"Whatever the reason may have been I know that I felt suddenly outside the whole business and most awfully depressed. I think Miss Monogue felt exactly the same. By the time the wine was on the table all I wanted was to get right away. It was almost as though I had been looking on at something that I was ashamed to see. There was a kind of deliberate determination about their happiness and Clare's little body with her hair on the verge, as it seemed, of a positive downfall, had something quite pitiful in its deliberate rejoicing; such a child, my dear--I never realised how young until last night. Such a child and needing some one so much older and wiser than Peter to manage it all.

"Well, there I was hating it when the final moment came. Cards got up and in one of the wittiest little speeches you ever heard in your life, proposed Peter's health, alluded to 'Reuben Hallard,' then Clare, then the Son and Heir, a kind of back fling at old Dawson's, and then last of all, an apostrophe to 'The Stone House' all glory and honour, &c.:--well, it was most neatly done and we all sat back, silent, for Peter's reply.

"The dear boy stood there, all flushed and excited, with his hair pushed back off his forehead and began the most extraordinary speech I've ever heard. I can't possibly give you the effect of it at secondhand, in the mere repetition of it there was little more than that he was wildly, madly happy, that there was no one in the world as happy as he, that now at last the gods had given him all that he had ever wanted, let them now do their worst--and so crying, flung his glass over his shoulder, and smashed it on to the wall behind him.

"I cannot possibly tell you how sinister, how ominous the whole thing suddenly was. It swooped down upon all of us like a black cloud. Credit me, if you will, with a highly--strung bundle of nerves (not so solid matter-of-fact as I seem, _you_ know well enough) but it seemed to me, at that moment, that Peter was defying, consciously, with his heart in his mouth, a world of devils and that he was cognisant of all of them.

The thing was conscious--that was the awful thing about it, I could swear that he was seeing far beyond all of us, that he was hurling his happiness at something that he had there before him as clearly as I have you before me now. It was defiance and I believe the minute after uttering it he would have liked to have rushed upstairs to see that his baby was safe....

"Be that as it may, we all felt it--every one of us. The party was clouded. Cards and Clare did their best to brighten things up again, and Peter and Tony and Janet Gale played silly games and made a great deal of noise--but the spirit was gone.

"I left very early. Miss Monogue came away at the same time. She spoke to me before she said good-night: 'I know that you are an old friend of Peter's. I am so fond of him--we all are at Brockett's, it isn't often that we see him--I know that you will be his true friend in every sense of the word--and help him--as he ought to be helped. It is so little that I can do....'

"Her voice was sad. I am afraid she suffers a great deal. She is evidently greatly attached to Peter--I liked her.

"Well, you in your sober way will say that this is all a great deal of nonsense. Why shouldn't Peter, if he wishes, say that he is happy? All I can say is that if you yourself had been there...."

CHAPTER VIII

BLINDS DOWN

I

It was not until Stephen Westcott had rejoiced in the glories (so novel and so thrilling) of his first birthday and "The Stone House" had been six months before the public eye that the effect of this second book could be properly estimated. Second books are the most surely foredoomed creatures in all creation and there are many excellent reasons for this.

They will assuredly disappoint the expectations of those who enjoyed the first work, and the author will, in all probability, have been tempted by his earlier success to try his wings further than they are, as yet, able to carry him.

Peter's failure was only partial. There was no question that "The Stone House" was a remarkable book. Had it been Peter's first novel it must have made an immense stir; it showed that he was, in no kind of way, a man of one book, and it gave, in its London scenes, proof that its author was not limited to one kind of life and one kind of background.

There were chapters that were fuller, wiser, in every way more mature than anything in "Reuben Hallard."

But it was amazingly unequal. There were places in it that had no kind of life at all; at times Peter appeared to have beheld his scenes and characters through a mist, to have been dragged right away from any kind of vision of the book, to have written wildly, blindly.

The opinion of Mrs. Launce was perhaps the soundest that it was possible to have because that good lady, in spite of her affection for Peter, had a critical judgment that was partly literary, partly commercial, and partly human. She always judged a book first with her brain, then with her heart and lastly with her knowledge of her fellow creatures. "It may pay better than 'Reuben Hallard,'" she said, "there's more love interest and it ends happily. Some of it is beautifully written, some of it quite unspeakably. But really, Peter, it's the most uneven thing I've ever read. Again and again one is caught, held, stirred--then, suddenly, you slip away altogether--you aren't there at all, nothing's there, I could put my ringer on the places. Especially the first chapters and the last chapters--the middle's splendid--what happened to you?... But it will sell, I expect. Tell your banker to read it, go into lots of banks and tell them. Bank clerks have subscriptions at circulating libraries always given them ... but the wild bits are best, the wild bits are splendid--that bit about the rocks at night ... you don't know much about women yet--your girls are awfully bad. By the way, do you know that Mary Hollins is only getting 100 advance next time? All she can get, that last thing was so shocking. I hear that that book about an immoral violet, by that new young man--Rondel, isn't it?--is still having a most enormous success--I know that Barratt's got in a whole batch of new copies last night--I hear...."

Mrs. Launce was disappointed--Peter could tell well enough. He received some laudatory reviews, some letters from strangers, some adulation from people who knew nothing whatever. He did not know what it was exactly that he had expected--but whatever it was that he wanted, he did not get it--he was dissatisfied.

He began to blame his publishers--they had not advertised him enough; he even, secretly, cherished that most hopeless of all convictions--that his book was above the heads of the public. He noticed, also, that wherever he might be, this name of Rondel appeared before him, Mr.

Rondel with his foolish face and thin mother in black, was obviously the young man of the moment--in the literary advertisements of any of the weekly papers you might see The Violet novel in its tenth edition and "The Stone House" by Peter Westcott, second edition selling rapidly.

He was again bewildered, as he had been after the publication of "Reuben Hallard" by the extraordinary variance of opinions amongst reviewers and amongst his own personal friends. One man told him that he had no style, that he must learn the meaning and feeling of words, another told him that his characters were weak but that his style was "splendid--a real knowledge of the value and meaning of words." Some one told him that he knew nothing at all about women and some one else that his women were by far the best part of his work. The variety was endless--amongst those who had appeared to him giants there was the same uncertainty. He seemed too to detect with the older men a desire to praise those parts of his work that resembled their own productions and to blame anything that gave promise of originality.

For himself it seemed to him that Mrs. Launce's opinion was nearest the truth. There were parts of it that were good, chapters that were better than anything in "Reuben Hallard" and then again there were many chapters where he saw it all in a fog, groped dimly for his characters, pushed, as it seemed to him, away from their lives and interests, by the actual lives and interests of the real people about him. This led him to think of Clare and here he was suddenly arrested by a perception, now only dimly grasped, of a change in her attitude to his writings. He dated it, thinking of it now for the first time, from the birth of young Stephen--or was it not earlier than that, on that evening when they had met Cards at that supper party, on that evening of their first quarrel?

In the early days how well he remembered Clare's enthusiasm--a little extravagant, it seemed now. Then during the first year of their married life she had wanted to know everything about the making of "The Stone House." It was almost as though it had been a cake or a pie, and he knew that he had found her questions difficult to answer and that he had had it driven in upon him that it was not really because she was interested in the subtleties of his art that she enquired but because of her own personal affection for him; if he had been making boots or a suit of clothes it would have been just the same. Then when "The Stone House"

appeared her eagerness for its success had been tremendous--there was nothing she would not do to help it along--but that, he somewhat ironically discovered, was because she liked success and the things that success brought.

Then when the book had not succeeded--or only so very little--her interest had, of a sudden, subsided. "Oh! I suppose you've got to go and do your silly old writing ... I think you might come out with me just this afternoon. It isn't often that I ask anything of you...." He did not believe that she had ever really finished "The Stone House." She pretended that she had--"the end was simply perfect," but she was vague, nebulous. He found the marker in her copy, some fifty pages before the end.

She was so easily impressed by every one whom she met that perhaps the laughing attitude of Cards to Peter's books had something to do with it all. Cards affected to despise anything to do with work, here to-day, gone to-morrow--let us eat and drink ... dear old Peter, grubbing away upstairs--"I say, Mrs. Westcott, let's go and rag him...." And then they had come and invaded his room at the top of the house, and sometimes he had been glad and had flung his work down as though it were of no account ... and then afterwards, in the middle of some tea-party he had been suddenly ashamed, deeply, bitterly ashamed, as though he had actually wounded those white pages lying up there in his quiet room.

He was at this time, like a man jostled and pushed and turned about at some riotous fair; looking, now this way, now that, absorbed by a thousand sights, a thousand sounds--and always through it all feeling, bitterly in his heart, that something dear to him, somewhere in some place of silence, was dying--

Well, hang it all, at any rate there was the Child!

II

At any rate there was the Child!

And what a child! Did any one ever have a baby like it, so fat and round and white, with its head already covered with faint golden silk, its eyes grey and wondering--with its sudden gravities, its amazing joys and terrific humour, the beauty of its stepping away, as it did, suddenly without any warning, behind a myriad mists and curtains, into some other land that it knew of. How amazing to watch it as it slowly forgot all the things that it had come into the world remembering, as it slowly realised all the laws that this new order of things demanded of its obedience. Could any one who had been present ever forget its crow of ecstasy at the first shaft of sunlight that it ever beheld, at its first realisation of the blue, shining ball that Peter bought, at its first vision, through the window, of falling snow!

Peter was drunk with this amazing wonder. All the facts of life--even Clare and his work--faded before this new presence for whose existence he had been responsible. It had been one of the astonishing things about Clare that she had taken the child so quietly. He had seen her thrilled by musical comedy, by a dance at the Palace Music Hall, by the trumpery pathos of a tenth-rate novel--before this marvel she stood, it seemed to him, without any emotion.

Sometimes he thought that if it had not been for his reminder she would not have gone to kiss the child goodnight. There were many occasions when he knew--with wonder and almost dismay--that she was afraid of it; and once, when they had been in the nursery together and young Stephen had cried and kicked his heels in a tempest of rage, she had seemed almost to cling to Peter for protection.

There were occasions when Peter fancied that the baby seemed the elder of the two, it was at any rate certain that Stephen Westcott was not so afraid of his mother as his mother was of him. And yet, Peter fancied, that could Clare only get past this strange nervous fear she would love the baby passionately--would love him with that same fierceness of passion that she flung, curiously, now and again upon Peter himself.

"Let me be promised," she seemed to say, "that I will never have any trouble or sorrow with my son and I will love him devotedly." Meanwhile she went into every excitement that life could provide for her....

It was on a March afternoon of early Spring after a lonely tea (Clare was out at one of her parties) that Peter went up to the nursery. He had just finished reading the second novel by that Mr. Rondel whose Violet sensation had occurred some two years before. This second book was good--there was no doubt about it--and Peter was ashamed of a kind of dim reluctance in his acknowledgment of its quality. The fellow had had such reviews; the book, although less sensational than its predecessor had hit the public straight in the middle of its susceptible heart. Had young Rondel done it all with bad work-well, that was common enough--but the book was good, uncommonly good.

He sent the nurse downstairs and began to build an elaborate fortress on the nursery floor. The baby lay on his back on a rug by the fire and contemplated his woollen shoe which he slowly dragged off and disdainfully flung away. Then, crowing to himself, he watched his father and the world in general.

He was amazingly like Peter--the grey eyes, the mouth a little stern, a little sulky, the snub nose, the arms a little short and thick, and that confident, happy smile.

He watched his father.

To him, lying on the rug, many, many miles away there was a coloured glory that ran round the upper part of the wall--as yet, he only knew that they gave him, those colours, something of the same pleasure that his milk gave him, that the warm, glowing, noisy shapes beyond the carpet gave him, that the happy, comfortable smell of the Thing playing near him on the floor gave him. About the Thing he was eternally perplexed. It was Something that made sounds that he liked, that pressed his body in a way that he loved, that took his fingers and his toes and made them warm and comfortable.

It was Something moreover from which delicious things hung--things that he could clutch and hold and pull. He was perplexed but he knew that when this Thing was near him he was warm and happy and contented and generally went to sleep. His eyes slowly travelled round the room and rested finally upon a round blue ball that hung turning a little from side to side, on a nail above, his bed. This was, to him, the final triumph of existence--to have it in his hand, to roll it round and round, to bang it down upon the floor and watch it jump, this was the reason why one was here, this the solution of all perplexities. He would have liked to have it in his hands now, so crowing, he smiled pleasantly at the Thing on the floor beside him and then looked at the ball.

Peter got up from his knees, fetched the ball down and rolled it along the floor. As it came dancing, curving, laughing along young Stephen shrieked with delight. Would he have it in his hands or would it escape him and disappear altogether? Would it come to him?... It came and was clutched and held and triumphed over.

Peter sat down by his son and began to tell him about Cornwall. He often did this, partly because the mere mentioning of names and places satisfied some longing in his heart, partly because he wanted Cornwall to be the first thing that young Stephen would realise as soon as he realised anything. "And you never can tell, you know, how soon a child can begin...."

Stephen, turning the blue ball round and round in his fingers, gravely listened. He was perfectly contented. He liked the sounds that circled about him--his father's voice, the rustle of the fire, the murmur of something beyond the walls that he could not understand.

"And then, you see, Stephen, if you go up the hill and round to the right you come to the market-place, all covered with shiny cobbles and once a week filled with stalls where people sell things. At the other end of it, facing you, there's an old Tower that's been there for ages and ages. It's got a fruit stall underneath it now, but once, years ago there was fighting there and men were killed. Then, if you go past it, and out to the right, you get into the road that leads out of the town.

It goes right above the sea and on a fine-day--"

"Peter!"

The voice broke like a stone shattering a sheet of glass. The ball dropped from young Stephen's hands. He felt suddenly cold and hungry and wanted his woollen shoe. He was not sure whether he would not cry. He would wait a moment and see how matters developed.

Peter jumped to his feet and faced Clare: Clare in a fur cap from beneath which her golden hair seemed to burn in anger, from beneath which her eyes, furiously attacked his. Of course she had heard him talking to the baby about Cornwall. They had quarrelled about it before ... he had thought that she was at her silly tea-party. His face that had been, a few moments before, gentle, humorous, happy, now suddenly wore the sullen defiance of a sulky boy.

Her breast was heaving, her little hands beat against her frock.