Luttrell read the telegram with surprise. It was not the answer which he had expected from the victim of the flesh-pots in front of him.
“You advise that?” he exclaimed.
“Yes. My dear Luttrell, as you know, you are a guest very welcome to me. But you don’t belong. We — Maud Carstairs, Tony Marsh and the rest of us — even Mario Escobar — we are the Come-to-nothings. We are the people of the stage door, we grow fat in restaurants. From three to seven, you may find us in the card-rooms of our clubs — we are jolly fine fellows — and no good. You don’t belong, and should get out while you can.”
Luttrell moved uncomfortably in his chair.
“That’s all very well. But there’s another side to the question,” he said, and from the deck above a woman’s voice called clearly down the stairway.
“Aren’t you two coming?”
Both men looked towards the door.
“That side,” said Hardiman.
“Yes.”
Hardiman nodded his head.
“Stella Croyle doesn’t belong either,” he said. “But she kicked over the traces. She flung out of the rank and file. Oh, I know Croyle was a selfish, dull beast and her footprints in her flight from him were littered with excuses. I am not considering the injustice of the world. I am looking at the cruel facts, right in the face of them, as you have got to do, my young friend. Here Stella Croyle is — with us — and she can’t get away. You can.”
Luttrell was not satisfied. His grey eyes and thin, clean features were troubled like those of a man in physical pain.
“You don’t know the strange, queer tie between Stella Croyle and me,” he said. “And I can’t tell you it.”
Hardiman grew anxious. Luttrell had the look of a man overtrained, and it was worry which had overtrained him. His face was a trifle too delicate, perhaps, to go with those remorseless sharp decisions which must be made by the men who win careers.
“I know that you can’t go through the world without hurting people,” cried Hardiman. “Neither you nor any one else, except the limpets. And you won’t escape hurting Stella Croyle, by abandoning your chances. Your love-affair will end — all of that kind do. And yours will end in a bitter, irretrievable quarrel after you have ruined yourself, and because you have ruined yourself. You are already on the rack — make no doubt about it. Oh, I have seen you twitch and jump with irritation — how many times on this yacht! — for trumpery, little, unimportant things she has said and done, which you would never have noticed six months ago; or only noticed to smile at with a pleased indulgence.”
Luttrell’s face coloured. “Why, that’s true enough,” he said. He was remembering the afternoon a week ago, when the yacht steamed between the green islands with their bathing stations and châlets, over a tranquil, sunlit sea of the deepest blue. Rounding a wooded corner towards sunset she came suddenly upon the bridges and the palace and the gardens of Stockholm. The women of the party were in the saloon. A rush was made towards it. They were summoned to this first wonderful view of the city of beauty. Would they come? No! Stella Croyle was in the middle of a game of Russian patience. She could play that game any day, every day, all day. This exquisite vision was vouchsafed to her but the once, and she had neglected it with the others. She had not troubled, even to move so far as the saloon door. For she had not finished her game.
Luttrell recalled his feeling of scorn; the scorn had grown into indignation; in the end he had made a grievance of her indifference to this first view of the city of Stockholm; a foolish, exasperating grievance, which would rankle, which would not be buried, which sprang to fresh life at each fresh sight of her. Yes, of a certainty, sooner or later Stella Croyle and he would quarrel, so bitterly that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never bring them again together; and over some utterly unimportant matter like the first view of Stockholm.
“Youth has many privileges over age,” continued Hardiman, “but none greater than the vision, the half-interpreted recurring vision of wider spaces and greater things, towards which you sail on the wind of a great emotion. Sooner or later, a man loses that vision and then only knows his loss. Stay here, and you’ll lose it before your time.”
Luttrell looked curiously at his companion, wondering what manner of man he had been in his twenties. Hardiman answered the look with a laugh. “Oh, I, too, had my ambitions once.”
Luttrell folded the cablegram which Hardiman had written out and placed it in the breast pocket of his dinner-jacket.
“I will talk to Stella to-night at dinner. Then, if I decide to send it, I can send it from the hotel over there at the landing-steps before we return to the yacht.”
Sir Charles Hardiman rose cumbrously with a shrug of his shoulders. He had done his best, but since Luttrell would talk the question over with Stella Croyle, shoulder to shoulder with her amongst the lights and music, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils and the pleading of her eyes within his sight — he, Charles Hardiman, might as well have held his tongue.
So very likely it would have been. But when great matters are ripe for decisions one way or the other, the little accident as often as not decides. There was a hurrying of light feet in the corridor outside, a swift, peremptory knocking upon the door. The same woman’s voice called in rather a shrill note through the panels! “Harry! Why don’t you come? We are waiting for you.”
And in the sound of the voice there was not merely impatience, but a note of ownership — very clear and definite; and hearing it Luttrell hardened. He stood up straight. He had the aspect of a man in revolt.
CHAPTER II
An Anthem Intervenes
UPON THE ENTRANCE of Hardiman’s party a wrinkle was smoothed away from the forehead of a maître d’hôtel.
“So! You have come!” he cried. “I began to despair.”
“You have kept my table?” Sir Charles insisted.
“Yes, but with what an effort of diplomacy!”; and the maître d’hôtel led his guests to the very edge of the great balcony. Here the table was set endwise to the balustrade, commanding the crowded visitors, yet taking the coolness of the night. Hardiman was contented with his choice of its position. But when he saw his guests reading the cards which assigned them their places, he was not so contented with the order of their seating.
“If I had known an hour before!” he said to himself, and the astounding idea crept into his mind that perhaps it was, after all, a waste to spend so much time on the disposition of a dinner-table and the ordering of food.
However, the harm was done now. There was Luttrell already seated at the end against the balustrade. He had the noise of a Babel of tongues and the glitter of a thousand lights upon his left hand; upon his right, the stars burning bright in a cool gloom of deepest purple, and far below the riding-lamps of the yachts tossing on the water like yellow flowers in a garden; whilst next to him, midway between the fragrant darkness and the hard glitter, revealing, as she always did, a kinship with each of them, sat Stella Croyle.
“I should have separated them,” Hardiman reflected uneasily as he raised and drank his cocktail. “But how the deuce could I without making everybody stare? This party wasn’t got up to separate people. All the same — —”
The hushed wonder of a summer night. The gaiety of a bright thronged restaurant! In either setting Stella Croyle was a formidable antagonist. But combine the settings and she took to herself, at once by nature, the seduction of both!
“Poor devil, he won’t have a dog’s chance!” the baronet concluded; and he watched approvingly what appeared to him to be Luttrell’s endeavour to avoid joining battle on this unfavourable field. He could only trust feebly in that and in the strength of the “something else,” the secret reason he was never to know.
It was about half-way through dinner when Stella Croyle, who had directed many a furtive, anxious glance to the averted face of her companion, attacked directly.
“What is the matter with you to-night?” she asked, interr
upting him in the midst of a rattle of futilities. “Why should you recite to me from the guide-book about the University of Upsala?”
“It appears to be most interesting, and quaint,” replied Luttrell hastily.
“Then we might hire a motor-car and run out there to luncheon. To-morrow! Just you and I.”
“No.” Harry Luttrell exclaimed suddenly and Stella Croyle drew back. Her face clouded. She had won the first round, but victory brought her no ease. She knew now from the explosion of his “No” and the swift alarm upon his face that something threatened her.
“You must tell me what has happened,” she cried. “You must! Oh, you turn away from me!”
From the dark steep garden at their feet rose a clamour of cheers — to Luttrell an intervention of Providence.
“Listen,” he said.
Here and there a man or a woman rose at the dinner tables and looked down. Upwards along a glimmering riband of path, a group of students bore one of their number shoulder-high. Luttrell leaned over the balustrade. The group below halted; speeches were made; cheers broke out anew.
“It is the Swedish javelin-thrower. He won the championship of the world this afternoon.”
“Did he?” asked Stella Croyle in a soft voice at his side. “Does he throw javelins as well as you? You wound me every time.”
Luttrell raised his head. It was not fear of defeat which had kept his looks averted from Stella’s dark and starry eyes. No thought of lists set and a contest to be fought out had even entered his head. But he did fear to see those eyes glisten with tears — for she so seldom shed them! And even more than the evidence of her pain he feared the dreadful submission with which women in the end receive the stroke of fortune. He had to meet her gaze now, however.
“I put off telling you,” he began lamely.
“So that this evening of mine with you might not be spoilt,” she returned. “But, my dear, my evening was already spoilt before the launch left the yacht gangway. I am not so blind.”
Stella Croyle was at this date twenty-six years old; and it was difficult to picture her any older. Partly because of her vivid colouring and because she was abrim with life; partly because in her straightness of limb and the clear treble of her voice, she was boyish. “What a pretty boy she would make!” was the first thought until you noticed the slim delicacy of her hands and feet, the burnish of gold on the dark wealth of her hair, the fine chiselling of brow and nose and chin. Then it was seen that she was all woman. She was tall and yet never looked tall. It seemed that you could pick her up with a finger, but try and she warned you of the weakness of your arm. She was a baffling person. She ran and walked with the joyous insolence of eighteen, yet at any moment some veil might be rolled up in her eyes and face to show you for one tragic instant a Lady of Sorrows.
She leaned towards Luttrell, and as Hardiman had foreseen the perfume of her hair stormed his senses.
“Tell me!” she breathed, and Luttrell, with his arguments and reasons cut and dried and conned over pat for delivery, began nevertheless to babble. There were the Olympic Games. She herself must have seen how they were fatal to their own purpose. Troubles were coming — battles behind the troubles. All soldiers knew! They knew this too — the phrase of a young Lieutenant-Colonel lecturing at the Staff College.
“Battles are not won either by sheer force or pure right, but by the one or the other of those two Powers which has Discipline as its Chief of Staff.”
He was implying neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would know surely enough when those words were rising to his lips which it was necessary that she should mark and understand. Meanwhile her perplexities and fears grew.
“Of course it can’t be that,” she assured herself again and again, but with a dreadful catch at her heart. “Oh no, it can’t be that.”
“That,” was the separation which some day or another — after a long and wondrous period — both were agreed, must come. But, consoling herself with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her. Now it suddenly dismayed her, a terror close at hand. Here on this crowded balcony joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle invitations of a summer night above the water! Oh no, it was not possible!
Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and listened now with all her soul. More than once during dinner she had seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction. He drew from it two papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other Hardiman’s reply. He handed her the first of the two.
“This reached me this morning.”
Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth. But the letters would not be still.
“Oh, what does it mean?” she cried.
“It offers me service abroad.”
Stella’s face flushed and turned white. She bent her head over the cablegram.
“At Cairo,” she said, with a little gasp of relief. After all Cairo was not so far. A week, and one was at Cairo.
“Further south, in the Sudan — Heaven knows where!”
“Too far then?” she suggested. “Too far.”
“For you? Yes! Too far,” Luttrell replied.
Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her eyes.
“But you are not going! You can’t go!”
Luttrell handed to her the second paper.
“You never wrote this,” she said very quickly.
“Yet it is what I would have written.”
Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman. She had recognised his handwriting. Hardiman was in Luttrell’s cabin while the rest of the party waited on the deck and the launch throbbed at the gangway. If a woman’s glance had power, he would have been stricken that instant. But she wasted no more than a glance upon the worldly-wiseman at the head of their table. She turned again to the first telegram.
“This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?”
“Yes.”
“To a cable of yours?”
“Sent three days ago.”
The answers she received were clear, unhesitating. It was a voice from a rock speaking! So utterly mistaken was she; and so completely Luttrell bent every nerve to the service of shortening the hour of misery. The appalling moment was then actually upon her. She had foreseen it — so she thought. But it caught her nevertheless unprepared as death catches a sinner on his bed.
She stared at the telegrams — not reading them. His arguments and prefaces — the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it — what she had caught of them, she blew away as so much froth. She dived to the personal reason.
“You are tired of me.”
“No,” Luttrell answered hotly. “That’s not true — not even a half-truth. If I were tired of you, it would all be so easy, so brutally easy.”
“But you are!” Her voice rose shrill in its violence. “You know you are but you are too much of a coward to say so — oh, like all men!” and as Luttrell turned to her a face startled by her outcry and uttered a remonstrant “Hush!”, she continued bitterly, “What do I care if they all hear? I am impossible! You know that, don’t you? I am quite impossible! I have gone my own way. I am one of the people you hate — one of the Undisciplined.”
Stella Croyle hardly knew in her passion what she was saying, and Luttrell could only wait in silence for the storm to pass. It passed with a quickness which caught him at loss; so quickly she swept from mood to mood.
He heard her voice at his ear, remorseful and most appealing. “Oh, Wub, what have I done that you should treat me so?”
Sir Charles Hardiman, watchful of the duel, guessed from the movement of her lips what s
he was saying.
“These nicknames are the very devil,” he exclaimed, apparently about nothing, to his startled neighbour. “The first thing a woman does when she’s fond of a man is to give him some ridiculous name, which doesn’t belong to him. She worries her wits trying this one and that one, as a tailor tries on you a suit of clothes, and when she has got your fit, she uses it — publicly. So others use it too and so it no longer contents her. Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and that she keeps to herself, for her own private use. That’s the nickname I am referring to, my dear, when I say it’s the very devil.”
The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might be very right. For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames; which was to assert that she had never been in love. For the practice seems invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had one for Æneas, and Virgil knew all about it. But since she was a woman, it would be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it would never have gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter. “Wobbles” had been the first name which Stella Croyle had invented for Harry Luttrell, though by what devious process she had lighted upon it, psychology could not have discovered. “Wub” was the nickname within the nickname, the cherished sign that the two of them lived apart in a little close-hedged garden of their own. Luttrell’s eyes were upon her as she spoke it. And she spoke it with a curious little wistful pursing of soft lips so that it came to him winged with the memory of all her kisses.
“Oh, Wub, must you leave me?” she pleaded in a breaking whisper. “What will be left to me if you do?”
Luttrell dropped his forehead in his hands. All the character which he had in those untried days bade him harden himself against the appeal. But his resolution was melting like metal in a furnace. He tried to realise the truth which Hardiman had uttered three or four hours before. There would be sooner or later a quarrel, a humiliating, hateful quarrel over some miserable trifle which neither Stella nor he would ever afterwards forgive. But her voice was breaking with a sob in a whisper at his ear and how could he look forward so far?
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 533