Tales of two people

In the course of the next few days the Powers That Be in the land took a hand – doubtless an entirely unconscious one – in the game. A peer died; his son, going up to the House of Lords, vacated the post of Under-Secretary for the Colonies. Amid a chorus of applause and of flattering prophecies Valentine Hare was appointed in his place. I met, at one of my clubs, a young friend who had recently entered the Colonial Office, and he told me that the new member of Administration’s secretary would in all probability be Oliver Kirby. “And it’ll give him a bit of a chance to show what’s he’s made of,” said my young friend, with the kindly patronage of youth.

But, under present circumstances, it might create a slight awkwardness, say, about lunch-time, mightn’t it? I doubted whether that appointment would be made.

VI

NOW I come to my share in this history. I confess that I approach it with doubt and trembling; but it has to be told here. It will never be told anywhere else – certainly not at the Lexingtons’, nor above all, for my peace’ sake, to my sister Jane.

The following day was a Sunday, and, according to a not infrequent practice of mine, I took a walk in Hyde Park in the morning – in the early hours before the crowd turned out. The place was almost deserted, for the weather was raw and chilly; but there, by some supernatural interposition as I am convinced, whether benign or malignant only the passage of years can show, in a chair at the corner of the Row sat Oliver Kirby. I stopped before him and said “Hallo!”

I had forgotten how entirely formal our previous acquaintance had been, perhaps because I had been thinking about him so much.

He greeted me cordially, indeed gladly, as I fancied, and, when I objected to sitting in the chilly air, he proposed to share my walk. I mentioned the secretaryship, remarking that I understood it was a good thing for a man to get. He shrugged his shoulders, then turned to me, and said, with a sudden twinkle lighting up his eyes, “One might be able to keep our friend straight, perhaps.”

“You think he needs it?”

“It’s only a matter of time for that man to come a cropper. The first big affair he gets to handle, look out! I’m not prejudiced. He’s a very good fellow, and I like him – besides being amused at him. But what I say is true.” He spoke with an uncanny certainty.

“What makes you say it?”

Kirby took my arm. “The man is constitutionally incapable of thinking in the right order. It’s always the same with him, I don’t care whether it’s an article about North Africa or that book of his about primitive man. He always – not occasionally, but always – starts with his conclusion and works backwards to the premises. North Africa ought to be that shape – it is! Primitive man ought to have thought that – he did! You see? The result is that the facts have to adapt themselves to these conclusions of his. Now that habit of mind, Wynne, makes a man who has to do with public affairs a dangerous and pernicious fool. He oughtn’t to be allowed about. What, I should like to know, does he think the Almighty made facts for! Not to be looked at, evidently!”

I was much refreshed by this lively indignation of the intellect. But, “You’re quite sure you’re not prejudiced?” said I.

“I said it all in a review of his book before I ever met him, or came into – ”

“Conflict with him?” I ventured to interpose.

He looked at me gravely. I thought he was going to tell me to mind my own business. I have so little that I never welcome that injunction. Then he smiled.

“I forgot that I’d met you at the Lexingtons’,” he said.

“I don’t think you need have told me that you’d forgotten.”

“Well, I had,” said he, staring a little.

“But you needn’t have said so – needn’t have put it that way.”

“Oh!” He seemed to be considering quite a new point of view.

“Not that I’m offended. I only point it out for your good. You expect people to be too much like you. The rest of us have feelings – ”

“I’ve feelings, Wynne,” he interrupted quickly.

“Fancies – ”

“Ah, well – perhaps those too, sometimes.”

“Fears – ”

He squeezed my arm. “You’ve struck me the right morning,” he said.

“Think what you’re asking of – the person we mean.”

“She’s to give me her answer after lunch to-day.”

“I believe it will be ‘No’ – unless you can do something.”

He looked at me searchingly, “What’s in your mind?” he asked. “Out with it! This is a big thing to me, you know.”

“It’s a big thing to her. I know it is. Yes, she has said something to me. But I think she’ll say ‘No,’ unless – well, unless you treat her as you want Val Hare to treat North Africa and primitive man. Apply your own rules, my friend. Reason in the right order!”

He smiled grimly. “Develop that a little,” he requested, or, rather, ordered.

“It’s not your feelings, or your traditions, or your surroundings, that count now. And it’s not what you think she ought to feel, nor what she ought as a fact to feel, nor even what’s she’s telling herself she ought to be brave enough and strong enough to feel. It’s what she must feel, has been bred to feel, and in the end does feel. What she does feel will beat you unless you find a way out.”

“What does she feel?”

“That it’s failure, and that all the other girls will say so – failure in the one great opportunity of her life, in the one great thing that’s expected of her; that it’s final; that she must live all her life a failure among those who looked to her for a great success. And the others will make successes! Would it be a small thing for a man? What is it to a girl?”

“A failure, to marry me? You mean she feels that?”

“Facts, please! Again facts! Not what you think you are, or are sure you are, or are convinced you could be; just what you are – Mr Kirby of the Colonial Office, lately promoted – it is promotion, isn’t it? – to be secretary to – ”

“Stop! I just want to run over all that,” he said.

At, and from, this point I limit my liability. I had managed to point out – it really was not easy to set up to tell him things – where I thought he was wrong. Somehow, amid my trepidation, I was aware of a pleasure in talking to a splendidly open and candid mind. He was surprised that he had been wrong – that touch of a somewhat attractive arrogance there was about him – but the mere suspicion of being wrong made him attentive to the uttermost. Tell him he hadn’t observed his facts, and he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, rest till he had substantiated, or you had withdrawn, the imputation. But, as I say, to suggest the mistake was all I did. I had no precise remedy ready; I believe I had only a hazy idea of what might be done by a more sympathetic demeanour, a more ample acknowledgment of Miss Constantine’s sacrifice – a notion that she might do the big thing if he made her think it the enormous thing; aren’t even girls like that sometimes? The sower of the seed is entitled to some credit for the crop; after all, though, the ground does more. I take none too much credit for my hint, nor desire to take too much responsibility.

He caught me by the arm and pulled me down on to a bench – a free seat just by the east end of the Serpentine.

“Yes, I see,” he said. “I’ve been an ass. Just since you spoke, it’s all come before me – in a sort of way it grew up in my mind. I know how she feels now – both ways. I only knew how she felt about my end of the thing before. I was antagonistic to the other thing. I couldn’t see Val as a sort of Westminster Abbey for the living – that’s the truth. Never be antagonistic to facts – you’ve taught me that lesson once more, Wynne.” He broke into a sudden amused smile. “I say, if your meddling is generally as useful as it has been to me, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go on meddling, old chap.”

I let that pass, though I should have preferred some such word as “interpose” or “intervene,” or “act as an intermediary.” I still consider that I had been in some sense invited – well, at any rate, tempted – to – well, as I have suggested, intervene.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Settle it,” replied Mr Oliver Kirby, rising from the bench.

He might have been a little more communicative. It is possible to suggest that. As a matter of fact, he was the best part of the way to Hyde Park Corner before I realised that I was sitting alone on the bench.

VII

HAD Kirby been at my elbow, his bullet head almost audibly pricing my actions, relentlessly assessing them, even while he admitted that they had done him good, I imagine that I should not have gone. His epithet rankled. I a meddler! I can only say that it is a fortunate circumstance that he never knew Jane.

However, I did call on Lady Lexington that afternoon, and found just a snug family party – that was what my hostess called it. In fact, besides myself, the only outsider was Valentine Hare; and could he be called an outsider? His precise appellation hung in suspense. Talk was intimate and bright.

In view of Val’s appointment, it was natural that it should turn on the Colonies. Val himself hinted that the Foreign Office would have given more scope for his specialty (he meant North Africa, not the “Religion of Primitive Man”); but Miss Constantine was hot on the Colonies, going so far, indeed, as to get out an atlas and discuss thousands of square miles, and wheat belts, and things like that. Once or twice I fancied that the new Under-Secretary would have been glad not to be quite so new; a few days of coaching from, say, Kirby (Had she had – ? At lunch? No; it was hardly thinkable; he couldn’t have taken that moment to instruct her) would have equipped him better for her excellently informed conversation. As for poor Lexington, he broke down entirely when she got out to Assiniboia and Saskatchewan, and said frankly that in his opinion there was more of Canada than any man could be expected to know about. That did not seem to be at all Miss Constantine’s view. She was stopped only by the ocean. I am not sure that a vaulting ambition did not confederate Japan.

Val was delighted. Miss Constantine was so cordial, so interested, so congratulatory on his appointment. There was, as it seemed to me, a serenity in her manner which had recently been lacking – a return of her old assurance, softened still, but not now by the air of appeal; it was rather by an extreme friendliness. Val must have felt the friendliness too, I think, for he expanded wonderfully, discoursing with marvellous fecundity, and with a knowledge as extensive as it was indefinite, of the British possessions beyond the seas. All said and done, he knew a lot more than I did; but, then, I was not his competitor.

So we got on splendidly together. Lady Lexington beamed, her lord warmed himself happily, Miss Constantine was graciousness itself, Val basked and blossomed – and I wondered what the deuce had happened at Mrs Something Simpson’s flat in Westminster. (Her real name was Whitaker Simpson, and I believe Jane knew it quite well.)

Yes, she was monstrously friendly – distrust that in your mistress whether wooed or won. She would do everything for Val that afternoon, except be left alone with him. The Lexingtons went – you can hardly stop people going in their own house; Miss Boots and Mr Sharpies, who were both there, went – to church. I tried to go, but she wouldn’t let me. Her refusal was quite obvious: Val – he was impeccable in manners – saw it. After precisely the right interval he rose and took his leave. I had the atlas on my knees then (we had got back to Assiniboia), and I studied it hard; but, honestly, I couldn’t help hearing. The tones of her voice, at least, hinted at no desire for privacy.

“Once more a thousand congratulations – a thousand hopes for your success,” she said, giving him her hand, as I suppose – my eyes were on the atlas.

“After that, I shall feel I’m working for you,” he replied gallantly. No doubt his very fine eyes pointed the remark.

“Shall you?” she said, and laughed a little. “Oh, you’ll – I’ll write you a note quite soon – to-morrow or Tuesday. I won’t forget. And – good-bye!”

“To-morrow or Tuesday? That’s certain?” His voice had an eagerness in it now.

“Yes, certain. I won’t forget. And – good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” he said, and I heard the door open.

“A thousand hopes!” she said again.

I suppose he made some response, but in words he made none. The door closed behind him.

I put the atlas on the sofa by me, got up, and went to her.

“I suppose I may go now, too?” I said.

“How clever you’re growing, Mr Wynne! But just let him get out of the house. We mustn’t give it away.”

A moment or two we stood in silence. Then she said: “You understand things. You shall have a note too – and a thousand hopes. And – good-bye!”

Not a suspicion of the meaning of this afternoon’s scene crossed my mind, which fact proved me, I daresay, to be very stupid. But Val was hardly likely to see more clearly, and I can’t altogether justify the play she made with the atlas and Assiniboia. As an exercise in irony, however, it had its point.

VIII

I DO not know what was in Val’s note: more of good-bye, and more than a thousand hopes, I imagine. Is it fanciful to mark that she had always said “hope” and never “confidence”? Mine bade me be at a certain corner of a certain street at eleven-thirty. “Where you will find me. Say nothing about it.” It was a little hard to say nothing whatever to Jane.

I went and met them at the corner – Mrs Something Simpson, Kirby, and Miss Constantine. Thence we repaired to a registry office, and they (I do not include Mrs Simpson) were married. They were to sail from Liverpool that afternoon, and we went straight from the office to Euston. I think it was only when the question of luggage arose that I gasped out, “Where are you going?”

“To Canada,” said Kirby briskly.

“For your trip?”

“For good and all,” he answered. “I’ve got leave – and sent in my resignation.”

“And I’ve sent in my resignation too,” she said. “Mr Wynne, try to think of me as only half a coward.”

“I – I don’t understand,” I stammered.

“But it’s your own doing,” he said. “Over there she won’t be a failure all her life!”

“Not because I’ve married him, at any rate,” Katharine said, looking very happy.

“I told you I should settle it – and so I did,” Kirby added. “And I’m grateful to you. I’m always grateful to a fellow who makes me understand.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “You’re not making me responsible?”

“For all that follows!” she answered, with a merry laugh. “Yes!”

That’s all very well, but suppose he gets to the top of the tree, as the fellow will, and issues a Declaration of Independence? At least he’ll be Premier, and come over to a conference some day. Val will be Secretary for the Colonies, probably (unless he has come that cropper). There’s a situation for you! Well, I shall just leave town. I daresay I sha’n’t be missed.

Lady Lexington carried it off well. She said that, from a strain of romance she had observed in the girl, the marriage was just what was to be expected of Katharine Constantine.

SLIM-FINGERED JIM

I

“WHAT did he get? “I asked. I had been working in my own room all the morning and had not seen the papers – they arrived from London about half-past eleven.

“Seven years’ penal servitude,” said our host the Major with grim satisfaction.

“Stiff!” I commented.

“Not a bit too much,” asserted the Major, helping himself to game pie again – he is a good luncher. “He’s a thoroughly bad lot – a professional thief, and a deuced clever one. It’s his first conviction, but it ought to have been his tenth, I should say.”

“He was certainly in that big American bond robbery,” said Crookes, “though he got off that time. Oxford man, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. In fact, I believe I was up one term with him,” said Millington. “I must have seen him, I think, but I can’t remember him.”

“Dear, dear!” our hostess observed, shocked apparently at this close proximity to the criminal classes.

“Rather good what the chap said when he’d been sentenced,” drawled Charlie Pryce. “See it? Well, he bowed to the judge, and then he bowed to the jury, and smiled, and shrugged his shoulders, and said: ‘The risks of the profession, gentlemen! Au revoir!’ Jolly good cheek!” Charlie’s round red face – he is very well nourished, as they say at inquests – beamed almost sympathetically.

“I suppose he owes his nickname to his professional dexterity?” said I.

“Suppose so,” agreed Charlie.

“No,” said Mrs Pryce, who was at the other end of the table. “His name is James – ”

“Yes, James Painter Walsh,” interposed the Major, accurate always.

“But he was called ‘Slim-Fingered’ because he had beautiful hands with very slender tapering fingers.”

“Hallo, Minnie!” cried Pryce. “How do you know that?”

“He told me himself,” she answered with a smile and the hint of a blush. “I crossed from America with him the time he was arrested at Queenstown for the bond robbery, and – well, we got acquainted. Of course, nobody knew who he was.”

A torrent of questions overwhelmed Mrs Pryce. She had achieved fame – she had known the hero of the last great jewel robbery. She spoke of him from first-hand knowledge. The unrivalled attraction of crime – crime in the grand manner – fascinates us all. But she wouldn’t say much.

“He was just an acquaintance for the voyage,” she told us; “though, of course, it was rather a shock when he was arrested at Queenstown.”

“Oh, what a surprise!” exclaimed Charlie Pryce jovially.

“A surprise?” She seemed to me to start ever so little. “Oh yes, of course – terrible!” she went on the next instant.

“Was he nice?” asked our hostess.

“Yes, he was very – very attractive,” she answered. And somehow I fancy her glance rested for a moment on her husband – indeed on a particular portion of him. Charlie was just lighting the after-lunch cigarette. Charlie’s hands – he is a very good fellow and well off – are decidedly red and particularly podgy.

II

I LIKED Mrs Pryce very much. She was pretty, dainty, bright, and – well, bachelors are so apt to think that pretty married women have a dull time at home that I will lay no stress on my own private opinion as to her domestic lot. Enough that I was always glad to talk with her, and that it was pleasant to walk with her in the Major’s quiet old garden on a fine night when the wind stirred the boughs and the moon shone. Inside they had taken to pool – and whisky-and-soda. I play the former badly, and take the latter when the evening is more advanced.

“Beautiful moon!” I observed, enjoying Nature, my company, and my cigar.

She was silent a moment. Then she said: “It shone just like that the third night out from New York.”

“Your last trip?” She crosses pretty often, as Charlie has business connections on the other side.

“No. The one when – the one we were talking about at lunch.”

“Ah! When our friend of the slim fingers – ?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s sit down,” I suggested. We were just passing a garden seat.

She smiled at me half sadly, half mockingly. She saw through me; she knew I wanted to hear more about it. By some sort of sympathy I knew that she wanted to talk about it. It was queer, too, to consider through what window that moon was shining on Slim-Fingered Jim. Did it – and his other surroundings – remind him of the broad Atlantic? “The risks of the profession, gentlemen!”

“Yes, he had beautiful hands,” she murmured.

“What’ll they look like when – ?”

She caught my hand sharply in hers. “Hush, hush!” she whispered. I felt ashamed of myself, but of course I couldn’t have known that – well, that she’d feel it like that.

“I was quite a girl,” she went on presently. “Yes, it’s six years ago – and the first two days of that voyage were like days in heaven. You know what it can be when it’s fine? You seem never to have known what space was before – and bigness – and blueness. Do you know what I mean?”

“It’s very exhilarating.”

“Oh, don’t be silly! Of course nobody was ill – anyhow only the people who meant to be before they started – and we had an awfully jolly table.”

“Mr Walsh one of your party?”

“Yes, he was at our table. I – sat next to him.”

I turned half round and looked at her. The moon was strong, I could see her eyes.

“Look here, do you want to go on with this story?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so – I’ve never told it before. But perhaps I’ll skip a little of it.”

“At the beginning?”

“Yes. Will you imagine the sun shining by day and the moon by night?”

“Yes. And a sparkling sea? And nothing to do?”

“Yes. And a young girl – quite a young girl.”

“Yes. And beautiful hands – and the rest to match?”

“Yes – including a voice.”

“Yes. Let’s skip to the second evening, shall we, Mrs Pryce?”

“Will you be a little more imaginative and skip to the third afternoon?”

“The third afternoon be it. What’s happening when we begin the story again?”

“I’m in my mother’s state-room, getting a tremendous lecture. I’m not sure you ought to hear it.”

“Oh, I know all about it. You meant no harm, probably, but really it was time you learnt to be more careful. Attractive girls couldn’t be too careful. Men were so ready to think this and that – and say this and that – and then go and boast about it in the smoking-room. And what did you or your mother know about him? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! No doubt he was a gentleman, and very pleasant and amusing – but really you knew nothing. He was probably an adventurer. And anyhow – well, really it wasn’t quite – not quite– ladylike to – to – ”

“Yes, that’s not a bad imagination,” interrupted Mrs Pryce. “Add mamma’s pince-nez, and it’s quite life-like.”

“And the result?”

“Great constraint in my manner towards Mr Walsh at dinner that evening.”

“And – further result – a melancholy walk by you on the deck after dinner – a walk at first solitary – subsequently shared by a puzzled and humble Mr Walsh?”

“I begin to think you have more experience than you always admit,” said Mrs Pryce. “But I think you’ll go wrong if you try to guess any more.”

“Then I won’t guess any more. Take up the thread. It’s now the third night out, and the moon is shining like that.” I pointed to the orb which was illuminating the Major’s garden – among other places where sundry of that liner’s former passengers might chance to be.

“I’ll go on,” she said, “and don’t interrupt me for a little while. There was a very light wind – you hardly felt it aft – and I was standing looking over the sea. He came up to me and began to talk about some trifle – I forget what it was, but it doesn’t matter. But I was afraid mamma would come up and look for me, so I said I was going down to read. But I waited for just a minute more – I suppose I expected him to ask me not to go. He said nothing, but took one big pull at his cigar, gave one big big puff of smoke out of his mouth and nose, and then threw the cigar overboard. ‘Good-night, Mr Walsh,’ I said. He looked at me – it was as light as it is now – and said: ‘Will you give me one minute, Miss Cochrane?’ ‘Well, only a minute,’ I said, smiling. I was really afraid about mamma. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said. I wonder if I blushed – and whether he could see if I did. I expect I did, and that he saw, because he went on very quickly: ‘Something that doesn’t matter much to you, but matters a bit to me.’ ‘Go on,’ I said. I was quite calm again now, because – well, because I saw he was going to say something serious – I mean, not of the sort I – I had thought he might be going to say before.”

“You saw he wasn’t making love to you, you mean?”

“I told you not to interrupt – but I daresay that’s putting it as nearly right as you can understand.”

I murmured thanks for this rather contemptuous forgiveness.

“Then he told me,” Mrs Pryce went on, “just simply told me – and said he was going to make some excuse for asking the purser to put him at another table.”

“But you can’t leave it like that!” I expostulated. “You’re throwing away all your dramatic effect. What did he say? His words, his words, Mrs Pryce!”

“He didn’t use any – not in the sense you mean. He just told me. He didn’t even put me on my honour not to tell anybody else. He said he didn’t care a hang about anybody else on board, but that he wanted to spare me any possible shock, and that he’d been concerned in the bond robbery and would probably be arrested at Queenstown, but that he expected to get off this time. I think I repeated ‘This time!’ because I remember he said then that he was a thief by profession, and couldn’t expect good luck every time. That was like what he said yesterday, wasn’t it?”