CHAPTER XXIV
The first time they allowed me to see her was after many days of
nerve-racking anxiety. I had indeed called at the clinique two or
three times a day for news, and I had written short letters of comfort
and received weirdly-spelt messages taken down from Lola's dictation
by a nurse with an imperfect knowledge of English. These kept the
heart in me; for the doctor's reports were invariably grave--possible
loss of sight in the injured eye and permanent disfigurement their
most hopeful prognostications. I lived, too, in a nervous agony of
remorse. For whatever happened I held myself responsible. At first
they thought her life was in danger. I passed nightmare days. Then the
alarming symptoms subsided, and it was a question of the saving of the
eye and the decent healing of the cheek torn deep by the claws of the
accursed brute. When Quast informed me of its summary execution I felt
the primitive savage arise in me, and I upbraided Quast for not having
invited me to gloat over its expiring throes. How the days passed I
know not. I wandered about the streets, looking into the windows of
the great shops, buying flowers and fruit for Lola in eccentric
quantities. Or sitting in beerhouses reading the financial pages of a
German paper held upside down. I could not return to London. Still
less could I investigate the German philanthropic methods of rescuing
fallen women. I wrote to Campion a brief account of what had happened
and besought him to set a deputy to work on the regeneration of the
Judds.
At last they brought me to where Lola lay, in a darkened room, with
her head tightly bandaged. A dark mass spread over the pillow which I
knew was her glorious hair. I could scarcely see the unbandaged half
of her face. She still suffered acute pain, and I was warned that my
visit could only be of brief duration, and that nothing but the
simplest matters could be discussed. I sat down on a chair by the left
side of the bed. Her wonderful nervous hand clung round mine as we
talked.
The first thing she said to me, in a weak voice, like the faint echo
of her deep tones, was:
"I'm going to lose all my good looks, Simon, and you won't care to
look at me any more."
She said it so simply, so tenderly, without a hint of reproach in it,
that I almost shouted out my horrible remorse; but I remembered my
injunctions and refrained. I strove to comfort her, telling her
mythical tales of surgical reassurances. She shook her head sadly.
"It was like you to stay in Berlin, Simon," she said, after a while.
"Although they wouldn't let me see you, yet I knew you were within
call. You can't conceive what a comfort it has been."
"How could I leave you, dear," said I, "with the thought of you
throbbing in my head night and day?"
"How did you find me?"
"Through Conto and Blag. I tried all other means, you may be sure. But
now I've found you I shan't let you go again."
This was not the time for elaborate explanations. She asked for none.
When one is very ill one takes the most unlikely happenings as
commonplace occurrences. It seemed enough to her that I was by her
side. We talked of her nurses, who were kind; of the skill of Dr.
Steinholz, who brought into his clinique the rigid discipline of a
man-of-war.
"He wouldn't even let me have your flowers," she said. "And even if he
had I shouldn't have been able to see them in this dark hole."
She questioned me as to my doings. I told her of my move to Barbara's
Building.
"And I'm keeping you from all that splendid work," she said weakly.
"You must go back at once, Simon. I shall get along nicely now, and I
shall be happy now that I've seen you again."
I kissed her fingers. "You have to learn a lesson, my dear, which will
do you an enormous amount of good."
"What is that?"
"The glorious duty of selfishness."
Then the minute hand of the clock marked the end of the interview, and
the nurse appeared on the click and turned me out.
After that I saw her daily; gradually our interviews lengthened, and
as she recovered strength our talks wandered from the little incidents
and interests of the sick-room to the general topics of our lives. I
told her of all that had happened to me since her flight. And I told
her that I wanted her and her only of all women.
"Why--oh, why, did you do such a foolish thing?" I asked.
"I did it for your good."
"My dear, have you ever heard the story of the tender-hearted
elephant? No? It was told in a wonderful book published years ago and
called 'The Fables of George Washington AEsop.' This is it. There was
once an elephant who accidentally trod on the mother of a brood of
newly-hatched chickens. Her tender heart filled with remorse for what
she had done, and, overflowing with pity for the fluffy orphans, she
wept bitterly, and addressed them thus: 'Poor little motherless
things, doomed to face the rough world without a parent's care, I
myself will be a mother to you.' Whereupon, gathering them under her
with maternal fondness, she sat down on the whole brood."
The unbandaged half of her face lit up with a wan smile. "Did I do
that?"
"I didn't conceive it possible that you could love me except for the
outside things."
"You might have waited and seen," said I in mild reproof.
She sighed. "You'll never understand. Do you remember my saying once
that you reminded me of an English Duke?"
"Yes."
"You made fun of me; but you must have known what I meant. You see,
Simon, you didn't seem to care a hang for me in that way--until quite
lately. You were goodness and kindness itself, and I felt that you
would stick by me as a friend through thick and thin; but I had given
up hoping for anything else. And I knew there was some one only
waiting for you, a real refined lady. So when you kissed me, I didn't
dare believe it. And I had made you kiss me. I told you so, and I was
as ashamed as if I had suddenly turned into a loose woman. And when
Miss Faversham came, I knew it would be best for you to marry her, for
all the flattering things she said to me, I knew--"
"My dear," I interrupted, "you didn't know at all. I loved you ever
since I saw you first lying like a wonderful panther in your chair at
Cadogan Gardens. You wove yourself into all my thoughts and around all
my actions. One of these days I'll show you a kind of diary I used to
keep, and you'll see how I abused you behind your back."
Her face--or the dear half of it that was visible--fell. "Oh, why?"
"For making me turn aside from the nice little smooth path to the
grave which I had marked out for myself. I regarded myself as a
genteel semi-corpse, and didn't want to be disturbed."
"And I disturbed you?"
"Until I danced with fury and called down on your dear head
maledictions which for fulness and snap would have made a mediaeval
Pope squirm with envy."
She pressed my hand. "You are making fun again. I thought you were
serious."
"I am. I'm telling you exactly what happened. Then, when I was rapidly
approaching the other world, it didn't matter. At last I died and came
to life again; but it took me a long time to come really to life. I
was like a tree in spring which has one bud which obstinately refuses
to burst into blossom. At last it did burst, and all the love that had
been working in my heart came to my lips; and, incidentally, my dear,
to yours."
This was at the early stages of her recovery, when one could only
speak of gentle things. She told me of her simple Odyssey--a period of
waiting in Paris, an engagement at Vienna and Budapest, and then
Berlin. Her agents had booked a week in Dresden, and a fortnight in
Homburg, and she would have to pay the forfeit for breach of contract.
"I'm sorry for Anastasius's sake," she said. "The poor little mite
wrote me rapturous letters when he heard I was out with the cats. He
gave me a long special message for each, which I was to whisper in its
ear."
Poor little Anastasius Papadopoulos! She showed me his letters,
written in a great round, flourishing, sanguine hand. He seemed to be
happy enough at the Maison de Sante. He had formed, he said, a school
for the cats of the establishment, for which the authorities were very
grateful, and he heralded the completion of his gigantic combinations
with regard to the discovery of the assassin of the horse Sultan. Lola
and I never spoke of him without pain; for in spite of his crazy and
bombastic oddities, he had qualities that were lovable.
"And now," said Lola, "I must tell him that Hephaestus has been killed
and the rest are again idling under the care of the faithful Quast. It
seemed a pity to kill the poor beast."
"I wish to Heaven," said I, "that he had been strangled at birth."
"You never liked him." She smiled wanly. "But he is scarcely to be
blamed. I grew unaccountably nervous and lost control. All savage
animals are like that." And, seeing that I was about to protest
vehemently, she smiled again. "Remember, I'm a lion-tamer's daughter,
and brought up from childhood to regard these things as part of the
show. There must always come a second's failure of concentration. Lots
of tamers meet their deaths sooner or later for the same reason--just
a sudden loss of magnetism. The beast gets frightened and springs."
Exactly what Quast had told me. Exactly what I myself had divined at
the sickening moment. I bowed my head and laid the back of her cool
hand against it, and groaned out my remorse. If I had not been there!
If I had not distracted her attention! She would not listen to my
self-reproach. It had nothing to do with me. She had simply missed her
grip and lost her head. She forbade me to mention the subject again.
The misery of thinking that I held myself to blame was unbearable. I
said no more, realising the acute distress of her generous soul, but
in my heart I made a deep vow of reparation.
It was, however, with no such chivalrous feelings, but out of the
simple longing to fulfil my life that I asked her definitely, for the
first time, to marry me as soon as she could get about the world
again. I put before her with what delicacy I could that if she had
foolish ideas of my being above her in station, she was above me in
worldly fortune, and thus we both had to make some sacrifices to our
pride. I said that my work was found--that our lives could be
regulated as she wished.
She listened, without saying a word, until I had finished. Then she
took my hand.
"I'm grateful," she said, "and I'm proud. And I know that I love you
beyond all things on earth. But I won't give you an answer till I'm up
and about on my feet again."
"Why?" I insisted.
"Don't ask. And don't mention the matter again. You must be good to
me, because I'm ill, and do what I say."
She smiled and fondled my hand, and cajoled a reluctant promise from
me.
Then came days in which, for no obvious reason, Lola received me with
anxious frightened diffidence, and spoke with constraint. The
cheerfulness which she had hitherto exhibited gave place to dull
depression. She urged me continually to leave Berlin, where, as she
said, I was wasting my time, and return to my work in London.
"I shall be all right, Simon, perfectly all right, and as soon as I
can travel, I'll come straight to London."
"I'm not going to let you slip through my fingers again," I would say
laughingly.
"But I promise you, I'll swear to you I'll come back! Only I can't
bear to think of you idling around a woman's sick-bed, when you have
such glorious things to do at home. That's a man's work, Simon. This
isn't."
"But it is a man's work," I would declare, "to devote himself to the
woman he loves and not to leave her helpless, a stranger in a strange
land."
"I wish you would go, Simon. I do wish you would go!" she would say
wearily. "It's the only favour I've ever asked you in my life."
Man-like, I looked within myself to find the reason for these earnest
requests. In casting off my jester's suit had I also divested myself
of the power to be a decently interesting companion? Had I become
merely a dull, tactless, egotistical bore? Was I, in simple, naked,
horrid fact, getting on an invalid's delicate nerves? I was scared of
the new picture of myself thus presented. I became self-conscious and
made particular efforts to bring a little gaiety into our talk; but
though she smiled with her lips, the cloud, whatever it was, hung
heavily on her mind, and at the first opportunity she came back to the
ceaseless argument.
In despair I took her nurse into my confidence.
"She is right," said the nurse. "You are doing her more harm than
good. You had better go away and write to her daily from London."
"But why--but why?" I clamoured. "Can't you give me any reason?"
The nurse glanced at me with a touch of feminine scorn.
"The bandages will soon be removed."
"Well?" said I.
"The sight of one eye may be gone."
"I know," said I. "She is reconciled to it. She has the courage and
resignation of a saint."
"She has also the very common and natural fears of a woman."
"For Heaven's sake," I cried, "tell me plainly what you mean."
"We don't quite know what disfigurement will result," said the nurse
bluntly. "It is certain to be very great, and the dread of your seeing
her is making her ill and retarding her recovery. So if you have any
regard for her, pack up your things and go away."
"But," I remonstrated, "I'm bound to see her sooner or later."
The nurse lost patience. "Ach! Can't you get it into your head that it
is essential it should be later, when she is strong enough to stand
the strain and has realised the worst and made her little
preparations?"
I accepted the rebuke meekly. The situation, when explained, was
comprehensible to the meanest masculine intelligence.
"I will go," said I.
When I announced this determination to Lola she breathed a deep sigh
of relief.
"I shall be so much happier," she said.
Then she raised both her arms and drew my head down until our lips
met. "Dear," she whispered, still holding me, "if I hadn't run away
from you before I should run away now; but it would be silly to do it
twice. So I'll come to London as soon as the doctor will let me. But
if you find you don't and can't possibly love me I shan't feel hurt
with you. I've had some months, I know, of your love, and that will
last me all my life; and I know that whatever happens you'll be my
very dear and devoted friend."
"I shall be your lover always!" I swore.
She shook her head and released me. A great pity welled up in my
heart, for I know now why she had forbidden me to speak of marriage,
and in some dim way I got to the depth of her woman's nature. I
realised, as far as a man can, how the sudden blasting of a woman's
beauty must revolutionise not only her own attitude towards the world,
but her conception of the world's attitude towards her. Only a few
weeks before she had gone about proudly conscious of her superb
magnificence. It was the triumphant weapon in her woman's armoury, to
use when she so chose. It had illuminated a man's journey (I knew and
felt it now) through the Valley of the Shadow. It had held his senses
captive. It had brought him to her feet. It was a charm that she could
always offer to his eyes. It was her glory and her pride to enhance it
for his delectation. Her beauty was herself. That gone, she had
nothing but a worthless soul to offer, and what woman would dream of
offering a man her soul if she had no casket in which to enshrine it?
If I had presented this other aspect of the case to Lola, she would
have cried out, with perfect sincerity:
"My soul! You get things like mine anywhere for twopence a dozen."
It was the blasting of her beauty that was the infinite matter. All
that I loved would be gone. She would have nothing left to give. The
splendour of the day had ceased, and now was coming the long, long,
dreary night, to meet which with dignity she was nerving her brave
heart.
The tears were not far from my eyes when I said again softly:
"Your lover always, dear."
"Make no promises," she said, "except one."
"And that is?"
"That you will write me often until I come home."
"Every day."
So we parted, and I returned to London and to my duties at Barbara's
Building. I wrote daily, and her dictated answers gave me knowledge of
her progress. To my immense relief, I heard that the oculist's skill
had saved her eyesight; but it could not obliterate the traces of the
cruel claws.
The days, although fuller with work and interests, appeared long until
she came. I saw but little of the outside world. Dale, my sister
Agatha, Sir Joshua Oldfield, and Campion were the only friends I met.
Dale was ingenuously sympathetic when he head of the calamity.
"What's going to happen?" he asked, after he had exhausted his
vocabulary of abuse on cats, Providence and Anastasius Papadopoulos.
"What's the poor dear going to do?"
"If I am going to have any voice in the matter," said I, "she is going
to marry me."
He wrung me by the hand enthusiastically and declared that I was the
splendidest fellow that ever lived. Then he sighed.
"I am going about like a sheep without a leader. For Heaven's sake,
come back into politics. Form a hilarious little party of your own--
anything--so long as you're back and take me with you."
"Come to Barbara's Building," said I.
But he made a wry face, and said that he did not think Maisie would
like it. I laughed and put my hand on his shoulder.
"My son, you have a leader already, and she has already tied a blue
riband round your woolly neck, and she is pulling you wherever she
wants to go. And it's all to the infinite advantage of your eternal
soul."
Whereupon he grinned and departed to the sheepfold.
At last Lola came. She begged me not to meet her at the station, but
to go round after dinner to Cadogan Gardens.
Dawkins opened the door for me and showed me into the familiar
drawing-room. The long summer day was nearing its end, and only a dim
twilight came through the open windows. Lola was standing rigid on the
hearthrug, her hand shielding the whole of the right side of her face.
With the free hand she checked my impetuous advance.
"Stop and look!" she said, and then dropped the shielding hand, and
stood before me with twitching lips and death in her eyes. I saw in a
flash the devastation that had been wrought; but, thank God, I pierced
beneath it to the anguish in her heart. The pity--the awful, poignant
pity--of it smote me. Everything that was man in me surged towards
her. What she saw in my eyes I know not; but in hers dawned a sudden
wonder. There was no recoil of shock, such as she had steeled herself
to encounter. I sprang forward and clasped her in my arms. Her
stiffened frame gradually relaxed and our lips met, and in that kiss
all fears and doubts were dissolved for ever.
Some hours later she said: "If you are blind enough to care for a
maimed thing like me, I can't help it. I shall never understand it to
my dying day," she added with a long sigh.
"And you will marry me?"
"I suppose I've got to," she replied. And with the old pantherine
twist of her body she slid from her easy-chair to the ground and
buried her face on my knees.
And that is the end of my story. We were quietly married three weeks
afterwards. Agatha, wishing to humour a maniac for whom she retained
an unreasonable affection, came to the wedding and treated Lola as
only a sweet lady could. But my doings passed her understanding. As
for Jane, my other sister, she cast me from her. People who did these
things, she maintained, must bear the consequences. I bore them
bravely. It is only now that my name is beginning to be noised abroad
as that of one who speaks with some knowledge on certain social
questions that Jane holds out the olive branch of fraternal peace.
After a brief honeymoon Lola insisted on joining me in Barbara's
Building. A set of rooms next to mine was vacant, and Campion, who
welcomed a new worker, had the two sets thrown into what house-agents
term a commodious flat. She is now Lady Superior of the Institution.
The title is Campion's, and for some odd feminine reason Lola is
delighted with it.
Yes, this is the end of the story which I began (it seems in a
previous incarnation) at Murglebed-on-Sea.
The maiming of Lola's beauty has been the last jest which the Arch-
Jester has practised on me. I fancy he thought that this final scurvy
trick would wipe Simon de Gex for ever out of the ranks of his rivals.
But I flatter myself that, having snapped my fingers in his face, the
last laugh has been on my side. He has withdrawn discomfited from the
conflict and left me master of the ground. Love conquers all, even the
Arch-Jester.
There are some who still point to me as one who has deliberately
ruined a brilliant career, who pity me as one who has gone under, who
speak with shrugged shoulders and uplifted eyebrows at my unfortunate
marriage and my obscure and cranky occupation. The world, they say,
was at my feet. So it was. But what the pitying critics lack the grace
to understand is that better than to have it under one's feet is to
have it, or that of it which matters, at one's heart.
I sit in this tiny hotel by the sea and reflect that it is over three
years since I awoke from death and assumed a new avatar. And since my
marriage, what have been the happenings?
Dale has just been elected for the Fensham Division of Westmoreland,
and he has already begun the line of sturdy young Kynnersleys, of
which I had eumoirous dreams long ago. Quast and the cats have passed
into alien hands. Anastasius Papadopoulos is dead. He died three
months ago of angina pectoris, and Lola was with him at the end.
Eleanor Faversham has married a Colonial bishop. Campion, too, has
married--and married the last woman in the world to whom one would
have thought of mating him--a frivolous butterfly of a creature who
drags him to dinner-parties and Ascot and suppers at the Savoy, and
holds Barbara's Building and all it connotes in vixenish detestation.
He roars out the agony of his philanthropic spirit to Lola and myself,
who administer consolation and the cold mutton that he loves. The
story of his marriage is a little lunatic drama all to itself and I
will tell it some day. But now I can only rough-sketch the facts. He
works when he can at the beloved creation of his life and fortune; but
the brain that would be inadequate to the self-protecting needs of a
ferret controls the action of this masterful enthusiast, and his one
awful despair in life is to touch a heart that might beat in the bosom
of a vicious and calculating haddock. I only mention this to explain
how it has come to pass that Lola and I are now all-powerful in
Barbara's Building. It has become the child of our adoption and we
love it with a deep and almost fanatic affection. Before Lola my
influence and personality fade into nothingness. She is the power, the
terror, the adoration of Lambeth. If she chose she could control the
Parliamentary vote of the borough. Her great, direct, large-hearted
personality carries all before it. And with it there is something of
the uncanny. A feat of hers in the early days is by way of becoming
legendary.
A woman, on the books of the Building, was about to bring a hopeless
human fragment into a grey world. Lola went to see what aid the
Building could provide. In front of the door lounged the husband, a
hulking porter in a Bermondsey factory. Glowering at his feet lay a
vicious mongrel dog--bull-terrier, Irish-terrier, mastiff--so did Lola
with her trained eye distinguish the strains. When she asked for his
wife in travail the chivalrous gentleman took his pipe from his mouth,
spat, and after the manner of his kind referred to the disfigurement
of her face in terms impossible to transcribe. She paid no attention.
"I'm coming upstairs to see your wife."
"If you pass that door, s'welp me Gawd, I'll set the dog on yer."
She paused. He urged the dog, who bristled and growled and showed his
teeth. Lola picked the animal up, as she would have picked up a sofa
cushion, and threw him across the street. She went to where he had
fallen, ordered him to his feet, and the dog licked her hand. She came
back with a laugh.
"I'll do the same to you if you don't let me in!"
She pushed the hulking brute aside. He resisted and laid hands on her.
By some extraordinary tamer's art of which she had in vain tried to
explain to me the secret, and with no apparent effort, she glided away
from him and sent him cowering and subdued some feet beyond the lintel
of the door. The street, which was watching, went into a roar of
laughter and applause. Lola mounted the stairs and attended to the
business in hand. When she came down the man was still standing at the
threshold smoking an obfusticated pipe. He blinked at her as if she
had been a human dynamo.
"Come round to Barbara's Building at six o'clock and tell me how she
is."
He came on the stroke of six.
The fame of Lola spread through the borough, and now she can walk
feared, honoured, unmolested by night or by day through the streets of
horror and crime, which neither I nor any other man--no matter how
courageous--dare enter at certain hours without the magical protection
of a policeman.
Sunshine has come at last, both into this little backwater of the
world by the sea and into my own life, and it is time I should end
this futile record.
Yesterday as we lay on the sands, watching the waves idly lap the
shore, Lola brought herself nearer to me with a rhythmic movement as
no other creature form of woman is capable of, and looked into my
eyes. And she whispered something to me which led to an infinite
murmuring of foolish things. I put my arms round her and kissed her on
the lips and on her cheek--whether the beautiful or the maimed I knew
not--and she sank into a long, long silence. At last she said:
"What are you thinking of?"
I said, "I'm thinking that not a single human being on the face of the
earth has a sense of humour."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Simply this," said I, "that what has occurred billions of billions of
millions of times on the earth we are now regarding as the only thing
that ever happened."
"Well," said Lola, "so it is--for us--the only thing that ever
happened."
And the astounding woman was right.
