"My dear friends," I said, "I give you my word of honour that is how modern novels are made. If you put an end to espionage the book market would be given over entirely to such works as 'The Automobile and How to Drive It' and 'Jane Austen and Her Circle.'"

"Then it's a very shady trade, mean and dishonourable," said Mac.

"We agreed upon that, you remember, when my novel was refused publication," I said, laughing.

"Yes," said Bill. "But when they accepted it, you got very stuck-up and refused to write any advertis.e.m.e.nts for a fortnight and said that whoever had written a good book was one of a n.o.ble company, and a lot more of it. It depends on the point of view."

"Of course it does, _ma mie_. In this case, the honest point of view is the one we must take. We must forget for a moment that we are English lady and gentlemen----"

"Never!" said Bill, firmly, lighting a cigarette.

"----and remember that we are students of life. What would Balzac or Flaubert have known of life if they had been merely gentlemen? Nothing!

What does a gentleman know? Nothing. What does he do in the world?

Nothing. Of what use is he beyond his interest as a vestige of a defunct feudalism? This is the Twentieth Century, in the United States of America, not the----"

"Oh stop, stop!" she said, laughing. "Go down and get that thousand words finished."

I went.

CHAPTER II

HIS CHILDREN

It was a week later, and we were sitting on the verandah looking out across Ess.e.x County towards Manhattan. To us, who some five years before had been shaken from our homestead in San Francisco and hurried penniless and almost naked across the continent, our location here in the Garden State, looking eastward towards the Western Ocean and our native isle, had always appeared as "almost home." We endeavoured to impress this upon our friends in England, explaining that "we could be home in four or five days easily"; and what were four or five days?

True, we have never gone so far as to book our pa.s.sage; but there is undoubted comfort in the fact that in a week at the outside, we could walk down Piccadilly. Out on the Pacific Slope we were, both physically and spiritually, a world away.

It pleased us, too, to detect in the configuration of the district a certain ident.i.ty with our own county of Ess.e.x, in England, where a cousin of Bill's had a cottage, and where, some day, we were to have a cottage too. Our home is called _Wigboro' House_, after the cousin's, and we have settled it that, just as you catch a glimpse of grey sea across Mersea Island from Wigborough, so we may catch the glint and glare of the lights of Manhattan, and, on stormy nights, feel on our lips the sharpness of the salt wind that blows across Staten Island from the Atlantic. It is an innocent conceit, and our only critic so far had been Miss Fraenkel, who had objected to the name, and advocated with American succinctness the advantage of a number. As Bill had remarked mournfully, "It wouldn't be so bad if it was number three or four, but _Five hundred and Eighty-two Van Diemen's Avenue_ is horrible!" We had given in to Miss Fraenkel of course, save that none of us had the courage to disillusion Bill's cousin. We still received from him letters addressed in his sprawling painter's hand "_Wigboro' House, Netley Heights, N. J., U. S. A._," a mail or so late. We never told him of _Van Diemen's Avenue_, nor for that matter had we mentioned our neighbours.

Curiously enough, it was he, that painter cousin of Bill's, thousands of miles away in that other Ess.e.x, who told _us_ something that we were only too quick to appreciate, about our neighbours.

We were talking of him, I remember, that afternoon as we sat on the stoop, Bill saying he would be writing soon, and Mac raising the vexed question of the Fourth Chair. You see, we have four rocking-chairs on our verandah, though there are but three of us, and Bill usually claims the hammock. It was no answer, I found, to suggest future friends as occupants for this chair. It grew to be a legend that some day I should bring home a bride and she should have it. I submitted to this badinage and even hinted that at first we should need but one chair.... I had heard ... nay seen, such things in San Francisco, before the earthquake.

In the meantime I had vamped up a very pretty story of the painter-cousin getting a commission to paint a _prima-donna_ in New York and coming over to visit us in great state. He might be induced to sit awhile in the vacant chair. It seemed more probable than Bill's legend, for I knew Miss F----, anybody I married, say, would want the hammock.

There was one drawback to my dream, and that was the humiliation of revealing to him Van Diemen's Avenue. He is a university man, and from his letters and Bill's description I should say he has a rather embarra.s.sing laugh when he finds a person out in a deception like that.

But so far he had not yet received a commission to paint a _prima-donna_ in New York, and he still pictures our Wigboro' house standing alone on Netley Heights, looking out across rolling country to the sea. Of course the photos that we send do not show any other houses near, and the verandahs make the place look bigger than it really is. He must be tremendously impressed, too, by Bill's courageous declaration (in inverted commas) that at the back the land is ours "as far as the eye can see." It is true, too, though the eye cannot see very far. There is a "dip," you know, common enough to Tria.s.sic regions; and as you stand at the back door and look westward the sky comes down and touches our cabbages, fifty yards away. It does, really!

Well, we were talking of him and incidentally of the Fourth Chair, when the children came round the corner of the house and, finding us there, stood looking at us.

That is all; just stood staring at us, with feet planted firmly on the gravel, hands in pockets and an expression of unwinking candour in their young eyes. It was absurd, of course, that we three grown-ups should have been so embarra.s.sed by a couple of urchins, but we were. The cool nerve of it, the unimaginable audacity of it, took our breath away. It was almost as though they were saying, "Well, and what are you doing here, hey?" There was something almost indelicate in their merciless scrutiny. We quailed.

There was, moreover, a deeper reason for our disquietude. We realized, afterward, that those children, one dark and one fair, had been quite unconscious of our existence before. Numberless times they had pa.s.sed us, even crossing our land on a short cut to the forest road, but without recognition. And though, in a pause between two absorbing interests, in a moment of disengagement from the more important matters of American childhood, they now deigned to favour us with their frank attention, it was rather disparagement than curiosity they exhibited. We now know the feelings of a Living Wonder in a show.

"h.e.l.lo," remarked the elder, the dark one, dispa.s.sionately, and we almost jumped. The other child fixed his eye on my slippers, which were of carpet and roomy. It seemed to me that the time had come to tell them of their lack of good manners.

"h.e.l.lo, little boy," I replied. I decided to approach the subject of manners circuitously.

"You ain't so very big yerself," said the elder boy, quite without emotion and merely as a stated fact. I admit freely that this, in the jargon of the streets, was "one on me." My general diminutiveness of person has always been more than compensated, I think, by a corresponding magnitude of mind; but one is none the less sensitive to wayside ribaldry. I have never been able to quench a certain satisfaction in the fact that the children who mocked the prophet were devoured by bears. An occasional example is certainly wholesome, if only to bring young people to their senses.

"You mustn't speak like that," I said, gently. "What is your name?"

"What yo' want to know for?" came the answer, and he joined his brother in examining my slippers. The baffling thing was that there was really nothing intentionally rude about these two rather pretty little fellows.

They were merely exhibiting, in a somewhat disconcerting fashion, it is true, the influence of republican freedom upon natures unwarped by feudal traditions of courtesy and _n.o.blesse oblige_. It was baffling, as I say, but encouraging for all that. I felt that if the others could restrain their indignation and I could school myself to pursue the catechism, I should eventually discover some avenue of inquiry that might lead to fresh knowledge of the _menage_ next door. I tried again.

"Well, you see," I explained, "we would like to get acquainted with you.

You tell us your names and we'll tell you ours. Eh?"

"I know your name, I do," he said, glancing at my face for a moment. I put out my hand to calm Bill's restlessness. It appeared afterwards that she "thought she was going to choke."

"Gee! you do? Well then, you can tell me yours," I went on.

"Giuseppe Mazzini Carville," he returned, and before we fully realized the stupendous possibilities which this implied the younger child raised his eyes to our faces.

"Want to know my name too?" he queried, not a quiver of an eyelid to show any self-consciousness.

"Of course," I said; "what is it?" We waited an instant, breathlessly.

"Benvenuto Cellini Carville," he p.r.o.nounced carefully, and added as an afterthought, "I'm Ben; he's Beppo."

"Fancy giving a child a name like that!" muttered Bill, compa.s.sionately.

"I call it a shame!" And she leaned over towards the two children. "Do you know my name then?" she asked.

The clear, steady eyes rested for a moment upon her face, and a slight smile curved the lips of the elder as he answered.

"Ma calls you the woman with two husbands," he remarked.

"Oh!" said Bill, and fell back into the hammock.

"Say, Kiddo," said Mac, reaching out a long arm and capturing them, "what do they teach you down in that old school anyway, eh?"

They squirmed.

"It is useless to try and force anything out of them," I warned.

"Remember the school-teacher is forbidden by law even to touch them."

They slipped away from his knee, and stood as before.

"Listen," I continued. "Got a father, Beppo?"

He surveyed me with some slight astonishment.

"Sure," he replied. "Of course I got a father, silly."

"Well, where is he?"

They looked at each other, their arms folded behind them, their toes digging the gravel.

"At sea," said Beppo, and Mac slapped his knee.