Part 25 (1/2)

”I believe so too. In all properly const.i.tuted women.”

”I tried to devote that streak to Lake,” she said. ”I did my best for him. But Lake was much too much of a gentleman or an idealist about women, or what you will, to know his business as a lover. And that side of me fell in love, the rest of me protesting, with a man named Caston.

It was a notorious affair. Everybody in New York couples my name with Caston. Except when my father is about. His jealousy has blasted an area of silence--in that matter--all round him. He will not know of that story. And they dare not tell him. I should pity anyone who tried to tell it him.”

”What sort of man was this Caston?”

Miss Grammont seemed to consider. She did not look at Sir Richmond; she kept her profile to him.

”He was,” she said deliberately, ”a very rotten sort of man.”

She spoke like one resolved to be exact and judicial. ”I believe I always knew he wasn't right. But he was very handsome. And ten years younger than Lake. And n.o.body else seemed to be all right, so I swallowed that. He was an artist, a painter. Perhaps you know his work.”

Sir Richmond shook his head. ”He could make American business men look like characters out of the Three Musketeers, they said, and he was beginning to be popular. He made love to me. In exactly the way Lake didn't. If I shut my eyes to one or two things, it was delightful. I liked it. But my father would have stood a painter as my husband almost as cheerfully as he would a man of colour. I made a fool of myself, as people say, about Caston. Well--when the war came, he talked in a way that irritated me. He talked like an East Side Annunzio, about art and war. It made me furious to know it was all talk and that he didn't mean business.... I made him go.”

She paused for a moment. ”He hated to go.”

”Then I relented. Or I missed him and I wanted to be made love to. Or I really wanted to go on my own account. I forget. I forget my motives altogether now. That early war time was a queer time for everyone. A kind of wildness got into the blood.... I threw over Lake. All the time things had been going on in New York I had still been engaged to Lake.

I went to France. I did good work. I did do good work. And also things were possible that would have seemed fantastic in America. You know something of the war-time atmosphere. There was death everywhere and people s.n.a.t.c.hed at gratifications. Caston made 'To-morrow we die' his text. We contrived three days in Paris together--not very cleverly. All sorts of people know about it.... We went very far.”

She stopped short. ”Well?” said Sir Richmond.

”He did die....”

Another long pause. ”They told me Caston had been killed. But someone hinted--or I guessed--that there was more in it than an ordinary casualty.

”n.o.body, I think, realizes that I know. This is the first time I have ever confessed that I do know. He was--shot. He was shot for cowardice.”

”That might happen to any man,” said Sir Richmond presently. ”No man is a hero all round the twenty-four hours. Perhaps he was caught by circ.u.mstances, unprepared. He may have been taken by surprise.”

”It was the most calculated, cold-blooded cowardice imaginable. He let three other men go on and get killed...”

”No. It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know nothing about. It was vile, contemptible cowardice and meanness. It fitted in with a score of ugly little things I remembered. It explained them all.

I know the evidence and the judgment against him were strictly just and true, because they were exactly in character.... And that, you see, was my man. That was the lover I had chosen. That was the man to whom I had given myself with both hands.”

Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed in the same even tones of careful statement. ”I wasn't disgusted, not even with myself. About him I was chiefly sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made him come out of a life that suited and protected him, to the war. About myself, I was stunned and perplexed. I had the clearest realization that what you and I have been calling the bright little personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over and done with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot. And there I was, with fifty years of life left in me and nothing particular to do with them.”

”That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.

”It didn't seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of something or go to pieces. I couldn't turn to religion. I had no religion. And Duty?

What is Duty? I set myself to that. I had a kind of revelation one night. 'Either I find out what all this world is about, I said, or I perish.' I have lost myself and I must forget myself by getting hold of something bigger than myself. And becoming that. That's why I have been making a sort of historical pilgrimage.... That's my story, Sir Richmond. That's my education.... Somehow though your troubles are different, it seems to me that my little muddle makes me understand how it is with you. What you've got, this idea of a scientific ordering of the world, is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been feeling my way towards. I want to join on. I want to got hold of this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a still greater economic and educational control of which it is a part. I want to make that idea a part of myself. Rather I want to make myself a part of it.

When you talk of it I believe in it altogether.”

”And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you.”

Section 9

Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont's confidences. His dispute with Dr. Martineau was present in his mind, so that he did not want to make love to her. But he was extremely anxious to express his vivid sense of the value of her friends.h.i.+p. And while he hesitated over this difficult and unfamiliar task she began to talk again of herself, and in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond's thoughts.

”Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself,” she said; ”now that I have told you so much. I did a thing that still puzzles me. I was filled with a sense of hopeless disaster in France and I suppose I had some sort of desperate idea of saving something out of the situation....