Chapter I (4)

The suffragette had lighted a cigarette in a laborious attempt to appear calm, but she pressed her hand to her breast as though she had been running. “I’m not coming,” she shouted, when he was within shouting distance.

He vaulted the railing of the race-course, and the railing of the garden. “What a bore!” he said. “Then I must stop too.”

“Why?” she asked.

Very far off, the launch was nestling at the side of the _Caribbeania_.

“For reasons I cannot be bothered to repeat to you.”

She veiled herself in a cloud of smoke.

“You know,” he added, “this is a repetition of the Elizabeth Hammer episode. Pure hysteria. Darling.”

There was an appreciable pause.

“Why, you’re right. So it is,” said the suffragette.

“Come on,” shouted the gardener. “We can catch it yet.”

“If I come,” she said, “it will be strong, not weak.”

“Of course,” said the gardener. “Come on.”

“It would be much easier to stay here.”

“Oh, much,” panted the gardener. “Come on, come on.”

So they ran, and on the way back they discovered how interminable the main street was, and how relentless is the sun of the West Atlantic. But when they reached the wharf, the launch was still clinging to the liner.

“A guinea,” shouted the suffragette, who was experiencing the joys of very big-game hunting, “to the boatman who can get us up to the _Caribbeania_ before she starts.”

She spoke in the voice of one accustomed to speaking in Trafalgar Square, and everybody understood her. A boat practically cut the feet from under them before she had finished speaking, and in it they splashed furiously out into the bay.

“We shall catch it,” said the gardener, rowing energetically with one finger. “I’m a man of luck.”

He was posing as one who would not utter a reproach. It was a convenient pose for all concerned. When they were about half-way, the suffragette said, “You know—it takes a little courage to admit hysteria.”

“Of course it does, my dear,” said the gardener. “I wouldn’t have done it for the world.”

Presently they were within bare shouting distance of the whale which had threatened to make Jonahs of them. A liner’s farewells are like those of a great many women I know, very elastic indeed.

“You’ll do it,” shouted a voice from the high boat-deck.

They did it. The Captain shook his finger at them from the bridge.

“What happened?” asked Courtesy, meeting them on the main deck with a shawl to put round the suffragette. Some women seem to think that a shawl, or a hot bath, or a little drop of sal-volatile are equal to any emergency under the sun.

“She didn’t know that was the last launch,” said the gardener, still posing as the magnanimous defender.

“Yes, I did,” said the suffragette.

“She was buying a souvenir round the corner,” persisted the gardener.

“No, I wasn’t,” contradicted the lady. “I made up my mind not to come back to the _Caribbeania_.”

“Ou, I say, how killing of you!” said Courtesy. “But he changed your mind?”

“No. I overcame it.”

“You quaint mite,” said Courtesy.

The gardener’s pose momentarily ended here, for he was stricken with whirling of the head and sickness, after running in the sun. Although there was a touch of martyrdom about it, it was not a dignified ending to a really effective pose. He had to seek the comfort of Hilda in his cabin.

Hilda had three flowers now, and they had cost her her independence, for she leaned upon a stick. But among her round green leaves she held up bravely her trinity of little gold suns.

The gardener being thus removed, Courtesy and the suffragette sat on the promenade-deck, and discussed the day. The suffragette was astonished to find herself in this position, being addressed as “my dear,” by a contemporary. “Just like a real girl,” she thought, for as she had never passed through the mutual hair-brushing stage with other girls, she always expected to be hated, and never to be loved. She found it rather delightful to have Courtesy’s hand passed through her arm, but she also found it awkward, and hardly knew how to adjust her own arm to the unaccustomed contact. The very small details of intercourse are very hard indeed to a snake, though pleasant by reason of novelty.

“So you didn’t want to come back, and he bullied you?” said Courtesy, frankly inquisitive. “After all, my dear, that’s what women are for.”

“It is NOT!” shouted the suffragette. “Women are not born with a curse on them like that. I chose to come back; I made a great effort, and came.”

“O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and tactfully changed the subject. Courtesy’s tact was always easily visible to the naked eye. “My dear, I must tell you what a killing interview I had with old Mrs. Rust. She clutched my arm when I got into the launch—think of that, my dear—and presently she said in a gruff sort of frightened voice, as if she was confessing a crime, ‘Miss Courtesy, I refuse to part with you; you are what I have been looking for; you are not to pay any attention to anybody else—do you hear? I forbid it.’ I screamed with laughter—on the quiet, you know. I said, ‘Do you want me to be a substitute for Hammer, Mrs. Rust?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Hammer was only a stopgap; I was keeping the position open for a person like you. I will give you two hundred a year if you will promise to stay by me as long as you can bear me’—and then she shouted as if she had made a mistake, and thought that noise could cover it—‘I mean as long as I can bear you.’”

“So what did you answer?” asked the suffragette.

“My dear, two hundred a year—what could I say?”

“But what were you originally going out to Trinity Island for?” asked the suffragette. “To visit relatives, weren’t you? What will they say?”

“Oh, they won’t say anything—to two hundred a year. I was really only coming out as a globe-trotter. I loathe colonial relations.”

The matrimonial motive was the skeleton in Courtesy’s cupboard.

“But wasn’t it killing, my dear?”

“Very killing,” agreed the suffragette gravely. She felt like one speaking a foreign tongue.

And then it occurred to Courtesy that she was squeezing the arm of one who, after all, had a criminal disregard of convention. She withdrew her arm, and proceeded to try and storm that house which she considered to be built on sand.

“I wish I could understand what you are up to, my dear?” she said. “Can’t I persuade you to leave that naughty gardener, or to marry him? You needn’t run away, or drown yourself or anything, just say to him, ‘THIS WON’T DO.’ I should be frightfully glad if I could feel you were all right. Why don’t you get married on landing?”

“We don’t want to,” said the suffragette, who was too inexperienced in the ways of The Generation to feel offended. “We neither of us ever pretended to want to.”

“Ou yes, of course I know the catchwords. I know you just came together as friends, and didn’t see any harm in it.”

“But we didn’t come as friends—we came as enemies.”

“Yes,” said Courtesy, with a furrowed brow. “But really, my dear, enemies don’t do these things.”

“They do. We do.”

“But, my good girl, you must know—you can’t be as innocent as all that.”

“Great Scott, no!” said the suffragette. “I’m not innocent!”

“Then am I to conclude,” said Courtesy, suddenly frigid, “that you fully realise the meaning of the life you are leading?”

“You are to conclude that,” said the suffragette, in a voice of growing militancy. “I realise its meaning much more fully than you do. I shall leave the gardener directly it becomes convenient to me to do so. For an utter stranger his behaviour has certainly been insufferable.”

“O Lor’!” exclaimed Courtesy, falling back upon her original line of defence. “An utter stranger ... I must go and button Mrs. Rust into her evening gown.”

There is something very annoying to a woman in being accused of innocence. The suffragette was quite cross.

For the next two days the _Caribbeania_ threaded her way cautiously between shore and shore. The horizon was frilled with palm-embroidered lands. Dry, terrible-looking beaches, backed by arid brown hills, marred the soft character of those calm seas. It was as if the _Caribbeania_ saluted the coast of South America, and South America turned her back upon her visitor. At two or three ports in that forbidding land the boat touched. Drake had passed that way, and had left his ill-gotten halo upon the coast, but that was the only life of the land. The flat, dead towns seemed brooding over flat, dead tragedies.

It was almost a relief to the travellers when the last night fell, and the ship was enclosed in darkness and its trivial insularity. There was a great dance that night. Captain Walters called it the Veterans’ dance, because the chalked deck was thick with non-combatants, who had determined to cast care aside and join with youth, because after all it was the last night, and one would never meet any of these people again. As a matter of fact, there was no youth to be joined, for youth sat out and began its farewells. Half a dozen hours is not an over-large allowance of time for farewells between people who have known each other three throbbing ocean weeks.

The suffragette actually danced with the chief engineer. He always danced with ladies who could not find partners, being a conscientious young man of forty-two, with a brand-new bride at home. The suffragette knew well that by his courtesy she was branded as one undesired, and she laughed her invisible cynical laugh.

I think men are akin to sheep as well as to monkeys, and the theory only needs a Darwin to trace the connection. I have yet to meet the man who, where women are concerned, does not follow in the track of others of his kind. I think that very few men conceive an original preference for a woman unbiassed by the public tendency.

Directly the gardener saw the suffragette dancing with the chief engineer, he wondered why he was not dancing with her himself, although she danced rather badly. The gardener felt a mysterious call to go and monopolise her directly she was at liberty.

“I’m glad you have come to talk to me,” said the suffragette. “Because I shall go on shore early to-morrow, and should like to say good-bye to you.”

“Good-bye?” questioned the gardener.

“You didn’t really expect me to stay with you, did you?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the gardener, and thought how peaceful and how stupid life would be without her. “I shan’t dream of letting you go.” And even while he said it, he experienced the awful feeling of being powerless to make his words good. He realised for the first time how indispensable to a man’s sight are soft straight hair that has never committed itself to any real colour, and a small pointed face, and quick questioning eyes. But there was something indescribable, peculiar to the suffragette, that made it impossible to humble oneself before her. She was anything but a queen among women; no man had ever wished to be trodden under her feet, though they were small and pretty. Plain people often have pretty hands and feet, a mark of Nature’s tardy self-reproach.

To any other woman, the gardener might have said, “Please, my dear ...” with excellent results. He had a good voice with a tenor edge to it, and he could pose very nicely as a supplicator. But not to the suffragette.

“I have not brought you all this way just to let you return to your militant courses,” he said, with a sort of hollow firmness. “I owe a duty to Trinity Island, after all, now that I have imported you.”

The suffragette smiled and said she was tired and would go to bed—good-bye.

The gardener said Good-night.

The _Caribbeania_ and the first ray of the sun reached the Island simultaneously next morning. When the gardener came on deck at half-past seven he found himself confronted by the town of Union, backed by its sudden hills. The _Caribbeania_, like a robber’s victim, ignominiously bound to the pier, was being relieved of its valuables. The air was thick with talk. On the pier the over-dressed representatives of British rule, in blue serge and gold braid, rubbed shoulders with the under-dressed results of their kind tyranny, in openwork shirts and three-quarters of a pair of trousers.

“Your wife went off early,” said the fourth officer to the gardener. “I asked her whether she were eloping all by herself, and she said you knew all about it.”

“Thanks,” said the gardener curtly.

You will hardly believe me when I tell you that his first conscious thought after this announcement was that he had no money to tip the steward with. The suffragette meant a good deal to him, and among the things she meant was temporary financial accommodation.

I hope that you have noticed by now that he was not a money-lover, but a steward was a steward, and this particular steward had been kind in improvising a crutch for Hilda. Any assistance from the suffragette was, of course, taken as temporary: independence was one of the gardener’s chronic poses. He meant to change it from a rather hollow dream into reality on arriving on the Island; he supposed that he would be able to turn his brains into money. He considered that no such brain could ever have landed at Union Town. Its price in coin, which had been rather at a discount in the stupid turmoil of London, would be instantly appreciable under this empty sky. His pose on the Island was to be The One Who Arrives, in capital letters.

He went down to his cabin to pack his little luggage. He had nothing beloved to pack now; men’s clothes seem to be inhuman things without a touch of the lovable, and they were all he had. For Hilda was dead. For the last week of her life she had been a little concrete exclamation of protest against her unnatural surroundings. One born to look simply at the sun, from the shelter of a whitewashed cottage wall, with others of her like jostling beautifully round her; a fantastic fate had willed that she should reach the flower of her life in a tipsy cabin, with a sea-wind singing outside the thick glass against which she leant. The gardener had given her a sailor’s grave somewhere near the spot in the Spanish Main to which I hope the spirit of Drake clings, for his mother-sea received him there. It was hardly a suitable ending for Hilda, but it was the best available.

The gardener set himself to put his scanty property together stealthily, and creep from the boat, that the stewards might not see him go. He had an unposed horror of ungenerosity. To him, as to most men, the tip was more of a duty than the discharge of a debt. He suffered keenly for a while from the discovery that there was no escaping from the stewards to-day, they were stationed with careful carelessness at every corner. Presently the siege was raised unexpectedly by the arrival of the boot-boy with a note.

“The lady left it, sir.”

It contained a five-pound note, and it was addressed in the suffragette’s small defiant handwriting.

Of course the hero of a novel should have thrown the whole missive into the sea. He should have struck an attitude and explained to the admiring boot-boy that such gifts from a woman could only be looked upon as an insult. But you must remember the gardener considered that the fortunes of the Island were at his feet. And he would not have gone so far as to pose at his own expense—not to speak of the steward’s. He put the note in his pocket, and went to the purser for change.

When his duties were discharged, he came on deck to collect any plans that might be in the air. It is a most annoying fact that theories will not take the place of plans. In theory you may be The One Who Arrives, but in practice you have to think about passing the customs and finding a cheap hotel and getting yourself a sun-helmet. I think the world has an antipathy to heroes; it certainly makes things very hard for them.

On deck Courtesy was sitting calm and ready. Her plans had been made for three days. She had only just stopped short of writing a time-table for the hourly career of herself and Mrs. Rust throughout their sojourn on the island. She had a genius for details.

“The suffragette has disappeared,” said the gardener. A disarming frankness was one of his weapons.

“I’m jolly glad,” replied Courtesy. “I believe you owe that to me, you naughty boy. I gave her a bit of my mind about it the other day.”

The gardener uttered no reproaches. He felt none. For he had learnt by now that the suffragette would never be affected by a bit of anybody’s mind.

“What are you going to do?” asked Courtesy. “We are going to the St. Maurice Hotel for four days—Father Christopher told us of it—and at mid-day on Saturday we go up to the hills for a fortnight, and then we hire a car and tour round the Island, staying twenty-four hours at Alligator Bay.”

“I’m going to look for work,” said the gardener.

“Sugar or bananas?”

“Neither. Head-work.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “Nobody on the Island ever uses their head except to carry luggage on.”

“That’s why I shall find work. There’s no competition in my line.”

“You funny ...” giggled Courtesy. “Isn’t he quaint, Father Christopher?”

For the priest was passing on his twenty-second circuit of the deck.

“Very droll, no doubt,” said the priest in the voice of a refrigerator, and continued to pass. He was very much annoyed with the gardener’s soul.

The gardener waited till he came round again before saying to Courtesy, “Besides, I have to look for the suffragette.”

“I hope you won’t find her this time,” said Courtesy. “Will you come to tea with us one day, and tell us which of your searches seems most hopeful. You see, now the suffragette’s gone, you are respectable for the moment, and I needn’t be afraid for Mrs. Rust’s morals.”

When Courtesy giggled, her hair laughed in the most extraordinary way. Everything she did was transmuted into something wonderful by that halo of hers.

“I’ll come to-day, if I may,” said the gardener, who had never mastered the art of social diffidence. “You’d better have me to-day, for I hope I shan’t be respectable to-morrow.”

Courtesy did not want him to-day. In her code there was only one programme for the first day in a strange land. It was made up of a visit to the principal church, the principal shop, the principal public gardens, and to a few “old-world relics of the past.” It did not include ordinary five-o’clock tea with a familiar figure. But, on the other hand, her invincible conventionality made it impossible for her to evade the gardener’s suggestion. Courtesy was content to suffer for her convictions. At any rate, you will notice that Mrs. Rust was not consulted.

“You may come,” Courtesy said. “At five. We are due back from the cathedral at a quarter to.”

Probably the reason why Mrs. Rust submitted to Courtesy’s tyranny from the first was that no other woman in the world would have done so.

The land reeled under the gardener’s feet as he arrived. The only comfort in parting with the sea after a long intimacy is that for the first day or two the land follows the example of its sister element. The gardener found more difficulty in walking straight along Union High Street than he had experienced along the deck of the _Caribbeania_.

The morning was yet very young when he put his little luggage down at the bamboo-tree arch of a house that proclaimed itself ready to receive boarders at moderate terms. He relied much on impulse, and the little house, which was lightly built on its own first story, so to speak, beckoned to him. But only in theory, for when he mounted the flight of wooden steps, and, through the open door, saw the dirty living-room, seething with gaudy trifles, he knew that in practice it was better suited to his means than to his mind.

However, he had rung the bell. One has to pay penalties for acting on impulse. A woman with black wire hair, a face the colour of varnished deal, and a pale pink dressing-gown, appeared. Luckily she transpired to be the hostess before the gardener had voiced the fact that he mistook her for a drunken housemaid.

“I want a room here,” began the gardener, who had never wanted anything less in his life. But the three pounds lay very light in his pocket.

“We can give you one,” said the lady, and took his portmanteau. She could have given him several, but not one worth having. She conducted him through one or two doors that led from the living-room. Each showed a less attractive bedroom than the one before, but the cheapest was barely within the range of prudence, as far as the gardener’s pocket was concerned. In a leaden voice, proceeding from a heart of lead, he concluded a bargain for the temporary possession of the least inviting. And when it was done, and the portmanteau deposited drearily in the middle of a dirty linoleum floor, he discovered that time had been standing still, and that it was hardly nearer five o’clock than before.

It was the first time he had realised the four thousand miles that lay between him and the kindly grey pavements of Penny Street. He remembered the look of the London lamps reflected in the slaty mirrors of London streets ... the smile of the ridiculous little griffin who sits on a pedestal at the top of Fleet Street, playing the ’cello with his shield ... the shrugging shoulders of St. Paul’s on tiptoe on the peak of Ludgate Hill ... the dead leaves blowing down the Broad Walk, in the rain....

There is no pose that saves you from that awful longing for the things that are no longer yours, and which you hated while you possessed.

“I said I was enough for myself. And I am not,” said the gardener, and hid his face in the mosquito net.

Strange things in barbaric colours made the garden outside a whirlpool. Sometimes these things say to you: “You are a very long way from home”; and you exult, and think This is Life. But sometimes they say again: “You are a very long way from home”; and you cry out, and think This is Worse than Death.

Now there are moral drawbacks about the posing habit. But there are also advantages, though possibly none deserved. For after three minutes of despair the gardener straightened himself, blinked, and began putting his spare shirt into a drawer that would not shut. He was posing as One Who was Seeing Life, and who was Making the Best of it. The vision that inspired this brave pose was the ghost of a pair of small haggard eyes, set in a short pointed face, eyes that cried easily and never surrendered. A thin unbeautiful ghost with clenched fists, and in the air, the ghost of a low and militant voice.

“I am not enough,” the gardener admitted. “But together, we are enough.”

He whistled a comic song tentatively. The Englishman never whistles or sings to suit his feelings. He dies to the tune of “Tipperary,” or goes to his wedding humming the “Dead March in Saul.”

There was no more life to be seen in that hot little room, even by one fixed in an optimistic pose. He emerged into the sitting-room, and through an opposite and open door he could see the pink dressing-gown, containing his landlady, heaving sleepily under a mosquito net. One of her bare feet was drooping under the net. At this he had to swallow down London again violently, and remember that he was Seeing Life, and that he was Luckier than Most.

Did you know that the surest way of ensuring luck is to be sure that you are lucky?

“Now I will find my suffragette,” he said, standing between the bamboos at the gate. And he expelled an entering misgiving that he was perhaps presuming on his luck.

It was curiously cool in the shade of the high cactus hedge that ran along one side of the way. A fresh breeze, like the unbidden guest at the wedding, conscious that it was not attired in character, crept guiltily in from the sea. The sun, which would have disclaimed even distant relationship with the cool copper halfpenny that inhabits English skies, fretted out the black shadows across and across the white street. The gardener thought painfully of many glasses of cold water that he had criminally wasted in England. He stiffened his long upper lip, and tried to look for new worlds instead of remembering the old.

He went into the Botanical Gardens, and sat on a seat opposite the mad orchids. I think the Almighty was a little tired of His excellent system by the time He came to the orchids, so He allowed them to fashion themselves. For they are contrived, I think, and not spontaneously created like the rest.

On the other end of the seat were two children, so blessedly English that for a moment the gardener smelt Kensington Gardens. The girl wore very little between her soft neck and her long brown arms and legs, except a white frill or two, and a passion flower in her sash. The boy, more modest, was encased in a white sailor suit. Both were finished off at the feet with sandals.

Hardly had the gardener sat down when he was regretfully aware that he had sat by mistake on a pirate-ship in mid-ocean. The two commanders looked coldly at him from their end of the treasure-laden deck, and there was an awkward silence which somehow left the impression that much exciting talk had immediately preceded it on that vessel.

“I beg your pardon,” said the gardener. “I forgot to tell you that I am the prisoner you seized when you captured your last prize. There was a desperate resistance, but in spite of heavy odds, you overcame me.”

The boy, because he was a boy, looked for a second towards his mahogany-coloured Nana, who was staring an orchid out of countenance farther up the path. The girl, because she was a girl, looked neither right nor left, but straight at the gardener, and said: “All right then. But you mustn’t let your feet dangle into the sea. And you must be very frightened.”

The gardener restrained his feet, and became so frightened that the whole vessel shook. The boy continued to look doubtful, until his sister reminded him in a hoarse whisper: “It’s all right, Aitch, we were wanting somebody to walk the plank.”

In providing a willing villain, the gardener was supplying a long-felt want in pirate-ships. So thoroughly did he do his duty that when he was finally obliged as a matter of convention to walk the walking-stick blindfolded, and die a miserable death by drowning in the gravel-path, the pirate-ship seemed to have lost its point.

“Let’s betend,” said the lady-pirate, “that Aitch and me are fairies, and we touch you with our wand and you turn into a speckled pony.”

“Greatscod, no,” said Aitch; for there are limits to what a fellow of seven can betend in company. “Don’t let’s have any fairying, my good Zed. Let’s betend we’re just Aitch and Zed, and we’ll show the prisoner the Secret Tree.”

So they set off, and the Nana, who might as well have been a Nanning-machine for all the individuality she put into her work, trotted behind them.

The Secret Tree was one of those secrets that remain inviolate because it occurs to nobody to lay them bare. It was an everyday little palm tree, exquisitely bandaged by Nature in cocoanut matting; it was very fairy-like, and when you looked up at its fronds in their infinite intersections against the sky, you saw a thrill, like the thrill you see on a cornfield curtseying in the wind, or in the light moving across watered silk. In one of the folds of the palm tree’s garment a White Pawn, belonging to Aitch, had made his home. He lived there for days at a time—the gardener was told with bated breath—and the park-keeper never knew he was there. At night he saw the fireflies light their lamps, and heard the swift slither of the fearful scorpion; once he had reported an adventure with a centipede three times his own size. That pawn was the epitome of People Who Stay Up Late At Night, and Are Not Afraid of the Dark. A super-grown-up.

On their way to the garden gate, each child held a hand of the gardener, and the automatic Nana walked behind. As they came out into the main street, the gardener thought that the houses looked like skulls—so white they were, and so soulless, and their windows so black and empty.

“Greatscod,” said Aitch, “what is happening to the church steeple?”

For it was reeling in front of them, to the tune of a paralysing open roar from underground.

Behind them the automaton blossomed madly into life, Nana fled shrieking back into the garden.

Those two things happened, one by one, like sparks struck out of a flaming experience. Then everything happened at once, and yet lasted a lifetime. There seemed not a second to spare, and yet nothing to be done.

The gardener felt unspeakably terrified, his mother earth shot away from under him, truth was proved false. He discovered that he had seized Aitch and Zed, one under each arm; and later on—his memory having vaulted the blank—he found that he was lying on them in the gutter, and that Aitch was yapping like a dog. Zed was crying, “Mother, Mother.” And the gardener, with a quick vision of some one watering a cool English herbaceous border, also said, “Mother, Mother.”

After a while a green beetle ran past his eye, and he recalled the moment, and raised himself upon his hands and knees. A fire of pain burnt him suddenly, and he turned his head and saw a pyre of twisted iron posts heaped upon his legs.

The air was thick with strange sounds, muffled as if from a gramophone. Some one quite near, but unseen, was shouting, “Oh, Oh,” as regularly as a clock’s chime. There was a rending wheeze behind them, and the gardener looked round in time to see a palm tree sink with dignity into a trench that had been gashed at its feet. But that might have been a dream.

He felt absolutely sick with horror. His head seemed as though it were all at once too big for his skin. His whole being throbbed terribly in a sort of echo of the three throbs that had laid life by the heels.

Yock—Yollock—Yollock. A pounce, and then two shakes, like a terrier dealing with a rat. Why had one ever trusted oneself to such a risky crumb of creation as this world? The gardener lost himself in littleness. And presently found that he had insinuated himself into a sitting position, and was feeling very sick indeed.

“That was an earthquake,” remarked Zed, with the truly feminine trick of jumping to foregone conclusions. And she burst into tears, wailing still, “Mother, Mother.”

“It is funny we should both have thought of her,” observed the gardener, forgetting that there was room for more than one mother in this tiny world. His eyes were fixed on a thin and fearful stream of blood that was issuing from between two bricks in the mass of miscellany that had once been a house. “Blood—from a skull?” he thought, and fainted.

For centuries his mind skirted round some enormous joke. It was so big that he could not see its point, and then again it was so little that he lost it. At any rate it was round, and turned with a jovial hum.

Later on he was aware of the solution of a problem which he felt had been troubling him all his life. What colour was the face of a nigger pale with fright? It was several colours, chiefly the shade of a wooden horse he had once loved, but mottled. But the whites of the eyes were more blue than white, they shone like electric light. With an effort he fitted the various parts of his mind together.

“Hullo, constable,” he said in a voice he could not easily control. “This is a pretty business, isn’t it?” And he tried to rise, and to whistle a bar or two, in an effort to assume the pose of the hero who trifles in the face of death. But he could not rise. He was pinned to the pavement by a leg that seemed somehow to have lost its identity.

It is not in the least romantic to be hurt. There is something curiously dirty in the feeling of one’s own pain, and in the sight of one’s own blood, though wounds in others are rather dramatic.

Now Courtesy was a person who, without ever trying to be sensational, was often unexpected by mistake. Coincidence seemed to haunt her. Out of the hundred streets that lay shattered in Union Town that afternoon, she chose the one in which the gardener lay, and, accompanied by the priest, she bore down upon that unheroic hero, laden with brandy and bandages. The gardener saw her large face, frank as a sunflower, between him and the yellow sky.

The priest was quite obviously a saviour. You could see in his eye that he was succouring the wounded. You could hear in his voice as he addressed the terrified hotel porters who followed him that he was busy rising nobly to an emergency.

“Why, gardener,” said Courtesy, in the tones of one greeting a friend at a garden party. “You here? I was wondering what had become of you. Now what’s the matter with you?”

She poured him out some brandy, as though it were the ordinary thing for a lady to offer to a friend in the street. And the gardener’s world regained its feet, he wondered why he had been so frightened.

“Poor little mites,” said Courtesy to Aitch and Zed. “They won’t forget this in a hurry, will they?”

There is something very comforting in the utterly banal. That is why the instinct is so strong in good women to make you a cup of tea, and poke the fire, when you are crossed in love.

“But if she had been the suffragette ...” thought the gardener. He knew quite well that the thing would not have been so well done, had it been the suffragette. He was fully aware that the operation of having his leg put into improvised splints, and of being lifted upon a door, would have been much more painful, had it been accomplished by the little nervous hands of the suffragette, instead of the large excellent hands of Courtesy.

It is discouraging to those of us who have spent much money on becoming fully efficient in first aid and hygiene and practical economy and all the luxuries of the modern female intellect, to find how perfect imperfection can seem.

“Thank you—you little darling,” said the gardener with his eyes shut, when, after a few spasms of red pain, he was safe upon the door. White-clad hotel porters stood like tombstones at his head and feet.

“Lor’ bless you,” said Courtesy. “Take him to the St. Maurice, porter. It’s the only place left more or less standing, I should think.”

“It is not,” said the priest. “Excuse me, Miss Briggs, there are thousands in this stricken town in need of our help, and I should prefer that only the gentler and worthier of the sufferers should come under that roof. There are many excellent resting-places where our friend here would be far more suitably placed. You ought to know his character by now, and you must think of your own good name.”

“Rot,” said Courtesy. “What do his morals matter when he’s broken his leg?”

“Remember you are also succouring these innocent children,” persisted the priest. “Would you have them under the same roof?”

“Rot,” repeated Courtesy. “The roof’ll be all right.”

“Dose little children ...” said the policeman suddenly. “He covahed dem when dat house was fallin’. Verree brave gentleman. I chahnced to be runnin’ by....”

“Of course he did,” said Courtesy. “The St. Maurice, porter.” And seizing Aitch and Zed each by a hand, she started the procession.

The High Street looked as if one side of it had charged the other with equally disastrous results to both. At different points in it, fire and heavy smoke were animating the scene. Distracted men and women panted and moaned and tore at the wreckage with bleeding hands. A little crying crowd was collected round a woman who lay nailed to the ground by a mountain of bricks, with her face fixed in a glare of terrible surprise. By the cathedral steps the dead lay in a row, shoulder to shoulder, with the horrid uniformity of sprats upon a plate. Courtesy lifted up Zed and called Aitch’s attention to the healthier distress of a little dog, which ran around looking for its past in the extraordinary mazes of the present.

The gardener, swinging along painfully upon his door, opened his eyes and saw the fires. To his surprise he recognised the house which could boast the highest flames. Its wall had fallen to disclose the shattered remains of the rooms in which the gardener had lately wrestled with despair. The bamboos and the gorgeous garden watched unmoved the pillar of fire that danced in their midst. There was no sign of the wire-haired woman.

But only one thought came to the gardener’s mind on the subject. “Why she will see that. It is a beacon from me to her.”

As a matter of fact she did not.

A pretty woman, crying in a curious laughing voice, ran into Courtesy’s arms. “My little babies ...” she quavered. “What a catastrophe. I don’t know where my husband is. There is a grand piano on my bed.”

“This is my mother,” said Aitch.

“Come along to the St. Maurice,” said Courtesy. “That’s where I am taking your babies to. Our piano there is still in its proper place.”

So they all followed the gardener.

“Somebody must go and find a doctor,” said Courtesy at the door of the St. Maurice. She looked suggestively at the priest.

But he replied, “I wash my hands of the matter, Miss Briggs. I consider this to be a judgment on that young man.”

“A judgment?” wept the mother of Aitch and Zed. “Why, what has he done?”

“He saved the lives of your babies,” replied Courtesy. “And anyway, a judgment needs a surgeon just as much as a simple fracture.”

“Yerce, yerce, only don’t ask me to help,” said the priest. “I prefer to succour those deserving of help.” And he went out into the street again. He seemed wedded to the word succour. It is a pose word, and fitted him exactly. Nothing but an earthquake could have made this worm turn. But the effect of the disaster on the priest was an obstinate certainty that there was a Jonah in the case, and that, as heaven was never to blame, the wicked were entirely responsible.

“Oh, Lor’,” said Courtesy. “I’ll have to go for a surgeon myself.”

“I’ll go with you,” cried the mother of Aitch and Zed, whose name, for the sake of brevity, was Mrs. Tring. “I don’t know what has become of my Dally” (who was her husband).

“Somebody must sit with the gardener,” said Courtesy, when she came back from a successful search for an intact bed, into which, with the help of a housemaid, she had inserted the gardener.

“I will sit with him,” said the harsh voice of Mrs. Rust, as she rose from a seat where she had been sitting with an enormous paper bag held in a rigid hand. “I refuse to run about the streets with brandy. All the old cats are doing that.”

“Why, Mrs. Rust,” observed Courtesy, whose conventionality was not quite so striking after an earthquake as it had been upon the comparatively stable Atlantic. “I had clean forgotten that you existed.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “I was buying mangoes when the incident occurred. Perhaps the gardener would like a mango.”

“Perhaps he would. I am so glad to see that you don’t take the same view about the gardener as the——”

“I never take the same view,” barked Mrs. Rust. “Show me the boy’s room.”

So the gardener saw that poisonous hair advance along a shaft of sunlight that intruded through the broken shutter.

“Your jug and basin are broken,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful.”

“Oh, there are several things broken in this town,” he said feverishly. “Windows and necks and a heart or two.”

Mrs. Rust sat deliberately on a chair and burst into tears.

“I was buying mangoes,” she sobbed stormily, “from a black man with bleached hair. And the whole of a shop-front fell out on him. One brick hit my toe. I looked at the man through a sort of cage of fallen things. It was as if—one had trodden on red currants.”

“What did you do?” panted the gardener. “How fine to live in a world where things happen.”

“I ran away,” said Mrs. Rust shakily. “I didn’t pay for the mangoes.”

“I would rather have had this happen,” said the gardener after a pause, “and have broken my leg, than have had an ordinary day to meet me on Trinity Island.”

After another pause, he added: “But I have lost the suffragette. And that is another matter.”

“Was she killed?” asked Mrs. Rust, steeling herself against the commonplace duty of condolence.

“Certainly not,” replied the gardener. “She is a militant suffragette.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.

“How good the world is,” said the gardener, “to provide such excellent material. The sea, and the earthquake, and a fighting woman to love. Just think—an earthquake—on my first day. I am a man of luck.”

“You have broken your leg,” Mrs. Rust informed him.

“I have,” admitted the gardener rather fretfully. “But then everything has its price.”

“A good many other people have come off much worse,” said Mrs. Rust. “I’m not complaining, mind, but any other woman would say you were disgracefully selfish. A lot of people are dead, and a lot of other people’s people are dead....”

“The longer I live ...” said the gardener, from the summit of his twenty-three years, “the surer I am that we make a fuss which is almost funny over death. We run after it all over the world, and then we grumble at it when it catches us up from behind. It’s an adventure, of course, but then—so is—shaving every morning. Compare death with—love, for instance.”

He felt ashamed of this after he had said it, and tried to cover it with a little laugh which shook him, and changed into a yelp. After breathing hard for a little while he went on.

“We who have survived this ordeal have gained much more than we risked. I know that anything is worth a risk, the risk in itself is the gain, and to risk everything for nothing is a fine thing. Why otherwise do we climb Alps, or hunt the South Pole? In theory, I would run in front of an express train to save a mou. In theory I don’t mind what I pay for danger. That’s why I love the suffragette; she would risk her life for a little vote, and her honour for a bleak thing like independence.”

“Do you love the suffragette?” asked Mrs. Rust, who was at heart a woman, although she believed herself to be a neutral intelligence.

“I do, I do,” cried the gardener, suddenly and gloriously losing his pose of One Who Evolves a New Scale of Values—in other words, the pose of a Paradox. But his emotion awoke his nerves, and for a while, although the suffragette obsessed his imagination, pain obsessed the rest of the universe.

When Courtesy and the doctor came in, they found the gardener with a temperature well into three figures. So for some time Mrs. Rust was not allowed to see the patient.

By the time the gardener felt better, the earthquake, in the eyes of the townspeople of Union, had become not so much of a horror as a disaster, a thing possible to dilate upon and even to lie about. The homeless were beginning to look upon homelessness as a state to be passed through rather than the end of things, the bereaved were discovering little by little that life may arise from ashes, and that sackcloth may be cut quite becomingly. Those ghosts of dead hope who still searched among the ruins were looked upon as “poor things” rather than companions in sorrow. Young nigger ladies, dressed in pink and silver, flaunted their teeth and their petticoats around the firemen who worked desultorily at the little gaseous fires that broke out among the lamentable streets. The one church that remained standing was constantly full. (The picture palace had met the fate it perhaps deserved.) There is nothing in the world so saved as a saved nigger. And nothing so lost as a lost nigger. After an earthquake it always occurs to these light and child-like minds that it is safer to be saved. The horse has fled from the stable, but the door might as well be attended to, and the padlock of salvation is not expensive. Fervent men and women throng the pews, shouting hymns down the back of each other’s neck, and groaning away sins they do not realise, to the accompaniment of words they do not understand. Those who have lived together in innocent sin hurry to the altar for the ring, which, to these harmless transgressors, is as the fig-leaf apron of Eden, and heralds virtuous tragedy.

When the gardener became well enough to resent being ill, he was allowed visitors, among whom was one, by name Dallas Tring, Esquire. This was a very honest man who, in spite of having an excellent heart, believed that he always told the truth at all costs. The only lie he permitted himself, however, was constantly on his lips. It was: “I take your meaning.”

It was obviously unnatural to him to be enthusiastic. It is to most very honest people. He came into the gardener’s room like an actor emerging from stage fright on to the stage.

“You saved my children from being crushed to death,” he said, and seized the gardener’s hands. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Oh, not at all,” murmured the gardener. “I pretty nearly crushed them to death myself. Have a whisky and soda.”

This last is the Trinity Island retort to everything, its loophole, its conversational salvation. The average Englishman takes several weeks to acquire the habit in the real Island style, but the gardener was always more adaptable than most.

Privately he did feel unreasonably conceited about the rescue. He would have admitted that the impulse to gather Aitch and Zed beneath his prostrate form had been unconscious, but he considered that unconscious heroism proves heroism deeply ingrained. Nevertheless, the people who voice your conceit for you are only a little less trying than the people who relieve you of the duty of being humble. One must do these things for oneself.

Mr. Dallas Tring was glad to have accomplished his duty, which was not spontaneous, but had been impressed upon him by his wife. Left to himself he would have said: “Say, that was good of you. I’d have been cut up if anything had happened to the kids.”

His wife not having warned him how to proceed, he began now to talk about the banana crops. It was only towards the end of the interview that he risked himself once more upon the quicksands of emotion.

“Look here, you know, it’s altogether unspeakable—what I owe you. Those are the only children we have. Aitch is a fine boy, don’t you think?”

“Fine,” agreed the gardener, relieved to be allowed a loophole of escape from, “Not at all.”

“You’re a fine boy yourself,” added Mr. Tring. “When you get well, will you come and help me?”

“What to do?”

“To start again.”

“Oh, yes,” replied the gardener. “I love starting again. What I never can do is to go on.”

After this the gardener, considered to be stronger, was allowed to see Mrs. Rust again. She was now but little better than a fretful echo of Courtesy.

Some people seem born to walk alone, and others there are who are never seen without a group behind them. Courtesy was as far a leader of men as can be compatible with having no destination to lead them to. She never knew what it was to be without a “circle.” Acquaintances were as necessary to her as air, and she used them, as she used air, innocently for her own ends.

Mrs. Rust never attained to the dignity either of being alone or the leader of a group, though she worshipped independence. She believed she had bought precedence of Courtesy for £200 a year.

And on the occasion of this visit to the gardener, she believed that she was about to shock and surprise that wise young man.

“Do you know what I have done?” she asked, when she had to some extent overcome the nervous cautiousness of behaviour impressed upon her by the absent Courtesy.

“I do not,” said the gardener, whose gently irreverent manner towards her was his salvation in her eyes. “It’s sure to be something that any one else would be ashamed of doing.”

Mrs. Rust bridled. “It was partly to annoy you that I did it,” she said. “Because you dared to advise me not to. I have sent my son Samuel a cheque, so as to launch his hotel.”

“Rash woman,” protested the gardener. “If you knew your son Samuel as well as I do——”

“I know he is my son, so he cannot be altogether a fool.”

The gardener bent his thick threatening eyebrows upon her.

“Do you know what else I have done?” she continued.

“I tremble to think,” replied the invalid.

“I have advertised for your suffragette in the Union Paper. Courtesy said what a mercy it would be if she should have got safely away and wouldn’t come back, so I advertised, just to show that I disagreed. I never knew her name, so I described her appearance....”

“Her little size ...” he said eagerly. “Her small and hollow eyes. Her darling-coloured hair that always blew forward along her cheeks....”

“Well, I didn’t put it like that,” said Mrs. Rust.

“She had such wonderful little hands,” said the gardener, upon whom a sick-bed had a softening, not to say maudlin effect. “You could see everything she thought in her hands. They were not very white, but pale brown. You might have mentioned them. But she is obviously mine. Nobody could overlook that. Nobody could overlook her at all.”

“On the contrary,” said Mrs. Rust, “she is a perfectly insignificant-looking young woman. And I am sure that she would strongly resent your describing her as though she were a dog with your name on its collar. She had sensible views about women.”

You have been intended to suppose all this time that the suffragette had succumbed to the earthquake, but as she is the heroine—though an unworthy one—of this book, I am sure you have not been deceived. Loth as I am to admit that a friend of mine should have been so near to such an experience without reaping the benefit of it, I am obliged by tiresome truth to confess that she was never aware of the earthquake as an earthquake at all.

She was in the train when it happened, a little Christian the Pilgrim, making her way through many difficulties up to the Delectable Mountains. Far off they stood, defying the pale sea and the pale plains, shadowed mountains, each with its cool brow crowned by a halo of cloud.

The train service in Trinity Islands is not their chief attraction. First, second, and third class alike may watch the vivid country from the windows, otherwise there is no compensation for rich or poor. The price of a first-class fare is supposed to guarantee your fellow-passengers matching yourself as nearly as possible in complexion; it also entitles you to a deformed wicker chair in a compartment that a cow would appeal against in the Home Country. The wicker chair, unsettled by its migratory life, amuses itself by travelling drunkenly around the truck, unless you lash yourself to the door-handle with your pocket-handkerchief, or evolve some other ingenious device.