There are some who still point to me as one who has deliberately ruined a brilliant career, who pity me as one who has gone under, who speak with shrugged shoulders and uplifted eyebrows at my unfortunate marriage and my obscure and cranky occupation. The world, they say, was at my feet. So it was. But what the pitying critics lack the grace to understand is that better than to have it under one"s feet is to have it, or that of it which matters, at one"s heart.
I sit in this tiny hotel by the sea and reflect that it is over three years since I awoke from death and a.s.sumed a new avatar. And since my marriage, what have been the happenings?
Dale has just been elected for the Fensham Division of Westmoreland, and he has already begun the line of st.u.r.dy young Kynnersleys, of which I had eumoirous dreams long ago. Quast and the cats have pa.s.sed into alien hands. Anastasius Papadopoulos is dead. He died three months ago of angina pectoris, and Lola was with him at the end. Eleanor Faversham has married a Colonial bishop. Campion, too, has married--and married the last woman in the world to whom one would have thought of mating him--a frivolous b.u.t.terfly of a creature who drags him to dinner-parties and Ascot and suppers at the Savoy, and holds Barbara"s Building and all it connotes in vixenish detestation. He roars out the agony of his philanthropic spirit to Lola and myself, who administer consolation and the cold mutton that he loves. The story of his marriage is a little lunatic drama all to itself and I will tell it some day. But now I can only rough-sketch the facts. He works when he can at the beloved creation of his life and fortune; but the brain that would be inadequate to the self-protecting needs of a ferret controls the action of this masterful enthusiast, and his one awful despair in life is to touch a heart that might beat in the bosom of a vicious and calculating haddock.
I only mention this to explain how it has come to pa.s.s that Lola and I are now all-powerful in Barbara"s Building. It has become the child of our adoption and we love it with a deep and almost fanatic affection.
Before Lola my influence and personality fade into nothingness. She is the power, the terror, the adoration of Lambeth. If she chose she could control the Parliamentary vote of the borough. Her great, direct, large-hearted personality carries all before it. And with it there is something of the uncanny. A feat of hers in the early days is by way of becoming legendary.
A woman, on the books of the Building, was about to bring a hopeless human fragment into a grey world. Lola went to see what aid the Building could provide. In front of the door lounged the husband, a hulking porter in a Bermondsey factory. Glowering at his feet lay a vicious mongrel dog--bull-terrier, Irish-terrier, mastiff--so did Lola with her trained eye distinguish the strains. When she asked for his wife in travail the chivalrous gentleman took his pipe from his mouth, spat, and after the manner of his kind referred to the disfigurement of her face in terms impossible to transcribe. She paid no attention.
"I"m coming upstairs to see your wife."
"If you pa.s.s that door, s"welp me Gawd, I"ll set the dog on yer."
She paused. He urged the dog, who bristled and growled and showed his teeth. Lola picked the animal up, as she would have picked up a sofa cushion, and threw him across the street. She went to where he had fallen, ordered him to his feet, and the dog licked her hand. She came back with a laugh.
"I"ll do the same to you if you don"t let me in!"
She pushed the hulking brute aside. He resisted and laid hands on her.
By some extraordinary tamer"s art of which she had in vain tried to explain to me the secret, and with no apparent effort, she glided away from him and sent him cowering and subdued some feet beyond the lintel of the door. The street, which was watching, went into a roar of laughter and applause. Lola mounted the stairs and attended to the business in hand. When she came down the man was still standing at the threshold smoking an obfusticated pipe. He blinked at her as if she had been a human dynamo.
"Come round to Barbara"s Building at six o"clock and tell me how she is."
He came on the stroke of six.
The fame of Lola spread through the borough, and now she can walk feared, honoured, unmolested by night or by day through the streets of horror and crime, which neither I nor any other man--no matter how courageous--dare enter at certain hours without the magical protection of a policeman.
Sunshine has come at last, both into this little backwater of the world by the sea and into my own life, and it is time I should end this futile record.
Yesterday as we lay on the sands, watching the waves idly lap the sh.o.r.e, Lola brought herself nearer to me with a rhythmic movement as no other creature form of woman is capable of, and looked into my eyes. And she whispered something to me which led to an infinite murmuring of foolish things. I put my arms round her and kissed her on the lips and on her cheek--whether the beautiful or the maimed I knew not--and she sank into a long, long silence. At last she said:
"What are you thinking of?"
I said, "I"m thinking that not a single human being on the face of the earth has a sense of humour."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Simply this," said I, "that what has occurred billions of billions of millions of times on the earth we are now regarding as the only thing that ever happened."
"Well," said Lola, "so it is--for us--the only thing that ever happened."
And the astounding woman was right.