I have now to tell how Aunt Angela was as good as her word about the housewarming of her new abode. I hope that in these last pages I have not seemed harsh in thought to the kind and aimless soul. She did not meditate the mischief that came of that evening, and it was not for lack of anything she was able to do to remedy it afterwards that partial, if not total shipwreck came. But that helped little. Malevolence, in my experience, is not the worst of dangers a man as exposed as I has to fear. It is the mischief hat grows as it were of itself, inherent in persons and their diverse characters and manifold relations that is the deadly thing. That is not mere bad luck; it is fatality, and there is no defeating it. I myself was so specially open to it that to all intents and purposes I might as well have gone skinless through the world.... Well, I grinned and bore it. Only one other person knew that I was skinless, and she, alas, was skinless too. Oh, take it on my authority if you cannot take it otherwise, that you will do wisely to keep out of my predicament unless you are of a different temper from mine, have skins to spare, or are prepared to endure the shock I was presently to endure.

I made no attempt to see that other skinless person. If she had found herself driven, from need or any other consideration, to seek a job with the Consolidation, so much the worse; I did not see that that released me from anything she had laid upon me. In any case, as Miss Day's successor, I should rarely see her; even did she pass to the place lately held by Miss Lingard I should, no doubt, be able to avoid her; and for the rest, as she herself had said, things must drift. Sometimes, if I must confess the truth, I found myself getting quite childishly petulant about her. Why had she given me to suppose she was something she wasn't? Why had she let me see her all caught-up and wise and able to bear, as she had shown herself on that first memorable night, and then gone to pieces like this? I couldn't have known her private feelings, but she must have known them....

And what kind of impossible situation was going to be created if, even avoiding other intercourse, I had to encounter those tourmalines of her eyes every time I passed through the busy office to Pepper's room?

So sometimes I forgot what I had laid upon her, and was callous enough and harassed enough to entertain almost a weak resentment against her.

Aunt Angela's new dwelling was in one of those curiously secluded little squares or "circuses" that lie immediately east of King's Cross Road in the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant. You turn up from the squalid shops and public-houses and trams, and the length of a short steep street brings you into a space with well-built houses about it, trees and birds in the middle, and long narrow gardens with apple and plum and pear at the back. Away to the north the heights of Hampstead seem positively precipitous, and, looking the other way, the multitude of turrets and towers and spires, with St Paul's reigning over them all, is singularly inspiring. Aunt Angela's rooms were very advantageously placed for both these prospects. The first time I went she took me up a breakneck ladder, through a square trapdoor in which I almost stuck fast, and out on to the leads. The sky, torn in primrose-coloured rents and all smoke-browned, was very stormy and fine; and Aunt Angela was looking forward to taking tea out on the roof when the summer came.

"And I shall be able to look away to where my dear ones are," she said, looking north again.

Her room was immediately under this flat roof. It had two windows which looked on the trees in front, and, at the half turn of the stairs, a third which gave on the grimy back garden. In this garden poultry scratched; but there really was a plum-tree, and also a fig that had been known to bear. Her bed, being convertible into a couch by day, did not require to be screened off after all, and the tiny fireplace had brown tiles and a blackleaded iron kerb. One peculiarity the apartment had which I ought to mention: this was a large enclosed cistern, which by rights ought to have been on the roof outside. It held the water supply for the whole house, and as the ball inside it rose and sank, its sounds varied from a gentle tinkling to a soft whispering; the sounds never quite ceased. A stout post some feet from the wall supported one corner of this cistern, and this Aunt Angela, or rather I for her, converted into a hatstand.

It was as she handed me the four black hooks and the paper of screws for this purpose one evening that the sound of the cistern sank to a hissing. "Oh, do give a look to it," she said; "perhaps it wants a washer or something: you can reach it from the window-ledge. And oh, dear, I've got the screws but no screwdriver! There have been hooks in before, haven't there? You'll have to put these higher up then. I'll see if I can borrow a screwdriver downstairs; but see to the cistern first."

But there was nothing to be done with the cistern; if she stayed there she would have to get used to it, that was all. I went up from Pall Mall several evenings to see to her installation, but I never imagined she would stay there very long. The place looked too suddenly cosy when the fire was lighted and the tea-table brightly set.

And so I put her the hooks and a shelf or two up, and made her as comfortable as I could.

Then one night, just as she was settling down, I went in about something or other and found Miss Levey and Aschael there. They seemed to have come for the evening, for their hats were on the hooks on the cistern post. Miss Levey appeared to have forgotten that I had virtually forbidden her my house and turned her out of her job as well; as we shook hands anybody might have supposed that we were the best of friends. She and Aunt Angela appeared to be on quite affectionate terms; and I gathered that Miss Levey was giving lessons by post in secretarial work and doing quite well out of it. Her passing over by the Consolidation she spoke of as a resignation. She was planning to link up her Commercial Correspondence Class with some Guild or other for the Economic Emancipation of Women, and wanted to tell me all about it. I did not stay long.

And of course I couldn't choose Aunt Angela's associates for her.

At first I had refused to go to that party of Aunt Angela's. I had grounds enough for my refusal, for we live half our lives two or three years ahead at the Consolidation, and there were clouds on the economic horizon. Men who live what I may call "short-date" lives can provide for contingencies as they arise, but the surveyor of the future, though he may know things to be inevitable, must be prepared, not for one way in which they may come about, nor even for the most probable way, but for all possible ways. Any one of a thousand symptomatic occurrences may make the Consolidation's most elaborate plans of yesterday of no avail, and work is ten times work when this happens. It had happened several times lately, and but for Pepper's marvellous resilience, my own capacity for long spells of forced labour, and the invaluable inertia of administrative departments, it would have proved too much for us.

I can honestly say that, full of these preoccupations, I had not been influenced by the fact that in all probability Aschael and Miss Levey would be there. I had forgotten all about them.

But Evie's look of resignation when I had told her that I was not going had touched me. We now knew quite a number of people, some of them quite charming people too; and while Evie made less use of this advantage than I could sometimes have wished, I couldn't reproach her for being faithful to her older friends. For a long time we had not been anywhere together. Therefore, seeing her patient yet fallen face, I had promised to make an effort at least to fetch her away, and to arrive earlier if possible. Her instant brightening had amply repaid me.

The party was given on a sharp night towards the end of January, and, try as I would, I had been unable to leave Pall Mall before half-past nine. I should have liked to walk, but that would have taken nearly three-quarters of an hour, and so, near the old F.B.C., I had hailed a hansom. "King's Cross, and then I'll tell you," I had said to the driver; and as I had sped along Holborn and up Judd Street I had relapsed into consideration of the affairs of the day again. The stopping of the hansom and the lifting of the trap aroused me. I gave the man the name of a chapel, and bade him then take a turning to the left; and we went forward again. We passed up a short, steep street at a walk, and stopped in the little "circus."

Aunt Angela's two front windows were lighted and open at the top, and as I paid off my cabman sounds of a nasal singing floated out. I ascended the steps and rang twice—Aunt Angela's signal; but I had to give the double ring again, so merry were they making upstairs. Then I heard steps descending. They were a man's steps, and I gave a sort of mental nod when Aschael opened the door. I had thought he would be there.

"Ve'd about given you up," he said familiarly. "Come in, von't you?"

I followed Aschael upstairs.

It would not greatly have surprised me had Miss Levey taken it upon herself to receive me, as her fiancÉ (if he was her fiancÉ; I never knew) had made me welcome downstairs; but Aunt Angela, trying to appear calm, but really one flutter of pleasure at the success of her little party, met me at the door.

"How late you are," she said gaily. "Yes, yes—I know you'd have come sooner if you could. I'm not scolding you. Now I expect you're hungry; you must have some supper first, and then you shall be introduced to anybody you don't know. Mr Aschael, you'll get him all he wants, won't you?"

"Vith pleasure, Miss Angela," said Aschael, bustling about, all hands and smiles and ringlets.

Along the wall to my right, as I entered, ran a table, spread with the disarray of a quite elaborate supper. Plates were littered with banana skins, grape-twigs with the tiny morsels of pulp still on them, broken biscuits and remnants of jelly; and beyond this table, under the cistern in the corner, was a smaller one, with half a frilled ham, the wreckage of a tongue and a severely mutilated cold pie. Several flasks of colonial Burgundy had been opened; syphons stood among these; and from that secret and inexhaustible hoard of her belongings Aunt Angela had unearthed quite a large number of wineglasses, red ones, green ones, and some of clear glass. Nay, the entertainment had even run into a large box of Christmas crackers; the coloured paper and bright gelatine of these lay scattered among the plates; and my first impression of the number of people who made the room very warm was that half of them had flimsy tissue-paper caps and bonnets on their heads.

But, as I happened to be more than a little hungry, I merely sketched a sort of general and inclusive bow, sat down, and allowed Aschael to wait on me.

Then, my hunger appeased, I began to look about me.

That the gathering was too large for Aunt Angela's not very large room I instinctively set down to Miss Levey's account, for several of those present appeared to be her friends. There must have been ten or a dozen people there. Miss Levey herself had already given me several welcoming nods across the room from where she sat, cross-legged and resolutely youthful, on the floor at Evie's feet; and on her black hair was a tissue-paper cap of Liberty, with a red spot on one side of it. I had already discovered that the sounds of nasal singing I had heard came from the metal corolla of a gramophone. This, I surmised, belonged to the gentleman who was operating it, a little Japanese named Kato, whom I had seen once or twice at Aunt Angela's old boarding-house in Woburn Place. He wore a dairymaid's bonnet of pale blue, with torn strings. Two other of Aunt Angela's old fellow-boarders also were there, one of them a delicate little man with white spats, a Mr Trimble, the other an attenuated little lady, with the red marks of a pince-nez across the bridge of her nose, and very thin hair, silver save for a few strands of a yellowish hue. Sitting on Aunt Angela's couch-bed was a younger couple, not very obviously engaged, yet nevertheless carrying on what I gathered to be a courtship by means of quick glad exchanges of the more paradoxical sayings of Schmerveloff. "Oh, rather!" the lady gasped from time to time; "And do you remember that passage?"... "Remember it! I should say so—about the 'man-made law' you mean?" These at any rate bore all the marks of being friends of Miss Levey's, and members of the Emancipation Guild. Aunt Angela herself, Evie, and Billy Izzard completed the party.

As I was pushing back my chair, having supped, the gramophone broke out again. Not to interrupt it, I sat where I was, watching the little Japanese who operated it. Mr Kato seemed to have neither eyebrows nor lashes, and the slits of his eyes with their little bitumen dots held, as he looked slyly up from time to time, that indulgent, insulting expression that I distrust in his race over here. He had the appearance of trying the air of the "Intermezzo" from Cavalleria Rusticana upon us, as if he contemptuously thought to gauge our taste; and his small hands touched screws and lifted little metal arms with a negligent intelligence. He, too, had nodded to me, though our acquaintance was of the slightest; and with him on the one hand, and Miss Levey on the other, I hoped Evie would not want me to stay very long.

The tune had finished, and I had made another motion to rise when suddenly a few words of Miss Levey's caused me to start, and then to sink slowly back into my chair again. She was speaking to Mr Kato.

"Oh, do let's have 'Ora pro Nobis' again, Mr Kato—Miss Windus loves it so—don't you, Kitty?"

The next moment the lady whose silver hair was intermixed with brownish strands, the lady whom I had taken to be an old fellow-boarder from Woburn Place, had given a little nod and said "Please." As if to hear the better, she set her pince-nez on her nose.

I saw the little scalene triangles of her eyes....

Like so much obliterating smoke, the past six or seven years rolled away....

Only six or seven years, and I had failed to recognise her!

Not quite knowing what I did, I found myself crossing to the table under the cistern and returning again with a great hacked-off piece of tongue. I sat down to supper again.

There were candles on the table, and little bright refractions of light came darting through the angles of flower-stands and glasses. I watched these as I made pretence to eat. Presently I found myself quite curious about which fleck of light came from which angle, and my eyes sought to trace each sparkle to its origin. A few moments before I had been drinking Burgundy from a green glass; another glass, a red one, stood close to it; but as the candles were placed neither dyed the cloth with the little spot of its own hue. Perhaps—I am trying to tell you quite literally, and as nearly as I can remember, the infantile occupation that had suddenly engrossed me—perhaps if I moved the candle I should get the little spots. I moved the candle this way and that. Presently each of the glasses stood over its own little jewel of light, this one red as a ruby, the other green as grass....

And I cannot better tell you how curiously stunned even my sense of hearing seemed to be than by saying that I heard not one note of "Ora pro Nobis," but only the soft hissing of the cistern overhead in the corner.

But, after I know not what space of time in which I had become half hypnotised by those two tiny refractions of coloured light, I suddenly put the glasses away from me. Also I heard the gramophone once more, and felt the returnings of methodical thought. There came to me, after all this time, the very ordinary reflection that Kitty must have recognised me—had probably known I was coming—and had not been able to endure my presence in the room.... I remembered Evie's words: "I think you are wrong if you think that things like that go on for years and years." Looking covertly up, I saw that Evie had moved, and was now on the other side of Kitty from that occupied by Miss Levey. As I watched, she picked up Kitty's handkerchief, and Kitty smiled. Kitty's eyes even met mine, but whether they saw me or were merely full of "Ora pro Nobis," which was being played for the second or third time, I could not tell. They moved away again without having given any sign of recognition.

Then the tune ended, and Miss Levey jumped up.

"Now, let's have something jolly!" she cried. "And Mr Jeffries has finished his supper—make room for him in the circle—move up, Aschael."

It came suddenly upon me that there was one place, and one place only in that room for me to take. I had risen. I strode over the box of records in which Mr Kato was rummaging, sat down next to Kitty Windus, and held out my hand.

"How do you do, Kitty?" I said.

So far was she from starting or trembling that she merely turned, blinked a little, and, taking my hand, said, in the thin little voice I used to know so well, "Ah! I thought you'd come and speak to me, by-and-by."

So if Miss Levey had deliberately planned this for my confusion, I triumphed over her.

For a quarter of an hour Evie and I sat one on either side of Kitty Windus. There was no difficulty whatever. Kitty, though she spoke little, showed no more restraint than it had been her wont to show, and there was nothing to bring up even the ghost of our past relation. And if I triumphed over Miriam Levey, so Evie triumphed over me in the private glances she gave me past the back of Kitty's head. She had been right, and I wrong. Those stories of how Kitty had been found walking round and round Lincoln's Inn Fields at night, unable, when confronted by a policeman, to remember her own name, or where she lived—I strongly doubted them. I even found Louie's account of her mental state difficult to believe.... She spoke of her neuralgias. She had been a martyr to them, she said, but they had been better lately. Somebody's Tic Mixture had done them more good than anything else. I ought to try it—she'd write the name of it down for me on a piece of paper in case I forgot—she hadn't been remembering things very well lately herself. Louie had advised her to try Somebody Else's Tincture, but she didn't believe in that at all; it was one of these imitations that the shopmen were always trying to palm off on people.... At this point, seeing she had mentioned Louie, I thought it safe to venture an offhand, "Oh, how's Louie, by the way?" But Kitty, apparently forgetting that she herself had introduced the name, pursed her lips. Louie, she mumbled, hadn't behaved very well. She didn't mean to herself; she wouldn't in the least have minded that; but one had friends, and liked to see them treated as friends, which some people—— She stopped as Billy Izzard came up, perhaps hearing Louie's name.

So great was my relief at all this, that I suddenly found myself quite carelessly gay. But for Miss Levey's presence I might have been positively happy. But that lady's fussy attentions to myself did not cause me to drop my guarded attitude towards her. I smiled when she put a paper cap on my head also (she had kept a cracker specially for me, she said); and I made a joke when she read some amatory motto or other; that, I said, would be more in her friends' line—indicating with a glance the couple who conducted the intellectual courtship on the couch. But Miss Levey wagged her short finger at me; she wasn't going to have fun made of the members of her League, she said; and she even went so far as to slap the back of my hand with a paper fan she carried and to tell me I was naughty. Mr Kato, the dotted almonds of his eyes blinkingly comprehending us all, ran through the remaining records and then asked if there were no more; and Aunt Angela herself said that if he wanted more she was afraid he'd have to fetch them from the landing. It was only then that I learned that the gramophone was Aunt Angela's. I had supposed it to belong to Mr Kato.

So we sat and laughed and enjoyed ourselves. Billy Izzard had taken an old letter from his pocket and was making a jotting of the scene. I suppose that mixture of littered supper-table, grotesque tissue-paper caps, and Aunt Angela's miscellaneous furniture must have appealed to his always keen sense of the incongruous. They had got fresh records; I had seen Mr Kato come in with an old soap-box, and had heard Miss Levey's cry of juvenile delight: "Oh, they're all comics!" They were entreating Aschael to sing, who liked being entreated, but said, No, Miriam was the singer. Miriam replied merrily that unless they were careful she would sing, and then they would know all about it. Aunt Angela laughed heartily at this: and in the end Aschael sang, not very appropriately, "The Boys of the Bulldog Breed." Mr Kato "Hurrahed" and Miss Levey "Banzaied," and Aunt Angela, who had slipped out during the song to wash glasses in her little pantry, called the little nonentity from Woburn Place to help her in giving us all claret-cup.

"What a pity Mr Aschael's voice isn't properly trained!" Kitty remarked, turning to me.

"An awful pity!" Evie struck vivaciously in from the other side of her. "I'm sure he'd have a splendid voice!"

It was odd, the way in which the pair of us took Kitty under our wing.

"You don't sing, do you, Kitty?" Evie next asked.

Kitty didn't. Evie admitted that she didn't either. "But," she said, "we aren't going to let Mr Aschael off with one song, are we? Come, Mr Kato—you're Master of the Ceremonies——"

"I'm just finding one he knows." Mr Kato grinned over his shoulder.

"A comic, mind," warned Miss Levey, "and then Kitty can have 'Ora pro Nobis' again before we go."

And in token that the song was going to be comic, Aschael got up on his feet and set himself in a gesture he had doubtless picked up at the Middlesex Music Hall.

"Now, Mr Aschael," said Kato.

Aschael cleared his throat.

At the first notes of a curiously thin piano accompaniment, I felt Kitty shrink and close as a daisy closes at the approach of night....

You will tell me that I ought to have stopped the machine—smashed it—fallen on it—done something, anything; but put yourself in my place; nay, put yourself in the place of the three of us who sat together, and who had sat together the last time we had heard the song Aschael sang. Did I tell you when that had been, or didn't I? I had better tell you now.... It had been up the River, with a summer twilight falling, and distant banjos sounding, and the Japanese lanterns making long, wavy reflections in the water. Our party had been four, not three, then, and the fourth of us had sung this song Aschael was singing now. He had sung it, lolling in the stern, beating time with one hand, and very careful about the spotting of a new pair of white flannel trousers.

Oh yes, I daresay I ought to have done something rather than let those two other poor things hear that song again....

But a hideous fear, of which they knew nothing, kept me fascinated and still. So long as they only remembered the song and that other occasion they were the lucky ones. I envied them their luck. No let-off so merciful was mine.... And my horror was enhanced, not so much by those two faces at which I dared not glance, as by our atmosphere of tawdry festivity—the sprinkling of coloured gelatine on the floor, the mocking caps of tissue paper on our heads, and the florid antics of Aschael, turning and grimacing, now this way, now that.

That I might keep this added horror of mine from them, there was even yet a chance....

For the song, you understand, was being sung twice, once by the unknown maker of the record in the machine, and the second time, as it were over it, by Aschael. As the two voices did not perfectly coincide, the result was a sort of palimpsest of sound, with, as sometimes happens in palimpsests, the old and almost erased message the more significant one. Aschael kept irregular pace with a far-off amateur voice and the faint tinkling of a piano.... Like a bolt into my brain had come the knowledge of whose that horrible instrument had been, and how it had come into Aunt Angela's possession. I remembered her visits to Guildford; I remembered Mrs Merridew's funeral; I remembered her old kindnesses in providing a certain young man in London with a "home from home." The machine had come from Guildford, a legacy, a memento, a giggle from the tomb....

But they, those two poor stricken souls, could yet be spared that knowledge. It was dreadfully too much that they knew the song, and that he had known it, and that he had sung it that summer's evening up the River. The rest of the horror might still be kept from them.

"All together—chorus," cried Aschael jubilantly:

Then I felt that last desperate hope of mine slipping away—Aschael was beginning to forget the words, and to make out with gestures and grimaces, leaving gaps through which there started up thin and tinkling and facetious horrors.... I saw that Kato had realised; I had once come upon him and Archie drinking whisky and soda together; his eyes met mine curiously, and I fancied his lips shaped the name:

"Merridew?"

This next I have from Billy Izzard. He tells me that all at once I sprang to my feet and cried, in a huge and boisterous voice that drowned everything else, "Never mind, Aschael—chorus—all together!—"

Clapping my hands, Billy says, I fell back into a chair.

But I was out of it again in an instant. I was not to escape so easily as all that. Kato had his finger on the lever; I cannot say how, nor whether, he guessed what was to come, nor whether he tried to avert it; if he did, he was too late. From that damnable box there came a long catarrhal wheeze—high-pitched and tenor the words came:

"Now, Evie—Evie's turn—make her sing, mother—bosh—of course she's going to sing!——"

I was neither at Aunt Angela's party nor yet in a boat on a summer's evening up the River. How can I tell you where I was? In what drawing-room? Sitting on what chair? Surrounded by what company?... I swear to you that I have seen a place I have never seen, been in a place I never in my life was in. I can describe to you a family gathering with Mrs Merridew there, and her son there, and Evie there, and myself never, never there. I have seen, whether they ever existed or not, French windows opening on a lawn, and a slackened tennis-net beyond, and an evening flush in the sky, and the air dark with homing rooks.... Nothing will persuade me that these eyes are in fact ignorant of that quiet home of Archie Merridew's—and yet Guildford is a place in which I have never been.

Then a sound like the hissing of a thousand cisterns filled my ears. Through it I heard Kitty Windus's scream of terror, but it sounded an infinite distance away. From Evie I had heard nothing. For one moment I saw everything reel and aslant—Kato, the Schmerveloffians on the sofa, the cistern-post with its hats and coats and one hook empty, steeving up towards a tilted ceiling....

Then came the blow on the back of my head, and the sounds of the cistern ceased. I had fallen across Aunt Angela's tiled hearth, and lay in a cloud of steam from the kettle I had overturned in my fall.