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.
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