Aliens Part 16

And then we went in to lunch.

CHAPTER IX

WE AWAIT DEVELOPMENTS

If it were necessary to epitomize our att.i.tude towards Mr. Carville during that lunch, it might perhaps be discovered in the word "doubt."

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

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

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

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

"He said so," persisted her husband.

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

He came round to our view in the end, when I reminded him of the _scaldino_. Personally, the idea was incredible. When I thought of Mrs.

Carville bending over the brazier, of her dark, n.o.ble face with its large tragic eyes, and then of the smart convent-bred miss who was called Gladys--absurd!

Miss Fraenkel remained faithful to her mission throughout the meal, and enlisted our sympathy by recounting the struggles of Mrs. Wederslen to capture the league for her own social purposes. It was an old story, this of the ambition of Mrs. Wederslen. Mrs. Wederslen seemed to think that in a community of artists the art-critic's wife is queen. Mrs.

Williams had rebelled against this, and there was tension between them.

Mrs. Wederslen had even made the insane experiment of trying to patronize Bill. There had been a meeting, a few words on each side, and the rest was silence. Without any definite verbal information on the point, Mac and I knew that Bill's tongue would be stilled in death ere she would speak charitably of Mrs. Wederslen. And here were Miss Fraenkel's piquant features aglow with a flush of indignation and her hazel eyes aflame with ladylike resentment, because that imperious woman was endeavouring to a.s.sert her sovereignty over the league. In the great problems thus raised it seemed likely that the smaller matter of Mrs.

Carville's allegiance might be swamped. I endeavoured to bring this discussion into alignment with my own imaginings, a common human weakness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And Gladys," added Mac.

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

"I say, old man."

"What?"

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

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

"No. Here he comes!"

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

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

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

He gave me one of his quick looks and smiled.

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

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

It was a ceremonious bow with which Mr. Carville greeted her as he rose.

He did not offer to shake hands, as middle-cla.s.s people generally do, to their credit. He gave her one square look and then dropped his eyes, and I couldn't detect him even glancing at her again. He seemed to have made a brief examination and then dismissed her from his memory.

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

Carville's inalienable right to his seat.

"Full speed ahead!" said Mac, jocularly.

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

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

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

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

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

"At first I was all abroad at the sudden meeting. A minute before Gladys came down that staircase, if you'd asked me whether I cared for her I'd have said no; it was all burned up long ago. But now I'd seen her again, thin and sallow and changed as she was, it had all come back with a rush. Do you know that kind of love? It's because of the way it rushes back on you, knocks you down and tramples on you, makes you feel mean and degraded and ashamed, that I pray G.o.d it may never happen on me again. I like to think a man may never have it but for one woman.

Sometimes, away out East, when I've been drowsing in a hammock listening to the sweat dripping on the deck and watching the blue hills in the distance, it has come upon me. Sometimes in dreams I've seen her face clearer than I ever saw it in life.... You know them, perhaps?...

Dreams so vivid that one's brain and body ache with the pain of it? Ah!"

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

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

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

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