Jaffery by William J. Locke

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I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and chin on
hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with absorbed
interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a shaky voice:

"I should love it! I should love it!"

"But it's lunatic," said I.

"So much the better."

"But the proprieties."

She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and flung out
her hands towards me.

"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What have Jaff
Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I travel from Scutari
to London?"

"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different now?"

It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from glow to
defensive sombreness admitted its significance.

"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the same."
She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath lowering brows.
"If you think just because he and I are good friends now there's any
difference, you're making a great mistake. And just you tell Barbara
that."

"I will do so--" said I.

"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha Prescott is not
going to let herself be made a fool of by a man who's crazy mad over
another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not me. And as for the
proprieties"--she snapped her fingers--"they be--they be anything'd!"

To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I drank
the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back on the
manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat
anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its discomfort.

"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear, will
always be in the way."

"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.

We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery sun now
about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables, followed by
the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.

"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en understands
the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem and Madagascar and
North and South Amerikee,' come."

"But this is midsummer madness," said I.

"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and fortuitously
caught a waiter by the arm. "_Meme chose pour tout le monde_." He
flicked him away. "Now, this is business. Will you come and rough it?
The _Vesta_ isn't a Cunard Liner. Not even a passenger boat. No
luxuries. I hope you understand."

"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said Liosha.

"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but you
mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign on as
one of the crew?"

"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up to the
binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in irons."

"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her
incredulity.

"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and portmanteaux
aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.

"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.

"The _what_?" I asked.

"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha and me
have dunnage."

"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a
parrot in a cage."

Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light
mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to
become of the forty-odd _colis_ that we passed through the customs this
morning?"

"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over his
third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I brought him
along? I told him he'd come in useful."

"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a lone man,
give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all this baggage?
They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and I shall be
arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are agencies of
expedition. We can forward the luggage by _grande vitesse_ or _petite
vitesse_--how long are you likely to be away on this Theophile Gautier
voyage--'_Cueillir la fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka_'?"

"Four months," said Captain Maturin.

"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just in
time."

I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing
difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a
nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates
belonging to a woman who is not my wife.

There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the
others practical details, in which I had no share. A suit of oilskins
and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated
argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them
from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night. Liosha, aglow with
excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of
thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so
tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and
apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide. We drifted
mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Cafe-Restaurant,
where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not
one of the others took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a
schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth--it might
have been tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or
cared. His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and
clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such
plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table,
after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight--I whispered the
information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to
Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it
more piquantly crooked than ever. Captain Maturin went through the
performance with the grave face of another classical devotee to duty;
but his heart--poor fellow!--was not in his food. It was partly in
Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of
having as cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman
of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century
finery, who was sitting next to him.

Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do before
turning in--including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook's mate's
outfit--and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning. If his new
deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts,
he would see to their adequate reception.

"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said he,
with a grip like--like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and
clamping in a steamer's machinery--and athwart his green-grey eyes
filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of humour--"There's still
time."

"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact that all
my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet."

If I am not urbane, I am nothing.

He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The
rearrangement of her luggage--"dunnage," I corrected--would be a lengthy
process. She thanked me, in her best Considine manner, for all the
trouble I had taken on her account, sent her love to Barbara and to
Susan, whose sickness, she trusted, would be transitory, expressed the
hope that the care of her belongings would not be too great a strain
upon my household--and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very
middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities and
respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around my neck in
a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary, I do love you!"
and marched away magnificently through the staring tables to the inner
recesses of the hotel.

Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are credited in
France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with
traditions of _le flegme britannique_; but there was not much _flegme_
about Liosha's embrace, and so the good Havrais were mystified.

There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have run after
her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more instinctively
artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might suppose. Besides, there
was the bill to pay. We sat down again.

"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery. "He's one
of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a damnable way of
getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command of a great liner
instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred tons."

I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described it in
those terms to Liosha."

"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned
cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."

It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.

"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."

"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when I
contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment.
But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short
of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in the
morning."

"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."

"Give them to me now," said I.

He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind tidying up,
some day--I left my papers in a deuce of a mess."

"All right," said I.

"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything should
crop up."

He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the document,
which I put into my letter case.

"And what about letters?"

"Don't want any. Unless"--said he, after a little pause, frowning in the
plenitude of his content--"if you and Barbara can make things right
again with Doria--then one of you might drop me a line. I'll send you a
schedule of dates."

"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.

"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me there's only
one woman in the world."

"Let us have a final drink," said I.

We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.

When I awoke the next morning the _Vesta_ was already four hours on her
way to Madagascar.

CHAPTER XX

I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the County
of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely confess it.
I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men are--which, thank Heaven, I am
not--I might wear a pound or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my
person. This I decline to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot
keep a key. Of all the household stowaway places under my control (and
Barbara limits their number) only one is locked; and that drawer
containing I know not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so
forever and ever--for the key is lost. Such important documents as I
desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who are
trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My
other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any
rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying
on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a
freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case
wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on
my arrival at Northlands.

"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge of this
thing."

But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must accept
the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a luggage label to
the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend, "Key of Jaffery's
flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into the wall of my library.

"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I am not
going to have anything to do with this crack-brained adventure."

"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at considerable
length on the subject, "one would think that I could have prevented it.
If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to throw her cap over the
topmasts, why in the world shouldn't they?"

"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the description
you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child will be utterly
miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure and her skin."

I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the steamship
_Vesta_.

As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St. Quentin's
Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who, knowing me to be
a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need not have burdened
myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's chambers. I found the
small sitting-room in very much the same state of litter as when Jaffery
left it. He enjoyed litter and hated the devastating tidiness of
housemaids. Give a young horse with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an
hour's run in an ordinary bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal
appearance of Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his
books and pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos,
of old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs
and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender care
upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder, which
reposed--most useful piece of furniture--in the middle of the
hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric radiator that took the
place of a grate, I let these things be, and concentrated my attention
on his papers which lay loose on desk and table. This was obviously the
tidying up to which he had referred. I swept his correspondence into one
drawer. I gathered together the manuscript of his new novel and swept it
into another. On the top of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the
original manuscript of "The Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper
and threaded through with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer
of the desk, which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his
bedroom, where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and
looked around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed
two photographs on his dressing-table--one of his mother, whom I
remembered, and, one of Doria--these I laid face downwards so that the
light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered portmanteau from
beneath the lid of which protruded three or four corners of scribbling
paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the offending beer-barrel in a dark
alcove. The basin set below the tap, in order to catch the drip, was
nearly full. In four months' time the room would be flooded with sour
and horrible beer. Full of the thought, I deposited the letters in the
drawer with the rest of the correspondence, and, leaving the flat,
summoned the lift, and in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter
with the contents of a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow
that mantles from man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a
friend for life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the
labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery and
myself had, at least, one thing in common--videlicet, the keyless habit.
I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked some hidden
_trait-d'union_. Now I had found it.

And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how congenial
Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the _Vesta_. The
weather had changed from summer calm to storm. The gentleman from the
meteorological office who writes for the newspapers talked about
cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales in the channel and on the west
coasts of France. The same was likely to continue. The wind blew hard
enough in Berkshire, what must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a
matter of fact, as we learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a
short letter from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips
considerably later--for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to
the bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe--they had made
their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during which they
apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas washed the
deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food had not been
procurable. It seemed that every horror I had prophesied had come to
pass. I should have pitied them, but for the blatant joyousness of their
communications. "I was not seasick a minute, and I have never been so
happy in my life," wrote Liosha. "Hilary should have been with us,"
wrote Jaffery. "It would have made a man of him. Liosha in splendid
fettle. She goes about in men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her
hand to anything when she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just
imagine them having cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing
in wet and dirt. . . .

About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in my all
too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her first visit
since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to make friends with us
once more, and to prove it showed the pleasanter side of her character.
She professed not to have forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the
terrible episode in less vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that
she missed him more than she would confess, even to herself. In her
reconstituted existence he had stood for an essential element.
Unconsciously she had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his
constant service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now
that she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's
neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble uncomfortably.
After all, she had provoked the man (this with some reluctance she
admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up and shaken her. He
had had no intention of dashing out her brains or even of giving her a
beating. In her heart she repented. Otherwise why should she take so ill
Jaffery's flight with Liosha, which she characterised as abominable, and
Liosha's flight with Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?

"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday
morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a
disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat back
in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the woman. One
would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of stain."

"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."

"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot. "You, a
man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off with that
dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with Jaffery. What
respectable woman--well, what honest woman, according to the term of the
lower classes--would run away with two men within twenty-five hours?"

"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going to marry
her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because there's no question
of marriage or anything else between them."

"_Sancta simplicitas!_" She shook her head from side to side and looked
at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a fool. But she isn't. The
best one can say for her is that she has no moral sense. I know the
type."

"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.

She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied with her
ready sureness:

"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own among
literary people."

"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional chair."

"You're as bemused as Barbara."

"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've studied
an individual, which you haven't."

She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own way--Paul and
Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to me?"

"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it--what the dickens does it matter
to you?"

"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.

"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with malicious
intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again. You've banished
him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no concern of yours. If
he chose to elope with the fat woman in a freak museum, why shouldn't
he? What would it have to do with you?"

"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not sitting
on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the more
insulting."

"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.

"Precisely."

She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she had
swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to myself. She
was eaten up with jealousy.

"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the absent being
always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back and hear what
they've got to say for themselves."

She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little black and
ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What they may say is a
matter of perfect indifference to me."

I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what
Jaffery's--practically--last words to me were: 'There's only one woman
in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away with a laugh. "And to
prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh, Hilary"--with the tips of
her fingers she brushed my hair--"you really are a simple old dear!"

"All the same--" I began.

"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy conversation. I
didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you
have one."

She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down _Les Fleurs du
Mal_. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm, and went out.

Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good discipline.
It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever get Jaffery back
again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I was certain that not
only would she forgive past mishandling, but for the sake of keeping him
would put up with a little more. Whether she would marry him was another
story. I had every reason to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned
her bosom's lord. In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She
regarded a second marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough,
with her husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery
back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would
treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of course, were my
conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact
that she found herself lost without Jaffery and that she was furiously
jealous of Liosha.

It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived. Barbara
and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all my gods I
would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I arrived with a
mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid at a great hotel on
the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed in the Adriatic. We
revisited familiar churches and picture galleries in Venice. We mingled
with a cosmopolitan crowd and developed the complexions (not only in our
faces) of an Othello family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every
August, Mr. Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and
other feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her
marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about
nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.

Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the sea having
subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the
normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands,
coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch. Liosha, we were
given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and
swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship's boats with
paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux. She had
struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera,
had taken their photographs. They sent us one of the two standing side
by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could
not wish to see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and
Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's sake,
had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the
trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in
disgraceful fringes.

"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks
anything but utterly miserable."

"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she maintained.

"Well, it's her own skin."

"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.

What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had the last
word.

The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly afterwards
Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the Adrian-haunted
flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her
father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a
series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its
sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery. She still maintained her
unrelenting attitude, and spoke scornfully of him; but once or twice she
asked when this mad voyage would be over, thereby betraying curiosity
rather than indifference.

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