The Sixth Sense.

by Stephen McKenna.

PROLOGUE

LONDON AFTER TWENTY YEARS

"As when a traveller, bound from North to South, Scouts fur in Russia: what's its use in France?

In France spurns flannel: where's its need in Spain?

In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers!

Linen goes next, and last the skin itself, A superfluity at Timbuctoo.

When, through his journey was the fool at ease?

I'm at ease now, friend; worldly in this world, I take and like its way of life; I think My brothers who administer the means, Live better for my comfort--that's good too; And God, if he pronounce upon such life, Approves my service, which is better still."

ROBERT BROWNING: "Bishop Blougram's Apology."

I paused, with my foot on the lowest step of the Club, to mark the changes that had overtaken Pall Mall during my twenty years' absence from England.

The old War Office, of course, was gone; some of the shops on the north side were being demolished; and the Automobile Club was new and unassimilated. In my day, too, the Athenaeum had not been painted Wedgwood-green. Compared, however, with the Strand or Mall, Piccadilly or Whitehall, marvellously little change had taken place. I made an exception in favour of the character and velocity of the traffic: the bicycle boom was in its infancy when I left England: I returned to find the horse practically extinct, and the streets of London as dangerous as the railway stations of America.

I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the London of 1913.... Then I wondered if I should find anything to keep me long enough to grow acclimatised. Chance had brought me back to England, chance and the "wandering foot" might as easily bear me away again. It has always been a matter of indifference to me where I live, what I do, whom I meet. If I never seem to get bored, it is perhaps because I am never long enough in one place or at one occupation. There was no reason why England should not keep me amused....

A man crossed the road and sold me a _Westminster Gazette_. I opened it to see what was engaging the England of 1913, remembering as I did so that the _Westminster_ was the last paper of importance to be published before I went abroad. As I glanced at the headlines, twenty years seemed to drop out of my life. Another Home Rule Bill was being acclaimed as the herald of the Millennium; Ulster was being told to fight and be right: the Welsh Church was once more being disestablished, while in foreign politics a confederation of Balkan States was spending its blood and treasure in clearing Europe of the Turk, to a faint echoing accompaniment of Gladstone's "bag and baggage" trumpet call. At home and abroad, English politics repeated themselves with curiously dull monotony.

Then I turned to the middle page, and saw I had spoken too hastily.

"Suffragette Outrages" seemed to fill three columns of the paper. My return to England had synchronised with a political campaign more ruthless, intransigeant and unyielding than anything since the Fenian outrages of my childhood. I read of unique fifteenth-century houses burnt to the ground, interrupted meetings, assaults on Ministers, sabotage in public buildings, and the demolition of plate-glass windows at the hands of an uncompromising, fearless and diabolically ingenious army of destroyers. On the other side of the account were entered long sentences, hunger-strikes, forcible feeding and something that was called "A Cat and Mouse Act." I was to hear more of that later: it was indeed the political parent of the "New Militant Campaign" whose life coincided with my own residence in England. I fancy the supporters of the bill like Roden, Rawnsley or Jefferson genuinely believed they had killed hunger-striking--and with it the spirit of militancy--when the Government assumed the power of imprisoning, releasing and re-imprisoning at will. The event proved that they had only driven militancy into a fresh channel....

It is curious to reflect that as I at last mounted the steps and entered the Club, I was wondering where it would be possible to meet the resolute, indomitable women who formed the Council of War to the militant army. It would be a new, alluring experience. I was so occupied with my thoughts that I hardly noticed the hall porter confronting me with the offer of the New Members' Address Book.

"Surely a new porter?" I suggested. At ten guineas a year for twenty years, it was costing me two hundred and ten pounds to enter the Club, and I did not care to have my expensive right challenged.

"Seventeen years, sir," he answered with the gruff, repellent stiffness of the English official.

"I must have been before your time, then," I said.

Of course he disbelieved me, on the score of age if for no other reason; and the page boy who dogged my steps into the Cloak Room, was sent--I have no doubt--to act as custodian of the umbrellas. My age is forty-two, but I have never succeeded in looking more than about eight and twenty: perhaps I have never tried, as I find that a world of personal exertion and trouble is saved by allowing other people to do my trying, thinking, arranging for me ... whatever I am, others have made me.

There was not a single familiar face in the hall, and I passed into the Morning Room, like a ghost ascending from Hades to call on aeneas.

Around me in arm-chair groups by the fire, or quarrelsome knots suspended over the day's bill of fare, were sleek, full-bodied creatures of dignified girth and portentous gravity--fathers of families, successes in life. These--I told myself--were my contemporaries; their faces were for the most part unknown, but this was hardly surprising as many of my friends are dead and most of the survivors are to be found at the Bar. A barrister with anything of a practice cannot afford time to lunch in the spacious atmosphere of Pall Mall, and the smaller the practice, the greater his anxiety to conceal his leisure. For a moment I felt painfully insignificant, lonely and unfriended.

I was walking towards the Coffee Room when a heavy hand descended on my shoulder and an incredulous voice gasped out----

"Toby, by Gad!"

No one had called me by that name for fifteen years, and I turned to find a stout, middle-aged man with iron-grey hair and a red face extending a diffident palm.

"I beg your pardon," he added hastily, as he saw my expression of surprise. "I thought for a moment...."

"You were right," I interrupted.

"Toby Merivale," he said with profound deliberation. "I thought you were dead."

The same remark had already been made to me four times that morning.

"That's not original," I objected.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

"You used to be Arthur Roden in the old days when I knew you. That was before they made you a Privy Councillor and His Majesty's Attorney-General."

"By Gad, I can hardly believe it!" he exclaimed, shaking my hand a second time and carrying me off to luncheon. "What have you been doing with yourself? Where have you been? Why did you go away?"

"As Dr. Johnson once remarked...." I began.

"'Questioning is not a mode of conversation among gentlemen,'" he interrupted. "I know; but if you drop out of the civilised world for the third of a lifetime...."

"You've not ordered yourself any lunch."

"Oh, hang lunch!"

"But you haven't ordered any for me, either."

My poor story--for what it was worth--started with the plovers' eggs, and finished neck-to-neck with the cheese. I told him how I had gone down to the docks twenty years before to see young Handgrove off to India, and how at the last moment he had cajoled me into accompanying him.... Arthur came with me in spirit from India to the diamond mines of South Africa where I made my money, took part with me in the Jameson Raid, and kept me company during those silent, discreet months when we all lay _perdus_ wondering what course the Government was going to pursue towards the Raiders. Then I sketched my share in the war, and made him laugh by saying I had been three times mentioned in despatches. My experience of blackwater fever was sandwiched in between the settlement of South Africa, and my departure to the scene of the Russo-Japanese war: last of all came the years of vegetation, during which I had idled round the Moorish fringe of the Desert or sauntered from one Mediterranean port to another.

"What brings you home now?" he asked.

"Home? Oh, to England. I've a young friend stationed out at Malta, and when I was out there three weeks ago I found his wife down with a touch of fever. He wanted her brought to London, couldn't come himself, so suggested I should take charge. _J'y suis_...."

I hesitated.

"Well?"

"I don't know, Arthur. I've no plans. If you have any suggestions to make...."

"Come and spend Whitsun with me in Hampshire."

"Done."

"You're not married?"

"'Sir,'" I said in words Sir James Murray believes Dr. Johnson ought to have used, "'in order to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent.'"

"And never will be, I suppose."

"I've no plans. You, of course...."

I paused delicately, in part because I was sure he wanted to tell me all about himself, in part because I could not for the life of me remember what had come of the domestic side of his career during my absence abroad. He was married, and the father of a certain number of children before I left England; I had no idea how far the ramifications went.