A Servant of the Public

Why, so they could! Anybody would be glad to play that part; it might bring new treasure of glory to the great – sweet strange fame to one yet unknown. Ora's sobs were for a moment stayed; she sat looking straight in front of her.

Ah, how hard things were! How they harassed, how they tortured, how they tore one asunder! She lay back and sobbed again, now not so passionately, but more gently, yet despairingly. So tragic a guise may sometimes be assumed by such homely truths as that you cannot blow both hot and cold, that you can't eat your cake and have it, and that you must in the end decide whether you will go out by the door or by the window.

She had told Ashley to come to her again that day to hear her decision. It was the appointed hour, and she began to listen for his tread with fear. For he would think that she did not love him, and she did love him; he would say that she wanted to go, and she loathed going; he would tell her all her going meant, and she knew all it meant. It would be between them as it had been yesterday, and worse. Alas, that she should have to fear the sound of Ashley's foot! Ah, that she could throw herself into his arms, saying, "Ashley, I won't go!" Then the sweet companionship and days in the country could come again, all could be forgotten in joy, and the existence of to-morrow be blotted out.

And Mr. Hazlewood and Babba would get somebody else to play the part – the great, great part.

There was the tread. She heard and knew it, and sat up to listen to it, her lips parted and her eyes wide; marked it till it reached the very door, but did not rise to meet it. She would sit there and listen to all that he said to her.

He came in smiling; that seemed strange; he walked up to her and greeted her cheerily; she glanced at him in frightened questioning.

"So you've arranged it?" he said, sitting down opposite to her.

"How do you know, Ashley?"

"Oh, I should know, anyhow," he answered, laughing; "but I met Babba singing a song in Piccadilly – rather loud it sounded – and he stopped to tell me."

"Oh," she murmured nervously. That he had come to know in this way seemed an anti-climax, a note which jarred the tragic harmony; she would have told him in a tempest of tears and self-reproach.

"You've done quite right," he went on. "It wasn't a chance to miss. I should have been a selfish brute if I'd wanted you to give it up. Besides – " He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Come, Ora," he went on, "don't look so sorrowful about it."

He was not as he had been the day before; the touch of mockery which she had seemed to see then was quite gone. He took her hand and caressed it gently.

"Poor dear," he said, "making up your mind always upsets you so terribly, doesn't it?"

"It's going away from you," she whispered, and her grasp fixed tightly on his hand.

"For a few months," he said.

"Don't you think that long?" she cried, her eyes growing reproachful; she had made up her mind that it was eternity.

"I don't mean to think it long, and you mustn't think it long," he said. "The time'll go like lightning. Get an almanac and ink out the days, as homesick boys do at school; it's quite consoling. And you'll have so much to do, so much to fill your thoughts."

"And you?"

"Oh, I shall jog along till you come back. I shall be there to meet you then. We'll come up to town together."

Was this really all? Was there no great, no final tragedy, after all? So it might seem from his quiet cheerful manner. Ora was bewildered, in a way disappointed, almost inclined to be resentful.

"It looks as if you didn't care so very much," she murmured; she tried to draw her hand away from his, but he held it fast. He shut his lips close for a moment, and then said, still very quietly,

"You mustn't think it means that, dear." On the last word his voice quivered, but he went on again. "It means a very long night; the sun won't rise again for ever so many months. But some day it will." She had turned her head away, and, as he made this confident declaration, a smile bent his lips for a moment, a smile not of amusement.

"Will it?" she asked, leaning towards him again, praying him to repeat his comforting words.

"Of course it will."

"And you won't forget me? Ashley, don't forget me!"

"Not likely, my dear," said he. "I think Miss Pinsent makes herself remembered."

"Because I shan't forget you, not for a moment," she said, fixing her eyes on his. "Oh, it's hard to leave you!"

She took up her handkerchief from the small table and dried her eyes. "Your picture will go with me everywhere," she said, lightly touching it. "But I shan't be able to have your roses, shall I? Would you like some tea, Ashley?"

"Very much indeed," said he.

After all, why not tea? There is nothing in tea necessarily inconsistent with tragedy; still her vague forecasts of this conversation had not included the taking of tea.

"Now show me your agreement," he said. "I must see that they've not done you."

As they had tea, they looked through the contract, clause by clause. On the whole Ashley was very well satisfied, although he suggested that one or two points might be modified in Ora's favour; she quite grasped what he put forward and thought that she would be able to obtain the concessions from her partners.

"I ought to make all I can, oughtn't I?" she asked. "I'm giving up so much to go."

"You ought to be as greedy as you possibly can," he assured her with a laugh. He wanted to prevent her from beginning to talk again of what she was giving up; what she would gain was a better topic; just as she must not think how long she would be away, but on the other hand how soon she would be back. We cannot control facts, but there is a limited choice of aspects in which we may regard them and present them for the consideration of our friends. In this little free field optimism and pessimism are allowed to play.

"You can always make me happy!" she sighed, leaning back.

"I know the way to do it, you see," he answered. He had decided that in this case the best way to do it was to let her go and play her part.

"Even when you're gone, I shan't be as miserable as I was before. You've made it all seem less – less big and less awful, you know. Every day will really be bringing me nearer to you again; even the first day! It'll begin directly, won't it? Oh, I shall cry, but now I shall be able to think of that too."

He was not deceiving her in anything like the grave manner in which he had deceived her concerning Jack Fenning, but he felt something of the same qualms. He did not yield an inch to them externally; he had made up his mind to cheat her into going happily; when once that was done, he thought she would soon grow happy; and if it were to be done, it should be done thoroughly. A few tears were inevitable, but they must be alleviated with smiles of hope.

"Directly you go away, you'll begin coming back, won't you? Really I almost wish you were gone already, Ora!"

She laughed at this whimsical idea, but agreed that the actual going would be the one irremediably black spot. Then she grew grave suddenly, as though an unwelcome thought had flashed into her mind.

"Ashley," she said, "suppose I – I meet Jack! He's over there, you know. What shall I do?"

"Oh, he won't bother you, I expect," Ashley assured her.

"But if he does? I shan't have you to take care of me, you know."

"If he does, you go straight to Hazlewood. He's a good fellow and knows his way about the world. He'll see you come to no harm and aren't victimised."

"Will he keep Jack away from me?"

"Yes, I think so. Take him into your confidence." Ashley smiled for a moment. "He'll know the sort of man Fenning is."

Ora seemed a good deal comforted.

"Yes, I like Sidney Hazlewood," she said. "He's awfully tiresome sometimes, but you feel that you can rely on him. He gives you an idea of strength, as if you could put yourself in his hands. Oh, but not so much as you do, of course! But then you won't be there."

"He'll look after you just as well as I should."

"Perhaps he will, as far as the actual thing goes," she admitted. Then she began to smile. "But – but I shan't like it so much from him."

"You never know that till you try," said Ashley, answering her smile with a cheerful smile.

"Oh, that's absurd," said Ora. "But I do think he'll stand by me." She leant forward and put her hand on his knee. "If I were in very, very great trouble and sent for you, would you come?"

"Yes," said Ashley, "I'd come then."

"Whatever you had to do? Whatever time it took? However far off I was?"

"Yes," he answered. "Anyhow I'd come. But you won't – " He hesitated for a moment. "You won't have any cause to send for me," he ended.

"Oh, but I should rather like one," she whispered, almost merrily.

He shook his head. "I shall come only if you're in very, very great trouble; otherwise you must depend on Hazlewood. But you won't be in trouble, and I don't think you'll have any bother about Fenning." For would not Mr. Fenning have the best of reasons for avoiding observation while Hazlewood was about? To Hazlewood he was Foster, and Miss Macpherson, by the dictates of politeness, Mrs. Foster.

It was in entire accord with the line of conduct which Ashley had laid down for himself that even now he said no more of Jack Fenning, and nothing of what he had done about him or heard about him. He stood aside; he had determined not to take her life into his hands; he could not put his into hers; he would not, then, seek to shape events either for her or for himself; he would give her no information and urge on her no course. If she came across her husband, something would very likely happen; or again it was quite probable that nothing would occur except an unpleasant interview and the transference of some of Ora's earnings to Jack's pocket. Miss Macpherson might appear or she might not. Ashley had gone as far as he meant to go when he told Ora to look to Mr. Hazlewood if she were in any trouble. And if she should chance to want, or assent to, "nosings" being carried on, why, was not Babba Flint to be of the party? He dismissed all this from his mind, so far as he could. It was not part of Ora, but yet it hung about Ora; he hated it all because it hung about her, and would intrude sometimes into his thoughts of her. Why had such sordid things ever come near her? But they had, and they, as well as the play and the part, were a fence between her and him. The bitterness of this conclusion was nothing new; he had endured it before; he endured it again as he talked to her and coaxed her into going happily.

But amid all the complexities of reasons, of feelings, and of choices in which men live, there are moments when simplicity reasserts itself, and one thing swallows all others; joy or sorrow brings them. Then the meeting is everything; or again, there is nothing save the parting, and it matters nothing why we must part, or should part, or are parting. Not to be together overwhelms all the causes which forbid us to be together; the pain seems almost physical; people cannot sit still when it is on them any more than when they have a toothache. Such a moment was not to be altogether evaded by any clever cheating of Ora into going happily. There were the inevitable tears from her; in him there was the fierce impulse after all to hold her, not to let her go, to do all that he was set not to do, by any and every means to keep her in hearing and sight and touch. For when she was gone what were touch and hearing and sight to do? They would all be useless and he, their owner, useless too. But of this in him she must see only so much as would assure her of his love and yet leave her to go happy. That she should go happy and still not doubt his love was the object at which he had to aim; the cost was present emptiness of his own life. But things have to be paid for, whether we are furnishing our own needs or making presents to our friends; the ultimate destination of the goods does not change a farthing in the bill.

His last hour with her seemed to set itself, whether in indulgence or in irony he could not decide, to focus and sum up all that she had been to him, to shew all the moods he knew, the ways he loved, the changes that he had traced with so many smiles. She wept, she laughed, she hummed a tune; she took offence and offered it; she flirted and she prayed for love; she held him at arm's length, only to fall an instant later into his arms; she said she should never see him again, and then decided at what restaurant they would dine together on the evening of reunion; she waxed enthusiastic about the part, and then cried that all parts were the same to her since he would not be in the theatre. To be never the same was to be most herself. Yet out of all this variety, in spite of her relapses into tragedy, the clear conclusion formed itself in his mind that she was going happy, at least excited, interested, eager, and not frightened nor utterly desolate. Yet at the last she hung about him as though she could not go; and at the last – he had prayed that this might be avoided – there came back into her eyes the puzzled, alarmed, doubtful look, and with it the reproach which seemed to ask him what he was doing with her, to say that after all it was his act, that he was master, and that when she gave herself into his hands no profession of abdication could free him from his responsibility. If it were so, the burden must be borne; the delusion under which she went must not be impaired.

The last scene came on a misty morning at Waterloo Station; it had been decided that he should part from her there, should hand her over to the men who wanted to make money out of her, and so go his ways. The place was full of people; Babba chattered volubly in the intervals of rushing hither and thither after luggage, porters, friends, provisions, playing-cards, remembering all the things he had forgotten, finding that he had forgotten all that he meant to remember. Hazlewood, a seasoned traveller, smoked a cigar and read the morning paper, waiting patiently till his man should put him in the reserved corner of his reserved carriage; certainly he looked a calm man to whom one might trust in a crisis. Ora and Ashley got a few minutes together in the booking-office, while her maid looked to her trunks and Babba flew to buy her flowers. Nobody came near them. Then it was that it seemed as though the success of his pretence failed in some degree, as though she also felt something of the sense which pressed so remorselessly on him, the sense of an end, that thus they were now together, alone, all in all to one another, and that thus they would never be again. The tears ran down Ora's cheeks; she held both his wrists in her hands with the old grip that said, "You mustn't go." She could not speak to him, he found nothing to say to her; but her tears cried to him, "Are you right?" Their reproach was bitter indeed, their appeal might seem irresistible. What now beside them were parts and plays, lives and their lines, Hazlewoods, Babba Flints, aye, or Jack Fennings either? They pleaded for the parlour in the little inn, reminding him how there first she had thrown herself on his mercy, asking him whether now for the first time he meant in very truth to turn cruel and abuse the trust.

But days had passed, and months, since then; with love had come knowledge, and the knowledge had to be reckoned with, although it had not destroyed the love. Was that ungentle? The knowledge was of himself as well as of her; he dealt no blow that he did not suffer. The knowledge was, above all, of the way things were and must be. Therefore in all the stress of parting he could not, desire it as he might, doubt that he was right.

Hazlewood raised his voice and called from the platform, "Off in five minutes, Mead! Hadn't you better take Miss Pinsent to her carriage?"

"Come, Ora," he said, "you must get in now."

For a moment longer she held his arms.

"I don't believe I shall ever see you again," she said. Then she dried her eyes and walked with him on to the platform. Here stood Babba, here Hazlewood, here all the retinue. Ashley led her up to Hazlewood. "Here she is," he said; he seemed to be handing her over, resigning charge of her. The three turned and walked together to the train.

"You'd rather go down just with your maid, I daresay," said Hazlewood. "It's time to get in, you know." He held out his hand to Ashley and then walked away.

"Now, dear," said Ashley Mead.

She gave him her hand. For long he remembered that last grasp and the clinging reluctance with which it left him.

"Good-bye, Ashley," she said.

"You're beginning to come back from this minute," he reminded her, forcing a smile. "As soon as ever the train moves you're on your way home!"

"Yes," she smiled. "Yes, Ashley." But the charm of that conceit was gone; the tone was doubtful, sad, with only a forced recognition of how he meant to cheer her. Her eyes were more eloquent and more sincere, more outspoken too in their reproach. "You're sending me away," they said.

So she went away, looking back out of the window so long as she could see him; not crying now, but with a curious, wistful, regretful, bewildered face, as though she did not yet know what he had done to her, what had happened, what change had befallen her. This was the last impression that he had of her as she went to encounter the world again without the aid to which he had let her grow so used, without the arm on which he had let her learn to lean.

But he seemed to know the meaning she sought for, to grasp the answer to the riddle that puzzled her. As he walked back through the empty town, back to the work that must be done and the day that must be lived through, it was all very clear to him, and seemed as inevitable as it was clear.

It was an end, that was what it was – an utter end.

For if it were anything but an end, he had done wrong. And he had no hope that he had done wrong. The chilling sense that he knew only too well the truth and the right of it was on him; and because he had known them, he was now alone. Would not blindness then have been better?

"No, no; it's best to see," said he.

CHAPTER XXII

OTHER WORLDS

Elisha wore worthily the mantle of Elijah; nay, there were fresh vigour and a new genius in the management of Muddock and Mead. The turn-over grew, the percentage of working expenses decreased, the profits swelled; the branches were reorganised and made thoroughly up to the needs of the times; the big block in Buckingham Palace Road advanced steadily in prestige. For all this the small, compact, trim man with the keen pale-blue eyes had to be thanked. He had found a big place vacant; he did not hesitate to jump up to it, and behold, he filled it! Moreover he knew that he filled it; the time of promotion was over, the time of command was come. His quieter bearing and a self-possession which no longer betrayed incompleteness by self-assertion marked the change. He did not now tell people that he made sovereigns while they were making shillings. He could not give himself grace or charm, he could not help being still a little hard, rather too brusque and decisive in his ways; he could not help people guessing pretty accurately what he was and whence he came; but the rough edges were filed and the sharpest points rounded. Even Bowdon, who was for a number of reasons most prejudiced, admitted that it was no longer out of the question to ask him to dinner.

The business was to be turned into a company; this step was desirable on many grounds, among them because it pleased Miss Minna Soames. She was to marry Bob Muddock, now Sir Robert, and although she liked Bob and Bob's money she did not care much about Bob's shop. Neither did Bob himself; he did not want to work very hard, now that his father's hand was over him no more, and he thought that a directorship would both give him less to do and mitigate a relationship to the shop hitherto too close for his taste. So the thing was settled, and Bertie Jewett, as Managing Director, found himself in the position of a despot under forms of constitutional government. For Bob did as he was told; and given that a certain event took place, Bertie would control the larger part of the ordinary shares in virtue of his own holding, his brother-in-law's, and his wife's. Preference shares only had been offered to the public.

The event would take place. Nobody in the circle of the Muddocks' acquaintance doubted that now, although perhaps it might not occur very soon. For it was not the sort of thing which came with a rush; it depended on no sudden tempest of feeling, it grew gradually into inevitability. Union of interest, the necessity of constant meetings, the tendency to lean one on the other, work slowly, but when they have reached a certain point of advance their power is great. Bertie Jewett had not spoken of marriage yet and not for some time would he; but he had already entered the transaction on the credit side of his life's ledger. Alice knew that he had; she did not run away. Here was proof enough.

"It's not the least use your saying you hope it won't happen. It will," Lady Bowdon remarked to her husband; and he found it impossible to argue that she was wrong. For there was no force to oppose the force of habit, of familiarity, of what her family wanted, of what the quiet keen little man wanted and meant to have. Alice was not likely to fall into a sudden, new, romantic passion; her temper was not of the kind that produces such things. She had no other wooers; men felt themselves warned off. Was she then to live unmarried? This was a very possible end of the matter, but under the circumstances not the more likely. Then she would marry Bertie Jewett, unless the past could be undone and Ashley Mead come again into her heart. But neither was her temper of the sort that lets the past be undone; the registers of her mind were written in an ink which did not fade. Besides he had no thought of coming back to her.

But there was now, after Ora had gone off with her play and her part, a revival of friendship between them, started by a chance encounter at the Bowdons' and confirmed by a talk they had together when Ashley called in Kensington Palace Gardens. He was not insensible, and thought that she was not, to an element of rather wry comedy which had crept into their relations. He was sorry for himself, as he had very good grounds for being; he perceived that she was sorry for herself and, in view of the dominance and imminence of Bertie Jewett, fully acknowledged the soundness of her reasons. The comic side of the matter appeared when he recognised that, side by side with this self-commiseration, there existed in each of them an even stronger pity for the other, a pity that could not claim to be altogether free from contempt, since it was directed towards what each of them had chosen, as well as towards what had chanced to befall them from outside. They had both been unfortunate, but there was no need to dwell on that; the more notable point was that whereas he had chosen to be of Ora Pinsent's party with all which that implied, she was choosing to be of Bertie Jewett's party with all which that implied. It was no slur on their own misfortunes that each would now refuse to take the others place or to come over to the others faction. The pity then which each had for the other was not merely for a state of circumstances accidental and susceptible of change, but for a habit of mind; they pitied one another as types even while they came again to like one another as individuals. For naturally they over-ran the mark of truth, he concluding that because she was drifting towards Bertie she was in all things like Bertie, she that because he had been carried off his feet by Ora Pinsent he was entirely such as Ora was. There was certainly something of the comic in this reciprocity of compassion; it made Ashley smile as he walked beside Alice in the garden.

"So Bob's going to cut Buckingham Palace Road?" he asked.

"Hardly that. Oh, well, it'll come to something like that. Minna has aristocratic instincts."

"I remember she had them about the theatre."

"She doesn't like the shop." Alice had been laughing, but grew grave now as she added, "Do you know, I get to like the shop more and more. I often go there and look on while they take stock or something of that kind. One's in touch with a real life there, there's something being done."

"I suppose there is," he admitted rather reluctantly. "I don't in the least object to other people doing it. However you said from the beginning that it wouldn't suit me."