CHAPTER I

"There Are Heroisms All Round Us"

Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon

earth,--a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly

good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self. If

anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the

thought of such a father-in-law. I am convinced that he really

believed in his heart that I came round to the Chestnuts three days a

week for the pleasure of his company, and very especially to hear his

views upon bimetallism, a subject upon which he was by way of being an

authority.

For an hour or more that evening I listened to his monotonous chirrup

about bad money driving out good, the token value of silver, the

depreciation of the rupee, and the true standards of exchange.

"Suppose," he cried with feeble violence, "that all the debts in the

world were called up simultaneously, and immediate payment insisted

upon,--what under our present conditions would happen then?"

I gave the self-evident answer that I should be a ruined man, upon

which he jumped from his chair, reproved me for my habitual levity,

which made it impossible for him to discuss any reasonable subject in

my presence, and bounced off out of the room to dress for a Masonic

meeting.

At last I was alone with Gladys, and the moment of Fate had come! All

that evening I had felt like the soldier who awaits the signal which

will send him on a forlorn hope; hope of victory and fear of repulse

alternating in his mind.

She sat with that proud, delicate profile of hers outlined against the

red curtain. How beautiful she was! And yet how aloof! We had been

friends, quite good friends; but never could I get beyond the same

comradeship which I might have established with one of my

fellow-reporters upon the Gazette,--perfectly frank, perfectly kindly,

and perfectly unsexual. My instincts are all against a woman being too

frank and at her ease with me. It is no compliment to a man. Where

the real sex feeling begins, timidity and distrust are its companions,

heritage from old wicked days when love and violence went often hand in

hand. The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing

figure--these, and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the

true signals of passion. Even in my short life I had learned as much

as that--or had inherited it in that race memory which we call instinct.

Gladys was full of every womanly quality. Some judged her to be cold

and hard; but such a thought was treason. That delicately bronzed

skin, almost oriental in its coloring, that raven hair, the large

liquid eyes, the full but exquisite lips,--all the stigmata of passion

were there. But I was sadly conscious that up to now I had never found

the secret of drawing it forth. However, come what might, I should

have done with suspense and bring matters to a head to-night. She

could but refuse me, and better be a repulsed lover than an accepted

brother.

So far my thoughts had carried me, and I was about to break the long

and uneasy silence, when two critical, dark eyes looked round at me,

and the proud head was shaken in smiling reproof. "I have a

presentiment that you are going to propose, Ned. I do wish you

wouldn't; for things are so much nicer as they are."

I drew my chair a little nearer. "Now, how did you know that I was

going to propose?" I asked in genuine wonder.

"Don't women always know? Do you suppose any woman in the world was

ever taken unawares? But--oh, Ned, our friendship has been so good and

so pleasant! What a pity to spoil it! Don't you feel how splendid it

is that a young man and a young woman should be able to talk face to

face as we have talked?"

"I don't know, Gladys. You see, I can talk face to face with--with the

station-master." I can't imagine how that official came into the

matter; but in he trotted, and set us both laughing. "That does not

satisfy me in the least. I want my arms round you, and your head on my

breast, and--oh, Gladys, I want----"

She had sprung from her chair, as she saw signs that I proposed to

demonstrate some of my wants. "You've spoiled everything, Ned," she

said. "It's all so beautiful and natural until this kind of thing

comes in! It is such a pity! Why can't you control yourself?"

"I didn't invent it," I pleaded. "It's nature. It's love."

"Well, perhaps if both love, it may be different. I have never felt

it."

"But you must--you, with your beauty, with your soul! Oh, Gladys, you

were made for love! You must love!"

"One must wait till it comes."

"But why can't you love me, Gladys? Is it my appearance, or what?"

She did unbend a little. She put forward a hand--such a gracious,

stooping attitude it was--and she pressed back my head. Then she

looked into my upturned face with a very wistful smile.

"No it isn't that," she said at last. "You're not a conceited boy by

nature, and so I can safely tell you it is not that. It's deeper."

"My character?"

She nodded severely.

"What can I do to mend it? Do sit down and talk it over. No, really,

I won't if you'll only sit down!"

She looked at me with a wondering distrust which was much more to my

mind than her whole-hearted confidence. How primitive and bestial it

looks when you put it down in black and white!--and perhaps after all

it is only a feeling peculiar to myself. Anyhow, she sat down.

"Now tell me what's amiss with me?"

"I'm in love with somebody else," said she.

It was my turn to jump out of my chair.

"It's nobody in particular," she explained, laughing at the expression

of my face: "only an ideal. I've never met the kind of man I mean."

"Tell me about him. What does he look like?"

"Oh, he might look very much like you."

"How dear of you to say that! Well, what is it that he does that I

don't do? Just say the word,--teetotal, vegetarian, aeronaut,

theosophist, superman. I'll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will only

give me an idea what would please you."

She laughed at the elasticity of my character. "Well, in the first

place, I don't think my ideal would speak like that," said she. "He

would be a harder, sterner man, not so ready to adapt himself to a

silly girl's whim. But, above all, he must be a man who could do, who

could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a

man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I

should love, but always the glories he had won; for they would be

reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton! When I read his wife's

life of him I could so understand her love! And Lady Stanley! Did you

ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband?

These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul,

and yet be the greater, not the less, on account of her love, honored

by all the world as the inspirer of noble deeds."

She looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm that I nearly brought down

the whole level of the interview. I gripped myself hard, and went on

with the argument.

"We can't all be Stanleys and Burtons," said I; "besides, we don't get

the chance,--at least, I never had the chance. If I did, I should try

to take it."

"But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of man I

mean that he makes his own chances. You can't hold him back. I've

never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well. There are heroisms

all round us waiting to be done. It's for men to do them, and for

women to reserve their love as a reward for such men. Look at that

young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon. It was blowing a

gale of wind; but because he was announced to go he insisted on

starting. The wind blew him fifteen hundred miles in twenty-four

hours, and he fell in the middle of Russia. That was the kind of man I

mean. Think of the woman he loved, and how other women must have

envied her! That's what I should like to be,--envied for my man."

"I'd have done it to please you."

"But you shouldn't do it merely to please me. You should do it because

you can't help yourself, because it's natural to you, because the man

in you is crying out for heroic expression. Now, when you described

the Wigan coal explosion last month, could you not have gone down and

helped those people, in spite of the choke-damp?"

"I did."

"You never said so."

"There was nothing worth bucking about."

"I didn't know." She looked at me with rather more interest. "That

was brave of you."

"I had to. If you want to write good copy, you must be where the

things are."

"What a prosaic motive! It seems to take all the romance out of it.

But, still, whatever your motive, I am glad that you went down that

mine." She gave me her hand; but with such sweetness and dignity that

I could only stoop and kiss it. "I dare say I am merely a foolish

woman with a young girl's fancies. And yet it is so real with me, so

entirely part of my very self, that I cannot help acting upon it. If I

marry, I do want to marry a famous man!"

"Why should you not?" I cried. "It is women like you who brace men up.

Give me a chance, and see if I will take it! Besides, as you say, men

ought to MAKE their own chances, and not wait until they are given.

Look at Clive--just a clerk, and he conquered India! By George! I'll

do something in the world yet!"

She laughed at my sudden Irish effervescence. "Why not?" she said.

"You have everything a man could have,--youth, health, strength,

education, energy. I was sorry you spoke. And now I am glad--so

glad--if it wakens these thoughts in you!"

"And if I do----"

Her dear hand rested like warm velvet upon my lips. "Not another word,

Sir! You should have been at the office for evening duty half an hour

ago; only I hadn't the heart to remind you. Some day, perhaps, when

you have won your place in the world, we shall talk it over again."

And so it was that I found myself that foggy November evening pursuing

the Camberwell tram with my heart glowing within me, and with the eager

determination that not another day should elapse before I should find

some deed which was worthy of my lady. But who--who in all this wide

world could ever have imagined the incredible shape which that deed was

to take, or the strange steps by which I was led to the doing of it?

And, after all, this opening chapter will seem to the reader to have

nothing to do with my narrative; and yet there would have been no

narrative without it, for it is only when a man goes out into the world

with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the

desire all alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight

of him, that he breaks away as I did from the life he knows, and

ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the

great adventures and the great rewards. Behold me, then, at the office

of the Daily Gazette, on the staff of which I was a most insignificant

unit, with the settled determination that very night, if possible, to

find the quest which should be worthy of my Gladys! Was it hardness,

was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own

glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to

ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.