The work upon which I had been engaged during the evening did not engross my mind that night when I retired. Over and over again I endeavoured to measure the distance I had advanced in knowledge of my neighbour since I stepped out into the moonlight. I wished to realize the exact advantage I would hold over Mac and Bill when we met next morning at breakfast. And that was just what I found myself unable to do. Both of my friends were shrewd enough to smile if I trotted out the startling information that he came from Hertfordshire. Of course, they would say, he must come from somewhere. And if I remarked he had been in the Mediterranean, they would fail to see anything amazing in a sailor having been in the Mediterranean. And then, how was I to convey to them the extraordinary impression he had made upon me by the simple statement that he was an alien? Why, they would exclaim, were not we aliens too? Were not fifty per cent of our acquaintances in the United States aliens? No, it was impossible. They would not understand. And if they would not understand that, how could they be expected to appreciate in all its puzzling simplicity his ejaculation: "An author? Ah!" It occurred to me with some bitterness that a brutal editor in San Francisco had once complained The next morning I slept late, until past seven in fact. It had ever been an axiom with us that the indolence attributed to the "artistic temperament" was a foolish tradition. Creative power As I opened my napkin I saw that Bill had something of importance to impart, and it came out at once. "He's mending the fence!" she exclaimed, passing the toast. "And going about it as though he knew what he was doing," added Mac. I was glad of this discovery of theirs. It would enable me to introduce my own contribution modestly, yet with effect. "I wonder," I said, "if he would approve of that tree being cut down." Mac stirred in his chair. The daily spectacle of those two little boys hacking slivers from the prostrate tree had been very trying to him. "I judge not," he said with energy. "A man who——" "I wish we knew the exact relations between them," I interrupted. "I mean, whether they quarrel at all." "Of course they do," said Bill without thinking. "All married people do—at times." Her husband looked down his nose into his egg. I smiled. "True, since you say it," I replied, "but you must remember that just as no two people look exactly alike, so no two couples live on exactly the same terms. Just as——" "Oh, what do you know about it?" said Bill. "Trust a bachelor to lay down the law." "Those who look on—you know," I protested. "That isn't true in regard to marriage," she retorted, "because unless you are married you don't look on at all, see?" I saw. "I am going to speak to him after breakfast," announced Mac. "He seems a very decent sort of chap. I wonder what he is at sea." "I had quite a little chat with him last night," I began. "You did!" they exclaimed. I nodded, enjoying their surprise. "Yes," I said. "I found you were gone to bed when I finished, and so I went out on the flags for a short walk. He was out there doing the same thing." "Go on!" said Bill. "He didn't say anything about mending the fence," I remarked. "Oh goodness! Tell us what he did say," she implored. "Well, not much. He comes from Hertfordshire." "He's English then! I thought so," said Mac, relieved. "He said No," I answered. "That was one of "Did he, by Jove! So he is; but it's a very strange thing to say," said Mac. Bill regarded me with interest. "He's going to keep us guessing," she remarked, dolefully. "No," I said, taking another piece of toast. "He accepted my invitation to tea this afternoon, and he is going to tell us about himself." After all I had overlooked my most telling item. I might have known that the fact of his visit would prove more thrilling than any gossip coming secondhand from me. They wished to speak with him again, this man who had come upon us so quietly yet so dramatically. We had all become sufficiently American to desire "a good look at him." And when Americans take a good look at you they go over you with a fine tooth comb. They see everything, from a knot in your bootlace to the gold-filling in your teeth. My friends "sat up" as I made my announcement. I felt that, in editorial parlance, I had made a scoop. "Bully!" said Mac, and Bill, her chin on her hand, looked across at me with approval. After all, again, my lack of enterprise in interrogating Mr. Carville the night before was bearing fruit. It was crediting me with a sportsmanlike reluctance to steal a march on my friends. I had, unconsciously done what we English call "the right thing." I had invited him to tea. Suddenly Bill's eyes became anxious. "Are they both coming?" she asked. "I—I don't think so," I faltered. "I can't say exactly why, but I don't think so. You see," I went on, "the reason he offered to tell me about himself was a question of mine about his children. I said their names were curious enough to strike anyone. He said it was a long story. And he offered to step over himself. Now," I felt more certain of myself now, "the story of his children's names may take two directions. If he named them he will not want his wife to hear him tell about it. If she named them, which is not likely, why, he would scarcely take the trouble to come over and tell strangers about it, would he?" "I'm very glad to hear it," said Bill. "So am I," I agreed. "I think it is best to get acquainted with families on the instalment plan, don't you?" "Rather!" said Bill, and held out her hand for my cup. It was a perfect morning, clear and crisp, and the long sunlit vista of Van Diemen's Avenue tempted us sorely. We went through our daily struggle. Those people who work by rote, who are herded in offices and factories, and who are compelled by the laws of their industries to remain at their posts whether the sun shines or not, often regard the lives of free lances like us as merely agreeable holidays; they would certainly be somewhat staggered to find the enormous will-power involved in resisting the calls of the open road. There are so many subtle arguments in favour of By nine o'clock we would all be at work. So it was on this bright morning in October. I remember being rather struck with the excellence of the work of the preceding evening. It was not great work, you may say, not by any means in the category of immortal classics. It was not even signed, being an appreciation of a certain proprietary article in common use and extensively advertised. There was to me a quite indescribable humour in the fact that this essay in admiration was eventually published in French, German, Swedish and Polish, running into a six-figure issue, while my last novel, a sincere piece of literature, hung fire, so to speak, and never got beyond the publisher's preliminary forecast of a thousand copies. Was I not angry? Far from it. I was no puling undergraduate with a thin broad-margined book of It must not be supposed that we had arrived at this way of thinking by a sudden leap. Again, far from it! My friend and I had been undergraduates, and very proud of ourselves into the bargain, long ago in England. But we had travelled since then, in more senses than one. We had known comfort and we had known the mute impressive numbness of despair. We had made "scoops" at times and celebrated them with joyous junketings. Once we had dined at Delmonico's, a meal of which the memory is still an absurd chaos. We had, moreover, confronted America with a blank wall of unyielding British prejudice. We had entrenched ourselves behind our conception of the thing to do and stupidly refused to do anything else. And we had been beaten to our knees. For it And so we realized at length that, after all, the country was there before us; that they had not asked us to come; that we might as well do things the way they wanted. All this was sound physic for us. It made us, in the true sense of the word, cosmopolitan, made us broad in culture and stimulated that deep human sympathy and understanding which lay at the root of that impatience with which we awaited the story of our neighbour. I was typing a letter about three o'clock when I heard Mac's quick step on the stairs and the opening of the door. It is his custom to take advantage of his view of the path from the studio window to forestall the postman, and I took no further notice until I heard the hum of conversation. And so I was the last to appear. He was standing in the middle of our room, his back to me, his Derby hat in his hand, looking curiously about the walls. I saw his glance held for a moment by the old English clock with its swinging pendulum and weights. It passed on to the chimney-piece loaded with antique silver, bizarre brasses, candle-snuffers and snuff-boxes. It moved over to the bust of Bill that Von Roon had given "I'm glad you've come," I said, shaking hands. His clasp was firm, almost athletic. "We tea at four, but I don't think I told you that." "No," he said, "you didn't. I always have tea at three and it didn't occur to me that the custom might be different." "Don't apologize," said Bill. "It only takes a minute to make. Do you like it strong?" He smiled. "It's the only way I get it, at sea," he said. "Strong! Boiled would be a better word for it." "We like it strong," said Mac. "Sit down please. Here, I'll take your hat." He sank back in a chair and looked about him. For the first time we saw him without a hat. A wide head, full over the temples, and with thinning hair on the brow, it was in no wise unusual. The head of a professional man, shall I say? His hands lay palm downward on the arms of the chair, the knuckles white, the broad flat nails imperfectly manicured. "You've got a snug little place here," he remarked. "A very snug little place. It's very old The tea came in then, and Bill offered him a cup. I think I was a little disappointed in his remarks. They were like his first impression on me the day before, so commonplace, so laboriously undistinguished that again the conviction was forced upon me that it was a pose. Had I expected too much? Was he merely a self-satisfied egoist, clever enough to perceive our interest and impose upon it? Bill endeavoured to clear the air. The mention of "art curtains" always made Mac restive. "Do you like pictures?" she asked. He gave her one of his quick glances. "Some," he replied. "I believe, if I'd been taught, that I could have done something in that line," and he pointed with his saucer towards a water-colour, a drawing of the Golden Gate from Russian Hill. I hardly knew what to make of this new development. I really did not believe he had looked at it. Moreover the drawing was not clamant with noisy daubs to attract the attention. It was not even recognizable as a view of the Golden Gate. It was a study of colour-combination, in an unusually high key, of interest to artists, but not to the public. Only the cognoscenti had remarked that picture before. "You like it?" I said, taking it down and handing it to him. "Ah!" he said, setting his cup and saucer on the We looked at him in astonishment, and he assumed an attitude of apology. "I beg pardon," he said. "What I meant was it reminded me of old Turner, you know, messing about with coloured sugar-plums." "A colour-scheme?" said Mac, light dawning in his puzzled face. "That's it, that's the word: colour-scheme," said Mr. Carville. "I'd forgotten the word." And he handed the drawing back. "You wonder at a seafaring man coming out here to live?" "It's a very healthy district," I suggested. "Mrs. Carville don't like New York, that's all," he said, simply. "Personally, I shouldn't have bothered. But she's quite right." "I should think it was better for the children too," said Bill. He nodded vigorously, packing the tobacco into his pipe. "Fresh air," said Mac, who slept out on the porch half the year. "Oh there's plenty of fresh air in Atlantic Avenue," he said. "I had something else in mind." He looked thoughtful, and then his face lighted up with an extremely vivid indignation. It died away again in a moment, but it transfigured him. "Automobiles," he added. We nodded, understanding him perfectly. We had seen them, in New York as in Brooklyn, career "Have you lived in America long?" I inquired. "Both the kids were born here," he replied. "Yes, that's nearly eight years since we came. You see—but it's a long story. I don't know whether you'd be interested——" Bill rose. "Let us go outside," she said. "It's beautifully warm." We went out. "You must take the Fourth Chair," said Bill, looking at us. We explained to him the legend of the Fourth Chair. "You see," I added, "we were expecting you. There is fate in this." For a long time he sat quietly looking across the valley, as though pondering something. "I think I might as well begin at the beginning," he said at last, "and work up to the kids' names gradually. Though as a matter of fact I could tell you in two words the reasons for giving them such un-English names, it wouldn't explain how I feel. And that I take it is what you are after?" "Begin at the beginning," I said. "So I will. I told you I was born at sea. My father was a merchant skipper of Boston. I don't "My father married four times. There was one peculiarity, or fatality if you like, about the Carvilles, and that was their failure to beget sons. Daughters came right along all the time. I have fourteen cousins, all married, and all got boys! The first three wives my father had only produced two daughters, who died before their mothers. You can understand that those six big men took it badly there were no sons. When the third wife died, childless, my father had given up the sea for a while and had invested in a ship-yard at St. John, New Brunswick. It was there that he met my mother. "I can't go into details I never knew, so all I can say is that my mother was French Canadian. They had a big farm away up the Petitcodiac River and the girls used to come down to St. John to finish an education that began in Moncton and really ended, in my mother's case, in London, England. "They built ships in those days in St. John, and some of the best were my father's work. As I said, "And my father did more than that, he sailed them and owned them. So far he had been under the Union flag, but this time, when he married my mother, and his finest masterpiece, the Erin's Isle, was anchored in St. John Harbour ready for sea, the Red Ensign was flying at the gaff." "Did your mother go too?" asked Bill. "Surely! you think that strange? Well, it was that or a life away at the back of everything; life on a farm, with a visit once a year to St. John. You like the country, don't you? Yes, but if you'd been down in the back-woods, if you'd lived in the thrifty way French Canadians have picked up from the Nova Scotians, and improved, if you were young and wanted to see something, you'd risk your soul to get away from it. You think a woman would have an awful life at sea. My mother jumped at it. She married a man who was sailing as skipper before she was born, and jumped at it! Taking everything into consideration, I don't blame her. You see, she had ambition, my mother had. Her education had been good enough, and she wanted to find a sphere where she could use it." "And so she went to sea?" said Bill in gentle sarcasm. Bill's aversion to the sea amounts almost to malevolence. She is a bad sailor. "For the time being, and to see the world," said Mr. Carville. "She had seen nothing, remember. Well, she saw it. They were away five years. You can imagine my father's feelings when the first child was a girl. She was born off the Ladrone Islands in the Pacific on the way to Hong Kong. I suppose he got over the disappointment somehow, for I never heard my mother say anything about quarrels except on the subject of living ashore. I told you my mother had ambitions. She wanted to live in England and have an establishment. But my father couldn't see the use. If she wanted to live ashore, he argued, why couldn't "She got her way, but not all at once. One voyage she left the ship in Bombay and travelled across India, rejoining at Calcutta. Then she lived in Antwerp a good while, but got sick of it and shipped again when the ship sailed for Callao. That was the last of her voyages, my mother's I mean. For all I know the Erin's Isle swims yet. My sister was drowned and I was born before she dropped her anchor in London River." "Drowned!" said Bill; "a little baby?" "Going ashore in Callao," said Mr. Carville, turning to her, "there was a 'roller' started. I believe it's caused by the sea-bed shifting; slight earthquake in fact. The roller was a big wave and struck the ship's boat as they were rowing across the harbour. Accidents will happen, no matter how careful you are." "Yes," we said quietly, "they will." "They went from Callao to Brisbane and loaded again in Melbourne for home. My mother used to say she thought they would never get round the Cape of Good Hope. My father had done the voyage once in sixty-two days, almost a record; but this time everything went dead wrong. They "My mother told me that my father nearly went crazy with joy when I was born one Sunday morning, 18 south, 21 west, at seven bells on the starboard watch. They were in the trade then, spanking along almost due north for Fernando Noronha. It was rum for all hands that morning, almost the only soft thing left on the ship, and a little tea. The tea came in handy for their pipes, my mother told me. Poor chaps! They were dying for a smoke. Well, I have always got a good deal of satisfaction from knowing everybody was glad I came into the world. My father was dancing mad to get home and tell all the folks that the curse was lifted. He promised my mother anything; a home in London was one thing. He said he would quit the sea, for another. And he kept his word too. He was going on fifty-five, and had been at sea for thirty-eight years. Think of that! I've been at it for fifteen years now, and it seems an infernally long time. Thirty-eight years! "So they settled in England. I don't know whether He looked from one to the other as we sat there, our chairs twisted a little so that we could see his face. The question was a shrewd one. I remember wondering if he was aware how vividly it brought back to our minds our first few weeks in San Francisco, our mistakes, our petulant anger with strange habits, our feeling of awful homesickness. Again we nodded silently. "For a time they were up against it, you would say," he went on, "and they didn't dare to move away from their lodgings in the East India Dock Road. It was natural for my father to think he ought to live near the ships. The custom of living in the suburbs, commuting as they call it here, hadn't begun in the seventies. It was my mother who fired his ambition to live further out. It would have been all right and everything might have been different if his ambition hadn't been fired in another direction at the same time. "My father had done well on the whole. He had saved for years and kept his money in banks or in ships, which he understood. But now, when the Erin's Isle was sold and he found himself worth about fifty thousand dollars, he began to invest in all sorts of queer ventures. He wanted to double his fortune before he died. Others had done it, men he met in Leadenhall Street and on the Baltic; why shouldn't he? You see, he had got hold of the There was no bitterness in the exclamation, only a veiled irony, a detached amusement, at this memory of a dead ambition. We did not interrupt. "They moved out just a little way, to Mildmay Park. You must remember that my father had no friends outside of business friends, and he had no idea that he would gain anything by moving west. My mother disliked what she saw of Kensington and Bayswater, and they thought in their simplicity that places with names like Mildmay Park, Finsbury Park, and finally Oakleigh Park, were good enough to begin on. Each move was a little further out, a little bigger house and a little higher rent until at Oakleigh Park, when I was six years old, it was a big semi-detached villa, with a garden and tennis-lawn and professional people for neighbours. That year my brother was born and my father began to die. "You will laugh, I suppose, at the folly of it, but in her own way, my mother was setting up to be a fine lady. We had a cook and housemaid, and a nurse for me, and fine things I learned from her! "He began to die when I was not quite six, and he went on dying and at the same time investing money until I was nearly eight. Imagine it! A great big man, as irritable as a child, slowly rotting away inside with cancer and two helpless little children, one a baby. All the time it was doctor after doctor, each one recommending a different cure; all the time it was investment after investment, the estate getting more and more entangled. He went to Baden one autumn and came home worse. He tried Harrogate in the spring, but it was no use. He came back, went to bed and never rose from it. Mind you, all the time the cancer was eating his body, this other cancer was at his mind. He plunged into the craziest schemes for getting twenty per cent. interest. Nothing my mother could say was able to make him see the madness of it. She wanted him to buy land, but he said no one but a fool would buy land unless they had a fortune to keep it up. At last, one January, it was over and done with. He died, and we had a grand funeral, and the real business of life began for us. "For me it took a shape that I never got used to for all the years I was kept at it—school. For the life of me I can't see what use it was to me or to anyone else. What does a child learn at school that's of any use to him? You'll think I am talking like an ignorant fool, I dare say, but hear me out. Between eight and seventeen I went to six different schools. The country in those days was spotted with them. Some were called colleges, some academies, one was called an 'Ecole' of something or other. Each one I went to had a different badge, a different coloured tassel, a different set of rules and subjects. Barring the last one, which was down in Essex, near Maldon, they were simply swindles. A mile from our house was a board-school, but it would not have been keeping up our position to send me there. I learned to read and write, but, Great God! curiosity will make a child do that. If he isn't curious to learn what's the use of him learning? He just forgets it, as I forgot it, as you did too very likely, forgot it and learned it again when you needed to. A child ought to be outdoors learning the names of flowers and trees and birds. I know what I'm talking about, mind! You may fancy that if a boy is going into the professions as I was to go, as I did go, he ought to be schooled. Well, when I entered my profession at seventeen, I had to begin at the bottom for all my schooling. I know as much of 'professions' as most men, and I say of schools, I have no faith in them. The men who teach them know nothing. They're frauds and they know it. All that these schools did for me "Twenty per cent! Twenty per cent! The madness of it! The holes and corners he had rushed into, in his frantic hunt for twenty per cent! A bank in Australia, a railroad in Ecuador, a sailing ship that never by any chance sailed into prosperity, a ginger-beer works in Denmark, a cement works in Spain, a foolish concern which proposed to earn vast sums by buying moribund bad debts, a drydock in Japan, and a lunatic-scheme for shoeing horses without nails! This last invention, if I remember rightly, was to fasten them with steel suspenders and a kind of cuff-button over the pastern! And we couldn't even leave the infernal things to die of inanition. Not content with paying no dividend, their familiar demons used to wake up and demand more capital. Calls! I would come home from school for my vacation and find my mother nearly crazy over another call. We were so simple that at first we paid them, and my father's old 'business friends' (he hadn't any others that I ever heard of) saw no objection. Humph! When I read in novels how a father's friends help the hero and heroine, succouring the widow and the fatherless, I must smile. I recall the days of our storm and stress, when those sleek and slippery wolves, the 'business friends' of my father, sat round waiting for my poor distracted, gallant-hearted mother to stumble and stagger in her struggle with those wild-cats of investments. Wild cats! Bengal tigers were a better name for them! But she didn't! She "Somehow or other, my mother did eventually get things straight. There wasn't much to bring up a future Prime Minister on, and besides, there was my brother. He took more after my father than I did. I was mother's boy, but he was a dark daring little devil without much respect for either of us. I don't know quite how it began, but between us there grew a feeling that can't be called brotherly love. Perhaps he realized that, according to my mother's ideas of founding a family, I was to be first and he was to be—nowhere. As it happened this was not just. He was clever from the very first. I was to be an engineer, and he was to do—well, anything that came along. But he had the talent for engineering; I hadn't. I liked it, same as any boy does, but while I couldn't do a simple division sum without making a mess of it, he could do it in his head, and standing on his head for that matter. Whatever he tried, that he could do, whereas my range has always been quiet and limited. I liked reading. He never seemed to be in the house long enough to read anything, but he knew more than I did. He does now." "Where is he now?" I asked. He laughed. "That's more than I can say. I'll get to that presently. What I want you to understand is the feeling we brothers had for each other. He didn't detest me, you know. He didn't take the trouble to do that. He simply laughed at me. He made friends with board-school boys and even errand-boys. One day my mother saw him out in the baker's cart driving it round the neighbourhood. It was a sore humiliation for her, I'm afraid. He didn't care. There were girls, too, even when he was only ten or eleven. Humph! "All this time I was growing up in this sort of life, the life of the professional classes. When I left school, at seventeen, neither my mother nor I had much idea of the way a young gentleman became an engineer. She had no relatives in England, my father's brothers were either at sea or dead, and my father's business friends dropped away when he died, a way business friends have, I've noticed since. We were aliens still as far as real friends went. And then one day we saw an interview in a paper called the Young Pilgrim, one of those mushy papers for young people that do a lot of harm, in my opinion. It was an interview with Sir Gregory Gotch, the great engineer. My mother, who had a good deal of practical enterprise, decided to write to him and ask him. I've often wondered what he thought of that letter. It ran something like this: Mrs. Carville presents her compliments to Sir Gregory Gotch, and would be obliged to him if he would inform her of the best way to article her son (aged seventeen) to the engineering profession in a manner "We went, the gentlemanly youth and his ladylike mother, and saw the heads of the firm. We discovered then, that there were two ways of learning engineering, an easy way and a hard way. People say there's no royal road to learning. Like most proverbs, it's a lie. There's always a royal road, if you happen to be king of enough money. I might be an ordinary apprentice or a special pupil. If I was apprenticed I should have to start at six o'clock in the morning and work just like the men. I would stay in one shop for seven years and be turned out an expert mechanic. And I would have to wait six months for an opening, as they were full-up. If I came as a pupil, however, I would be allowed to spend so much time in each shop, including the offices; I could start at nine o'clock in the morning and finish the whole business in three years. The premium was nine hundred dollars, and I could start that minute. They didn't seem to care how soon they got that nine hundred dollars. "We talked it over in the train. Of course, I was "That time was what you might call a comedy of errors. I am not going to admit that I idled, for it is not true. I was ambitious. Since I was to be an engineer I went at it bald-headed. I went to polytechnics and night-schools, I spent whole nights in study, and did everything that any young chap could do. The whole of my efforts did not amount to a row of rivets. Why? I was up against the gentility again. I met the professional classes face to face. "There were three other chaps there as pupils, and it so happened that they were every one from the great public schools. One was from Haileybury, one from Eton, and another from Winchester. When they found I was not one of them they ragged me, of course, which was good and proper. I often think the ragging in public schools is one of the few useful things they do there. When these men found I intended to study my profession they thought I was stark mad. They were all nice "So it went on for the three years, my mother patiently waiting for me to get through my time and start in earnest as a professional man. My brother was at school, the one near Maldon, and was giving her a lot of trouble. I only saw him during the vacations. He was a big fellow, while as you see, I'm rather on the small side. I don't know that that should cause anybody any amusement! But because I was twenty and he was thirteen and nearly as tall as I was, he was for ever laughing. It seemed to him a huge joke. And as I thought about it the idea came to me that even nature was on his side and against me. It almost seemed as though she'd not only given him the brains, but the stature to be the great man my father and mother longed for. He was good-looking too, I remember, even then. My mother had to pack off a servant that vacation, a silly giggling little girl. "I couldn't very well say anything to him, because I was getting into hot water myself for spending money. And when he wrote in mid-term for an "I had been drifting along for some time, expecting when my time was up to be put on the staff, as was usual with pupils. They usually gave us a job until we could use our influence to get an appointment somewhere. But in my case it didn't happen so. The day my three years' term was up, a beautiful spring day, the junior partner informed me that I could consider myself finished, and handed me a reference that, for all the use it was, might have gone into the waste-paper basket then and there. "I was staggered. I had no idea of how to get a job. Why had I been pushed out? Simply because the firm had found out I had no influence with Sir Gregory Gotch, no standing socially at all. I was an alien in their ranks. I went out of that office with all the externals of a gentleman and a public-school boy, but inwardly an outsider as you may say. One thing I had though, and that was the firm conviction that 'pull' and not merit counted. I had to get some one to 'influence' a job in my favour. It would not have been gentlemanly to answer an advertisement! "My mother thought at once of one of my uncles, who had retired from the sea and was now a marine superintendent in Fenchurch Street. I called to see him; but he was abroad attending to a damaged ship. I think it was a month before I happened Mr. Carville paused again, and leaning over to one of the geranium tubs knocked his pipe out. Suddenly he laughed. "Why," he said, "I'm telling you the whole story." "That's what we want you to do," I said, and the others nodded. "The trouble is, you know," went on Mr. Carville, "one thing leads to another. You can't understand what I am without knowing how my brother and I came to be so—antagonistic. And to explain that it's necessary to show you how I grew up in this professional, easy-going, snobby atmosphere and took it all in, while he, my brother, cut out his own course and went his own way in defiance of everything. I remember now! I saw that Winchester chap—his father was a wine-merchant and Master of the Tinkers' Company—at Lord's. I had nothing to do, and instead of hunting round to get a job, I went to Lord's to see the cricket. There was old Belvoir clumping away at the nets. Engineering! Pooh! He had eight hundred a year his aunt left him—catch him practising as an engineer. He was going on a tour of all the Mediterranean watering-places with an M.C.C. team. Well, we had lunch in the pavilion, and I mentioned in a jolly sort of way that I'd been jounced out of the office. He said it was 'a bally shame,' Oh, I did envy that chap his eight hundred a year! Life "I was going away after the match when I discovered he had been thinking about me. That was Belvoir all over. He was a gentleman, and a gentleman to my mind is like an artist in one thing only, he is born—and then made. That was Belvoir. He had privileges as an English gentleman, but he had also duties. We had been together in the shop as pupils; that gave me a claim on him. He said he had an uncle in Yorkshire who was chairman of an engineering firm, and he would write to him. More than that, he did write and I got an appointment in their London office in Victoria Street. Good old Belvoir! Remember Spion Kop? That was the last of Belvoir. Lord's, Riviera, clubs—Spion Kop.... "I settled down into that berth in Victoria Street as a cat settles into a cushion. I was warm, comfortable, well-paid, well-dressed and had all I wanted in reason. I lived at home and commuted to the city every day, travelling first class, living first class. I settled down. I was on the way to what my mother and father had in view, a comfortable position. "My brother was at school, of course, down near Maldon. I never really got hold of my mother's private opinion of her second son. It was a mys "The main difference between us, when I was twenty-two and he was fifteen, was the subject of women. That sounds strange, I suppose. But go back. What did you know about women at fifteen? Or about yourself? My brother knew no more, but he acted on the little he did know, we were afraid. Especially we who grow up in such a social life as I have been talking of; we are afraid. My brother was never afraid of anything. If he wants a thing he makes one bound and grabs it. If he hates a thing he makes another bound and hits it. I've seen a man flinch just because my brother looked at him. As for women, humph! He had only to hold up his hand. "Now I don't offer it as a proof of virtue, but at twenty-one I had not bothered with girls much. I will explain in a minute why this was the case. For the same reason I did not smoke or play cards. Let me get back to my brother. "One mid-term my mother got a letter from the There was another pause as Mr. Carville struck a match. It was nearly dark and we watched his face reflecting the glow. Suddenly Bill realized the time and rose. "Won't you stay to dinner?" she asked. "No thank you," he said. "Mrs. Carville's going into Newark this evening, I believe, and we're going to take the boys to a show." He rose. "I must get back. Good-night." "Come in and finish your story," said Mac. "All right. Good-night and thank you." He lifted his hat and stepped off the porch. |