Читать книгу The Rash Act - Ford Madox Ford - Страница 4

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The morning seemed to herald a glorious day. The motionless silver of the sea was ruffled in irregular streaks like watered satin. The light mists were rising from the horizon and the islands. Sunlight from over the stone pines just touched the end of the jetty so that there was a triangle of gold. A boat, anchored beyond, brooded, motionless. On the translucent water it seemed to be suspended in the air. It became vivid—a melon slice of incandescent white, a curved stripe of scarlet. Another, parallel below, was of azure. The boat should have caught the light first. It was further out than the end of the little pier.

The phenomenon was no doubt occasioned by the irregular outlines of the pines. Or perhaps a beam pierced an interstice in their tops. The prow of the boat stood up, white, shaped like half an open fan. The sail, untidily housed on the curving felucca-yard was lambent maroon. Then all the light went out of the whole caboodle.

It was as if he had been vouchsafed a chromolithographic close-up of a prehistoric craft. In miniature the thing had been one of the thousand ships that Helen's face had launched and Homer catalogued.

What a thought for that moment!

He was suspended as this boat had been—between nothing and nothing. There was nothing to think of but visible objects. The sea, level: blue at the edges. The stone pines bent, red-trunked. The umbrella pines brighter in colour.

The sunlight was falling on the islands now...a landscape without mercy. It smiled with the heartless smile of syrens. Infinitely without the quality of pity.

He imagined that Mile Simone, the chambermaid, would find his bedroom tidier than usual. He was always tidy. Now there would be not a scrap displaced. Not a cigarette paper. She would perhaps think him considerate! Tuberculous: that was what she was. You could not be so thin without being tuberculous. She might even think that nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

An aged man in improbably soiled ducks came down the inclined plane leading from the Douane. Why should the white Douane building be as large as the barracks for a detachment of soldiers? No other house in the place was larger than a pill-box and the whole port consisted of not more than twenty pill-boxes. The port was no larger than the mainsail of a schooner-yacht. At one time bands of smugglers had landed there. Coming from Corsica, their brows bound with handkerchiefs. Long flint-lock muskets behind their backs. They needed detachments of troops with which to drive off the picturesque bandits. Picturesque days!-Helen! Homer! Bandits! Salee rovers! Centurions! The landscape with its heartless smile had seen them all with the same equanimity. With the same it regarded him: him Henry Martin Aluin Smith: free, male and twenty-one. Rising thirtysix, that is to say. It is all one, twenty-one or thirty-five if you are called Henry Martin Aluin with 'Smith' to top it off...If you are going...But a less grotesque name would have given more dignity to the occasion or to a cross!

He was at least spared the indignity of Aluin-Smith. On his passport, which, along with his letter to Alice, he had obligingly wrapped in oiled silk that also enveloped a fifty franc note, 'I, the undersigned, Secretary of State of these United States' had boggled at the task of inserting a hyphen between his last two names. That would perhaps let his grizzled boar of a father out. Presumably his grizzled boar of a father would not like to have the name 'Aluin-Smith' on a cheap metal cross looking over the Mediterranean. His father had achieved the name Aluin-Smith with some difficulty on his candy wrappers. Early specimens that Henry Martin had seen had borne the legend 'Alcyone A. Faber.' That had become, presumably as his father had lived himself into the life of Springfield, Ohio, 'A. A. Smith.' Faber is after all the Latin for the more American 'Smith.' At last, on marriage it stood up boldly as: 'A. Aluin-Smith.'...Mother had been the daughter of a 'pharmacist' who in those old-fashioned days called himself Smith the Chymist—with a 'y'. A rigid New Englánder he had been and claimed to be a man of science, no tooth-brush or pop corn pedlar.

Henry Martin wondered too about his tombstone. His father would no doubt attend to that. He would probably waver between having the remains thrown into the common fosse of the paupers of St. Jean du Var and a lump of Vosges rock that would be smoothed to a glassy finish as to one panel which would be inscribed: H.M.A.S. UN ETRANGER. 15 AUG. MCMXXXI. His father would not be one to omit the date. An orderly, if truculent, man fond of making memoranda! His packets—even his one cent pre-war packets of Pisto-Brittle had been decorated with a slip inviting the complaints of purchasers. The slip would bear a facsimile of his father's signature, a number running into millions and a date.

H.M.A.S.

UN ETRANGER NOYE 3. Le 15 Août MCMXXXI

The inscription would be in good Roman capitals. 'Leaded caps' was perhaps the technical word! Presumably there would be no religious addition. That would be frowned upon by ecclesiastical Authority. It was singular that his father had never become Protestant Episcopal. It was held in Springfield that Catholicism was a cult only for nursemaids. They gave to the priest their hard-earned pennies out of little leather purses. This he had heard time out of mind in prep-school where the boys had been nearly all German Lutheran. Possibly it was Moravian. At any rate Springfield was a great centre for the production of German Lutheran clergy. The training college on its insignificant mound had had architectural features. As a boy he had been awed by them...Well, if Henry Alcyone Aluin had become Protestant Episcopal—or even Moravian—he, Henry Martin Aluin, might have had a pious aspiration carved on that polished granite panel. As it was, there would be none now. It might as well run:

HIC

EXIT

SMITH'S

PISTO-BRITTLE

—drowned in the Mediterranean 15.8.31!

There would be no one to carry on that sticky dynasty. Brother Hal as an engineer with a fine if laborious career in the Klondike would not want to be bothered. Nor certainly would Heldenstamm, Sister Carrie's husband. He would want to go on hunting wild boars in Luxemburg...A precipitous country. All rocks, streams and trees. That was why his father made his family tombs out of boulders. The habit shocked the inhabitants of Springfield. When it had merely been a matter of Aunt Hedwig, Comtesse de Pralinghem, it had not so much mattered. But when father buried mother under a similar lump Springfield had said that had been un-American. If mother had been alive she would never have stood for it. But it had looked like good publicity. When father had first come to the country he had manufactured peanut brittle. Then mother—before the marriage—had suggested that pistachios were more genteel than peanuts. But father had continued to manufacture peanut brittle after he began making the other. Henry Martin could remember as a tiny boy standing behind the counter in the drug-store. His father would be laughing at his attempts to wrap up tablets of Pisto-Brittle. They were thinner than the peanut concoction, trays of which stood by the first cash register. That you cut with fat, sharpened pincers that opened like crocodile jaws and bit out chunks of the rocky candy. There was another candy made with almonds. Some called it almond rock.

On a Saturday afternoon he, Henry Martin, would be allowed to cut up the candy for customers. The country folk came in and bought it to take to their children though old folks said they liked sucking it themselves. It reminded them of their courting days before they had lost their teeth. They turned it round in their toothless jaws and chuckled.

His father let him have on such Saturday afternoons every exact ounce he could cut out with the pincers at one cut. He never managed many. Hardly ever more than two cuts in an afternoon. Well he was earning a large lump of almond rock! Really such a tombstone much resembled that candy. When it was cut it had sides like polished granite—for the inscription. The almonds on the other side had the ruddled appearance of the reddish boulder from Luxemburg.

The proudest moments of his life he had known, not inside but on the sidewalks, on winter evenings, outside that drug-store. With a woollen cap and mittens, a small sled dangling behind, the parti-coloured lights falling on the trodden snow from the great red, blue and yellow bottles. The other boys goggling up at them. That was pride...his proprietary interest...those flaring demijohns! Really of course they were mother's. Father had only come into the drug-store on the marriage. That accounted for mother's social ambition. She had to give father a hoist. She had married below her even by American standards. Her father had been Smith the Chymist! Father had started his career as far as Springfield was concerned in a wooden shed with a shutter that pushed up and displayed his candies. On a vacant lot on Main Street.

There was nothing to be ashamed of in that. But it was kept in the background. Only; when they took grave walks with father on Sundays down Main Street he had been used to stop opposite what had been successively Parke's, the butchers', Gurney's, the booksellers', and the Ohio Electric Corporation's show-store. Henry Martin believed it was now the First National. Or perhaps the First National had failed. So many had in the last few months.

Father would point out that there he had started his career. In a shed. Hal and Henry Martin in their creaking boots—Sister Carrie in her rustling starched petticoats that stuck out all round her tartan stockings—they would stand goggling whilst father pointed his gold-knobbed cane at the shutters—at first of Parke's, then of Gurney's. The Electric Corporation did not have shutters even on Sunday. Nights, they had a light burning so that you saw the copper wind fans and nickel irons! 'Ready for service,' night and day. Father, with his top hat and white waistcoat with mother-of-pearl buttons would expatiate on the fact that there he had had his first shed. Occasionally he would stop a passer-by—two passers-by or three—and tell them, too, the tale. He would swell—they would all seem to swell and smile cordially—at the thought of the growth of Springfield.

Presumably that was how the news of father's Sunday afternoon habit had reached the ears of mother. At any rate father was told that it would be better for the children's health if they were taken into more rural surroundings on a Sunday. So, for a time they were taken along the ridge where villas and porticos and stoops were beginning to arise among the apple orchards.

So father, by all accounts, had been the better American, even if his name had at first been Faber and even though mother had come of one of the first families in New England. They heard that from both father and mother often enough. Grandpa Smith had emigrated to Springfield from Fall River...oh, a great many years ago. So mother had been born over the coloured bottles in Springfield. But to be born in a stable does not make you a mare if you are a lady and the daughter of a scientist. It was said to have broken Grandpa Smith's heart when, by the pressure of his wife and daughter, he was forced to give up a section of a counter to his son-in-law's candies. At any rate he had died within a year of the marriage, not living to see Henry Martin who had come into the world two days after the old gentleman's death.

If he had known that the Smith family would one day have two visible countesses in it it might have heartened him up. No other family in Springfield could show the like though nearly every one of them had non-visible liens that attached them to Royalty, Durchlauchts, Serenities, and Archdukes. Many of them, they whispered in moments of expansion over their sewing, if they or their husbands chose to exercise their rights, might well be sewing coronets on their teacloths. But they were too democratic. Most of mother's napkins and finer face towels did have coronets. That was because they were presents from Aunt Hedwig and Sister Carrie.

But Aunt Hedwig had not arrived in Springfield until many years after Grandpa Smith's death, though she had lived to see the marriage of Sister Carrie to her nephew Van Heldenstamm who now, in the Ardennes, hunted wild boars from a castle rejuvenated by Pisto-Brittle profits.

Auntie Hedwig had arrived in Springfield as a refugee from Luxemburg a very few months after the outbreak of the European war. Apparently her husband, the Comte de Pralinghem, had had his ancestral ruin desecrated by invaders and had died of apoplexy. A certain veil had been drawn over that part of her career. Until the United States had entered the unfortunate struggle Springfield had been markedly Central Empire in complexion, and, after the Comtesse de Pralinghem had made an incendiary speech in German about atrocities committed in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, there had been some talk of riding her on a rail out of town.

That at least had been Brother Hal's story. Henry Martin had been at Dartmouth and, being at that time on bad terms with his father, had not seen his relation till later. What he had seen of her had not increased his pride of race. She had seemed a nasty, toothless, dirty, very aged woman who took snuff, smelt of brandy and talked French with a hideous accent. Hal said she had bought her husband, the deceased Count, with money sent her by father and he made disobliging surmises as to the Count's past.

The aged man who had been descending the stone stade was clattering on the flat rocks at Henry Martin's side. He was toothless, wrinkled and aged like Aunt Hedwig. His neck was as deeply set in his shoulders as a chimpanzee's, his arms as long. He squinted up with difficulty at the skies and raising his arms as if they had been a marionette's, flapped them, ill-jointedly, up and down, up and down, with, at the end of them, hands like powerless hooks.

Henry Martin wondered whether it had not been the old man's mahogany-coloured, wrinkled face that had reminded him of his aunt. The wrinkles were ingrained with dirt. But they say that men about to drown see their whole lives with extraordinary vividness. He had certainly just seen Springfield much more plainly than he had ever wanted to see it again after he first left it. He could have sworn he had just been standing by the level-crossing over the railway with the gates shut and the inextricable jumble, in that squalid thoroughfare, of automobiles and horse-trucks that the cops never succeeded in reconciling. There were all sorts of white marks and lumps in the roadway. There were more of them pro rata in Springfield than in all New York with Chicago thrown in. Why did provincial cities have to go to these excesses?

Brother Hal said nothing in the world would induce him to drive his Buick down those streets again. He himself would certainly never again tread its unrepaired sidewalks. He had once or twice returned there—at the dictates of conscience—after he had broken irrevocably with the old man. Hal, he presumed, had inherited their father's impetuous, wild boar's obstinacy. He himself had perhaps more of his mother's New England conscience and determination. It worked out at something very like irresolution. Few people—certainly few young men of his generation, free and male, had by the age of thirty-five made as much of a muddle of their lives. He seemed never to have been free for a minute till that moment. He presumed he might call himself male.

But at that moment he was being resolute enough. The old man—Marius Vial, the proprietor of the inn and half the boats in the harbour—was undoubtedly urging him not to go out. He was reciting the long incomprehensible sorty of seventeen boats that had been sunk by a trombio off the end of Cap Cépet, at the end of the peninsula of St. Mandrier. Out there!...

He hooked a claw into Henry Martin's forearm and waved his other flibbertigibbet arm at the distant promontory with its slopes of fir woods.

Henry Martin considered that, to the old man, he must present an aspect of inflexible Nordic valour. He had laughed, disengaged his arm and continued striding towards the land end of the little pier. The old man might be right—but again he might be wrong. He had grappled himself to Henry Martin's side every day for an hour or so during the past serene-weathered week and had recited the story of the trombio—a local dialect version of the word trombe which means a cloudbreak. And every day he had dissuaded Henry Martin from going out. That might be sympathetic fear. It might also be just business. Henry Martin had hired the boat for a week from Olive, Marius Vial's grandson—but the boat, like the hotel and every stick in it, belonged to the old fellow. The old fellow might very well want him to get as little hire out of it as the recital of the storm could make him. On first hearing the story he had actually not gone out. But during the succeeding twenty-four hours there had not been a breath of wind on the glassy sea. This time he was going!

He was, however, worried about the boat. What would happen to it? It was, it is true, insured. Old Marius Vial had seen to that before he would begin to think of letting his grandson hire it out to a visitor. He would be doing the Vials no harm. But the thought of the boat, drifting empty, was very disagreeable to him. You should not treat boats like that. A boat manned had a dignity, as if a purpose. Even anchored or hitched to a buoy its dignity does not desert it. It waits; it broods; it retains a personality. It is all right hauled up on a beach. It has stability. But drifting, lurching clumsily to an unexpected wave, exhibiting parts usually hidden, a boat is degraded. You should not degrade boats any more than you should mishandle tools or maltreat animals. A boat adrift is like an ownerless dog, the tail and ears drooping, the gait furtive.

The problem of the boat had worried him a great deal. A story he had heard had returned to him again and again whilst he had been pondering the problem at odd moments during the last six or seven days. He had heard the story in Lowland Scotland—from a red headed Scotsman married to a Chicago girl. The girl had had a name that in Chicago stank of dollars and eatables. Henry Martin had wondered that Ferguson had had an ancient and battered car of an extinct model. Ferguson had explained that the chauffeur would not let him have a new one. The car was the chauffeur's pride. He wanted to drive it for ever, scattering nuts and bits of radiator all over the countryside—to show what he could do! He said he would prove that he could get more out of it than the chauffeur of the people on the next estate who had a brand new, silver Rolls-Royce.

Ferguson had told him the story as a comment on his chauffeur and on how people regarded their implements and vehicles once they had got attached to them and credited them with individualities. An aviator—or at any rate a man who had owned a plane for a long time—had also a wife to whom he was as attached as to his plane. He found his wife had a lover. Life ended for him. He invited the unsuspecting lover to take a flight with him. He intended to smash the plane and put an end to both of them.

He couldn't do it—not because he was afraid of Death but because he could not bear to put a slur on the fair fame of his plane. People would think she had failed him. And, still more, he could not bear to make her do wrong because she would feel humiliation.

Henry Martin had felt the same about his boat. It is true that he had run her only about a fortnight—but a fortnight of continual society is ample to make you intimate with boats or people. He had loafed, drifting all about such of the sea as was there visible, doing nothing—as if he had been immured in the boat. Shut in on himself! It had not perhaps been good for him. But what did that matter? He was beyond good and evil.

He had chosen with great deliberation the place at which he would step off the boat. The great harbour had a mole—if that was what you called it?—a sea wall with two openings for the passage of warships. At each opening was a little lighthouse with a guardroom for signallers. It was their duty to watch events in the harbour. Therefore Henry Martin had resolved to end it about fifty yards from the left-hand lighthouse—fifty or a hundred.

A certain fastidiousness may be allowed to one in the choice of the place of one's end! In any case he assumed that right, and there was no one to stop him. He had passed over the chosen spot several times in the course of the last week. Once he had put the boat about three or four times on a course of a couple of hundred yards. If it had been murder he was planning you could with full warrant have said it was premeditated.

He had gone close in under the terrace of the little lighthouse. The sentry had called to him to stop and had asked him if he were practising for the speed boat races. That proved that they watched the proceedings of even the smallest boats. For smugglers, no doubt!

He had answered, No, he had dropped a pocketbook overboard and had been trying to recover it...

Was one, then, as fastidious in lying as in the choice of the place of one's end? Wouldn't it have been just as easy to accept the lie the sentry had provided for him? It was in any case what the Jesuits would justify as a lie of necessity. He could hardly have told the fellow that he had been cruising back and forth over the place where he intended to end his life. In order to insure that the last landscape his eyes would see would be agreeable to him. It would certainly be agreeable. On the one hand the island towered up, near by, dark with pines and chestnuts because it was the north slope. Close to him would run the white mole that kept the heavier waves of the open sea from the harbour...and, far beyond the waters of the outer harbour, the façades of houses, irregular in height, white as a general colour and basking in the sunlight. Arid mountains towered up behind.

He had disliked the cold sea that you saw from Nantucket or Portland, Maine. That was perhaps due to his inland birth and inland origins. You could hardly think of an inhabitant of Springfield or the descendant of Luxemburgers as a sailor. But he had had, in his time, a cruising yawl and then a speed boat on Lake Michigan and, to the little, glassy, azure, sunlit Mediterranean coves and harbours he had taken exactly as a duck takes to water.

The sentry, leaning over the balustrade that surrounded the lighthouse had jeered at him for letting his pocketbook go overboard and, still more, for thinking he could recover it from the sea. He had said that it might be washed on to the landing steps and asked Henry Martin for his name and address. Henry Martin had replied:

'Henry Martin Aluin Smith, Hotel Belle Vue, Carqueiranne,' and the sentry had waved his hand as the boat drifted away.

Perhaps the fellow really took him for a smuggler trying to pick up a buoy. Or a spy trying to observe details of the fort whose semaphore showed white on the outline of the island. Well, he would learn the truth if he ever walked in the cemetery above the railway behind the town. There would be the name on the lump of almond rock...Or perhaps the sentry would read of the case in the papers. Or perhaps he had not caught the name at all. Or perhaps he would see him, Henry Martin, male, free and thirty-six, step over the side of the boat.

Perhaps, too, his father might refuse to go to the expense of the tombstone. There was no knowing what his father would do. In his thirty-odd years of acquaintanceship he had never sized his father up. He was like a wild boar—like a mountain. Slumped down in his round-backed office chair as if he would never move again, but occasionally lifting a heavy hand and dropping it. Behind his little, watchful eyes his thoughts ran round and round—actively, no doubt. He was tyrannical, cunning, intelligent, sentimental, vindictive and completely without shame. He must be rising sixty—but still of immense physical strength and very little bowed.

He could not be said to have modelled himself on the old-school American Merchant. He was too obtuse to model himself on anyone. But it worked out like that. Perhaps the Europeans who came to America had to be fitted to work out true to type if they were to succeed. To the type, mental and physical. Father certainly made a good, representative American of the old-school—even to the remorseless, overhung jawbone. He was indomitable and passionate—but Henry Martin had never felt settled in his mind as to what was his father's ruling passion. It was no doubt centred in Smith's Pisto-Brittle...But what did he see in that simple business edifice? There was no knowing. He hardly seemed to wish to extend its fame to the extreme corners of the continent. Once he had said to Henry Martin:

'Don't you believe you're going to come into a lot of millions. I shall never die worth more than a million and a half!' So that even if Henry Martin pleased him to the day of his death he could not expect to have more than three-quarters of a million. It was not a great sum to receive after having played the sedulous ape...for fifty years. There was no reason why father should not see eighty.

The reward had not seemed good enough—either to Brother Hal or himself. Hal had simply cut and run—into engineering. He seemed to lead a riotous and successful life with a good humoured, healthy Swedish girl he had picked up—mostly on the Alaska-Canada border. When the couple of them hilariously descended on Springfield—usually, of course, in the winter—they united in windy vitality to make fun of that city, of the old man, of Henry Martin, and of Sister Carrie if she happened to be there for Christmas. How the old man regarded Hal and Greta there was no knowing. When they actively displayed their satisfaction with each other and turned the house upside down the old man merely blinked—as if at sunshine in a high wind. He said nothing. Sister Carrie kissed him good night on the bald forehead. He blinked. It might be pleasurably; it might not.

But when he, Henry Martin, had had his tumultuous affair with Wanda, the old man had said:

'One sixty-horse power Swedish nightingale is quite enough sunshine in the American home.' So he might have been jeering at Greta. But he might not. It might have been as if he had said—as he did say—that such and such a proportion of milk-butter was a good thing in Pisto-Brittle de luxe, but too much spoilt the crispness.

Equally, you couldn't tell how he took the Van Heldenstamm family. When Aunt Hedwig had imported that beetle-browed, lanky, greasy-accented piece of Belgian aristocracy to Springfield with the avowed intention of marrying him to Carrie, the old man had uttered no objections. Mother had been delighted. Poor mother! She had pointed out the analogies that existed between old New England families and the European aristocracies. They—she and her children—through the Huntingdons of Dorchester, Massachusetts, were undoubtedly, if mysteriously, descended from the Earls of Huntingdon. The most famous of that family had been the great Robin Hood—who was certainly a democratic figure in that what he took from the rich he gave to the poor.

But no doubt a great part of the pleasure that poor mother had taken in the anticipated noble alliance had come from the fact that it put her level with father. She was to have an authentic Countess of her own blood to score against Aunt Hedwig. That some sort of rivalry existed between poor father and mother was indubitable. It manifested itself on her part in half tones of the voice; on his part, in chuckles that were barely audible. These symptoms might be presumed to occur when either had scored off the other—as if each, on occasion, should say: 'I told you so!'

Henry Martin had not the least idea what it was all about...No doubt about minute points in the housekeeping, the cooking, father's indigestion. Or his clothes and behaviour on social occasions. They were obviously the best of friends, but father's tastes in ties and trouserings were flamboyant and he stuck to his gold-headed cane long years after the habit of carrying such articles had passed from the Middle West. If the cane had been of malacca with smooth, rich-looking gold for its handle it might have passed. But it was of ebony and had elaborate gold-chasings in the worst style of the eighteeneighties. The perfectly genuine gold extremity looked as if it were the cheapest of gilt brass.

At any rate, when the gorgeous wedding in the Roman Catholic church was over, father let the cane be wrapped up in tissue paper and put away in the mahogany chest of drawers in the bedroom. And he gave up railing at the New England vegetable plates and pot-roasts that poor mother insisted were essential to his health. That was the symbol that poor mother was, for the rest of her life, to dominate him completely.

It might have been indeed that he had lost all spirit when he lost Carrie. He was probably deeply—deep-rootedly—attached to her.

At any rate, before consenting to the marriage, he had called her into his office and, fingering her necklace pathetically as she stood before him, had asked her if she really knew what she was in for if she married Van Heldenstamm. He drew for her vivid pictures of the habits of the Belgian aristocracy. They were apparently the only aristocracy left that were aristocratically outrageous in the old style. They carried off each other's wives on coal-black chargers, shot injured husbands across the moats of chateaux, kidnapped the children awarded by courts to injured spouses, flogged their butlers, maintained harems in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp or on their properties under the nose of their wives. They had, the old man said, all the black properties of the old-time Spaniards and Netherlanders from whom they drew their blood. And he pointed out that if Van Heldenstamm proved an exception Sister Carrie couldn't expect to find in Europe the freedom and the affection that young American girls expected as theirs of right. At best the life of a European chateau is one of unceasing calls on you. There are the servants, the priests, the peasants, the poor neighbours, making perpetual calls on your purse, your needle, your poultry yard and, above all, your time. He would not want a daughter of his, if she was to occupy a prominent position in a country bordering on one that had been his own to occupy that position with any want of dignity...

As far as Henry Martin could see, the old man had come with more dignity himself out of that interview than out of any other that he had had with his children. Perhaps he had felt it more! With Henry Martin and Brother Hal he had never come off well. Brother Hal had simply defied him at every turn. He had done what he wanted, never asked his father for a penny and had prospered boisterously in half-opened territories and markets. He had worked on bridges in Spain, Mexico, Sweden, Buenos Aires, and New Mexico—on the machinery of gold mines in Ballarat, South Africa and now, in the Klondike. He had earned good money and had even now a good sum invested in one or two inventions that, in spite of the times, were beginning to do well.

His own career Henry Martin was shy of recalling in this his final review of it. He was strolling desultorily along the pier. Old Marius Vial, having given up the struggle to dissuade him, had hobbled forward to gloat over the boat as he gloated over all his property.

What was the good of reviewing a career that was so soon to run inside a lump of pink granite with one polished side? As if it were an automobile running into its last garage. He didn't want to think of his perpetual wanderings with Springfield as a base—the town to which he had as perpetually returned to make new beginnings. And new excursions under the sardonic eyes of his father...Surely if father had loved his wife he would have shown more sympathy with the aspirations of her son!

He had never seemed to.

Their first wounding and atrocious quarrel had come just after Henry Martin's return for the first time from Dartmouth. He had still been a freshman and still had ambitions to become a writer. Over that they had not directly quarrelled. Not ostensibly!

If he was now thirty-five he ought to have been born in 1896. Actually he had been born in 1895. He would be thirty-six in three months' time...But he would not, of course. 'He would have been' was perhaps the way to express it. It was a mistake to have been born in the nineteenth century when the whole of your life was to be passed in the twentieth.

Carrie had been born on July 11th, 1894. It was just over a month since he had sent her his last birthday telegram. Hal had been born on January 9th, 1901...It was perhaps a mistake to have been born between an early maturing, soft natured sister and a brother much smaller than oneself. He had no doubt been rendered soft by his sister's solicitude...It was not good for a boy to go to his first socials under the wing of an elder sister. It had got him into the early habit of relying on women for advice and support.

Carrie had been married early in 1915—when she had been just under twenty-one. He had been at Dartmouth...was it a year, then? He was not certain. These dates confused themselves. There were too many of them.

Mother had died in...yes, in late 1915. She had only had a countess of her own blood for four months! And a son at Dartmouth for fifteen.

He had come home for her death. She had, it then appeared, only just kept up for the wedding and had been under opiates for most of the time since then. The old man must have suffered like hell all those months. But to Henry Martin he had seemed merely callous.

Coming home from the funeral he had gone straight to the kitchen door and had shouted to the cook in Luxemburg Flemish that she would cook Luxemburg fashion from then on. He had afterwards gone up to his bedroom, opened the drawer and taken out from its tissue paper his gold-knobbed cane.

Coming straight back from college triumphs Henry Martin had regarded that as an offensive assertion of recovered freedom. At Dartmouth he had been quite popular. He had had money to throw away. He stood already six feet in his gym shoes and was very large boned. Taking college life with immense seriousness he had united to a studiousness sufficient to make him stand very well with the English teaching staff, a zealous observance of fraternity necessities. He had, too, a great devotion to athletics. He was light of foot in spite of his weight, very muscular and of remarkable balance for a cub. He knew that he was already under observation for the Rhodes Scholarship list of 1916.

Three days after mother's funeral father had sent for him to the office and had told him that he would not be going back to Dartmouth. His blinking eyes had watched Henry Martin's face with the effect of a medieval executioner taking stock of the emotions of a victim to whom he had announced sentence of death. He had said simply:

'You won't be going back to Dartmouth.' Without any breaking of the news.

Henry Martin had stood like a pole-axed ox. Swaying.

After a long time father had added:

'You will be going to learn the business from the bottom. American fashion. Stoking. Boiling. Cutting. Packing. Carting, travelling, retail selling. Boy clerk. Head cashier...Partner...Sole owner.'

Henry Martin did not think he had shown himself wanting in resolution. Then, or ever! Then why did he seem like Hamlet to himself? He was now bronzed to the shade of a quadroon, over six feet in his stockings. He was perhaps too aware of his height, ft had done him no good.

Conscious of his own prowess on the football field he had asked his father: Was wrapping candy the job for a fellow who stood over six feet? His father had heaved his great bulk humorously back in his chair. Henry Martin had been conscious, then, that he had behind him he did not know how many generations of ancestors all, like his father, six feet two and over. And—back into the remotest recesses of time!—they had all wrapped toffee in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg.

He had no instinctive repugnance for the trade. Even in the social stiffness of Magdalen College, Oxford, England, he had not felt ashamed of his descent. Not amongst the descendants of a hundred belted earls.

He had got his Rhodes Scholarship all right—at the cost of working as a dishwasher and cleaner in his off moments at Dartmouth. Or a little perhaps because of it! The governing authorities of that place of education had no doubt looked with a kindly eye on that gentle six-footer who indomitably washed dishes and scrubbed floors—in the determination of being a scholastic and athletic honour to his Alma Mater.

He had got to Oxford all right. But he had not stayed there long. He had found the dreaming spires as disagreeable as the Lutheran College of Springfield, Ohio. Not as painfully sordid but more minatory. He felt that he would turn pudding-faced and rice-milky in the brain. The war had been on then, of course, and the contents of the cloisters and courts was distinctly what was there called off-colour—or too coloured. He had found himself a lanky giant amongst copper, coffee, or saffron-hued midgets—from Paraguay, the hinterlands of Bengal or Monrovia. Or else they were odd-come-shorts from obscure London suburbs with grotesque names.

Other colleges indeed had been more highly-coloured in spots. Once the Queen had been dining at Balliol and the more truculent spirits of Magdalen had paraded before that college shouting: 'Bring out your black man, Balliol.' Balliol had amongst its undergraduates at the moment the coal blackest negro that those climes had ever seen.

In the return party Balliol had paraded before Magdalen yelping:

'Bring out your white man, Magdalen.'

And they had seized on tall, white Henry Martin and dragged him along the High whilst little, yellow and particoloured fellows had tried to rescue him.

He had frequently wondered whether that confusing experience had not considerably influenced his life. For the worse! At any rate it had been there that, as far as he could remember, he had for the first time wished seriously to be someone else. He had wished intensely to be a certain broad-faced Japanese—a little man with an immense mouth over-filled with gigantic teeth!

It was the measure of his discontent with himself that he should have wished to be something so completely unpresentable. To have wished to be a Japanese was unthinkable. But to have wished to be such an ugly one!...

Yet on the face of it he had at that date nothing to be ashamed of. He might, had he wished it, have been Smith's Pisto-Brittle, Junior. That was a position equivalent—not to that of a crown prince or an archduke heir-apparent...But equivalent to that of a quite considerable earl's eldest son. Or he might have been well in the running towards representing his country at the next Olympic Games—and so a world hero, though at that date the Olympic Games had seemed remote enough.

But he could have had his father's money if he had chosen to pretend enthusiasm for his father's business. Or if he had chosen to take a little trouble in the way of wire-pulling he could have had the support of the professional speculators in brawn and muscle who turn you into the meat of which heroes are made...

On the face of it his record when he had again faced his father and Springfield had been one of sufficient toughness! He had toughly defied his father, the dons of Oxford, the sergeants of a British regiment. He had toughly followed the true national tradition in performing menial functions in a café whilst proving himself a credit to the place of his education.

Where then was the snag?

He was walking along the pier...towards suicide. Suicide is an act of despair. Still more it is a confession of ineffectualness.

Yet it calls for resolution...No, he had never been wanting in resoluteness...Then...

It was as if he were not all of one piece. It was perhaps that. Born in the nineteenth and having lived the great part of his life in the twentieth century.

Resolution was the note of the nineteenth, mental confusion of the twentieth. Perhaps it was that.

He remembered motoring in a public motorbus in the Pyrenees last year. An incredibly arid region of bare, piled up rocks. He had been even then not so far from his bedrock bottom dollar. 'Anacondas' were hovering at the thirty mark. He had bought at 115—as an investment. With the highest possible advice. The man who had advised him was said to have lost seventy million—out of one hundred and twenty. It was very likely true, too...'Kennecotts' had been even worse than 'Anacondas'.

Well, that arid region like one of the circles of Dante's Hell, had made him think prophetically of 'Anacondas' at 15...And passing their dividend as like as not!...So he had said to the fortyish lady next him in the bus.

'What would you do if you found yourself on the roadside here? Without a cent!'

His mind had run through a number of expedients. You could wire to people across the Atlantic for funds, you could find the nearest American Consulate and apply for relief...At that time he could still have cabled to the First National...

The grey, firm-looking lady with brown eyes had gazed at him with amazement.

'Do?' she had answered. 'What should I do...I should find a job!'

He had felt crushed to abashment...That was the nineteenth century speaking. America of the nineteenth century...She was five...or at the most seven years older than he. A few years more spent in that hardier century had sufficed to give her the gift of incisive resolution. And Valour. She was ready to take her life in her hands and establish it in that arid waste. At a moment's notice...

What then was the matter with him?...He had had quite-a time-a full year, whilst Anacondas and the rest wavered slowly down 1015—14—13...like a flock of sheets of paper dropped from a height and darting sideways; to right, to left, inward, outward...but always down. He had had a full year in which impatiently to watch that decline and to know that destitution approached. He had known that he would ultimately find himself where he now was...In a stern, if not arid, district of the South...Without a cent...

That lady had looked out over the side of the bus at the pink rocks and, without a moment's hesitation, had declared that she would find a job...He had hardly so much as written a line. It had been before the publication of his unfortunate book. Yet he had gone to Paris and settled there...as a 'writer.'

On the occasion of his momentous and quivering interview in 1915—sixteen years ago—he had told his father he intended to 'write.'...He was going to get a Rhodes Scholarship and then with the requisite culture behind him follow in the footsteps of...Shakespeare...Goethe...Possibly Sainte-Beuve...

His father had looked at him with little, twinkling, chuckling eyes. For a long time. Then he had said:

'My boy...if you want to hitch your wagon to a star you can. But not on my money!' He had lifted his hand and dropped it heavily on the desk. He had added:

'Never!'

Henry Martin, at Dartmouth, had found himself attracted to the group that ran the collegiate periodicals. They had all announced themselves as having the intention of 'writing.'...Just writing, without much intimation of whether they intended to produce verse or prose, novels or volumes on metaphysics.

His father had chuckled again and had repeated:

'Yes, my boy. Hitch your wagon to a star. But not on my money...You come of an honourable line of sugar boilers...I assure you they would all turn in their graves...Yes; turn in their graves if they thought the tombstone of one of their family would say "lousy ink-slinger"...Yes..."Lousy inkslinger."'

In his rare anti-American, or rather anti-New England moments when debating with mother, father was accustomed to cite the phrase about the wagon and the star with derision as proof of New England craziness...It was the product of a New England writer...Holmes maybe. Or Emerson.

'Hitch your wagon to a star!' he used to exclaim, rolling his shoulders against the back of his chair. 'Who ever heard of such nonsense! Ain't hitchin' posts good enough for Fall River?'

Poor mother, who was reduced to silence when father really kicked over the traces, would say that the sentiment was allegorical and beautiful. The old man would go on jerking in his chair till he had become motionless and exclaimed earnestly, leaning forward and demonstrating with his short fingers:

'Why, if you hitched your wagon to a star it would go flying away. Maybe it would knock other stars out of their places. Then your candy would fall all over the world...A nice figure you would look! And they'd carve on your tombstone: "Phaeton of Fall River fell in the river."'

His mind ran on tombstones. European Teuto-Frankish minds still did. Father, in private, thought Holbein's 'Dance of Death' the finest humour in the world....And, when Henry Martin came to think of it, he was not averse from thinking of tombstones himself. There was a mural inscription at Antibes, a few miles from where he then stood. It was on the wall of the Roman Theatre—to the memory of a boy dancer who had died young.

'SALTAVIT. PLACUIT. MORTUUS EST.'

'He danced. He gave pleasure. He is dead.'

It would be nice to have that on one's tombstone. But he never would. That would no doubt make his real epitaph—that he had never given pleasure. He had certainly danced. Only last night he had danced—well enough. But he could feel that he gave no pleasure to the little, depressed French poule who was in his arms...He could not attribute many sins to himself. But he had never given pleasure. Not to his father; not to his college friends: not to his Magdalen tutor: not to the sergeants of his British regiment. Not to Wanda...certainly not to Alice. Not on necking parties in the corners of woods with girls who had to neck someone or socially fade...Well, he had danced, he had given no pleasure. He would certainly be dead. In an hour and a half maybe.

The sun was now gloriously up. He was at the end of the pier. Long, glutinous flakes of brilliance were reflected from folds of the glassy water. In its translucent depths beneath his nose the negligible oursins were like remote doorknobs. One of them was dead. It was not brown but skeleton grey. What could be more negligible than a dead sea-urchin? The most negligible thing in the world!

He was going to step off the half-deck above the motor of the boat—a hundred yards from the opening through the mole...Step off. Like a sentry on his beat. Stiff! In a soldierly manner.

That was how he had arranged it with himself.

You could not dive effectively off a boat. Or he could not. To slip over the side would, considering the circumstances, be undignified. Like shuffling out of the world...But to step stiffly, find nothing for the foot and chance what came...