Systems and Universes overpast, The Seraph came upon the Four, at last, Guiding and guarding with devoted mind The tedious generations of mankind Who lent at most unwilling ear and eye When they could not escape the ministry....

Yet, patient, faithful, firm, persistent, just Toward all that gross, indifferent, facile dust, The Archangels laboured to discharge their trust By precept and example, prayer and law, Advice, reproof, and rule, but, labouring, saw Each in his fellow's countenance confessed, The Doubt that sickens: 'Have I done my best?'

Even as they sighed and turned to toil anew, The Seraph hailed them with observance due; And after some fit talk of higher things Touched tentative on mundane happenings.

This they permitting, he, emboldened thus, Prolused of humankind promiscuous.

And, since the large contention less avails Than instances observed, he told them tales--Tales of the shop, the bed, the court, the street, Intimate, elemental, indiscreet: Occasions where Confusion smiting swift Piles jest on jest as snow-slides pile the drift.

Whence, one by one, beneath derisive skies, The victims bare, bewildered heads arise: Tales of the pa.s.sing of the spirit, graced With humour blinding as the doom it faced: Stark tales of ribaldry that broke aside To tears, by laughter swallowed ere they dried: Tales to which neither grace nor gain accrue, But only (Allah be exalted!) true, And only, as the Seraph showed that night, Delighting to the limits of delight.

These he rehea.r.s.ed with artful pause and halt, And such pretence of memory at fault, That soon the Four--so well the bait was thrown-- Came to his aid with memories of their own-- Matters dismissed long since as small or vain, Whereof the high significance had lain Hid, till the ungirt glosses made it plain.

Then as enlightenment came broad and fast, Each marvelled at his own oblivious past Until--the Gates of Laughter opened wide-- The Four, with that bland Seraph at their side, While they recalled, compared, and amplified, In utter mirth forgot both zeal and pride.

High over Heaven the lamps of midnight burned Ere, weak with merriment, the Four returned, Not in that order they were wont to keep-- Pinion to pinion answering, sweep for sweep, In awful diapason heard afar, But shoutingly adrift 'twixt star and star.

Reeling a planet's...o...b..t left or right As laughter took them in the abysmal Night; Or, by the point of some remembered jest, Winged and brought helpless down through gulfs unguessed, Where the blank worlds that gather to the birth Leaped in the womb of Darkness at their mirth, And e'en Gehenna's bondsmen understood.

They were not d.a.m.ned from human brotherhood.

Not first nor last of Heaven's high Host, the Four That night took place beneath The Throne once more.

O lovelier than their morning majesty, The understanding light behind the eye!

O more compelling than their old command, The new-learned friendly gesture of the hand!

O sweeter than their zealous fellowship, The wise half-smile that pa.s.sed from lip to lip!

O well and roundly, when Command was given, They told their tale against themselves to Heaven, And in the silence, waiting on The Word, Received the Peace and Pardon of The Lord!

'My Son's Wife'

(1913)

He had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth, and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He and a few friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun. It demanded Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries, tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole trimmed with love-making to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke.

Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat a.s.sured that he and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn, and the New Order.

His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the day's end. The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity of an experimenter in Social Relations. And since the Immoderate Left contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell Midmore's lot was far from contemptible.

At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that Midmore's mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed which denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two, after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with a long nose, who called him 'Master Frankie'; and there he was congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute, who turned out to be his aunt's lawyer. He wrote his mother next day, after a bright account of the funeral:

'So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here.

The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except "huntin',"

insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with occasional peasants who do not utter. In case it should not be wet enough there is a wet brook in the middle of it. Ther House is by the brook. I shall look into it later. If there should be any little memento of Jenny that you care for, let me know. Didn't you tell me that mid-Victorian furniture is coming into the market again? Jenny's old maid--it is called Rhoda Dolbie--tells me that Jenny promised it thirty pounds a year. The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the funeral. But that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny has destroyed all her private papers and records of her _vie intime_, if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The Sperrit man told me that if I had means of my own I might come and live on Ther Land. I didn't tell him how much I would pay not to! I cannot think it right that any human being should exercise mastery over others in the merciless fashion our tom-fool social system permits; so, as it is all mine, I intend to sell it whenever the unholy Sperrit can find a purchaser.'

And he went to Mr. Sperrit with the idea next day, just before returning to town.

'Quite so,' said the lawyer. 'I see your point, of course. But the house itself is rather old-fashioned--hardly the type purchasers demand nowadays. There's no park, of course, and the bulk of the land is let to a life-tenant, a Mr. Sidney. As long as he pays his rent, he can't be turned out, and even if he didn't'--Mr. Sperrit's face relaxed a shade--'you might have a difficulty.'

'The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,' said Midmore.

'Well, hardly--ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, t.i.thes, fire insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course, it returned two hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs are rather a large item--owing to the brook. I call it Liris--out of Horace, you know.'

Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.

'I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?' he repeated.

'We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions. Then, that is all except'--here Midmore half rose, but Mr. Sperrit's little grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly--'except about Rhoda Dolbie, Mrs. Werf's maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt's last will. She grew secretive towards the last--elderly people often do--and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case.... My motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore ...

but, as I was saying, whenever she made her will with _us_, Mrs. Werf always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!' A clerk with a baldish head and a long nose dealt doc.u.ments on to the table like cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. 'It's in no sense a legal obligation, of course,' said Mr. Sperrit. 'Ah, that one is dated January the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.'

Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with no good grace: 'Well, I suppose she'd better have it--for the present at any rate.'

He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and fifty-four pounds a year was not exactly four hundred, and that Charlie's long nose annoyed him. Then he returned, first-cla.s.s, to his own affairs.

Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which he had then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for some months and promised most variegated and interesting developments, on which he dwelt luxuriously all the way to town. When he reached his flat he was not well prepared for a twelve-page letter explaining, in the diction of the Immoderate Left which rubricates its I's and illuminates its T's, that the lady had realised greater attractions in another Soul. She re-stated, rather than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her justification, and ended in an impa.s.sioned demand for her right to express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed out, she could pa.s.s but once. She added that if, later, she should discover Midmore was 'essentially complementary to her needs,' she would tell him so. That Midmore had himself written much the same sort of epistle--barring the hint of return--to a woman of whom his needs for self-expression had caused him to weary three years before, did not a.s.sist him in the least. He expressed himself to the gas-fire in terms essential but not complimentary. Then he reflected on the detached criticism of his best friends and her best friends, male and female, with whom he and she and others had talked so openly while their gay adventure was in flower. He recalled, too--this must have been about midnight--her a.n.a.lysis from every angle, remote and most intimate, of the mate to whom she had been adjudged under the base convention which is styled marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the h.e.l.l appointed; desolate, desiring, with no G.o.d to call upon. About eleven o'clock next morning Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite called upon him 'for they had made appointment together' to see how he took it; but the janitor told them that Job had gone--into the country, he believed.

Midmore's relief when he found his story was not written across his aching temples for Mr. Sperrit to read--the defeated lover, like the successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul--was put down by Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room.

The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall smelt of damp cloaks.

'It's our evening to take the winter cantata,' Mr. Sperrit explained.

'It's "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." I hoped you'd come back.

There are scores of little things to settle. As for the house, of course, it stands ready for you at any time. I couldn't get Rhoda out of it--nor could Charlie for that matter. She's the sister, isn't she, of the nurse who brought you down here when you were four, she says, to recover from measles?'

'Is she? Was I?' said Midmore through the bad tastes in his mouth.

'D'you suppose I could stay there the night?'

Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to some one to leave their 'pipes of parsley 'ollow--'ollow--'ollow!' Mr. Sperrit had to raise his voice above the din.

'Well, if I asked you to stay _here_, I should never hear the last of it from Rhoda. She's a little cracked, of course, but the soul of devotion and capable of anything. _Ne sit ancillae_, you know.'

'Thank you. Then I'll go. I'll walk.' He stumbled out dazed and sick into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the brook.

It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was unchained and Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the hall and then fainted--as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours of strong emotion and little food.

'I'm sorry,' he said when he could speak. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, his head on Rhoda's lap.

'Your 'ome is your castle, sir,' was the reply in his hair. 'I smelt it wasn't drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your supper.'

She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard horses' feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks and gra.s.s. It pa.s.sed close to the shuttered bay-window.

But each will mourn his own, she saith, And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath Than my son's wife, Elizabeth ...

Cusha--cusha--cusha--calling.

The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray. 'And then I'll put you to bed,' she said. 'Sidney's coming in the morning.'

Midmore asked no questions. He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and water drugged him to instant sleep.

Rhoda's voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ''ip, foot, or sitz,' which he understood were the baths of the establishment. 'Suppose you try all three,' she suggested. 'They're all yours, you know, sir.'

He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs--he had seen worse ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains were his--all his. So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away.

Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi prints. He spent two hours after breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart leaped up at such things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled pa.s.sage, a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery, seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven shillings in silver.

'You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after your measles,' said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket. 'Now, this was your pore dear auntie's business-room.' She opened a low door.

'Oh, I forgot about Mr. Sidney! There he is.' An enormous old man with rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda withdrew sniffing. The man looked Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door. 'I reckon she told you who I be,' he began. 'I'm the only farmer you've got.

Nothin' goes off my place 'thout it walks on its own feet. What about my pig-pound?'