The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cup of Fury, by Rupert Hughes This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Cup of Fury A Novel of Cities and Shipyards Author: Rupert Hughes Illustrator: Henry Raleigh Release Date: October 28, 2009 [EBook #30351] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CUP OF FURY *** Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE CUP OF FURY Books by RUPERT HUGHES THE CUP OF FURY THE UNPARDONABLE SIN WE CAN’T HAVE EVERYTHING IN A LITTLE TOWN THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT CLIPPED WINGS WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY? THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER EMPTY POCKETS LONG EVER AGO HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK Established 1817 “It would be nice to be married,” Marie Louise reflected, “if one could stay single at the same time.” The CUP OF FURY A Novel of Cities and Shipyards BY RUPERT HUGHES Author of “WE CAN’T HAVE EVERYTHING” “THE UNPARDONABLE SIN” ETC. ILLUSTRATED BY HENRY RALEIGH HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON THE CUP OF FURY Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America Published May, 1919 D-T ILLUSTRATIONS “It would be nice to be married,” Marie Louise reflected, “if one could stay single at the same time.” Frontispiece Facing p. He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled. 3 “This is the life for me. I’ve been a heroine and a war-worker about as long as I can.” 75 “‘It’s beautiful overhead if you’re going that way,’” Davidge quoted. He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back. “Aren’t you afraid to push on when you can’t see where you’re going?” she demanded. 91 There was something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral majesty. 166 How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each other’s examination. 235 “So I have already done something more for Germany. That’s splendid. Now tell me what else I can do.” Nicky was too intoxicated with his success to see through her thin disguise. 270 Nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer- boy crouching at Sutton’s elbow. 282 BOOK I IN LONDON He tried to swing her to the pommel, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled. THE CUP OF FURY CHAPTER I 3 CHAPTER I Then the big door swung back as if of itself. Marie Louise had felt that she would scream if she were kept a moment outside. The luxury of simply wishing the gate ajar gave her a fairy-book delight enhanced by the pleasant deference of the footman, whose face seemed to be hung on the door like a Japanese mask. Marie Louise rejoiced in the dull splendor of the hall. The obsolete gorgeousness of the London home had never been in good taste, but had grown as lovable with years as do the gaudy frumperies of a rich old relative. All the good, comfortable shelter of wealth won her blessing now as never before. The stairway had something of the grand manner, too, but it condescended graciously to escort her up to her own room; and there, she knew, was a solitude where she could cry as hard as she wanted to, and therefore usually did not want to. Besides, her mood now was past crying for. She was afraid of the world, afraid of the light. She felt the cave-impulse to steal into a deep nook and cower there till her heart should be replenished with courage automatically, as ponds are fed from above. Marie Louise wanted walls about her, and stillness, and people shut out. She was in one of the moods when the soul longs to gather its faculties together in a family, making one self of all its selves. Marie Louise had known privation and homelessness and the perils they bring a young woman, and now she had riches and a father and mother who were great people in a great land, and who had adopted her into their own hearts, their lives, their name. But to-day she asked nothing more than a deep cranny in a dark cave. She would have said that no human voice or presence could be anything but a torture to her. And yet, when she hurried up the steps, she was suddenly miraculously restored to cheerfulness by the tiny explosion of a child’s laughter instantly quenched. She knew that she was about to be ambushed as usual. She must pretend to be completely surprised once more, and altogether terrified with her perfect regularity. Her soul had been so utterly surprised and terrified in the outer world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome, since nothing keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of sanity like the counterweight that comedy furnishes to tragedy, farce to frenzy, and puerility to solemnity. The children called her “Auntie,” but they were not hers except through the adoption of a love that had to claim some kinship. They looked like her children, though––so much so, indeed, that strangers thought that she was their young mother. But it was because she looked like their mother, who had died, that the American girl was a member of this British household, inheriting some of its wealth and much of its perilous destiny. She had been ambuscaded in the street to-day by demons not of faery, but of fact, that had leaped out at her from nowhere. It solaced her somehow to burlesque the terror that had whelmed her, and, now that she was assailed by ruthless thugs of five and seven years, the shrieks she had not dared to release in the street she gave forth with vigor, as two nightgowned tots flung themselves at her with milk-curdling cries of: “Boo-ooh!” Holding up pink fat hands for pistols, they snapped their thumbs at her and said: “Bang! Bang!” And she emitted most amusing squeals of anguish and staggered back, stammering: “Oh, p-p-please, Mr. Robbobber and Miss Burgurgular, take my l-l-life but spare my m-m-money.” She had been so genuinely scared before that she marred the sacred text now, and the First Murderer, who had all the conservative instincts of childhood, had to correct her misquotation of the sacred formula: “No, no, Auntie. Say, ‘Take my money but spare my life!’ Now we dot to do it all over.” “I beg your pardon humbly,” she said, and went back to be ambushed again. This time the boy had an inspiration. To murder and robbery he would add scalping. But Marie Louise was tired. She had had enough of fright, real or feigned, and refused to be scalped. Besides, she had been to the hairdresser’s, and she explained that she really could not afford to be scalped. The boy was bitterly disappointed, and he grew furious when the untimely maid came for him and for his ruthless sister and demanded that they come to bed at once or be reported. As the warriors were dragged off to shameful captivity, Marie Louise, watching them, was suddenly shocked by the thought of how early in life humanity begins to revel in slaughter. The most innocent babes must be taught not to torture animals. Cruelty comes with them like a caul, or a habit brought in from a previous existence. They always almost murder their mothers and sometimes quite slay them when they are born. Their first pastimes are killing games, playing dead, stories of witches, cannibalistic ogres. The American Indian is the international nursery pet because of his traditional fiendishness. It seemed inconsistent, but it was historically natural that the boy interrupted in his massacre of his beloved aunt should hang back to squall that he would say his prayers only to her. Marie Louise glanced at her watch. She had barely time to dress for dinner, but the children had to be obeyed. She made one weak protest. “Fräulein hears your prayers.” “But she’s wented out.” 4 5 “Well, I’ll hear them, then.” “Dot to tell us fairy-’tory, too,” said the girl. “All right, one fairy-’tory––” She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to her lap demanding “somefin bluggy.” Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her memory among the Grimms’ fairy-tales. She could recall nothing that seemed sweet and guileless enough for these two lambs. All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish plots; of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers; of their being turned over to peasants to slay; of their being changed into animals or birds; of their being seized by wolves, or by giants that drank blood and crunched children’s bones as if they were reed birds; of hags that cut them up into bits or thrust them into ovens and cooked them for gingerbread. It occurred to her that all the German fairy- stories were murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against each of the legends. But her mind could not find substitutes. After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize for romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She confessed her poverty of ideas. The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed: “Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed.” In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way hallowed by their attitude, and the world seemed good to her again as she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can be, innocent of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so recently come. But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned in swarms, starving in multitudes, waiting for food like flocks of lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered as they drowned. She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty “Amen” she protested. “You didn’t thank God for anything. Haven’t you anything to thank God for?” If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, “Oh yes!” They looked at each other, understood, nodded, clapped their hands, and chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their finger-tips, and the boy said: “We t’ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old Lusitania.” And the girl said, “A-men!” Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss of the Lusitania that had first terrified her. She had just seen it announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the blasphemy. She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them with all her ferocity. She towered over them and cried out upon them: “You wicked, wicked little beasts, how dare you put such loathsome words into a prayer! God must have gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it. Wherever did you get so hateful an idea?” “Wicked your own self!” the boy snapped back. “Fräulein read it in the paper about the old boat, and she walked up and down the room like what you do, and she said, ‘Ach, unser Dott––how dood you are to us, to make sink dat Lusitania!’” He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise broke in: “It’s Fräulein’s work, is it? I might have known that! Oh, the fiend, the harpy!” The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew that his beloved Fräulein was being called something, and he struck at Marie Louise fiercely, kicked at her shins and tried to bite her hands, screaming: “You shall not call our own precious Fräulein names. Harpy, your own self!” And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled face and echoed, “Harpy, your own self!” It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by these irascible cherubs that her anger vanished in regret. She pleaded: “But, my darlings, you don’t know what you are saying. The Lusitania was a beautiful ship––” The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: “She wasn’t as beautiful as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond.” Marie Louise condescended to argue: “Oh yes, she was! She was a great ship, noble like Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and she was loaded with passengers, men and women and children: and then suddenly she was ripped open and sunk, and little children like you were thrown into the water, into the deep, deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore them from 6 7 8 their mothers’ arms and ran off with them, choking and strangling them and dragging them down and down––forever down.” She was dizzied by the horde of visions mobbing her brain. Then the onrush of horror was checked abruptly as she saw the supercilious lad regarding her frenzy calmly. His comment was: “It served ’em jolly well right for bein’ on ’at old boat.” Marie Louise almost swooned with dread of such a soul. She shrank from the boy and groaned, “Oh, you toad, you little toad!” He was frightened a little by her disgust, and he took refuge in a higher authority. “Fräulein told us. And she knows.” The bit lassiky stormed to his support: “She does so!” and drove it home with the last nail of feminine argument: “So there now!” Marie Louise retorted, weakly: “We’ll see! We’ll soon see!” And she rushed out of the room, like another little girl, straight to the door of Sir Joseph, where she knocked impatiently. His man appeared and murmured through a crevice: “Sorry, miss, but Seh Joseph is dressing.” Marie Louise went to Lady Webling’s door, and a maid came to whisper: “She is in her teb. We’re having dinner at tome to-night, miss.” Marie Louise nodded. Dinner must be served, and on time. It was the one remaining solemnity that must not be forgotten or delayed. She went to her own room. Her maid was in a stew about the hour, and the gown that was to be put on. Marie Louise felt that black was the only wear on such a Bartholomew’s night. But Sir Joseph hated black so well that he had put a clause in his will against its appearance even at his own funeral. Marie Louise loved him dearly, but she feared his prejudices. She had an abject terror of offending him, because she felt that she owed everything she had, and was, to the whim of his good grace. Gratitude was a passion with her, and it doomed her, as all passions do, good or bad, to the penalties human beings pay for every excess of virtue or vice––if, indeed, vice is anything but an immoderate, untimely virtue. CHAPTER II Marie Louise let her maid select the gown. She was an exquisite picture as she stood before the long mirror and watched the buckling on of her armor, her armor of taffeta and velvet with the colors of sunlit leaves and noon- warmed flowers in carefully elected wrinkles assured with many a hook and eye. Her image was radiant and pliant and altogether love-worthy, but her thoughts were sad and stern. She was resolved that Fräulein should not remain in the house another night. She wondered that Sir Joseph had not ousted her from the family at the first crash of war. The old crone! She could have posed for one of the Grimms’ most vulturine witches. But she had kept a civil tongue in her head till now; the children adored her, and Sir Joseph had influence enough to save her from being interned or deported. Hitherto, Marie Louise had felt sorry for her in her dilemma of being forced to live at peace in the country her own country was locked in war with. Now she saw that the woman’s oily diplomacy was only for public use, and that all the while she was imbruing the minds of the little children with the dye of her own thoughts. The innocents naturally accepted everything she told them as the essence of truth. Marie Louise hoped to settle the affair before dinner, but by the time she was gowned and primped, the first premature guest had arrived like the rashest primrose, shy, surprised, and surprising. Sir Joseph had gone below already. Lady Webling was hull down on the stairway. Marie Louise saw that her protest must wait till after the dinner, and she followed to do her duty to the laws of hospitality. Sir Joseph liked to give these great affairs. He loved to eat and to see others eat. “The more the merrier,” was his motto––one of the most truthless of the old saws. Little dinners at Sir Joseph’s––what he called “on fameals”––would have been big dinners elsewhere. A big dinner was like a Lord Mayor’s banquet. He needed only a crier at his back and a Petronius to immortalize his gourmandise. To-night he had great folk and small fry. Nobody pretended to know the names of everybody. Sir Joseph himself leaned heavily on the man who sang out the labels of the guests, and even then his wife whispered them to him as they came forward, and for a precaution, kept slipping them into the conversation as reminders. There were several Americans present: a Doctor and Mrs. Clinton Worthing who had come over with a special shipload of nurses. The ship had been fitted out by Mrs. Worthing, who had been Muriel Schuyler, daughter of the 9 10 11 giant plutocrat, Jacob Schuyler, who was lending England millions of money weekly. A little American millionaire, Willie Enslee, living in England now on account of some scandal in his past, was there. He did not look romantic. Marie Louise had no genius for names, or faces, either. To-night she was frightened, and she made some horrible blunders, greeting the grisly Mr. Verrinder by the name of Mr. Hilary. The association was clear, for Mr. Hilary had called Mr. Verrinder atrocious names in Parliament; but it was like calling “Mr. Capulet” “Mr. Montague.” Marie Louise tried to redeem her blunder by putting on an extra effusiveness for the sake of Mr. and Mrs. Norcross. Mrs. Norcross had only recently shaken off the name of Mrs. Patchett after a resounding divorce. So Marie Louise called her new husband by the name of her old, which made it very pleasant. Her wits were so badly dispersed that she gave up the attempt to take in the name of an American whom Lady Webling passed along to her as “Mr. Davidge, of the States.” And he must have been somebody of importance, for even Sir Joseph got his name right. Marie Louise, however, disliked him cordially at once––for two reasons: first, she hated herself so much that she could not like anybody just then; next, this American was entirely too American. He was awkward and indifferent, but not at all with the easy amble and patrician unconcern of an English aristocrat. Marie Louise was American-born herself, and humbly born, at that, but she liked extreme Americanism never the more. Perhaps she was a bit of a snob, though fate was getting ready to beat the snobbery out of her. And hers was an unintentional, superficial snobbery, at worst. Some people said she was affected and that she aped the swagger dialect. But she had a habit of taking on the accent and color of her environments. She had not been in England a month before she spoke Piccadilly almost impeccably. She had caught French and German intonations with equal speed and had picked up music by ear with the same amazing facility in the days when certain kinds of music were her livelihood. In one respect her Englishness of accent was less an imitation or an affectation than a certain form of politeness and modesty. When an Englishwoman said, “Cahn’t you?” it seemed tactless to answer, “No, I cann’t.” To respond to “Good mawning” with “Good morrning” had the effect of a contradiction or a correction. She had none of the shibboleth spirit that leads certain people to die or slay for a pronunciation. The pronunciation of the people she was talking to was good enough for her. She conformed also because she hated to see people listening less to what she said than to the Yankee way she said it. This man Davidge had a superb brow and a look of success, but he bored her before he reached her. She made ready for flight to some other group. Then he startled her––by being startled as he caught sight of her. When Lady Webling transmitted him with a murmur of his name and a tender, “My daughter,” Davidge stopped short and mumbled: “I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you before, somewhere, haven’t I?” Marie Louise snubbed him flatly. “I think not.” He took the slap with a smile. “Did I hear Lady Webling call you her daughter?” Marie Louise did not explain, but answered, curtly, “Yes,” with the aristocratic English parsimony that makes it almost “Yis.” “Then you’re right and I’m wrong. I beg your pardon.” “Daon’t mention it,” said Marie Louise, and drew closer to Lady Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the decency to reproach herself for being beastly to the stranger, but his name slipped at once through the sieve of her memory. Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name that changes an it to a him or a her. The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back on and outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate. We are great for giving names to selected fragments of the chaos of life. In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would see something mystic and intended in the meeting that was to be the detached prologue of their after conflicts. They would quite misremember what really happened––which was, that she retained no impression of him at all, and that he called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he had met years and years before for just a moment, and had never forgotten because he had not known her well enough to forget her. He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at a resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining for a moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl of old dreams––a girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville theater in a Western state. She was one of a musical team that played all sorts of instruments––xylophones, saxophones, trombones, accordions, cornets, comical instruments concealed in hats and umbrellas. This girl had played each of them in turn, in solo or with the rest of the group. The other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she had captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism, and the strange cry she put into her music. When she played the trombone she looked to him like one of the angels on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too, in four voices––in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They called her “Mamise, the Quartet in One.” 12 13 Davidge had thought her marvelous and had asked the manager of the theater to introduce him. The manager thought him a young fool, and Davidge had felt himself one when he went back to the dingy stage, where he found Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go on. She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary, painfully plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward and rather contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge had never ceased to blush, and blushed again now, when he recalled his labored compliment, “I expect to see your name in the electric lights some of these days–– or nights, Miss Mamise.” She had grumbled, “Much ubbliged!” and returned to the ape, while Davidge slunk away, ashamed. He had not forgotten that name, though the public had. He had never seen “Mamise” in the electric lights. He had never found the name in any dictionary. He had supposed her to be a foreigner––Spanish, Polish, Czech, French, or something. He had not been able to judge her nationality from the two gruff words, but he had often wondered what had happened to her. She might have been killed in a train wreck or been married to the ape-trainer or gone to some other horrible conclusion. He had pretty well buried her among his forgotten admirations and torments, when lo and behold! she emerged from a crowd of peeresses and plutocrats in London. He had sprung toward her with a wild look of recognition before he had had time to think it over. He had been rebuffed by a cold glance and then by an English intonation and a fashionable phrase. He decided that his memory had made a fool of him, and he stood off, humble and confused. But his eyes quarreled with his ears, and kept telling him that this tall beauty who ignored him so perfectly, so haughtily, was really his lost Mamise. If men would trust their intuitions oftener they would not go wrong so often, perhaps, since their best reasoning is only guesswork, after all. It was not going to be destiny that brought Davidge and Marie Louise together again so much as the man’s hatred of leaving anything unfinished––even a dream or a vague desire. There was no shaking Davidge off a thing he determined on except as you shake off a snapping-turtle, by severing its body from its head. A little later Sir Joseph sought the man out and treated him respectfully, and Marie Louise knew he must be somebody. She found him staring at her over Sir Joseph’s shoulder and puzzling about her. And this made her wretchedly uncomfortable, for perhaps, after all, she fretted, he had indeed met her somewhere before, somewhere in one of those odious strata she had passed through on her way up to the estate of being called daughter by Lady Webling. She forgot her misgivings and was restored to equanimity by the incursion of Polly Widdicombe and her husband. Polly was one of the best-dressed women in the world. Her husband had the look of the husband of the best-dressed woman in the world. Polly had a wiry voice, and made no effort to soften it, but she was tremendously smart. She giggled all the time and set people off in her vicinity, though her talk was rarely witty on its own account. Laughter rippled all through her life. She talked of her griefs in a plucky, riant way, making eternal fun of herself as a giddy fool. She carried a delightful jocundity wherever she went. She was aristocratic, too, in the postgraduate degree of being careless, reckless, superior even to good manners. She had a good heart and amiable feelings; these made manners enough. She had lineage as well, for her all-American family ran straight back into the sixteen hundreds, which was farther than many a duke dared trace his line. She had traveled the world; she had danced with kings, and had made two popes laugh and tweak her pointed chin. She wasn’t afraid of anybody, not even of peasants and servants, or of being friendly with them, or angry with them. Marie Louise adored her. She felt that it would make no difference to Polly’s affection if she found out all there was to find out about Marie Louise. And yet Polly’s friendship did not have the dull certainty of indestructibility. Marie Louise knew that one word wrong or one act out of key might end it forever, and then Polly would be her loud and ardent enemy, and laugh at her instead of for her. Polly could hate as briskly as she could love. She was in one of her vitriolic moods now because of the Lusitania. “I shouldn’t have come to-night,” she said, “except that I want to talk to a lot of people about Germany. I want to tell everybody I know how much I loathe ’em all. ‘The Hymn of Hate’ is a lullaby to what I feel.” Polly was also conducting a glorious war with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Lady C.-W. had bullied everybody in London so successfully that she went straight up against Polly Widdicombe without a tremor. She got what-for, and everybody was delighted. The two were devoted enemies from then on, and it was beautiful to see them come together. Lady Clifton-Wyatt followed Polly up the receiving line to-night and invited a duel, but Polly was in no humor for a fight with anybody but Germans. She turned her full-orbed back on Lady C.-W. and, so to speak, gnashed her shoulder-blades at her. Lady C.-W. passed by without a word, and Marie Louise was glad to hide behind Polly, for Marie Louise was mortally afraid of Lady C.-W. She saw the American greet her as if he had met her before. Lady Clifton-Wyatt was positively polite to him. He must be a very great man. She heard Lady Clifton-Wyatt say something about, “How is the new ship coming on?” and the American said, “She’s doing as well as could be expected.” 14 15 16 So he was a ship-builder. Marie Louise thought that his must be a heartbreaking business in these days when ships were being slaughtered in such numbers. She asked Polly and her husband if they knew him or his name. Widdicombe shook his head. Polly laughed at her husband. “How do you know? He might be your own mother, for all you can tell. Put on your distance-glasses, you poor fish.” She turned to Marie Louise. “You know how near- sighted Tom is.” “An excellent fault in a man,” said Marie Louise. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Polly. “You can’t trust even the blind ones. And you’ll notice that when Tom comes to one of these décolleté dinners, he wears his reading-glasses.” All this time Widdicombe was taking out his distance-glasses, taking off his reading-glasses and pouching them and putting them away, and putting on his distance-glasses, and from force of habit putting their pouch away. Then he stared at Davidge, took off his distance-glasses, found the case with difficulty, put them up, pocketed them, and stood blearing into space while he searched for his reading-glasses, found them, put the case back in his pocket and saddled his nose with the lenses. Polly waited in a mockery of patience and said: “Well, after all that, what?” “I don’t know him,” said Widdicombe. It was a good deal of an anticlimax to so much work. Polly said: “That proves nothing. Tom’s got a near-memory, too. The man’s a pest. If he didn’t make so much money, I’d abandon him on a door-step.” That was Polly’s form of baby-talk. Everybody knew how she doted on Tom: she called him names as one scolds a pet dog. Widdicombe had the helpless manner of one, and was always at heel with Polly. But he was a Titan financially, and he was signing his name now to munitions-contracts as big as national debts. Marie Louise was summoned from the presence of the Widdicombes by one of Lady Webling’s most mysterious glances, to meet a new-comer whom Lady Webling evidently regarded as a special treasure. Lady Webling was as wide as a screen, and she could always form a sort of alcove in front of her by turning her back on the company. She made such a nook now and, taking Marie Louise’s hand in hers, put it in the hand of the tall and staring man whose very look Marie Louise found invasive. His handclasp was somehow like an illicit caress. How strange it is that with so much modesty going about, people should be allowed to wear their hands naked! The fashion of the last few years compelling the leaving off of gloves was not really very nice. Marie Louise realized it for the first time. Her fastidious right hand tried to escape from the embrace of the stranger’s fingers, but they clung devil- fishily, and Lady Webling’s soft cushion palm was there conniving in the abduction. And her voice had a wheedling tone: “This is my dear Nicky I have spoken of so much––Mr. Easton, you know.” “Oh yes,” said Marie Louise. “Be very nice to him,” said Lady Webling. “He is taking you out to dinner.” At that moment the butler appeared, solemn as a long-awaited priest, and there was such a slow crystallization as follows a cry of “Fall in!” to weary soldiers. The guests were soon in double file and on the march to the battlefield with the cooks. Nicky Easton still had Marie Louise’s hand; he had carried it up into the crook of his right arm and kept his left hand over it for guard. A lady can hardly wrench loose from such an attention, but Marie Louise abhorred it. Nicky treated her as a sort of possession, and she resented his courtesies. He began too soon with compliments. One hates to have even a bunch of violets jabbed into one’s nose with the command, “Smell!” She disliked his accent, too. There was a Germanic something in it as faint as the odor of high game. It was a time when the least hint of Teutonism carried the stench of death to British nostrils. Lady Webling and Sir Joseph were known to be of German birth, and their phrases carried the tang, but Sir Joseph had become a naturalized citizen ages ago and had won respect and affection a decade back. His lavish use of his money for charities and for great industries had won him his knighthood, and while there was a certain sniff of suspicion in certain fanatic quarters at the mention of his name, those who knew him well had so long ago forgotten his alien birth that they forgave it him now. As for Marie Louise, she no longer heeded the Prussic acid of his speech. She was as used to it as to his other little mannerisms. She did not think of the old couple as fat and awkward. She did not analyze their attributes or think of their features in detail. She thought of them simply as them. But Easton was new; he brought in a subtle whiff of the hated Germany that had done the Lusitania to death. The fate of the ship made the dinner resemble a solemn wake. The triumphs of the chef were but funeral baked meats. The feast was brilliant and large and long, and it seemed criminal to see such waste of provender when so much of the world was hungry. The talk was almost all of the Lusitania and the deep damnation of her taking off. Many of the 17 18 19 guests had crossed the sea in her graceful shell, and they felt a personal loss as well as a bitterness of rage at the worst of the German sea crimes. Davidge was seated remotely from Marie Louise, far down the flowery lane of the table. She could not see him at all, for the candles and the roses. Just once she heard his voice in a lull. Its twang carried it all the way up the alley: “A man that would kill a passenger-ship would shoot a baby in its cradle. When you think how long it takes to build a ship, how much work she represents, how sweet she is when she rides out and all that––by Gosh! there’s no word mean enough for the skoundrels. There’s nothing they won’t do now––absolutely nothing.” She heard no more of him, and she did not see him again that night. She forgot him utterly. Even the little wince of distress he gave her by his provincialism was forgotten in the anguish her foster-parents caused her. For Marie Louise had a strange, an odious sensation that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were not quite sincere in their expressions of horror and grief over the finished epic, the Lusitania. It was not for lack of language; they used the strongest words they could find. But there was missing the subtile somewhat of intonation and gesture that actors call sincerity. Marie Louise knew how hard it is even for a great actor to express his simplest thoughts with conviction. No, it was when he expressed them best that he was least convincing, since an emotion that can be adequately presented is not a very big emotion; at least it does not overwhelm the soul. Inadequacy, helplessness, gaucherie, prove that the feelings are bigger than the eloquence. They “get across the footlights” between each player on the human stage and his audience. Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting too well and too much. Marie Louise hated herself for even the disloyalty of such a criticism of them, but she was repelled somehow by such rhetoric, and she liked far better the dour silence of old Mr. Verrinder. He looked a bishop who had got into a layman’s evening dress by mistake. He was something very impressive and influential in the government, nobody knew just what. Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder’s silence the distracted muttering and stammering of a young English aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating from wounds and was going up in the air rapidly on the Webling champagne. He was maltreating his bread and throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be understood, he groaned to himself, but loudly enough to be heard the whole length and breadth of the table: “I remember readin’ about old Greek witch name Circe––changed human beings into shape of swine. I wonder who turned those German swine into the shape of human beings.” Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked––by the vulgarity, no doubt. “Swine” do not belong in dining- room language––only in the platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal “without which.” It resulted first as “veetowit veech,” then as “whidthout witch.” He made it on the third trial. Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered two other glances moving in the same direction. Lady Webling looked anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder’s gaze was merely studious. Marie Louise felt an odd impression that Lady Webling was sending a kind of heliographic warning, while the look of Mr. Verrinder was like a search-light that studies and registers, then moves away. Marie Louise disliked Easton more and more, but Lady Webling kept recommending him with her solicitous manner toward him. She made several efforts, too, to shift the conversation from the Lusitania; but it swung always back. Much bewilderment was expressed because the ship was not protected by a convoy. Many wondered why she was where she was when she was struck, and how she came to take that course at all. Lady Clifton-Wyatt, who had several friends on board and was uncertain of their fate, was unusually fierce in blaming the government. She always blamed it for everything, when it was Liberal. And now she said: “It was nothing short of murder to have left the poor ship to steal in by herself without protection. Whatever was the Admiralty thinking of? If the Cabinet doesn’t fall for this, we might as well give up.” The Liberals present acknowledged her notorious prejudices with a sigh of resignation. But the Marquess of Strathdene rolled a foggy eye and a foggy tongue in answer: “Darlling llady, there must have been war-ships waitin’ to convoy the Lusitania; but she didn’t come to rendezvous because why? Because some filthy Zherman gave her a false wireless and led her into a trap.” This amazing theory with its drunken inspiration of plausibility startled the whole throng. It set eyeballs rolling in all directions like a break in a game of pool. Everybody stared at Strathdene, then at somebody else. Marie Louise’s racing gaze noted that Mr. Verrinder’s eyes went slowly about again, studying everybody except Strathdene. Lady Clifton-Wyatt’s eyes as they ran simply expressed a disgust that she put into words with her usual frankness: “Don’t be more idiotic than necess’ry, my dear boy; there are secret codes, you know.” “S-secret codes I know? Secret codes the Germans know––that’s what you mean, sweetheart. I don’t know one little secret, but Huns–– Do you know how many thousand Germans there are loose in England––do you?” Lady Clifton-Wyatt shook her head impatiently. “I haven’t the faintest notion. Far more than I wish, I’m sure.” 20 21 “I hope so, unless you wish fifty thousand. And God knows how many more. And I’m not alluthing to Germans in disguise, naturalized Germans––quinine pills with a little coating. I’m not referring to you, of course, Sir Joseph. Greates’ respect for you. Ever’body has. You have done all you could to overcome the fatal error of your parents. You’re a splen’id gen’l’man. Your ’xception proves rule. Even Germans can’t all be perf’ly rotten.” “Thank you, Marquess, thank you,” said Sir Joseph, with a natural embarrassment. Marie Louise noted the slight difference between the English “Thank you” and Sir Joseph’s “Thang gyou.” Then Lady Webling’s eyes went around the table, catching up the women’s eyes and forms, and she led them in a troop from the embarrassing scene. She brought the embarrassment with her to the drawing-room, where the women sat about smoking miserably and waiting for the men to come forth and take them home. CHAPTER III There must have been embarrassment enough left to go round the dining-table, too, for in an unusually brief while the men flocked into the drawing-room. And they began to plead engagements in offices or homes or Parliament. It was not yet ten o’clock when the last of the guests had gone, except Nicholas Easton. And Sir Joseph took him into his own study. Easton walked a trifle too solemnly straight, as if he had set himself an imaginary chalk-line to follow. He jostled against the door, and as he closed it, swung with it uncertainly. Lady Webling asked almost at once, with a nod of the head in the direction of the study door: “Well, my dear child, what do you think of Nicky?” “Oh, I don’t know. He’s nice, but––” “We’re very fond of him, Sir Joseph and I––and we do hope you will be.” Marie Louise wondered if they were going to select a husband for her. It was a dreadful situation, because there was no compulsion except the compulsion of obligation. They never gave her a chance to do anything for them; they were always doing things for her. What an ingrate she would be to rebuff their first real desire! And yet to marry a man she felt such antipathy for––surely there could be some less hateful way of obliging her benefactors. She felt like a castaway on a desert, and there was something of the wilderness in the immensity of the drawing-room with its crowds of untenanted divans and of empty chairs drawn into groups as the departed guests had left them. Lady Webling stood close to Marie Louise and pressed for an answer. “You don’t really dislike Nicky, do you?” “N-o-o. I’ve not known him long enough to dislike him very well.” She tried to soften the rebuff with a laugh, but Lady Webling sighed profoundly and smothered her disappointment in a fond “Good night.” She smothered the great child, too, in a hugely buxom embrace. When Marie emerged she was suddenly reminded that she had not yet spoken to Lady Webling of Fräulein Ernst’s attack on the children’s souls. She spoke now. “There’s one thing, mamma, I’ve been wanting to tell you all evening. Please don’t let it distress you, but really I’m afraid you’ll have to get rid of Fräulein.” Lady Webling’s voluminous yawn was stricken midway into a gasp. Marie Louise told her the story of the diabolical prayer. Lady Webling took the blow without reeling. She expressed shock, but again expressed it too perfectly. She promised to “reprimand the foolish old soul.” “To reprimand her!” Marie Louise cried. “You won’t send her away?” “Send her away where, my child? Where should we send the poor thing? But I’ll speak to her very sharply. It was outrageous of her. What if the children should say such things before other people? It would be frightful! Thank you for telling me, my dear. And now I’m for bed! And you should be. You look quite worn out. Coming up?” Lady Webling laughed and glanced at the study door, implying and rejoicing in the implication that Marie Louise was lingering for a last word with Easton. Really she was trying to avoid climbing the long stairs with Lady Webling’s arm about her. For the first time in her life she distrusted the perfection of the old soul’s motives. She felt like a Judas when Lady Webling offered her cheek for another good-night kiss. Then she pretended to read a book while she listened for Lady Webling’s last puff as she made the top step. At once she poised for flight. But the study door opened and Easton came out. He was bending down to murmur into Sir Joseph’s downcast countenance. Easton was saying, with a tremulous emotion, “This is the beginning of the end of 22 23 24 England’s control of the sea.” Marie Louise almost felt that there was a quiver of eagerness rather than of dread in his tone, or that the dread was the awe of a horrible hope. Sir Joseph was brooding and shaking his head. He seemed to start as he saw Marie Louise. But he smiled on her dotingly and said: “You are not gone to bed yet?” She shook her head and sorrowed over him with a sudden rush of gratitude to his defense. She did not reward Easton’s smile with any favor, though he widened his eyes in admiration. Sir Joseph said: “Good night, Nicky. It is long before I see you some more.” Nicholas nodded. “But I shall see Miss Marie Louise quite soon now.” This puzzled Marie Louise. She pondered it while Nicky bent and kissed her hand, heaved a guttural, gluttonous “Ah!” and went his way. It was nearly a week later before she had a clue to the riddle. Then Sir Joseph came home to luncheon unexpectedly. He had an envelope with him, sealed with great red buttons of wax. He asked Marie Louise into his office and said, with an almost stealthy importance: “My darling, I have a little favor to ask of you. Sometimes, you see, when I am having a big dealing on the Stock Exchange I do not like that everybody knows my business. Too many people wish to know all I do, so they can be doing the same. What everybody knows helps nobody. It is my wish to get this envelope to a man without somebody finding out something. Understand?” “Yes, papa!” Marie Louise answered with the utmost confidence that what he did was good and wise and straight. She experienced a qualm when Sir Joseph explained that Nicky was the man. She wondered why he did not come to the house. Then she rebuked herself for presuming to question Sir Joseph’s motives. He had never been anything but good to her, and he had been so whole-heartedly good that for her to give thought-room to a suspicion of him was heinous. He had business secrets and stratagems of tremendous financial moment. She had known him to work up great drives on the market and to use all sorts of people to prepare his attacks. She did not understand big business methods. She regarded them all with childlike bewilderment. When, then, Sir Joseph asked her to meet Nicky, as if casually, in Regent’s Park, and convey the envelope from her hand to Nicky’s without any one’s witnessing the transfer, she felt the elation of a child intrusted with an important errand. So she walked all the way to Regent’s Park with the long strides of a young woman out for a constitutional. She found a bench where she was told to, and sat down to bask in the spring air, and wait. By and by Easton sauntered along, lifted his hat to Marie Louise, and made a great show of surprise. She rose and gave him her hand. She had taken the precaution to wear gloves––also she had the envelope in her hand. She left it in Nicky’s. He smuggled it into his coat pocket, and murmuring, “So sorry I can’t stop,” lifted his hat and hurried off. Marie Louise sat down again and after a time resumed her constitutional. Sir Joseph was full of thanks when she saw him at night. Some days later he asked Marie Louise to meet Nicky outside a Bond Street shop. She was to have a small parcel and drop it. Nicky would stoop and pick it up and hand her in its stead another of similar wrapper. She was to thank him and come home. Another day Marie Louise received from Sir Joseph a letter and a request to take the children with her for a long walk, ending at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The children carried their private navies with them and squatted at the brim of the huge basin, poking their reluctant yachts to sea. The boy Victor perfected a wonderful scheme for using a long stick as a submarine. He thrust his arm under water and from a distance knocked his sister’s sailboat about till its canvas was afloat and it filled and sank. All the while he wore the most distant of expressions, but canny little Bettina soon realized who had caused this catastrophe and how, and she went for Victor of the U-stick with finger-nails and feet and nearly rounded him into the toy ocean. It evidently made a difference whose ship was gored. Marie Louise darted forward to save Victor from a ducking as well as a trouncing, and nearly ran over a man who was passing. It was Ross Davidge, whiling away an hour between appointments. He thought he recognized Marie Louise, but he was not sure. Women in the morning look so unlike their evening selves. He dared not speak. Davidge lingered around trying to get up the courage to speak, but Marie Louise was too distraught with the feud even to see him when she looked at him. She would not have known him, anyway. Davidge was confirmed in his guess at her identity by the appearance of the man he had se...