Jaffery by William J. Locke

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So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do all day,
I replied:

"Sit here."

"Don't you want to see the place?"

"The place," said I, "is parading before us."

"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."

"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and she's not in
a mood for jaunts."

"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful for her.
Oh, that swine of a blighter!"

His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the dozenth
time we went over the story.

"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She can't go
back to the boarding-house."

"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to Barbara."

"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know, Hilary,
there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if one only knew
the right way to take her."

The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal it. I
assented to Jaffery's proposition.

"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a Spanish
gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of truth and
honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been a nasty knock
for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as she has pulled
herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a big way."

And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing towards us
past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself. Another woman
would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us would have had to
soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her to eat and cajole her
into revisiting the light of day. Not so Liosha. She arrayed herself in
fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt, fitting close to her splendid
figure, which she held erect, a smart hat with a feather, and new white
gloves, and came to us the incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the
morning, our roses pinned in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her
lips were not quite under control, but she made a valiant show.

We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our chairs.

"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."

We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she looked
steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.

"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."

"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been rather
indiscreet."

"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.

"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat your
breakfast?"

She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What would she
have now? I sent a waiter for cafe-au-lait and a brioche and lectured
her on the folly of going without proper sustenance. The ghost of a
smile crept into her eyes, in recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism
with which I am wrongly credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for
the roses. They were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the
little tray and the _verseur_ poured out the coffee and milk. We watched
her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.

"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.

"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the boat? We
watched the London trains carefully."

"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and went to
bed at once."

"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What were you
doing at Southsea?"

"Staying with Emma--Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I couldn't stick
that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote to Emma to ask her
to put me up."

"So that's why you went on Thursday?"

"That's why."

"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs.
Considine--I mean Mrs. Jupp--into your confidence?"

"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going to
Havre--to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that. But Jaff
Chayne was the only person that had to know the truth."

We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the intrigue
that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left London on Sunday
for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of Havre. As there was no
Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to travel to Havre via Paris.
Being a crafty villain, he would not run away with Liosha straight from
London. She was to join him a week later, after he had had time to spy
out the land and make his nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His
fortnight up, he was sailing away again to America. Liosha was to
accompany him. In all probability, for I delight in thinking the worst
of Mr. Ras Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of
his tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he
worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed voyage
back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in the railway
network of the United States. I have made it my business to enquire into
the ways of this entertaining but unholy villain. This is what I am sure
he would have done. One girl some half dozen years before he had left
penniless in San Francisco and the door over which burns the Red Lamp
swallowed her up forever.

For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a soul
must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As Jaffery had
guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of Westminster Abbey.
Although her open nature abhorred the deception, she obeyed his
instructions in minor details and thought she was acting in the spirit
of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters to Mrs. Jardine to be
posted in London. By risking discovery of her secret during her visit to
the admirable lady at Southsea and by ingenuously disclosing the plot to
Jaffery she showed herself to be a very sorry conspirator.

She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to touch upon
the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not stay in Havre all
day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who might swagger into the
town from his swagger hotel on the _plage_, we carried out Jaffery's
proposal, hired an automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight
from inland into the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of
fisher-folk and fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged
needle gates jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden
grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the
sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew a
deep breath.

"Oh, let us all come and live here."

We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats wherein the
fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach where a few
belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the curious steps to
the terrace and listened to the last number of the orchestra. Then lunch
at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet among the fishing boats; and
afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the little shady courtyard. Jaffery
was very gentle with Liosha, treating her tenderly like a bruised thing,
and talked of his adventures and cracked little jokes and attended
solicitously to her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy
gratitude, and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled
her to make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and
sipped _creme de menthe_ with frank gusto. To me she appeared like a
naughty child who instead of meeting with expected punishment finds
itself coddled in affectionate arms. All resentment had died away.
Unreservedly she had laid herself as a "damn fool" at our feet--or
rather at Jaffery's feet, for I did not count for much. Instead of
blundering over her and tugging her up and otherwise exacerbating her
wounds, he lifted her with tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the
first time, save when Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a
spiritual relation with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy--she was
dealing with a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her
immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At the
same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously throbbing
and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those few hours.

To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in Jaffery's
category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have threatened on many
restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a gigantic wheel for his
benefit similar to that in which Susan's white mice take futile
exercise. If there was such a wheel he must, I am sure, get in and whirl
it round; just as if there is a boat he must row it, or tree to be
felled he must fell it, or a hill to be climbed he must climb it. At
Etretat, as it happens, there are two hills. He stretched forth his hand
to one, of course the highest, crowned by the fishermen's chapel and
ordained an ascent. Liosha was in the chastened mood in which she would
have dived with him to the depths of the English Channel. I, with
grudging meekness and a prayer for another five minutes devoted to the
deglutition of another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.

It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze tempered the
fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and agreeable to the feet. The
smell of wild thyme mingling with the salt of the low-tide seaweed
conveyed stimulating fragrance. When we reached the top and Jaffery
suggested that we should lie down, I protested. Why not walk along the
edge of the inspiring cliffs?

"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night," said he
throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I need rest."

Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after the quick
ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played charmingly in the
wind which blew her skirts close around her in fine modelling. I thought
of the Winged Victory.

"I'm not a bit tired," she said.

But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his fists,
she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to go contrary
to his desires?" and settled down beside him.

So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the dancing sea
and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long plume from a
steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us and the tiny
golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and were in fact
giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when suddenly Liosha broke
the spell.

"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have killed
him."

Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.

"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.

"I did strike him once."

"Oh?" said I.

"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to hear the
details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous elements. But
she left them to my imagination. "After that," she continued, "he saw I
was an honest woman and talked about marriage."

Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my dear,"
said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."

She shrugged her shoulders--it was the full shrug of the un-English
child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away.
"He was so funny."

"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle
remonstrance.

"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he was
different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very much.
You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't behave
like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me out to
dinner."

Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go on."

"What can I say?"--she shrugged her shoulders again. "With him I hadn't
to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I liked. You all think
it dreadful because I know, like everybody else, how children come into
the world, and can make jokes about things like that. Emma used to say
it was not ladylike--but he--he did not say so. He laughed. His friends
used to laugh. With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off
my stays"--she threw out her hands largely--"ouf!"

"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.

"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a crowd
of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a big
difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in a low
voice.

I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to Barbara for
her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My attitude, as you can
understand, was solely one of kindly curiosity. Liosha, for some
moments, also said nothing. Rather feverishly she pulled off her new
white gloves and cast them away; and I noticed an all but imperceptible
something--something, for want of a better word, like a ripple--sweep
through her, faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her
neck and dying away in a flush on her cheek.

"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the grass-blades.

She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or two and
clutched his shoulder.

"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I thought you
understood. I would have married anybody who would have taken me out of
prison. He was going to take me out of prison to places where I could
breathe." She fell back onto her heels and beat her breast with both
hands. "I was dying for want of air. I was suffocating."

Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.

"What are you talking about?"

She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my knees.

"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my throat"--and
forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's discipline she mimed her
words startlingly--"I was sick--sick--sick to death. You forget, Jaff
Chayne, the mountains of Albania."

"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I
remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"

She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide
swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not
now. Not after--No. But mountains, freedom--anything unlike prison. Oh,
I've gone mad sometimes. I've wanted to take up a fender and smash
things."

"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.

"And what have you done?"

"I've broken out of prison and run away."

"That's what I did," said Liosha.

Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at
her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.

"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what it
comes to."

No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy good-humour
had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of
wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and
restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with
him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not
given him the tiniest little scrap of her heart.

"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.

"I tried to be good to please you--you and Barbara and Hilary, who've
been so kind to me."

"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I'm
as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear
beads."

"So do I," said Liosha.

I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees,
consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a moment
afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect agreement of
babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff road. I jumped to
my feet and pursued them.

"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe the
decencies of civilised life."

CHAPTER XIX

"_Arretez! 'Arretez!_" roared Jaffery all of a sudden.

We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from Etretat. The
chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door, leaped out and
disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice reverberating from side
to side of the Boulevard Maritime.

"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"

I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw Jaffery in
characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the shoulders and
laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad, powerful-looking
fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a point, and wearing a
curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a bowler-hat. I noticed that he
carried neither stick nor gloves. The ecstasies of encounter having
subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the car.

"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted, opening the
door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a drink at
Tortoni's."

Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling, took
off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave, self-possessed
manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes, the colour of a
stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering him my seat next
Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he quickly established
himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto occupied by Jaffery.
Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur and leaned over the
partition. The car started.

"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard him. "From
Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and Mediterranean ports
thrown in. In the depth of winter. Remember?"

"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head round.
"We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of December."

"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and back."

"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain Maturin.

"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.

"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.

"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.

"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile.
"He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."

"Remember that night off Vigo?"

"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and
go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the
time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was
responsible for the saving of his ship.

"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.

"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.

"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself
included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."

Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks,
holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to
side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a
hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing
from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come--No.
It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty--I
thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was
violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest
desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the
two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.

"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"

"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I
grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board
ship."

He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the
entertainment of a pretty woman.

"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.

"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man
doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying
that I love the sea."

With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel,
Restaurant and Cafe Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was
thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families
enjoying the Sunday afternoon _aperitif_.

"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the
crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But
Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our
table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first,
I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and
chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha
was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain
Maturin, with the steady English sailor's suspicion of any other drink
than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an
appetite for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.

"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with
yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"

"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue Cross
Line--Ellershaw & Co.--trading between Havre and Mozambique."

"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.

I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information. "Portuguese
East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to Madagascar."

"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.

"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of soda
into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to me,
exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped his
drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us--for he was not a
spontaneously communicative man--that he now had a very good command:
steamship _Vesta_, one thousand five hundred tons, somewhat old, but
sea-worthy, warranted to take more cargo than any vessel of her size he
had ever set eyes on.

"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.

"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up now."

Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered another.

"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"

"Yes, worse luck."

"Why worse luck?" I asked.

"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.

Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of Madagascar
before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and plot of garden
at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.

"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.

Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr.
Chayne?"

Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white teeth
showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And bringing down his
hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder--"Why not? You and I. Out of this
rotten civilisation?"

Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement. So did I.
I thought he was going mad.

"Would you like it?" he asked.

"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang into her
face.

Captain Maturin leaned forward.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and certainly
there's no accommodation for ladies."

Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady--in your silly old sailor
sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me. When you had me aboard,
did you think of having accommodation for a gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At
any rate," said he, at the end of the peal, "you've a sort of spare
cabin? There's always one."

"A kind of dog-hole--for you, Mr. Chayne."

Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He jumped to
his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two adjoining and
crowded tables, for which, dismayed and bareheaded--Jaffery could be a
very courtly gentleman when he chose--he apologized in fluent French,
and, turning, caught Captain Maturin beneath the arm.

"Let us have a private palaver about this."

They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the
Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till they
disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:

"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"

"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.

"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that
her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the
hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my immortal soul to go."

I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring
craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.

"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I, pretending to
believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a tramp--without
another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals
in Noah's Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that
Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful
food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to
sleep in--a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of
a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping
seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to
see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down--a floating--when she
does float--a floating inferno of misery--here it is--I can tell you all
about it--any child in a board school could tell you--an inferno of
misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and
always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the
wind--to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods
catching fire, and the wheezing mediaeval boilers bursting and sending
you all to glory--"

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