CHAPTER I.

The Letter

I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long

periods in utter solitude—save for a few black faces—have made it a

rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their

self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism. It was in some such

spirit, with an added touch of self-consciousness, that, at seven

o’clock in the evening of September 23 in a recent year, I was making

my evening toilet in my chambers in Pall Mall. I thought the date and

the place justified the parallel; to my advantage even; for the obscure

Burmese administrator might well be a man of blunted sensibilities and

coarse fibre, and at least he is alone with nature, while I—well, a

young man of condition and fashion, who knows the right people, belongs

to the right clubs, has a safe, possibly a brilliant, future in the

Foreign Office—may be excused for a sense of complacent martyrdom,

when, with his keen appreciation of the social calendar, he is doomed

to the outer solitude of London in September. I say “martyrdom”, but in

fact the case was infinitely worse. For to feel oneself a martyr, as

everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my

position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it

had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August, when

ties were still fresh and sympathy abundant. I had been conscious that

I was missed at Morven Lodge party. Lady Ashleigh herself had said so

in the kindest possible manner, when she wrote to acknowledge the

letter in which I explained, with an effectively austere reserve of

language, that circumstances compelled me to remain at my office. “We

know how busy you must be just now”, she wrote, “and I do hope you

won’t overwork; we shall _all_ miss you very much.” Friend after friend

“got away” to sport and fresh air, with promises to write and chaffing

condolences, and as each deserted the sinking ship, I took a grim

delight in my misery, positively almost enjoying the first week or two

after my world had been finally dissipated to the four bracing winds of

heaven. I began to take a spurious interest in the remaining five

millions, and wrote several clever letters in a vein of cheap satire,

indirectly suggesting the pathos of my position, but indicating that I

was broad-minded enough to find intellectual entertainment in the

scenes, persons, and habits of London in the dead season. I even did

rational things at the instigation of others. For, though I should have

liked total isolation best, I, of course, found that there was a

sediment of unfortunates like myself, who, unlike me, viewed the

situation in a most prosaic light. There were river excursions, and so

on, after office-hours; but I dislike the river at any time for its

noisy vulgarity, and most of all at this season. So I dropped out of

the fresh air brigade and declined H——’s offer to share a riverside

cottage and run up to town in the mornings. I did spend one or two

week-ends with the Catesbys in Kent; but I was not inconsolable when

they let their house and went abroad, for I found that such partial

compensations did not suit me. Neither did the taste for satirical

observation last. A passing thirst, which I dare say many have shared,

for adventures of the fascinating kind described in the _New Arabian

Nights_ led me on a few evenings into some shady haunts in Soho and

farther eastward; but was finally quenched one sultry Saturday night

after an hour’s immersion in the reeking atmosphere of a low music-hall

in Ratcliffe Highway, where I sat next a portly female who suffered

from the heat, and at frequent intervals refreshed herself and an

infant from a bottle of tepid stout.

By the first week in September I had abandoned all palliatives, and had

settled into the dismal but dignified routine of office, club, and

chambers. And now came the most cruel trial, for the hideous truth

dawned on me that the world I found so indispensable could after all

dispense with me. It was all very well for Lady Ashleigh to assure me

that I was deeply missed; but a letter from F——, who was one of the

party, written “in haste, just starting to shoot”, and coming as a

tardy reply to one of my cleverest, made me aware that the house party

had suffered little from my absence, and that few sighs were wasted on

me, even in the quarter which I had assumed to have been discreetly

alluded to by the underlined _all_ in Lady Ashleigh’s “we shall _all_

miss you”. A thrust which smarted more, if it bit less deeply, came

from my cousin Nesta, who wrote: “It’s horrid for you to have to be

baking in London now; but, after all, it must be a great pleasure to

you” (malicious little wretch!) “to have such interesting and important

work to do.” Here was a nemesis for an innocent illusion I had been

accustomed to foster in the minds of my relations and acquaintances,

especially in the breasts of the trustful and admiring maidens whom I

had taken down to dinner in the last two seasons; a fiction which I had

almost reached the point of believing in myself. For the plain truth

was that my work was neither interesting nor important, and consisted

chiefly at present in smoking cigarettes, in saying that Mr So-and-So

was away and would be back about October 1, in being absent for lunch

from twelve till two, and in my spare moments making _précis_ of—let us

say—the less confidential consular reports, and squeezing the results

into cast-iron schedules. The reason of my detention was not a cloud on

the international horizon—though I may say in passing that there was

such a cloud—but a caprice on the part of a remote and mighty

personage, the effect of which, ramifying downwards, had dislocated the

carefully-laid holiday plans of the humble juniors, and in my own small

case had upset the arrangement between myself and K——, who positively

liked the dog-days in Whitehall.

Only one thing was needed to fill my cup of bitterness, and this it was

that specially occupied me as I dressed for dinner this evening. Two

days more in this dead and fermenting city and my slavery would be at

an end. Yes, but—irony of ironies!—I had nowhere to go to! The Morven

Lodge party was breaking up. A dreadful rumour as to an engagement

which had been one of its accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh

certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most

desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through

insignificance. Invitations for a later date, which I had declined in

July with a gratifying sense of being much in request, now rose up

spectrally to taunt me. There was at least one which I could easily

have revived, but neither in this case nor in any other had there been

any renewal of pressure, and there are moments when the difference

between proposing oneself and surrendering as a prize to one of several

eagerly competing hostesses seems too crushing to be contemplated. My

own people were at Aix for my father’s gout; to join them was a

_pis-aller_ whose banality was repellent. Besides, they would be

leaving soon for our home in Yorkshire, and I was not a prophet in my

own country. In short, I was at the extremity of depression.

The usual preliminary scuffle on the staircase prepared me for the

knock and entry of Withers. (One of the things which had for some time

ceased to amuse me was the laxity of manners, proper to the season,

among the servants of the big block of chambers where I lived.) Withers

demurely handed me a letter bearing a German postmark and marked

“Urgent”. I had just finished dressing, and was collecting my money and

gloves. A momentary thrill of curiosity broke in upon my depression as

I sat down to open it. A corner on the reverse of the envelope bore the

blotted legend: “Very sorry, but there’s one other thing—a pair of

rigging screws from Carey and Neilson’s, size 1⅜, _galvanised_.” Here

it is:

Yacht _Dulcibella_,

Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, _Sept_. 21.

_Dear Carruthers_,—I daresay you’ll be surprised at hearing from me, as

it’s ages since we met. It is more than likely, too, that what I’m

going to suggest won’t suit you, for I know nothing of your plans, and

if you’re in town at all you’re probably just getting into harness

again and can’t get away. So I merely write on the offchance to ask if

you would care to come out here and join me in a little yachting, and,

I hope, duck-shooting. I know you’re keen on shooting, and I sort of

remember that you have done some yachting too, though I rather forget

about that. This part of the Baltic—the Schleswig fiords—is a splendid

cruising-ground—A1 scenery—and there ought to be plenty of duck about

soon, if it gets cold enough. I came out here _via_ Holland and the

Frisian Islands, starting early in August. My pals have had to leave

me, and I’m badly in want of another, as I don’t want to lay up yet for

a bit. I needn’t say how glad I should be if you could come. If you

can, send me a wire to the P.O. here. Flushing and on by Hamburg will

be your best route, I think. I’m having a few repairs done here, and

will have them ready sharp by the time your train arrives. Bring your

gun and a good lot of No. 4’s; and would you mind calling at

Lancaster’s and asking for mine, and bringing it too? Bring some

oilskins. Better get the eleven-shilling sort, jacket and trousers—not

the “yachting” brand; and if you paint bring your gear. I know you

speak German like a native, and that will be a great help. Forgive this

hail of directions, but I’ve a sort of feeling that I’m in luck and

that you’ll come. Anyway, I hope you and the F.O. both flourish.

Good-bye.

Yours ever,

_Arthur H. Davies_.

Would you mind bringing me out a _prismatic compass_, and a pound of

Raven mixture?

This letter marked an epoch for me; but I little suspected the fact as

I crumpled it into my pocket and started languidly on the _voie

douloureuse_ which I nightly followed to the club. In Pall Mall there

were no dignified greetings to be exchanged now with well-groomed

acquaintances. The only people to be seen were some late stragglers

from the park, with a perambulator and some hot and dusty children

lagging fretfully behind; some rustic sightseers draining the last

dregs of the daylight in an effort to make out from their guide-books

which of these reverend piles was which; a policeman and a builder’s

cart. Of course the club was a strange one, both of my own being closed

for cleaning, a coincidence expressly planned by Providence for my

inconvenience. The club which you are “permitted to make use of” on

these occasions always irritates with its strangeness and discomfort.

The few occupants seem odd and oddly dressed, and you wonder how they

got there. The particular weekly that you want is not taken in; the

dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils

oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere

within me there was a faint lightening of the spirits; causeless, as

far as I could discover. It could not be Davies’s letter. Yachting in

the Baltic at the end of September! The very idea made one shudder.

Cowes, with a pleasant party and hotels handy, was all very well. An

August cruise on a steam yacht in French waters or the Highlands was

all very well; but what kind of a yacht was this? It must be of a

certain size to have got so far, but I thought I remembered enough of

Davies’s means to know that he had no money to waste on luxuries. That

brought me to the man himself. I had known him at Oxford—not as one of

my immediate set; but we were a sociable college, and I had seen a good

deal of him, liking him for his physical energy combined with a certain

simplicity and modesty, though, indeed, he had nothing to be conceited

about; liked him, in fact, in the way that at that receptive period one

likes many men whom one never keeps up with later. We had both gone

down in the same year—three years ago now. I had gone to France and

Germany for two years to learn the languages; he had failed for the

Indian Civil, and then had gone into a solicitor’s office. I had only

seen him since at rare intervals, though I admitted to myself that for

his part he had clung loyally to what ties of friendship there were

between us. But the truth was that we had drifted apart from the nature

of things. I had passed brilliantly into my profession, and on the few

occasions I had met him since I made my triumphant _début_ in society I

had found nothing left in common between us. He seemed to know none of

my friends, he dressed indifferently, and I thought him dull. I had

always connected him with boats and the sea, but never with yachting,

in the sense that I understood it. In college days he had nearly

persuaded me into sharing a squalid week in some open boat he had

picked up, and was going to sail among some dreary mudflats somewhere

on the east coast. There was nothing else, and the funereal function of

dinner drifted on. But I found myself remembering at the _entrée_ that

I had recently heard, at second or third hand, of something else about

him—exactly what I could not recall. When I reached the savoury, I had

concluded, so far as I had centred my mind on it at all, that the whole

thing was a culminating irony, as, indeed, was the savoury in its way.

After the wreck of my pleasant plans and the fiasco of my martyrdom, to

be asked as consolation to spend October freezing in the Baltic with an

eccentric nonentity who bored me! Yet, as I smoked my cigar in the

ghastly splendour of the empty smoking-room, the subject came up again.

Was there anything in it? There were certainly no alternatives at hand.

And to bury myself in the Baltic at this unearthly time of year had at

least a smack of tragic thoroughness about it.

I pulled out the letter again, and ran down its impulsive staccato

sentences, affecting to ignore what a gust of fresh air, high spirits,

and good fellowship this flimsy bit of paper wafted into the jaded

club-room. On reperusal, it was full of evil presage—“A1 scenery”—but

what of equinoctial storms and October fogs? Every sane yachtsman was

paying off his crew now. “There ought to be duck”—vague, very vague.

“If it gets cold enough”—cold and yachting seemed to be a gratuitously

monstrous union. His pals had left him; why? “Not the ‘yachting’

brand”; and why not? As to the size, comfort, and crew of the yacht—all

cheerfully ignored; so many maddening blanks. And, by the way, why in

Heaven’s name “a prismatic compass”? I fingered a few magazines, played

a game of fifty with a friendly old fogey, too importunate to be worth

the labour of resisting, and went back to my chambers to bed, ignorant

that a friendly Providence had come to my rescue; and, indeed, rather

resenting any clumsy attempt at such friendliness.