I said in astonishment. 'What for?'

"'Why, come up to town and have dinner with me, of course,' he laughed. 'The Prodigal Son. Which of us two is the Prodigal, Charley? 'Pon my soul, I believe you are. You've been wandering all over the world, I believe. I went to the funeral—you know.' I nodded. 'And the old chap said you were in some frightful hole or other. Well, let me get in and you can sit on the step. I'll take you up to my digs.'

"And that is what he did do, at a speed I could scarcely realize save by the wind that roared past my ears. We dropped down Barnet Hill like a bullet, we rushed through the gloaming with those blinding white beams cleaving the quiet gloom ahead of us and throwing preternaturally sharp shadows that reeled into oblivion like drunken goblins. It seemed to me, after my quiet meditative stroll, a monstrous invasion. We would flash round a curve with a whoop of the horn, and those pitiless rays would suddenly reveal in stark loneliness a man and a girl, clasped in each other's arms. Or they would loom up ahead, walking and lovemaking, and the sound of the horn would strike them to attitudes of paralyzed fear. Once we overtook a party in a trap, jogging pleasantly homeward, and we left them holding for their lives and the horse rearing with terror. I was holding on for my own dear life, for that matter. My brother lay back in his seat and carried on a loud monologue directed at me. He said he had to go to Southampton that night on urgent business, but must dine first. Was going to motor. This was a Stromboli, hundred horse-power racing machine. He was agent for Stromboli's. Had sold a lot of cars at twelve hundred guineas each. Had been up in Scotland staying at a country-house. And so on. I listened, but had nothing to say. He had no interest in my affairs, and every word he said showed me we were nothing and could be nothing to each other. And yet it had so happened that he had been to our mother's funeral, he had played the proper part while I was away on the ocean, a wanderer and a prodigal. He even had, as I saw later, a band of crape on his arm, which somehow I had forgotten to wear. He made me feel insignificant and hopelessly inferior. And suddenly, as I clung there, another thought sprang up in my mind, the possibility that I might even now be on the way to a meeting with Gladys again. Not that I had any rational reason to dread such a meeting. Indeed, it was she who had left me and gone to him. But I did dread it all the same. I knew it would find me tongue-tied and foolish. I could not rise to it and do myself justice. I am, I suppose, too self-conscious and shy.

"And soon we roared into lights and asphalt pavements and the heavy traffic. We crossed Marylebone Road and flew down Baker Street. Even I, ignorant as I was, had to admire the way my brother manoeuvred his huge machine round the buses and cabs. It was skill, sheer skill, with a dash of luck that was very like genius. We were in Piccadilly soon after and then, turning into a quiet street, we stopped and the engine stopped too. A man in livery came running down from the house and I followed my brother up the steps into a richly furnished hall, with Sheraton chairs and Persian rugs and oriental vases. Frank took several letters and a telegram from a green-baize board with pink tape bands cutting it into a diamond-pattern, and beckoned me to follow him upstairs. I did so, and we went into what he had called his 'digs.'

"You must understand, of course, that I am no judge of the way the rich live. I can say truthfully that my tastes are simple. If I had millions I really don't know that I should buy very much. Most probably I should be a miser as regards my own personal expenses. But for all that I could see that my brother's apartment was extraordinarily rich in its appointments. There were so many details you could not imitate cheaply. A man could sit in those rooms, and eat in those rooms and go to bed there and feel that he was rich. He might even feel happy, for they were not only rich and convenient, but comfortable. I was left in a deep leather chair by a wood fire burning in a bronze grate, in a room with chocolate-distempered walls hung with prints in black frames and one or two water-colours in white frames. I looked across at a small cabinet of books just above a writing table covered with many implements in bronze and ivory. For a moment I was reminded of those model rooms in department stores. I suppose that was unfair, but my sea-training had taught me that many tools generally mean a bad workman. Somehow, the moment the rich man blunders into any department of the world's labour, his wealth shows at a disadvantage. And gold pens and silver inkpots and jade paper-weights are as incongruous as ivory-handled sledge-hammers and rose-wood jack-planes, when you come to think of it.

"And if I were to judge such ways of living by that one experience, I should say that a man would eventually lose his sense of interior values. All these beautiful, useful and convenient things would assist him to greater achievement and finer virtue, but it would not be the same achievement and virtue that would emerge if he had stayed down in the arena and lodged with the gladiators in the back-streets. It couldn't be. Perhaps the men who could get the most out of wealthy environment are those like my brother, who simply care nothing for achievement or virtue as such, who live unconsciously for themselves and never have any sense of interior values, as I call them, at all. Their lives are like an exquisite design of nymphs and fauns and satyrs on an Etruscan jar—beautiful, rounded, complete. And inside the jar is nothing but a handful of rubbish....

"So I reflected as I sat in that deep chair and watched the wood-fire burning in the bronze grate. A silent man in a black suit came in and put a decanter and siphon at my elbow and went out again. Suddenly a phrase I had heard at sea came back to me, sharp and resonant. I was talking to old Fred Tateham, the mate, one day, he who had had a collision and lost his command, and he had been telling me his plans for his younger boy. He was going to put him in his brother's office. 'You know,' said he, 'I've a very successful brother.' I forget what this successful brother had succeeded in—some genteel profession like accountancy or attorney. It struck me as amusing at the time, a man boasting of the possession of a successful brother, just as he might proclaim his pride in a clever child or a fine garden or a good terrier. And now the phrase came back as one I could use myself. I had 'a very successful brother.' To confirm this whimsical notion, the successful brother entered the room in evening dress, with a band of crape on the arm and a black tie. He was irreproachable as he stood on the rug snapping black amber buttons into his cuffs and settling his shirt-front. He was so irreproachable that I lost my feeling of discomfort and inferiority in his presence. He leaned his head on the carved stone frame of the fire-place and stared at the flames thoughtfully.

"'You live here alone?' I asked, and he nodded.

"'For long?' He shook his head. 'I never stop long in digs,' he remarked, 'I get sick of them, don't you know, and try fresh.'

"'Where's Gladys?' I inquired, almost without knowing what I said. I was as surprised as he was at such temerity. For an instant he did not know what I meant. 'Gladys,' said he. 'Who the——Oh! now I remember——I don't know. Yes,' he went on, turning back to the fire, 'I remember now, Charley. I don't suppose I looked very well from your point of view, but all the same you haven't come home with a dagger in your sleeve, have you?' He laughed. 'By Jove, you weren't prowling along that road to-night waiting to stab me, were you, Charley? Like some bally foreigner.'

"'You know I wasn't,' I said. 'And besides, I had no selfish reasons for asking. I thought you might be engaged.'

"'I engaged?' he said, and shook his head. 'I'm not a marrying man. I wonder if we're going to die out, we Carvilles. Rotten race, anyhow. We seem to have no luck with our women. The mater was the only one. You should have seen them at the funeral. My God! No luck with our women, Charley. A natural tendency towards the lower middle classes. Don't you ever feel it? Like splashing through mud in dress pumps. I do. It's our curse, I believe. The Curse of the Carvilles!'

"I was so dumfounded at this unexpected piece of gratuitous slander that I sat perfectly still, although the silent servant in black had come in and announced dinner, and my brother was telling me to go and have a spruce-up in his dressing room. It was like being knocked on the head with a wooden mallet. I was stunned. Even when I found myself in a small room full of bureaus and wardrobes and had nearly walked into a double full-length mirror, I still felt stunned. He wondered if we were going to die out, did he. And he assumed, with a blood-freezing fatalism, that we both had a depraved taste in women. I looked round helplessly for a wash-stand and caught sight of a bath-room beyond a blue portiÈre. A natural tendency towards the lower-middle class, if you please! And I was just on the point of telling him about my sweetheart in Genoa! Going into the bath-room, I almost fell into a porcelain bath set in flush with the floor. A huge basin full of hot water stood ready under the nickelled faucets. Soaps of many colours lay at hand. Nail-scrubbers, manicuring tools, towels, sponges, creams, talcum powders, dentifrices, hair-lotions, blue bottles (with vermilion labels marked poison), green bottles marked ammonia, bottles with bulbs and sprays, cases of razors, festoons of strops—all these stood or lay on shelves at my elbow as I proceeded to wash my hands and face with a piece of yellow primrose soap that by some chance was among the welter of expensive brands. No luck with our women, observe. I certainly had had no luck with Gladys. But he, he, to whom women ran as though he were a necromancer, as though he had the secret of some spell that would make them forever youthful and lovely and happy—what complaint dared he make against them? Yet he had formulated the monstrous theory that 'our family' must either succumb to the lower-middle class or die out because of our unfortunate luck with our women. It was one of those propositions which are simply preposterous in theory, but perfectly true in fact. As I washed my face in that expensive basin and rubbed it with the expensive towels and brushed my hair with the expensive ivory-backed brushes, I lighted upon this interesting feature of my brother's thesis. It was true. What I could not get over was how the dickens he had discovered it, living as he did. It struck me as a good example of the cleverness that is so much more useful than either genius or industry. I doubt if he had any clear notion of what was meant by psychology, but he had intuitively divined an obscure flaw in our complicated mentality, a flaw searching back to some unsavoury interlude in our history. Of course, by lower-middle class he meant servants. This silent chap in black, with the hair growing low by his ears, would be of that class, the lower-middle. And—here I put the ivory-backed brushes down carefully and looked at myself as though I saw a stranger in the glass—and what was more, by the same token, was not I, a seafaring man, also one of the lower-middle? Good heavens! I became so tangled up in the new points of view suddenly illuminated by my brother's outrageous remarks that I nearly stepped into his expensive porcelain bath again. And then I heard him calling to me that the soup was getting cold, and I followed the servant into a small dining room singularly bare of everything save the indispensable belongings of a meal. Even the pictures were limited to one on each wall, as though more might distract the diner from his food. Except for a light over the lift opening there were only two electric candles with lemon shades on the table, where my brother sat, bolt upright, eating soup.

"Now, you know, I laughed as I sat down, because I would not have lived in this fashion at all. My idea of comfort, I reflected, was probably lower-middle. It included a high tea, with real food to eat, and a book propped up against the tea-cosy while I ate. Once or twice in my life I have been at the mercy of a table d'hÔte and I was not happy. Passenger ships, for example. They have all sorts of purÉes and consommÉs and entreÉs and fricassÉes and soufflÉs, but very little nourishing food. For some mysterious reason they serve you with a homeopathic dose of each course and then pitch about half a ton of all sorts of things down the garbage shoot into the sea, for the gulls and fishes to gorge themselves on. No doubt, as I say, my notions were wrong and my brother's were right. No use quarrelling about tastes.

"'Why do you laugh, Charley?' he inquired. 'I was thinking of what you said about our unfortunate instincts,' I replied. 'No doubt it is true, but I was wondering how you discovered it.'

"'I should say it was obvious in the past,' he answered gravely. 'As for the present—you and I you know—one has intuitions, what? And I have talked with men of old family, and they have told me of cases they know of.'

"'And you think,' I said, 'that it is a real danger, to marry beneath you?'

"'Yes,' he said, finishing his soup. 'You aren't contemplating it, are you, Charley?'

"'I don't look at life as you do,' I observed. 'I have become rather tired of all this talk about classes. I don't feel myself to be a blue-blooded person at all. I am a seafaring man. Plenty of my shipmates marry into their own class—the lower-middle class.'

"The silent person in black came in with a bottle in a basket, and filled our glasses with a white wine. My brother turned his glass round as he looked at me solemnly. 'I see,' he said, and began to eat his fish.

"'Of course,' I went on, 'your intuitions, as you call them, are quite correct as regards me, because when I marry, she will probably be just what you say. She would be as uncomfortable in a place like this as—as I am.'

"'Good God!' he muttered, staring at me. 'Is it as bad as that? I should have thought you would be glad to live decently when you get the chance.'

"'I have simple tastes,' I answered.

"'So have the beasts of the field,' he retorted, and fixed his eyes moodily upon his wine. I laughed.

"'Far better,' I said, 'to go each his own road and do the best he can. I've been through a good deal, Frank, since I saw you, and I dare say you've been through a lot too, only different. I've worked and been worked upon, and I've come to certain conclusions. There is no place for me in all this ordered English life, with its classes and masses and so on. I was thinking about it this afternoon when you nearly ran over me. Pride is at the bottom of half the misery in England. Personal integrity is all I ask of a man, modesty what I admire most in a woman. As for what you call splashing through mud in dress-pumps, I know what you mean and I avoid it. Worthless women are to be found in all grades. Marriage, no doubt, is a lottery, not only for us, but for the women. I doubt if taking thought ever makes it any less of a lottery. You say we Carvilles have no luck with our women. I wonder what 'our women' would say if they heard you. Are we the last word in humanity? Are we flawless in our integrity and purpose and achievement?'

"My brother shook his head without looking up from his plate.

"'That's not what I meant at all,' he remarked sullenly. 'That sort of thing doesn't apply to women. I was referring to breeding. Women of breeding would not trust themselves to us.'

"'Well,' I said, 'I shan't lose any sleep about it. If I were chief of a passenger ship, the lady-passengers of breeding——'

"My brother waved his hand. 'Let us dry up,' he said. 'You don't understand.'

"But I did! I knew exactly what he meant and many a bitter hour it had cost me when I was infatuated with the convent-bred miss who had trotted after him as soon as he had whistled 'come!' Breeding! The cant of it. The silly dishonesty of it! It is like those little three-by-two front yards you see in suburban streets, the last contemptible vestige of the rolling park-lands and fair demesnes of a far-off feudal time. It is like the silly Latin mottoes and heraldic crests you see on the doors of automobiles. It is a fetish in England. The boy from the great public schools sets the fashion, and all the little tinpot grammar-schools and academies follow suit and ape the clothes and the manners and the speech, the mincing speech, of people of breeding. And the little professional people who live in suburban villas do the same. They all worship and fear the fetish, the Collar-and-Tie god. You had better fasten a mill-stone about your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea than say or be or do anything their despicable little code considers ill-bred. Oh yes, I knew what my brother meant by breeding, but my experience had not tallied with what I had been taught. Sometimes I have fancied that some strain of chivalry had kept him under the illusion of birth and gentility. And then I have come to the conclusion that he was one of those who see things so objectively that they impress one as automatons. They don't learn, they know. They live in the world as if it was their home. They use their passions and desires as animals use their instincts. They have no diffidence before the great facts of life. And having this franchise in their pockets, so to speak, this permanent pass to every quarter of the City of the World, having this animal candour of outlook, they are naturally inarticulate. They are easily misunderstood because self-expression is foreign to them and they have no interest in abstract propositions as such. They pick up a phrase and play with it for a while, just as a kitten will play with a ball, or a puppy will walk round with a piece of wood in his mouth, pretending it is a bone. My brother was a good example, I thought, of this. What he said sounded true, and as far as he knew was true, because he had not got it out of books. A man of 'good family' had put the idea into his head. No doubt he would forget it in a month or so. And whatever he might think or hear or say, he would go on living his very untrammelled life, unabashed by Time or the perplexities of existence, until....

"And here I stopped in my reflections, for I am giving you now my thoughts as I walked back to my lodgings in Bloomsbury. I stopped, for it occurred to me that a man whose course is untrammelled may easily get beyond the bounds set by the unimaginative laws of the community. In plain words, I stopped to wonder admiringly what would become of him, supposing he didn't break his neck in his own motor-cars. I had seen him start, the eight cylinders of his monstrous and ridiculous machine thundering their unmuffled exhaust into the night and scaring the passing cab-horses. He had moved off with a wave of the hand, rather preoccupied with a portmanteau that was strapped beside him, moved off down Piccadilly towards Chelsea and Clapham. I reflected, as I passed the sombre, crouching shadow of the Museum, now he was flying under the stars along the Surrey roads, the great beams splitting the darkness ahead of him, the dust of his passing settling on the hedgerows and soiling the wayside turf. And to what end, I wondered, did my successful brother rush headlong through the night? To achieve greater success? To preach his gospel of breeding? To succour Gentility in distress? I wondered and went to bed.

"No, I did not see him again until long afterward, and in very altered circumstances, as they say. The harm he did me on this occasion did not come home until later, when in Italy again, I read in an Italian journal some of the details of the affair. A wave of anger swept over me then, I remember, at having been so far fooled as to preach to him my gospel of integrity in men and modesty in women, while he was deep in tortuous finance and unprofitable intrigues. Mind you, I don't know now the rights of the affair. The counsel for the defence made a brilliant effort to establish a case of the chivalrous shielding of a lady. He claimed that the accused had been lured to destruction by the voices of sirens. A man of brilliant social gifts, he had been carried away, intoxicated, by his success and had promised more than he could perform. The very fact of the lady (of rank) not coming forward, but leaving the prosecution in the hands of the trustees, was a proof that the accused was more sinned against than sinning. And so on and so forth. It was all in the Weekly Times. I walked up to the Galleria Mazzini one fine evening and sat in the Orpheum reading the latest performance of my successful brother. But the Italian paper which first told me about it dealt with the incident from the artistic side. There are a good many Italians in Egypt, as you know, and this paper had a correspondent in Cairo with a sharp pen that cut little cameos of the cosmopolitan life that centres round the Esbekiah Gardens. For my brother had gone to Southampton on urgent business. His business was so urgent that he crossed to France that night and went straight to Marseilles, where he sailed in a Messageries Maritimes boat to Egypt. The article in the paper was called The Flight into Egypt. The new arrival at Shepheard's Hotel was the life of the English visitors still staying on in Cairo. Parties who had been living among the Beduin in the desert came back for a week at Shepheard's and were entranced with him and his hundred-horse-power car. The daughter of a Beyrout ship-chandler who had retired and built a house at Heliopolis was infatuated with him and tried to monopolize him at the dances. Incidentally we learned that his hotel expenses were five pounds a day. This interested me keenly, because at the same time I was living in ample comfort on exactly five shillings a day. I suppose, I don't know, for I've never had the money to try it—but I suppose there is a snap and a tang about a life that costs five pounds a day, which is irresistible to some souls. Or is it that the cost of things never enters into these untrammelled people's heads at all? I wonder.

"But for all my personal interest in that Italian article and the black ending in Bow Street and a sentence of three years, I appreciated the author's treatment of his subject. He made a short story of it in the manner of Flaubert, minute, vivid and grim. He showed the weekly dances wearing thin at the end of the season, the daughters of the Levantine ship-chandlers, and Greek tobacco merchants, and Maltese petty officials, looking rather bleak at the prospect of another barren summer in Alexandria, when a new planet suddenly swims into their ken, young, rich, handsome, fascinating. They wake up again and the fight begins. You can see the Italian journalist, small, dark, with a pointed beard, pointed shoes, and sharp points of light in his dark eyes, hovering on the edge of the dance or perhaps taking a turn with the Levantine lady, observant and urbane. Things go on like this for a week or so when, the P. and O. boat from Brindisi having arrived at Port Said the day before, two English strangers arrive at the hotel. There is a dance that evening. I don't suppose this was strictly true, but I can understand the artistic pleasure it would give the Italian journalist to make little changes like that in his story. You remember Sir Walter Scott's confessed passion for giving a story 'a new hat and stick.' Well, there was a dance that evening, let us say, and the ladies, tired of the eternal English officer who never intends to let matters come to a head; tired of the French Canal clerk with his little friend in Alexandria; tired, perhaps, even of the witty and urbane Italian journalist, who I imagine loved his Genova la Superba, his Chianti and the keen air and heavenly blue of his Ligurian Apennines far more than he did that flat Delta full of all the half-breeds of the world—the ladies waited expectantly for the return of their new inspiration from Heliopolis, where he was gone with a party in his hundred-horse-power car. They wait in vain. Later the party return, somewhat puzzled themselves, explaining that two gentlemen had come out and interrupted the affair by drawing Mr. Carville aside and conversing with him inaudibly. And Mr. Carville makes his excuses. He apologizes to the Beyrout ship-chandler and everybody else, but he must leave with his friends for Port Said at once and catch the homeward-bound mail-boat. His presence is urgently demanded on business in London. The company gape. But our friend, the Italian journalist, doesn't go in for gaping. His business is, after all, news, and he burrows round, interviewing and telegraphing brothers of the craft until he lays bare the rather pathetic story. He doesn't tell it among his friends in the Land of Egypt. At any rate, he says he doesn't. He saves it for his home paper and lavished a lot of literary skill upon it. I imagine he got a good deal of fun out of my brother while he stayed in Cairo.

"And so, you see, my successful brother had experienced a serious set-back. I had a grim feeling that the women, 'our women,' as he had called them, would feel it far more in their seclusion in Surbiton than he would in his seclusion in—wherever he was. My feelings, in fact, were so grim that Rosa was perplexed, but I told her how my mother was now dead and I had no one in the world save herself. But at times I thought of our affairs gloomily. It seemed a poor end to our parents' fine dreams for the future—him so seriously set back, you may say, and me ploughing the ocean....

"And then it so happened that I got a chance of promotion on the spot. I'd been Second of the old Corydon a good while, when the Callisto, a cattle-boat, came in from the Argentine. The chief had taken sick and been buried at sea. The owners telegraphed I was to take the post, and they would send out another Second. It was very exciting, of course, getting in charge at last. It is extraordinary, the weight of responsibility that settles down on you all at once. Matters that you used to settle out of hand assume a new aspect when you yourself become the ultimate authority. It doesn't matter how hard a man has to work as Second, or what his troubles may be, he's always got the Chief behind him. He can sleep easy and deep, as he generally does, poor chap. But the Chief is different. He becomes a fatalist. He can't sleep. He has to make his decisions and keep his forebodings locked in his own breast. He becomes preoccupied with an absurd weight of care. He realizes that he cannot step round the corner and get the overlooker's advice. He is alone on the wide sea, and if he cannot solve his own problems, none can help him. And that is good spiritual discipline for a young man. He finds out then what he is really made of.

"And Rosa was excited too, for it meant we could soon get married and live in passable comfort almost anywhere we liked. It was a happy time for us. You see, we had grown accustomed to each other's ways and habits. We had struck a sort of average, and knew pretty well what pleased and what jarred each other. That, I imagine, is one of the secrets of living with a woman. Being simply considerate won't do, though, of course, it is necessary. But what a woman does hate is being startled with some fresh habit or idea. It spoils her illusion, her necessary illusion, that she knows all about you.

"I did not tell her anything of my successful brother's performances, though I have heard that a man always tells his sweetheart all the disreputable side of his family history. What he forgets to tell her she worms out of him after they are married. It may be so. I must be an exception, then. As I have said, Rosa was curious about England, and in trying to answer her questions I discovered I didn't know very much about England myself. But I said nothing about our family and their poor luck with their women. Perhaps I divined what an attractive tale my successful brother's escapades would seem to a romantic girl. There was a dare-devil glamour about everything my brother did that fascinates some minds. Indeed, it fascinated mine. But I was cured of glamour. My early love affair had left me a feeling of panicky fear of romance. Perhaps there is Puritan blood in us; but I feel that passion in itself is evil. I wanted no more of it. I looked forward to domestic life, my own vine and fig tree. Some day, I dreamed, I might write another little book. At night, when all was running smooth, I'd put down odds and ends.... Some day, perhaps. I don't think I shall fret, though, if nothing comes of it.

"I liked my new job. The Callisto was a much bigger ship than the Corydon, and more modern. Certainly cattle are very unpleasant cargo, and when we came into Genoa Harbour and the ship was being cleaned up, you could smell her clear away to the Galleria Mazzini! But at sea, on the long run south to Buenos Ayres, it was none so bad. I was looking forward to my marriage, you see. I was saving money and I was beginning to forget the past. It is easier for a seaman to do that than for anyone ashore. A sailor's past is all in pieces, so to speak. He can drop it bit by bit. But when you live ashore in one place, your past is like a heavy log that you're tied to and can't quit.

"Anyway, one night in Buenos Ayres, when I went ashore to mail a letter to Rosa, I was in good spirits. I reflected that, after all, my father's dreams of founding a family were not necessarily impossible. My brother's behaviour had nothing to do with it. I was going to marry Rosa. If we had children they would have a chance. But just as Rosa would not hear of Italy, so I was resolved with all my might against living in England. My children should never come under the influence of that gentility that had spoiled our early lives. For the old families in England who have been steeped in it for centuries, for men like Belvoir, for instance, I dare say it is an admirable plan. But not for me nor for mine. I had been writing about it to Rosa and I'd put at the bottom, 'America?'

"Another thing I wanted to do ashore was to call at the Sailors' Home and see if they could give us a Mess-room Steward. The young fellow who had shipped that voyage had deserted. They are always doing it in the Argentine. Wages are very high and they all think that they can do well up country. They sign on just to get their passage free. The ship was in Number One Dock, loading grain, and I walked across the bridge, up San Juan and took a trolley car along Balcarce to the Plaza de Mayo. It was a fine evening in September, quite cool after dark. I was rather pleased with myself, too. The boilers had opened up uncommonly well; the Second knew his work, and I had nothing to do but keep an eye on things in general. I posted my letter, and after walking up and down the Avenida de Mayo for a while, went down to the Parque Colon to get a car back. The trolleys of Buenos Ayres are a bit puzzling to a stranger because the routes go by numbers. I knew nothing about the car I wanted except that it had the number 'Forty-eight' on the bows.

"The Parque Colon is a large place running parallel with the Number Three Dock, full of big trees, and the avenues through it are rather dark. Considering how close it is to the busy part of the city it is lonely. Men have been found on the seats—dead! I daresay you have heard of Buenos Ayres. Like any other city where money can be made quickly, like London, like New York, Buenos Ayres is full of crooks. I believe they do their best to keep the place clean, but at that time it was pretty bad. The Skipper warned me to carry a revolver whenever I went ashore. Personally I'm against firearms. You generally find, after a row, that the dead man had a revolver in his hand. Unarmed strangers are not often touched.

"Number Forty-eight was a long while coming. Car after car came down the steep incline of Victoria and turning round eastward rumbled off along Paseo Colon. I walked a few steps down one of the dark avenues and sat down on a seat to finish my cigar. It was like walking into a dark room. I could hear the roar of the city, yet at the same time I could hear some local sounds plainly. A musty smell came up on the breeze from the river. Suddenly I heard the long deep note of a steamer's whistle: the Mihanovich Mail Boat leaving for Monte Video. I sat there quietly, thinking of nothing in particular, just glancing up now and then to note the numbers of the trolleys. At the sound of the whistle, though, I fell to thinking of Mihanovich. What a romance that man's life must have been! They tell me that about forty years ago he'd landed in that place, a Russian Pole, ignorant of the language, without any money or friends, a low-down beach-comber. And here he was, a millionaire. Every tug on the river has his big M on the funnel. He had fleets of steamers, mines, railways, banks; and he was even tendering for the contract of the new docks the city wanted. No wonder others came to make their fortunes. No gentility needed to make him succeed. And thinking of him, somehow I began to wonder if my brother might not make good out in the colonies say, some distant part of the world. Some time before this my uncle had told me that Frank had been released. Good behaviour had reduced his time to about twenty months. Surely, if he started in some place where they didn't ask too many questions he might get another chance. And I hoped so. I had no malice against him. He was one of those who can't keep their nature down; women were the curse of him. Well, perhaps prison had changed him. My uncle had said that he was 'changed,' but that might be for the worse. And just when the old chap was deciding to pay the passage out to New Zealand—buy him a ticket and see him on board—my brother had vanished again.

"Mind you, the interest I took in the matter was, you might say, purely dispassionate. I turned the case of my brother over in my mind as you might turn over the problems of a book you are half through. I'm not sure that at the moment when I was interrupted I was not smiling at the insane life he had led. For me, in spite of my sea-going business, life was settled, sedentary, monotonous. You can talk if you like of the romance of the sea, you may call it picturesque, but you cannot call it melodramatic. Personally I dislike melodrama. I dislike violent passion of any sort. I was thinking of all this and, as I say, smiling, when I heard tip-toes behind me, and before I could turn round I felt my throat held between two hands and my head pulled sharp over the back of the seat."

Once again Mr. Carville paused, opened his little brass box and took therefrom his piece of twist. With meticulous precision he pared and pared the required amount for his pipe, and began to roll it between his palms, his eyes fixed reflectively upon the geranium tubs. He had pushed his hat back a little, and above his steady grey-blue eyes there shone a pink unruffled brow.

"Once or twice in my life," he went on, "I have had a severe shock. Let me explain what I mean. A man brought up as I had been, in a genteel way, gets unaccustomed to physical violence. At school fighting was barred very strictly. In the works we pupils had no need to speak to the men at all. The first time I was ever struck was when I was a pupil. One of the apprentices thought I had been at his tools, came up and hit me a terrific blow on the chin. To anybody used to fighting it would have been nothing. It made me ill for a week. Of course, at sea I'd grown a good bit harder, but I'll never forget the first time a fireman went for me. There was always with me a feeling of outrage so to speak, a feeling not at all towards the man who struck me, you understand, but against myself, against a world that had made me what I was, soft and unskilled. That seems to me a peculiar weakness in our genteel civilization. You go along, for years perhaps, living a quiet, orderly, intellectual life, protected by law, by the Army and Navy, by the Police and by all 'the conventions of good society,' and then suddenly a man comes up and gives you a punch on the jaw! A very weak place in our civilization, I think?

"And, moreover, it brings into sharp relief another feature of our civilized life and that is our impotence to utilize our total experience. With a dog, a tiger, or a savage at the moment of attack, all his instincts, all his habits, all his intuition and ingenuity and physical advantage are automatically rushed to the front and flung upon the enemy in the most effective way possible. But the civilized man is 'all abroad.' His glasses fall off his nose, he loses his balance and his breath, he flinches, goes blind with helpless rage and indignation, and is held in contempt by the very policeman he pays to take the job off his hands and lock his enemy up. It's no exaggeration to say that some of us lack that power of instantly marshalling our faculties, maintaining a clear view and keeping the blood out of our eyes, which is called 'presence of mind.' It is a good phrase, that, because an intellectual person, when he is attacked with sudden violence, hasn't for the time being any mind at all. He is just a heap of nerves, a compound of puerile passion and hysterical protest.

"It seemed to me that my throat was held for a long time, in that grip. As a matter of fact it could not have been more than a couple of seconds. But it seemed long. It seemed to me as though the pressure, which was choking me to begin with, increased and increased. The power of it was not like the power of a machine, but evil, personal, spiteful. I remember I shut my eyes. I remember hot breath on my face. And then I remember a blank. In my memory it is like a space between inverted commas, without anything written. A blank....

"My head had slid down against the back of the seat, my knees were all cigar-dust, and my hat had fallen off, when I opened my eyes. I heard someone say, 'Sit up, for God's sake!' and I tried to do as I was told, to 'sit up for God's sake.' Somebody was sitting beside me, pulling at my shoulder. Now and again I heard him say, 'You damn fool!' He was angry with me then. I wondered what I'd done to make anybody angry. I tried to think. I'd been sitting on a seat in the Parque Colon. Very good. Why was I a damn fool? I decided to argue the point with this chap. I struggled up and felt for my hat. I heard him say, 'Listen, you fool!' There he was again. Always a fool. Then he said, 'Well, look then, if you can't hear,' and he struck a match and held it before his face. Humph!

"He pinched the match between his fingers and we were in the dark again. He said, 'Well, Charley, old man, that was a near squeak for you, a damn near squeak. What the devil d'you go sitting round a place like this for?'

"I remember being very much amused at this. He was actually angry with me! He had nearly choked the life out of me, and he was angry with me! I had nothing to say. My tongue seemed glued to my teeth. I brushed my hat and began to look for my cigar. What I was really looking for was my wits.

"He went on talking. 'Charley,' he says, 'I'm desperate. I'm down and out. For God's sake give me some money? What are you?' he says, 'what are you doing here? I thought you were a sailor. You look prosperous. Give me—lend me some money, or I'll have to take it.'

"While he went on like this, sometimes threatening, sometimes whining, I was collecting my faculties. The feeling that some one had wrapped copper wire tight round my neck was going away. I found my cigar. I struck a match, and by the light of it I saw my brother again.

"Yes, he was down and out. He had not had a shave for a week, his hat had been picked off a rubbish-heap, his trousers were muddied and torn at the knees, his coat was buttoned up to hide his black, hairy chest. He had no shirt. He was down and out.

"I settled in my mind what had happened before I spoke. This brother of mine had apparently made an exception in my favour. He had crept up behind me with the deliberate intention of strangling me and picking my pocket. Seeing my face he had decided that he could pick my pocket without strangling me.

"The curious thing was that I had no feeling of anger towards him. What filled me with a sort of panic was the fact that my brother had come back into my life. I hadn't realized it so plainly before, but he scared me. I suppose he saw something of this in my face, for he says, 'Charley, let bygones be bygones, old man. Help me make a fresh start!'

"'Hold on,' I said. 'The last time I saw you, Frank, you had bags of money. You had my place in the house——.' 'Oh, dry up!' he says, 'never mind what I had, look at me now. Charley, look at me. I've walked every foot of the way from Rosario. I'm broke, cleaned out, desperate. I've nothing to lose.'

"'You never had,' I told him. 'What do you want me to do?'

"Well, what do you think he asked me for? Nothing less than fifty pounds. He seemed to have a mania for fifty pounds. He couldn't demean himself, even in that state, to make it less. You might say he thought in fifties. 'Good God, man!' I said, 'do you think I'm made of money?' 'You look prosperous, Charley. Give me what you have and I'll take the rest to-morrow.' 'I'll do nothing of the sort,' I said. 'Here's my car.' And a Number Forty-eight came down Victoria. 'Is it?' says he. 'It's mine too, then,' and he follows me up to the track.

"When I had sat down in the car I began to think. I didn't know what to do. Evidently my brother had been so absorbed in his own life, so indifferent to anything that had happened to me, that he didn't even know what I was. That didn't prevent him asking nearly three months' wages of me, though! Now, if he saw me go down to the ship he would never let me alone. He sat there in the car near the door, his hands hanging over his knees, his head bowed to hide his chest, the paper ticket twisting in his fingers. That my brother! It came to me with a sudden shock, a spasm, that, as usual, right was on his side. I couldn't leave him like that. And yet what could I do? If I gave him money he would only prey on me again. Never mind: it was my duty to aid him. When the car stopped at the end of Paseo Colon I had made up my mind. I dropped off and waited in the dark shadow of the buildings opposite the Parque Leyema. He came up to me. I could see his lips trembling and his hands clutching. 'Charley, don't you play me false, don't you play me false! My God, Charley, I'll kill you—I'll do something with you, if you play me false.' It was like a child in hysterics. I didn't realize it immediately, but that was just what was the matter with my brother—hysteria. 'Easy,' I said, 'where can I take you? I'm not known here.' 'Take!' he says, 'to your own house, of course.' 'Listen,' I said. 'Do you hear what I say?' He nodded. 'Well,' I went on, 'I'm the chief engineer of a steamer in yon dock. If you come down with me, don't forget there's a sentry with a rifle on that bridge we've got to cross, there's two more patrolling the quay, and there's another armed watchman on board. And, Frank,' I added, 'when a man runs here, they shoot. They find out if he was a criminal afterwards. Understand?' He looked down on the ground, his shoulders moving in a sort of convulsion. 'Come on,' I said.

"He followed me like a shadow over the bridge, along the quay and up the gangway. The watchman saw us come aboard, but otherwise the dock was deserted. My room was on the starboard side, the second door in the alleyway. I looked along and down in the engine-room. The Fourth was down below reading a novel on the bench by the dynamo. All the rest were still ashore—up at the Bier Convent or the Apollo, I suppose. I opened my door and Frank stepped inside.

"'Now,' I said, shutting the ports, 'you're safe.'

"He sat side-ways on the settee, shading his eyes with his hands. Now that I saw him in the cold glare of two thirty-two candle-power lamps, he was awful. I took off my coat and set to work. From a drawer I took out a suit of underwear, socks, a suit of blue dungarees, a flannel shirt, an old cap and a pair of bluchers. I rolled these up in a big bath towel and handed them to Frank. 'Frank,' I said, 'listen.' He nodded. 'See this key? It fits the bath-room. The bath-room is the last wooden door in this alleyway. Go down there, open the door, take the key with you, lock yourself in, switch on the light, have a bath from head to foot, put these clothes on, roll up those rags in the towel and bring them back. If you meet anybody take no notice, act as if you belonged. Here's some soap.'

"I looked up and down the alleyway—no one there. Up and down outside the watchman slouched on the iron deck. Down below was the drone of the dynamo and the wheeze and whine of the Weir pumps. 'Go on,' I said. 'Mind, the last wooden door on the right. Don't go round the corner. Understand?' He looked at me for a moment and then flitted away down the long iron tunnel. I saw him poke about with his key, his body all crouched, the white bundle sticking out behind him. And then he vanished, and the door, heavy teak, slammed.

"I went into the mess-room then, to get some food. The steward as a rule left supper out for the juniors on duty, but as our young fellow had deserted I had to get the joint out of the pantry and carve some cold meat myself. I remember wondering what the Fourth would think if he came up and found the Chief nosing round the provision locker. There's a certain dignity, you see, that you mustn't lower before subordinates. However, he was too busy reading down below. I got a big plate of sandwiches and a slab of currant cake and went back to my room. I had a neat little mahogany dumb-waiter near the settee and I put it up and covered it with a linen towel. I spread the grub on it, and alongside of it I put a flask of whisky and a syphon of soda. I got quite interested. I had no idea of what to do with the man when he was washed and fed and clothed. I got down a box of cigars and set them alongside of the whisky. After all, he was my brother. I thought of the 'lady of high rank.' If she'd seen him as I saw him, she would have been satisfied. What would Gladys think of him? It may have been wrong, but I was rather pleased with myself. I was tickled to be able to help my brother. I knew that it was risky. I had no right to bring him aboard. I sat down to wait, when I saw that I'd forgotten to tie up my canary, and I was hunting for the calico I used at sea when the door opened and my brother came in with a rush.

"It almost seemed as though soap and water had had a magical effect on him. Literally, he wasn't the same man. His arms and legs stuck out of the dungarees, his hair was still damp and hung between his eyes, and his big hooked nose was dark red with towelling. He stood there, his hand on the brass knob, looking at me pinning a piece of calico round my canary.

"He looked at the little dumb-waiter spread for his supper and passed his hand over his face. 'Charley,' he says, 'I must have a shave first. The pangs of a guilty conscience,' he says, 'are piffle compared with the miseries of a beard. Have you a good razor?'

"I had in my room a fold-up wash-stand and shaving-glass. I opened it and pointed to the razors. 'There's no hot water,' I said. 'No hot—Why, Charley, you don't expect a chap to shave in cold, do you? Good God, man!'

"I give him credit for any amount of admiration for my little arrangements. I got out a little tripod spirit lamp with a copper-kettle that Rosa had given me; he was delighted. ''Pon my soul, Charley, you're an ingenious devil! Fancy you living here all so snug and I knowing nothing about it! Like Noah in his Ark, 'pon my soul.' When he began to lather he kept up a running fire of remarks, mostly insulting. 'And what are you here, old man? Admiral? Lord High Muck-a-Muck? They put you up a jolly sight better than they did me in the second cabin of that infernal liner I came over in. Heavens! Old Uncle Christopher wanted me to go to New Zealand. He was cracked about New Zealand; dippy, 'pon my soul. When I asked to see the manager of the affair, you know, the Skipper, they showed me an underbred brass-bound official called a Purser, who said he'd put me in irons if I wasn't civil. Oh, this world has some bounders in it, Charley, my boy. What do you get here, Charley? Pretty good screw, I suppose?' And so he ran on. When he had finished spilling the talcum powder all over the floor, using my brushes for his hair, he turned round and looked over the provisions.

"'Frank,' I said, 'when you've had something to eat and drink, I'll have a talk with you.' 'With pleasure, my dear chap,' says he. 'But what a meal! Mutton and sandwiches, cake and whisky. Is this your usual feed, Charley, may I ask? No wonder you look dyspeptic.' 'We're out of pheasant,' I said. He looks at me and bursts out laughing. 'Charley, my boy, I wonder how much you really will stand.' 'I'll tell you presently,' I said, and went on smoking.

"Dyspepsia didn't scare him much. He went across my dumb-waiter, eating every crumb, drinking every drop of the whisky and soda. Then he took a cigar, snipped it in his big teeth and held out his hand for a match. And then—he was sitting on my red plush settee, while I was in my arm chair—he swung his feet up and lay back on the cushions, puffing the smoke up in great clouds. 'Quite a reader!' he says, waving his cigar towards my book-case. 'You were always a chap for worming.'

"'Frank,' I said, 'we've a long account to settle. Somehow or other we've always been antagonistic. Why?'

"'How do you mean?' he says.

"'What have I done to you, that you should be always turning up and queering my pitch?'

"'Oh, you mean Gladys,' he says laughing. 'No,' I said, 'I don't mean Gladys particularly. I mean everything. Every time we come together you do me a bad turn.'

"'How can I do you a bad turn now?' he inquires blandly. 'I don't know,' I said, 'I don't know.'

"'I can tell you how you can do me a good turn, old man,' he says, sitting up. 'Can't you get me a billet, here? Just to get home, you know.'

"'We don't go home,' I said. 'We're on a time charter between here and Genoa.' 'Oh, that'll do,' he says. 'I can go home from there easily enough.'

"'I can give you a fireman's job,' I said, 'or a greaser's.'

"'A greaser's!' he says, his eyes sparkling at me. 'You say that to me, Charley——' 'Easy,' I said, 'if you shout you'll have some one in here. All the jobs I can give you are inferior. You have no rating on a ship, Frank. I've had to work five years or more for this job. Your automobile engineering is no use to you here, you know. You're down and out, you said just now.'

"'Yes,' he said, 'that's a fact. I must be humble and take anything. Anything, Charley.' 'Well,' I said, 'I can give you a light easy job as steward here for the engineers. If you hustle round you can pick it up. You'll have to swallow all your pride, you know, as I did when I came to sea. You'll have to make beds, tidy up the rooms, lay the table, wash dishes. Will you do it? The last one has just deserted. I was going to get one to-night if I hadn't met you.'

"He lay on the settee a long while, smoking and looking angrily at the books in the case.

"'Mind,' I said, 'this is on condition that in Genoa you clear out and leave me in peace. It's on condition you sign on under an assumed name. I've a position here. If it was known—you understand. I'm the chief engineer and it might cause trouble.'

"'Charley,' he says at last, 'you're a good chap and I'm a rotter. I'm a bad egg, a rolling stone, flotsam, garbage, punk, anything you like that smells to heaven. I hate myself sometimes. It's hate of myself that makes me desperate. But, give me this chance. Perhaps a sea-voyage will brace me up. Genoa, you say? They speak French there, don't they?'

"'No,' I said, 'they speak Genoese.' I couldn't help being a little sarcastic about that. 'But you'll find they speak English at Cook's office.'

"He looked at me for a while, his big eyes blinking through the smoke. He was thinking, I suppose. There's no doubt he has a remarkably active mind. I could feel he was taking in the situation. Suddenly he put his arms up and stretched, his feet crushing against the end of the settee.

"'Charley, my boy,' says he, 'I'll winter in Italy, that's what I'll do. It'll be a change after Rosario,' he says.

"'You can do as you please,' I told him, 'when you're paid off.' 'Until then, you'll have to do what the Second Engineer tells you. Understand?'

"'Oh, yes, Charley, I'll be as humble as dirt,' he says.

"Well, he was. I sent him ashore with a few Argentine dollars to get a bed for the night, and the next morning he comes down to the ship, as meek as milk, and asks the Second for a job. I'd told the Second about him, saying he's been recommended to me by people ashore and so on. I can't say I was very sanguine about the experiment. About the time in port I mean. At sea I had no fears. I knew that the discipline of the sea would be more than a match for any brother of mine.

"I began to wonder, as the days went on, what had become of the man who had sprung up and nearly strangled me that night. It almost seemed as though there was some mistake, as though my brother had vanished into the night and some other beach comber, with a big nose and dark eyes, had applied for the job. Never by any sign did he let on that he had seen me before. When I took him to the cabin for the Skipper to sign him on he gave the name of Frank Freshwater, without batting an eyelid you might say. When he'd gone out again the old man says to me, 'Looks as though he'd been a gentleman, years ago.' I said I believed that was the case, which was the reason folks ashore wanted to help him. 'Ah,' says he, blotting the articles, 'I'll expect he'll run off before we sail, Chief. These gentlemen are slippery customers.'

"My brother didn't run off. He soon got into the way of doing the work of Mess-room Steward. It was wonderful acting. 'More tea, Frank,' I'd say, and he'd jump for my cup—'Yes sir, yes sir.' It got on my mind. Sometimes when I was sitting in my room smoking and reading, I would hear him behind me setting something straight, making the bed perhaps, filling the water bottles, or cleaning the brass-work on the door. He'd never speak to me unless spoken to. If I said, 'Frank, how are you getting on?' he'd say, 'Very well, thanks,' and go out. I would sit there, wondering what had got hold of him. Was he pulling my leg?

"And at sea it was just the same. I expected a change at sea. Not a bit of it. In a way, you know, it's a lonely life I had at sea. It must be, on a ship where there's brass-edging and rigid discipline. The Skipper would take his walk up and down the bridge deck, and I would take mine up and down the awning-deck aft. And having the curious thing locked up in my breast, so to speak, it got on my mind. It sounds strange, but I began to wish my brother would speak to me. I began to recall how, when he was a little chap with long brown curls, he would bawl and storm because his bricks fell down. After all, we were brothers, eh? This politeness of his was too glaring. I felt that if he were to drop in in the evening, after eight bells say, I would let discipline slide enough to have a chat. But no! It was he who stood on his dignity. He would stand there at meals, watchful of my slightest want, watchful of everybody's wants, never saying a word, rigid as a statue. When his work was done he'd disappear into his own room, which he shared with the Second Cabin Steward in the port alleyway, and I wouldn't see him again until seven bells in the morning, when he'd come in with my tea, open the wash-basin, draw the water, set the towel, light the spirit-lamp, lay out my razors and say, 'Twenty past seven, sir.' Me, his brother!

"It gave me an insight, more than anything else could have done, into my brother's character. I saw that his failure was not due to weakness, but to strength. He went his own road. He had his own morality, his own code. Indeed, he almost convinced me that perhaps for him, Good and Evil didn't exist. I used to wonder what he was thinking about while he stood waiting on us, listening to our engine-room gossip, our talk of ships and the sea. Most of it must have been Greek to him, of course. If I stole a look at him, he would glance round the table, as though I had asked for something. It got on my mind.

"And a better mess-man never stepped, they said. Nothing was too much trouble. The Second, a very typical man, without much imagination as far as I could detect, quite startled me by saying, with his eyes wide open and a curious, proud expression on his face, that in his opinion, if the truth were known, 'our new mess-man' was a lord. What amused me was I never could get out of him what made him think so. I said, 'Go on with you. You wouldn't know a lord if you fell over one.' 'Oh, wouldn't I,' he said, turning sulky. I laughed. It just showed you what a tremendous power my brother had over people. And as the days went by, stories came up from various quarters, fabulous stories of 'that new mess-man.' They came up and went down again, and then came up again more fabulous than ever. He knew what he was doing perfectly well, and he showed a remarkable insight into the silly, credulous nature of seamen by the way his adventures were coloured. He never told me anything beyond that he'd had a fierce time. The legends were legends. The second cabin steward, who roomed with him, and a couple of impressionable apprentices, were forever bringing up new variations of the doings of 'that new mess-man.' They told a tale of how he had run through a fortune in no time and had been compelled to run away from his creditors. How? Oh, horses, you know, Newmarket and Epsom, supper parties, going everywhere first class, cigars ... champagne ... and so on. The second cook told the pantry-man 'that new mess-man' was a marvel on the mandolin; had been in an operatic orchestra ... studied abroad. Where? Oh, on the continent. And the old man himself heard a fantastic yarn from somewhere or other and handed it on to me, that 'your new mess-man' had been in the diplomatic service and had been broken 'on account of a woman' at one of these here embassies. 'No!' I said. 'Oh, quite likely,' says the Old Man, though I doubt if he knew any more of embassies than of metaphysics. The story gave an aristocratic sort of tinge to the ship, I suppose. As I say, I didn't know what had been happening in my brother's life of late and I had no great desire to know. Whatever he had done did not prevent him looking after his work. The Second was quite disturbed over the indefatigable way 'that new mess-man' tidied up his room. It was what the newspapers call 'an Augean task,' for the Second was not very neat in his habits. Boots, matches, cigarette-ends, pieces of waste, dirty boiler-suits and torn newspapers and magazines all over the floor. He never would put away his shore-clothes until we'd been at sea a week or two, and he kept a good many small tools under his mattress. Sailor fashion, you know. He had an electric fan, which for want of screws had tumbled into his wash-basin and cracked it. 'That new mess-man' had taken the fan away and jiggered with it until it ran as sweet as ever, and he'd got some cement and fixed the basin, and made a fine job of it! This was the Second telling me all about it. And he thought this paragon was a lord. He seemed to think a lord was an ingenious kind of plumber.

"Of course, as I've tried to explain to you shore folks, I stood too far above the common gossip of the ship to hear everything. Only now and again I was made to realize that my brother was still the same fascinating illusionist. It is a great gift. Don't think I'm not appreciative of it. Indeed, I envied him his power of mixing, as they say, his knack of 'setting the table in a roar.' A great gift! Once, coming along past the galley, where he was talking to a little crowd of cooks and scullions and cattlemen, I saw the bent heads, the eager, sparkling eyes, the parted lips, hanging expectantly on his every word. And, when the joke came, the quick rush of breath, the slapping of thighs, the explosions of laughter, the barks of the cattlemen and the high windy cackle of the young fellows. Gift? It is one of the gifts of the gods, I think. And one night, coming down the port alleyway from the chief mate's room, I passed my brother's quarters. There was a ragged curtain across the doorway, and as I passed in my rubber-soled shoes I caught a glimpse through a rent in the fabric. Three young chaps, the second-cabin steward and the two apprentices, were sitting on the settee, their eyes rapt, their mouths open. The Third Mate, an officer, of all the people in the world, was leaning against the wash-stand, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed in the same attentive way. I moved a little and saw my brother on the drawer-tops, smoking a cigarette, his eyes cast down, speaking in a low voice. As I watched he raised his eyes and gesticulated, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. And the audience nodded and smiled too. He was taking them along with him. He was telling them a story, the oldest trick in the world. I realized with a start that I had no business there, and went along and round to my own room. But I envied him, for with all his waywardness he had the gift of gifts. He could charm the hearts of men and women, and hold them with his words.

"As we came up the Gulf of Lyons I was thinking of seeing Rosa again, and so perhaps I gave less attention to Frank. But just as usual, the morning we arrived, as I was sitting in my room about five o'clock, waiting for the stand-by gong, he came in with coffee and toast. 'I suppose you're for the beach now, Frank,' I said. 'Oh yes,' he says, 'as soon as I'm paid off!' 'You've done a damn sight better than I expected,' I said, and then I stopped because he was looking at me in a peculiar way. He drew the bunk-curtains close, shifted the mat straight and went out.

"I was busy for a good while down below after we were tied up, for the Second was scared of a bad place in one of the furnaces. When I came up and sent the Third to call Frank, he came back and said he'd cleared out. 'Went ashore with the Old Man, sir.' Well, I thought, he'll be down to say good-bye, I suppose. I turned in, so as to be fresh in the evening for Rosa.

"It was a beautiful night at the end of October. Genoa is always beautiful to my mind, but that evening she was la Superba, as the citizens love to call her. Right round the bay the harbour lights twinkled, and above them the lights of the city seemed like a necklace of diamonds, hung against the night. As the boatman rowed me ashore I felt satisfied with myself. I was going to see my girl, and if I thought of my brother at all—well, I'd done the right thing by him. I wished him well. I intended, since he had made good, to give him some money to get home to England in comfort, if he wanted to go. Yes, I was very pleased that night.

"It wasn't long before Rosa and I were in the trolley car that runs along the Via Milano up to the Piazza de Ferrari, where all the cafÉs and theatres are. I bought tickets for the Verdi and then we went to Schlitz's, a big German restaurant in the Via Venti Settembre. I like restaurants, you know. Old Sam Johnson wasn't so far out when he voted for a tavern. That's one thing this country can't either import or invent—a tavern. They have the same name; every public house is called a cafÉ; but what are they? Simply pubs.

"We were coming up the Via Venti Settembre again to the Verdi, under those arches, when I saw my brother. He was standing by a little table set out by the kerb where an old woman was selling lottery-tickets. It used to be as much to the Italians as horse-racing is with English people. The evening papers had the winning numbers in the stop-press column. I saw my brother put down a bill, and the old woman gave him a bunch of tickets. And then he looked up and saw us.

"I ran right into trouble, you know, this time. Somehow or other, I'd forgotten Rosa. I didn't simply not try to avoid him, I waited for him to come up. It seemed only the right and proper thing. He came up, lifting his cap. He'd bought a suit of clothes and a pair of those long-toed foreign boots, but he still had the old cap I'd given him. Those clothes fitted him well, I remember, but he was a well-made man and easy to fit. The coat had a waist to it, and he was a fine figure of a man as he came up.

"I got a sort of panic at the moment he spoke. 'I'll see you to-morrow. I'll see you to-morrow,' I said, and tried to draw Rosa away. She looked at me in surprise. 'Who is it?' she asked me in Italian. 'Never mind,' I said. 'Come away.' 'I'll see you to-morrow.'

"'Why, Charley!' he says. 'You aren't going away without introducing me, surely.'

"I was in a cleft stick. All of a sudden the memory of what he had done with Gladys had rushed over me. I pulled Rosa away. 'To-morrow,' I kept saying to Frank. 'See you to-morrow.' He didn't understand, apparently; kept up with us, his lottery tickets in his hand, trying to look into Rosa's face, and she hanging back looking at him. In this way we came up to the Verdi doors, and I started to go in.

"Women are obstinate sometimes. Rosa kept looking at him as he walked beside her, and before we were inside the vestibule he had explained that it was strange I wouldn't introduce him, seeing we were brothers. She looked at me. I couldn't deny he was my brother. All I could do was to say, 'Go away, Frank, go away!' But he didn't go away. He stood beside us in the crowd in the vestibule looking down at us, laughing, and talking, absolutely at his ease. As usual he was putting me in wrong before some one I knew. 'Why,' he says, 'even that silly blue-nosed old bounder of a captain of yours has given me a good character. Come on, Charley, be a sport. 'Pon my soul, Charley, I never knew you were much of a man with the girls. Sly old dog, eh? Going to sea all this time and spotting all the hot-house fruit, eh?'

"'Frank,' I said, 'this lady is my future wife.'

"He fell away from us in his surprise, looked from Rosa to me and back again, quick, like a bird, and then burst into a roar of laughter.

"My brother Frank is one of those men who simply cannot believe in women. They honestly do not believe a virtuous woman exists. They strike you as vicious and coarse, these men, just when they are trying to be most charming. To my brother women were hot-house fruit. You can't blame such men altogether, because women themselves foster the idea. They act more like lunatics than sane people. Their heads are turned. No, you can't blame the men entirely.

"My brother was perfectly sincere when he burst out laughing at me. He didn't believe me for a minute. The idea of my 'walking-out' with a young lady in Genoa was comic. It was of a piece with all the rest of my damn foolishness. I never attempted to explain my feelings to him, and I don't suppose he understands to this day the terrible pain his laugh gave me. You can realize, when I'd been known to Rosa so long, that it would.

"My brother, somewhat to my surprise, left it at that. He threw up his hands, still holding the lottery-tickets, and turned away. We went into the theatre, and when we were fixed in the poltrone, seats where you can have a little table brought to you for the drinks and ices, I was able to explain something of my brother's record to Rosa. Every thing I told her about him interested her. Compared with my own history it was a story of adventure indeed. She would ask questions to lead me on. 'What did he do then?' When I told her simply that I'd met him 'down and out' at Buenos Ayres, she was so sorry. The mere trifling fact that he'd robbed one woman and swindled half-a-dozen others didn't matter. Of course, I couldn't tell her the details of Gladys' story—he had me there! And I wouldn't lower myself to speak of how he tried to choke me. After all, I believe that was a mistake. He wouldn't do that to me knowingly. So that you see, when you come to look at the tale I told Rosa, what wasn't downright pathetic and unfortunate was romantic and daring. Rosa was a quiet girl. We didn't quarrel over the matter, but I could see she was thinking of my brother, a fine figure of a man, by the way.

"I am quite sure now, after all these years, that it was what we would call just a passing interest. All women have their sudden romantic likings for strange men who catch their imaginations. I remember taking tea one afternoon in the house of a friend on Clapham Common. His sister, a middle-aged woman, and a friend of hers, middle-aged too, entertained me until my friend came in. These two women, fat and forty, could talk of nothing else for some time but a wonderfully nice 'bus-conductor they had spoken to coming back from Richmond. 'Oh, he was such a nice man!' they said, and then they'd look at each other. I was younger then and slightly scandalized. Women are queer. I suppose in a week they'd forgotten his very existence; but at the time, 'Oh, he was a nice man!' So it was with Rosa. Frank had filled her imagination, as he always did; but if she had not seen him again it would have passed like a mist.

"I don't blame her, nor even Frank, now. It was a tragical accident, and very nearly wrecked my happiness. You may say I ought to have left him in Buenos Ayres. I thought so at one time; but I believe now it would have made no difference. We were bound to meet some day. It was fate.

"I saw Rosa home and went back to the ship. The Old Man was going aboard just as I came to the gangway and asked me to go down and have a drink in his room. He was very excited about some lottery-tickets he had bought. Skippers and chiefs go in for these things a good deal. One captain in that employ won a cool ten thousand dollars in Bahia Blanca. It was the thing to do. Up in the agent's office the clerks would talk over the lottery drawings, and each skipper would be anxious to do the same as the others—you see? Well, my Old Man had bought fifty tickets. He was full of a system by which he picked them. Every third one, then every third one again. A mad idea! I thought of my brother waving his bunch, thought of his picking them up without even looking at the numbers. I said to the Old Man, 'Cap'n, you haven't a single good number. I expect the man who's got the lucky one is up in the city now.' 'Why, how do you know?' he said, passing the soda. 'I just feel it,' I said. He was worried about that. Gamblers have the most peculiar notions.

"Well, he sent the third mate ashore just before tea to get the Sera. 'Come on, Chief,' says he, coming into my room where I was washing, 'let's go through the numbers. I'm just crazy to prove you wrong.' 'Where did you buy them?' I asked. 'Outside the Verdi,' he told me. We went through them. I read out the numbers of his tickets while he compared them with those in the paper. His highest number was some two hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty-one, I remember. And the last winning number in the paper was that same number of thousands, two hundred and fifty-two. He dashed the paper on the floor. 'Darn!' he says, 'why didn't I take one more. Think o' that, Chief!' What was the use of thinking of it? 'I'm not surprised,' I said, 'though it is aggravating.' Humph!

"Half way down that splendid new street, one of the finest in Europe, the Via Venti Settembre, and not far from Schlitz's Restaurant, is Bertolini's Bristol Hotel. Rosa and I were walking down past it that night, on our way to Acquasole, where there was a band, when Frank came out. A cab stood at the kerb, and he was making for it when he saw us and bore down on us. He was dazzling. He had a big ulster and he was in evening dress. 'Now, Charlie, my boy, this is the limit. I was coming to see you. Come and dine with me at the Roma,' and he dragged us to the cab.

"Yes, his luck was back. He'd picked up the winning number, the one the Old Man had left. Ten thousand francs! He wasn't going to wait for the State to shell out. He just went to the Russian Bank in the Piazza Campetto and discounted the ticket for cash. In one flash he'd won more than I earned in a couple of years. Yes, he was going to winter in Italy, he said. Naples, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice; then Paris and London. Before I knew what I was doing I was standing outside of the Roma watching him help Rosa out of the cab. He carried things with a rush. Nothing too good for him. This was his natural element, luxury, excitement, whiz and snap. What a man!

"Again, I say, I don't blame Rosa. What girl wouldn't be fascinated by such a man? I had never realized before how charming a man could be. What had I to offer a woman to compare with him? In a few hours he had picked up enough Italian to patter with. Rosa spoke English, it is true, but what jokes he got out of his Italian! How he talked! There was I, just as I am now, blue serge and rather a plain little man, nothing special anyway. I was forgotten. The waiters took no more notice of me than if I'd been a portmanteau. And yet in the bank I had much more money than Frank. Ah! but he was flashing it. Didn't they run!

"I tried to have it out with Rosa as we went down to the Via Milano that night. Perhaps I was unreasonable. Perhaps I showed jealousy—a foolish thing to do. We parted rather cross with each other. You see, I'd never spent money like water on her. I was saving to have a home.

"I had rather a hard day following. The boilers had to be gone through, and that's a job I never leave to the Second. The boilers are the vitals of a ship. I don't care what happens in the engine-room so long as my boilers are all right. And so I was a bit late getting away at night. I went along to Rebecca's. Rosa was serving in the cafÉ, and I began to grumble to Rebecca. I told her that if necessary I would pay for some one else to do that work until we were married. Not that the chaps annoyed Rosa now that she was engaged, but I didn't like the idea of it. Rebecca said Rosa was doing it of her own accord. She said she didn't know what had come over the girl. Rosa came upstairs, and when I told her not to go into the cafÉ, she said she'd do as she liked. She said she didn't want to go out that evening; would rather stay at home. We had words....

"I left in a huff, I suppose, and went back to the ship. I felt badly used. The Old Man came along to my room and spent a couple of hours telling me how that new mess-man had won ten thousand francs. There were all sorts of frills to the story as he knew it. One of the clerks at the agent's had told him that the man was an English milord. That was a bit of my brother's cleverness. He had registered at the Bristol as Francis Lord. Of course, the papers had made the most of it.

"For two days I never went ashore. I was annoyed at Rosa. You know, these little tiffs are inevitable, though I must say we'd managed without them up to this. I said to myself that when she wanted me again she could have me. The mood lasted two days. I began to get anxious. I couldn't rest. After all, we were engaged. The ship went home for survey next voyage, it was rumoured, and I had promised Rosa we should go together. I put on my shore-clothes and went up to Rebecca's. I went in to have a drink first, intending to go round to the private door afterwards. Just as I sat down Rebecca came in and saw me. She beckoned me to come inside. We went upstairs. 'What's the matter?' I said. 'Rosa!' says Rebecca. 'She went out this evening to meet you, she said, and she's not back yet.'

"For a moment I couldn't quite see the drift. Perhaps I'm slow. But then I realized what might have happened. I took my hat and ran downstairs. Outside a carriage was crawling past. I jumped into it and told the man to drive all he knew to the Bristol. It's a stiff climb, but those two horses tore along the Principe, past the station, through Piazza Caricamento, up Via Lorenzo, full tilt. I jumped out and ran into the hotel and asked for the manager. I described my brother as well as I could. 'Yes, yes,' he said, 'that would be Signore Lord.' He had just paid his bill and gone. He was to get the Twenty-fifteen for Milan. The commissionaire said the Signore Lord had driven to the Brignole station, though he had been advised to go to the Principe, where he could get a better seat. I gave the man a franc and bolted out again. 'Stazione Brignole,' I told the man, and away we went. The 'Twenty-fifteen' would be there in about ten minutes. Five minutes later I was in the dreary, half-lighted, bare-looking waiting-room. There was only one person in sight. It was Rosa."

Mr. Carville paused and raised his head. We became aware of some one calling. I turned and beheld Mrs. Carville standing, her hands on her hips, at her door. She was calling to her husband in a clear, strong, vibrant voice. With a slight shrug, he rose.

"Si, si, Rosa," he replied equably, and then to us he smiled and, raising his hat, set it well over his eyes. He looked at his watch.

"Gee!" he said, "I must be off. I'll have to finish the yarn another time. Good day to you."

Looking down at his boots for a moment reflectively, and pocketing his pipe, he stepped down and walked sedately towards his house.