_ 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. _