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NLP Research Group 9

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

repassed

How many times the word 'repassed' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

beauty

How many times the word 'beauty' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

notice

How many times the word 'notice' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

kind

How many times the word 'kind' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

glimpses

How many times the word 'glimpses' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

advantages

How many times the word 'advantages' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

sooner

How many times the word 'sooner' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

bowing

How many times the word 'bowing' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

used

How many times the word 'used' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

parenthetically

How many times the word 'parenthetically' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

floating

How many times the word 'floating' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

kookaburras

How many times the word 'kookaburras' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

lakes

How many times the word 'lakes' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

satellites

How many times the word 'satellites' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

otherwise

How many times the word 'otherwise' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

slipped

How many times the word 'slipped' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

frusk

How many times the word 'frusk' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

held

How many times the word 'held' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

looking

How many times the word 'looking' appears in the text?

with the removal of her habit. "You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. "You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that's different from being rich in New York." She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it twice as quick myself." Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?" Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot. "Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!" The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries. The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie.... "Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: "The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?" At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference! When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen... There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat here nearly an hour." Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him I was out?" "Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me." "Asked for YOU?" The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?" "Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?" "I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie." This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table. "Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You never CAN," she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow "frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east." Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her "east" the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it, didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term... Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the "belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box... She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. "Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. "It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!" she exulted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so? They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends." Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. "Abner--can you really manage it all right?" He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can." A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. "You seen Elmer again?" "No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's. "Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!" "No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?" Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the same?" she whispered. "No. Spruced up. That's what scared me." It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off," she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night." V She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre. It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding --with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants, which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. "No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme. "Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. "Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. "What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is that his sister he's with?" "No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth. "Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?" "Yes--but the other people are not beckoning." Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. "NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO ASK QUESTIONS." The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold... The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. "Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here, do you? I say, that's first rate!" Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to

course

How many times the word 'course' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

woods

How many times the word 'woods' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

hatch

How many times the word 'hatch' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

humanity

How many times the word 'humanity' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

do

How many times the word 'do' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

uttered

How many times the word 'uttered' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

emphatically

How many times the word 'emphatically' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

shot

How many times the word 'shot' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

their

How many times the word 'their' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

trap,--as

How many times the word 'trap,--as' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

revolved

How many times the word 'revolved' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

have

How many times the word 'have' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

shandygaff

How many times the word 'shandygaff' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

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with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

myself

How many times the word 'myself' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

called

How many times the word 'called' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

seen

How many times the word 'seen' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

done

How many times the word 'done' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

worse

How many times the word 'worse' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

athirst

How many times the word 'athirst' appears in the text?

with things his mind could not contrive to reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite." "He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk." "Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket. "Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a bitter." "Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you." Pause and struggle. "Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right O." And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts. IV Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his, the "Joy de Vive." There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour waters. "Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular. "Don't mention it," said Platt. And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory. There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does. It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees. The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar. There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug. The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth! "Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!" The going in! The sitting down! The falling to! "Bread, O' Man?" "Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man." Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations. If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?... And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea. Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _d filements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness. "Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe. It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory. V Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the r le of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man." He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands." "I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd never hear him coming." "The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did. It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose." Chapter the Second The Dismissal of Parsons I Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say, "there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window." And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_. Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories. "The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason. Grip!" His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?" Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!" "He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some more of it." "Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!" "Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly. "Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets." "Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. "A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you say: El-_lo_! when you see it." He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. "Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly. "We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!" And as a matter of fact he did both. His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O' Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over now." "Over," gulped Polly. "Over for good and all, O' Man." II Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing his Blooming Window." "What window?" "What he said." Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons' unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black letters: "LOOK!" So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the boards at the back?" said Platt. He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department. Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished. Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside? He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. "Where are you going?" asked Mansfield. "Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him to get any meaning he could from it. Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in. Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. It was wonderful, but-- Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly. "Allittritions Artful Aid." He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well with the establishment he guided. Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed the left eyelid. An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_. "Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of the street. "What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?" began Mr. Garvace. Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his employer. Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. "Dressing it, Sir--on new lines." "Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace. Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command. Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly. Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!" Morrison appeared. "Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly." Morrison advanced and hesitated. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness, "but this is _my_ window." "Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away. Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested Mr. Garvace. "Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want to play the fool with a window----" "This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and there was a little pause. "Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison. "You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons. Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. "Get him out," said Mr. Garvace. Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with its coat off, shying things headlong. Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the window." Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted expletive. Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy breathing. Parsons was overpowered.... Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison. "You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath. III There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors. Life was not altogether a lark. The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you on the 'Ed and----" In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O' Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window." Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box. Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence. Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of." He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said. "No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here." He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied; "with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man. Humble Pie." Packing went on for a time. "But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake." "Heated altaclation," said Polly. "Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising wind. He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons. "You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly. Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. "Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the book. His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition," but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations. "You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate. "I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of aspirates for the moment. "You don't mean 'E ketches cholera." "I mean--he's easily put out." "Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate. Parsons was bound over. He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss. A minute or so after Platt dashed in. "Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him. "He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to a chap." There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. "Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me." Chapter the Third Cribs I Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul's Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons

memory

How many times the word 'memory' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

into

How many times the word 'into' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

your

How many times the word 'your' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

else

How many times the word 'else' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

task

How many times the word 'task' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

signify

How many times the word 'signify' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

blame

How many times the word 'blame' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

gave

How many times the word 'gave' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

perhaps

How many times the word 'perhaps' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

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within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

come

How many times the word 'come' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

fell

How many times the word 'fell' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

comes

How many times the word 'comes' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

each

How many times the word 'each' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

lover

How many times the word 'lover' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

dungeon,--john

How many times the word 'dungeon,--john' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

middle

How many times the word 'middle' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

want

How many times the word 'want' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

be

How many times the word 'be' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

making

How many times the word 'making' appears in the text?

within one hour of the time when I gave my word I regretted it as I have never regretted anything else in all my life. I resolved that, while I should, according to my promise, help the Scottish queen escape, I would not go with her. I resolved to wait here at Haddon to tell all to you and to our queen, and then I would patiently take my just punishment from each. My doom from the queen, I believed, would probably be death; but I feared more your--God help me! It is useless for me to speak." Here I broke down and fell upon my knees, crying, "Madge, Madge, pity me, pity me! Forgive me if you can, and, if our queen decrees it, I shall die happy." In my desperation I caught the girl's hand, but she drew it quickly from me, and said:-- "Do not touch me!" She arose to her feet, and groped her way to her bedroom. We were in Aunt Dorothy's room. I watched Madge as she sought with her outstretched hand the doorway; and when she passed slowly through it, the sun of my life seemed to turn black. Just as Madge passed from the room, Sir William St. Loe, with two yeomen, entered by Sir George's door and placed irons upon my wrist and ankles. I was led by Sir William to the dungeon, and no word was spoken by either of us. I had never in my life feared death, and now I felt that I would welcome it. When a man is convinced that his life is useless, through the dire disaster that he is a fool, he values it little, and is even more than willing to lose it. Then there were three of us in the dungeon,--John, Lord Rutland, and myself; and we were all there because we had meddled in the affairs of others, and because Dorothy had inherited from Eve a capacity for insane, unreasoning jealousy. Lord Rutland was sitting on the ground in a corner of the dungeon. John, by the help of a projecting stone in the masonry, had climbed to the small grated opening which served to admit a few straggling rays of light into the dungeon's gloom. He was gazing out upon the fair day, whose beauty he feared would soon fade away from him forever. Elizabeth's coldness had given him no hope. It had taken all hope from his father. The opening of the door attracted John's attention, and he turned his face toward me when I entered. He had been looking toward the light, and his eyes, unaccustomed for the moment to the darkness, failed at first to recognize of me. When the dungeon door had closed behind me, he sprang down from his perch by the window, and came toward me with outstretched hands. He said sorrowfully:-- "Malcolm, have I brought you here, too? Why are you in irons? It seems that I am destined to bring calamity upon all whom I love." "It is a long story," I replied laughingly. "I will tell it to you when the time begins to drag; but I tell you now it is through no fault of yours that I am here. No one is to blame for my misfortune but myself." Then I continued bitterly, "Unless it be the good God who created me a fool." John went to his father's side and said:-- "Sir Malcolm is here, father. Will you not rise and greet him?" John's voice aroused his father, and the old lord came to the little patch of light in which I was standing and said: "A terrible evil has fallen upon us, Sir Malcolm, and without our fault. I grieve to learn that you also are entangled in the web. The future looks very dark." "Cheer up, father," said John, taking the old man's hand. "Light will soon come; I am sure it will." "I have tried all my life to be a just man," said Lord Rutland. "I have failed at times, I fear, but I have tried. That is all any man can do. I pray that God in His mercy will soon send light to you, John, whatever of darkness there may be in store for me." I thought, "He will surely answer this just man's prayer," and almost before the thought was completed the dungeon door turned upon its hinges and a great light came with glorious refulgence through the open portal--Dorothy. "John!" Never before did one word express so much of mingled joy and grief. Fear and confidence, and, greater than all, love unutterable were blended in its eloquent tones. She sprang to John as the lightning leaps from cloud to cloud, and he caught her to his heart. He gently kissed her hair, her face being hidden in the folds of his doublet. "Let me kneel, John, let me kneel," she murmured. "No, Dorothy, no," he responded, holding her closely in his arms. "But one moment, John," she pleased. "No, no; let me see your eyes, sweet one," said John, trying to turn her face upward toward his own. "I cannot yet, John, I cannot. Please let me kneel for one little moment at your feet." John saw that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into his face. "Oh, forgive me, John! Forgive me! Not that I deserve your forgiveness, but because you pity me." "I forgave you long ago, Dorothy. You had my full forgiveness before you asked it." He lifted the weeping girl to her feet and the two clung together in silence. After a pause Dorothy spoke:-- "You have not asked me, John, why I betrayed you." "I want to know nothing, Dorothy, save that you love me." "That you already know. But you cannot know how much I love you. I myself don't know. John, I seem to have turned all to love. 'However much there is of me, that much there is of love for you. As the salt is in every drop of the sea, so love is in every part of my being; but John," she continued, drooping her head and speaking regretfully, "the salt in the sea is not unmixed with many things hurtful." Her face blushed with shame and she continued limpingly: "And my love is not--is not without evil. Oh, John, I feel deep shame in telling you, but my love is terribly jealous. At times a jealousy comes over me so fierce and so distracting that under its influence I am mad, John, mad. I then see nothing in its true light; my eyes seem filled with--with blood, and all things appear red or black and--and--oh! John, I pray you never again cause me jealousy. It makes a demon of me." You may well know that John was nonplussed. "I cause you jealousy?" he asked in surprise. "When did I--" But Dorothy interrupted him, her eyes flashing darkly and a note of fierceness in her voice. He saw for himself the effects of jealousy upon her. "That white--white Scottish wanton! God's curse be upon her! She tried to steal you from me." "Perhaps she did," replied John, smilingly, "of that I do not know. But this I do know, and you, Dorothy, must know it too henceforth and for all time to come. No woman can steal my love from you. Since I gave you my troth I have been true to you; I have not been false even in one little thought." "I feel sure, John, that you have not been untrue to me," said the girl with a faint smile playing about her lips; "but--but you remember the strange woman at Bowling Green Gate whom you would have--" "Dorothy, I hope you have not come to my dungeon for the purpose of making me more wretched than I already am?" "No, no, John, forgive me," she cried softly; "but John, I hate her, I hate her! and I want you to promise that you too will hate her." "I promise," said John, "though, you have had no cause for jealousy of Queen Mary." "Perhaps--not," she replied hesitatingly. "I have never thought," the girl continued poutingly, "that you did anything of which I should be jealous; but she--she--oh, I hate her! Let us not talk about her. Jennie Faxton told me--I will talk about her, and you shall not stop me--Jennie Faxton told me that the white woman made love to you and caused you to put your arm about her waist one evening on the battlements and-" "Jennie told you a lie," said John. "Now don't interrupt me," the girl cried nervously, almost ready for tears, "and I will try to tell you all. Jennie told me the--the white woman looked up to you this fashion," and the languishing look she gave John in imitation of Queen Mary was so beautiful and comical that he could do nothing but laugh and cover her face with kisses, then laugh again and love the girl more deeply and yet more deeply with each new breath he drew. Dorothy was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or to cry, so she did both. "Jennie told me in the middle of the night," continued Dorothy, "when all things seem so vivid and appear so distorted and--and that terrible blinding jealousy of which I told you came upon me and drove me mad. I really thought, John, that I should die of the agony. Oh, John, if you could know the anguish I suffered that night you would pity me; you would not blame me." "I do not blame you, Dorothy." "No, no, there-" she kissed him softly, and quickly continued: "I felt that I must separate her from you at all cost. I would have done murder to accomplish my purpose. Some demon whispered to me, 'Tell Queen Elizabeth,' and--and oh, John, let me kneel again." "No, no, Dorothy, let us talk of something else," said John, soothingly. "In one moment, John. I thought only of the evil that would come to her--her of Scotland. I did not think of the trouble I would bring to you, John, until the queen, after asking me if you were my lover, said angrily: 'You may soon seek another.' Then, John, I knew that I had also brought evil upon you. Then I _did_ suffer. I tried to reach Rutland, and you know all else that happened on that terrible night. Now John, you know all--all. I have withheld nothing. I have, confessed all, and I feel that a great weight is taken from my heart. You will not hate me, will you, John?" He caught the girl to his breast and tried to turn her face toward his. "I could not hate you if I would," he replied, with quick-coming breath, "and God knows I would not. To love you is the sweetest joy in life," and he softly kissed the great lustrous eyes till they closed as if in sleep. Then he fiercely sought the rich red lips, waiting soft and passive for his caresses, while the fair head fell back upon the bend of his elbow in a languorous, half-conscious sweet surrender to his will. Lord Rutland and I had turned our backs on the shameless pair, and were busily discussing the prospect for the coming season's crops. Remember, please, that Dorothy spoke to John of Jennie Faxton. Her doing so soon bore bitter fruit for me. Dorothy had been too busy with John to notice any one else, but he soon presented her to his father. After the old lord had gallantly kissed her hand, she turned scornfully to me and said:-- "So you fell a victim to her wanton wiles? If it were not for Madge's sake, I could wish you might hang." "You need not balk your kindly desire for Madge's sake," I answered. "She cares little about my fate. I fear she will never forgive me." "One cannot tell what a woman will do," Dorothy replied. "She is apt to make a great fool of herself when it comes to forgiving the man she loves." "Men at times have something to forgive," I retorted, looking with a smile toward John. The girl made no reply, but took John's hand and looked at him as if to say, "John, please don't let this horrid man abuse me." "But Madge no longer cares for me," I continued, wishing to talk upon the theme, "and your words do not apply to her." The girl turned her back disdainfully on me and said, "You seem to be quite as easily duped by the woman who loves you and says she doesn't as by the one who does not care for you but says she does." "Damn that girl's tongue!" thought I; but her words, though biting, carried joy to my heart and light to my soul. After exchanging a few words with Lord Rutland, Dorothy turned to John and said:-- "Tell me upon your knightly honor, John, do you know aught of a wicked, treasonable plot to put the Scottish woman on the English throne?" I quickly placed my finger on my lips and touched my ear to indicate that their words would be overheard; for a listening-tube connected the dungeon with Sir George's closet. "Before the holy God, upon my knighthood, by the sacred love we bear each other, I swear I know of no such plot," answered John. "I would be the first to tell our good queen did I suspect its existence." Dorothy and John continued talking upon the subject of the plot, but were soon interrupted by a warning knock upon the dungeon door. Lord Rutland, whose heart was like twenty-two carat gold, soft, pure, and precious, kissed Dorothy's hand when she was about to leave, and said: "Dear lady, grieve not for our sake. I can easily see that more pain has come to you than to us. I thank you for the great fearless love you bear my son. It has brought him trouble, but it is worth its cost. You have my forgiveness freely, and I pray God's choicest benediction may be with you." She kissed the old lord and said, "I hope some day to make you love me." "That will be an easy task," said his Lordship, gallantly. Dorothy was about to leave. Just at the doorway she remembered the chief purpose of her visit; so she ran back to John, put her hand over his mouth to insure silence, and whispered in his ear. On hearing Dorothy's whispered words, signs of joy were so apparent in John's face that they could not be mistaken. He said nothing, but kissed her hand and she hurriedly left the dungeon. After the dungeon door closed upon Dorothy, John went to his father and whispered a few words to him. Then he came to me, and in the same secretive manner said:-- "The queen has promised Dorothy our liberty." I was not at all sure that "our liberty" included me,--I greatly doubted it,--but I was glad for the sake of my friends, and, in truth, cared little for myself. Dorothy went from our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on the subject. Dorothy did not know the hour when her lover would leave Haddon; but she sat patiently at her window till at last John and Lord Rutland appeared. She called to Madge, telling her of the joyous event, and Madge, asked:-- "Is Malcolm with them?" "No," replied Dorothy, "he has been left in the dungeon, where he deserves to remain." After a short pause, Madge said:-- "If John had acted toward the Scottish queen as Malcolm did, would you forgive him?" "Yes, of course. I would forgive him anything." "Then why shall we not forgive Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Because he is not John," was the absurd reply. "No," said Madge, promptly; "but he is 'John' to me." "That is true," responded Dorothy, "and I will forgive him if you will." "I don't believe it makes much difference to Malcolm whether or not you forgive him," said Madge, who was provoked at Dorothy's condescending offer. "My forgiveness, I hope, is what he desires." "That is true, Madge," replied Dorothy, laughingly; "but may not I, also, forgive him?" "If you choose," responded Madge, quietly; "as for me, I know not what I wish to do." You remember that Dorothy during her visit to the dungeon spoke of Jennie Faxton. The girl's name reached Sir George's ear through the listening-tube and she was at once brought in and put to the question. Jennie, contrary to her wont, became frightened and told all she knew concerning John and Dorothy, including my part in their affairs. In Sir George's mind, my bad faith to him was a greater crime than my treason to Elizabeth, and he at once went to the queen with his tale of woe. Elizabeth, the most sentimental of women, had heard from Dorothy the story of her tempestuous love, and also of mine, and the queen was greatly interested in the situation. I will try to be brief. Through the influence of Dorothy and Madge, as I afterward learned, and by the help of a good word from Cecil, the queen was induced to order my liberation on condition that I should thenceforth reside in France. So one morning, three days after John's departure from Haddon, I was overjoyed to hear the words, "You are free." I did not know that Jennie Faxton had given Sir George her large stock of disturbing information concerning my connection with the affairs of Dorothy and John. So when I left the dungeon, I, supposing that my stormy cousin would be glad to forgive me if Queen Elizabeth would, sought and found him in Aunt Dorothy's room. Lady Crawford and Sir George were sitting near the fire and Madge was standing near the door in the next room beyond. When I entered, Sir George sprang to his feet and cried out angrily:-- "You traitorous dog, the queen has seen fit to liberate you, and I cannot interfere with her orders; but if you do not leave my Hall at once I shall set the hounds on you. Your effects will be sent to The Peacock, and the sooner you quit England the safer you will be." There was of course nothing for me to do but to go. "You once told me, Sir George--you remember our interview at The Peacock--that if you should ever again order me to leave Haddon, I should tell you to go to the devil. I now take advantage of your kind permission, and will also say farewell." I kissed Aunt Dorothy's cheek, took my leave, and sought Cecil, from whom I obtained a passport to France. Then I asked Dawson to fetch my horse. I longed to see Madge before I left Haddon, but I knew that my desire could not be gratified; so I determined to stop at Rowsley and send back a letter to her which Dawson undertook to deliver. In my letter I would ask Madge's permission to return for her from France and to take her home with me as my wife. After I had despatched my letter I would wait at The Peacock for an answer. Sore at heart, I bade good-by to Dawson, mounted my horse, and turned his head toward the Dove-cote Gate. As I rode under Dorothy's window she was sitting there. The casement was open, for the day was mild, although the season was little past midwinter. I heard her call to Madge, and then she called to me:-- "Farewell, Malcolm! Forgive me for what I said to you in the dungeon. I was wrong, as usual. Forgive me, and God bless you. Farewell!" While Dorothy was speaking, and before I replied, Madge came to the open casement and called:-- "Wait for me, Malcolm, I am going down to you." Great joy is a wonderful purifier, and Madge's cry finished the work of the past few months and made a good man of me, who all my life before had known little else than evil. Soon Madge's horse was led by a groom to the mounting block, and in a few minutes she emerged gropingly from the great door of Entrance Tower. Dorothy was again a prisoner in her rooms and could not come down to bid me farewell. Madge mounted, and the groom led her horse to me and placed the reins in my hands. "Is it you, Malcolm?" asked Madge. "Yes," I responded, in a voice husky with emotion. "I cannot thank you enough for coming to say farewell. You have forgiven me?" "Yes," responded Madge, almost in tears, "but I have not come to say farewell." I did not understand her meaning. "Are you going to ride part of the way with me--perhaps to Rowsley?" I asked, hardly daring to hope for so much. "To France, Malcolm, if you wish to take me," she responded murmuringly. For a little time I could not feel the happiness that had come upon me in so great a flood. But when I had collected my scattered senses, I said:-- "I thank God that He has turned your heart again to me. May I feel His righteous anger if ever I give you cause to regret the step you are taking." "I shall never regret it, Malcolm," she answered softly, as she held out her hand to me. Then we rode by the dove-cote, out from Haddon Hall, never to see its walls again. We went to Rutland, whence after a fortnight we journeyed to France. There I received my mother's estates, and never for one moment, to my knowledge, has Madge regretted having intrusted her life and happiness to me. I need not speak for myself. Our home is among the warm, sunlit, vine-covered hills of southern France, and we care not for the joys of golden streets so long as God in His goodness vouchsafes to us our earthly paradise. Age, with the heart at peace, is the fairest season of life; and love, leavened of God, robs even approaching death of his sting and makes for us a broad flower-strewn path from the tempestuous sea of time to the calm, sweet ocean of eternity. CHAPTER XVI LEICESTER WAITS AT THE STILE I shall now tell you of the happenings in Haddon Hall during the fortnight we spent at Rutland before our departure for France. We left Dorothy, you will remember, a prisoner in her rooms. After John had gone Sir George's wrath began to gather, and Dorothy was not permitted to depart from the Hall for even a walk upon the terrace, nor could she leave her own apartments save when the queen requested her presence. A few days after my departure from Haddon, Sir George sent Dawson out through the adjoining country to invite the nobility and gentry to a grand ball to be given at the Hall in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been sent a prisoner to Chatsworth. Tom Shaw, the most famous piper of his times, and a choice company of musicians to play with him were hired for the occasion, and, in short, the event was so glorious that its wonders have been sung in minstrelsy throughout Derbyshire ever since. Dorothy's imprisonment saddened Leicester's heart, and he longed to see her, for her beauty had touched him nearly. Accordingly, the earl one day intimated to Sir George his wish in terms that almost bespoke an intention to ask for the girl's hand when upon proper opportunity the queen's consent might be sought and perchance obtained. His equivocal words did not induce Sir George to grant a meeting by which Dorothy might be compromised; but a robust hope for the ultimate accomplishment of the "Leicester possibility" was aroused in the breast of the King of the Peak, and from hope he could, and soon did, easily step to faith. He saw that the earl was a handsome man, and he believed, at least he hoped, that the fascinating lord might, if he were given an opportunity, woo Dorothy's heart away from the hated scion of a hated race. Sir George, therefore, after several interviews with the earl, grew anxious to give his Lordship an opportunity to win her. But both Sir George and my lord feared Elizabeth's displeasure, and the meeting between Leicester and the girl seemed difficult to contrive. Sir George felt confident that Dorothy could, if she would, easily capture the great lord in a few private interviews; but would she? Dorothy gave her father no encouragement in the matter, and took pains to shun Leicester rather than to seek him. As Dorothy grew unwilling, Leicester and Sir George grew eager, until at length the latter felt that it was almost time to exert his parental authority. He told Aunt Dorothy his feeling on the subject, and she told her niece. It was impossible to know from what source Dorothy might draw inspiration for mischief. It came to her with her father's half-command regarding Leicester. Winter had again asserted itself. The weather was bitter cold and snow covered the ground to the depth of a horse's fetlock. The eventful night of the grand ball arrived, and Dorothy's heart throbbed till she thought surely it would burst. At nightfall guests began to arrive, and Sir George, hospitable soul that he was, grew boisterous with good humor and delight. The rare old battlements of Haddon were ablaze with flambeaux, and inside the rooms were alight with waxen tapers. The long gallery was brilliant with the smiles of bejewelled beauty, and laughter, song, and merriment filled the grand old Hall from terrace to Entrance Tower. Dorothy, of course, was brought down from her prison to grace the occasion with a beauty which none could rival. Her garments were of soft, clinging, bright-colored silks and snowy laces, and all who saw her agreed that a creature more radiant never greeted the eye of man. When the guests had all arrived, the pipers in the balcony burst forth in heart-swelling strains of music, and every foot in the room longed for the dance to begin. I should like to tell you how Elizabeth most graciously opened the ball with his Majesty, the King of the Peak, amid the plaudits of worshipping subjects, and I should enjoy describing the riotous glory which followed,--for although I was not there, I know intimately all that happened,--but I will balk my desire and tell you only of those things which touched Dorothy. Leicester, of course, danced with her, and during a pause in the figure, the girl in response to pleadings which she had adroitly incited, reluctantly promised to grant the earl the private interview he so much desired if he could suggest some means for bringing it about. Leicester was in raptures over her complaisance and glowed with triumph and delightful anticipation. But he could think of no satisfactory plan whereby his hopes might be brought to a happy fruition. He proposed several, but all seemed impracticable to the coy girl, and she rejected them. After many futile attempts he said:-- "I can suggest no good plan, mistress. I pray you, gracious lady, therefore, make full to overflowing the measure of your generosity, and tell me how it may be accomplished." Dorothy hung her head as if in great shame and said: "I fear, my lord, we had better abandon the project for a time. Upon another occasion perhaps--" "No, no," interrupted the earl, pleadingly, "do not so grievously disappoint me. My heart yearns to have you to myself for one little moment where spying eyes cannot see nor prying ears hear. It is cruel in you to raise my hopes only to cast them down. I beg you, tell me if you know in what manner I may meet you privately." After a long pause, Dorothy with downcast eyes said, "I am full of shame, my lord, to consent to this meeting, and then find the way to it, but--but--" ("Yes, yes, my Venus, my gracious one," interrupted the earl)--"but if my father would permit me to--to leave the Hall for a few minutes, I might--oh, it is impossible, my lord. I must not think of it." "I pray you, I beg you," pleaded Leicester. "Tell me, at least, what you might do if your father would permit you to leave the Hall. I would gladly fall to my knees, were it not for the assembled company." With reluctance in her manner and gladness in her heart, the girl said:-- "If my father would permit me to leave the Hall, I might--only for a moment, meet you at the stile, in the northeast corner of the garden back of the terrace half an hour hence. But he would not permit me, and--and, my lord, I ought not to go even should father consent." "I will ask your father's permission for you. I will seek him at once," said the eager earl. "No, no, my lord, I pray you, do not," murmured Dorothy, with distracting little troubled wrinkles in her forehead. Her trouble was more for fear lest he would not than for dread that he would. "I will, I will," cried his Lordship, softly; "I insist, and you shall not gainsay me."

bank

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without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

slant

How many times the word 'slant' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

believe

How many times the word 'believe' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

please

How many times the word 'please' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

where

How many times the word 'where' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

might

How many times the word 'might' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

attended

How many times the word 'attended' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

engineer

How many times the word 'engineer' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

between

How many times the word 'between' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

grossly

How many times the word 'grossly' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

pianos

How many times the word 'pianos' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

hope

How many times the word 'hope' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

expressionless

How many times the word 'expressionless' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

is

How many times the word 'is' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

salvation

How many times the word 'salvation' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

begging

How many times the word 'begging' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

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without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

nod

How many times the word 'nod' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

sympathies

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without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

sobs

How many times the word 'sobs' appears in the text?

without a glance at them and at the boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head. 'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his own devices. 'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then, worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air-- '"He says he thought nothing." 'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence. 'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve. '"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!" 'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time. '"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ." 'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. '"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know." 'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk." 'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.' CHAPTER 9 '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim. '"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there--look!" 'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge, would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die. '"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air." 'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear-- '"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for you from these boats." 'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer." 'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually, mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole breadth of the ship. 'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention. The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?" 'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. 'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring. 'He roused himself. '"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." 'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain. 'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained. '"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court. '"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself! Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!" 'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down. '"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured. '"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been." 'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes! Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he had not even heard the twang of the bow. 'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I stumbled over his legs." 'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse. '"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!" 'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up, slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me. . . ." 'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out-- '"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It seems," he added. 'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster. '"Looks like it," I muttered. '"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."' CHAPTER 10 'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me to see

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without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

love

How many times the word 'love' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

penelope

How many times the word 'penelope' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

pigtail

How many times the word 'pigtail' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

window

How many times the word 'window' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

fingers

How many times the word 'fingers' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

sterne

How many times the word 'sterne' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

pal

How many times the word 'pal' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

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without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

go

How many times the word 'go' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

talked

How many times the word 'talked' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

vanished

How many times the word 'vanished' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

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without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

touched

How many times the word 'touched' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

morning

How many times the word 'morning' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

slipped

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without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

wrong

How many times the word 'wrong' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

healing

How many times the word 'healing' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

ma'am

How many times the word 'ma'am' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

graver

How many times the word 'graver' appears in the text?

without any signs of fear or retreat, "I ought to get back over the wall." "It needn't matter to you," he said. "I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to." His breath caught against something. "No harm in telling you that," he said. "I should have to go back if I thought you were serious," she said after a pause, and they both smiled together. After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone. Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. "Knight!" she cried from the other side of the wall. "Knight there!" "Lady!" he answered. "Come again to-morrow!" "At your command. But----" "Yes?" "Just one finger." "What do you mean?" "To kiss." The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence.... But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall--and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval. VII From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. "He don't seem," said Johnson, "to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out." The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age. And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream.... And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall. "Look here," said Mr. Polly, "I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulations game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard." "Shut up!" said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. "I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got." "But you haven't got much money!" "I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say--I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do----" Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him. "Don't!" she said in an undertone. "Don't--what?" "Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his--what did you call it?" The ghost of a smile curved her face. "Gurdrum!" "But----!" Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening. A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself. "Shut _up_, Rosie!" said a voice. "I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!" "You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything." The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint. "You've got someone--" he said aghast. She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. "You filthy little Beasts!" she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation. For a couple of seconds he stood agape. Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall. Romance and his goddess had vanished. A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: "Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!" "You idiot!" cried Christabel. "You giggling Idiot!" Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery. Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together. "Fool," he said at last; "you Blithering Fool!" and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises. Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood--which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions. Chapter the Sixth Miriam I It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited. He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his brain. "Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!" "Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly. "None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort, is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?" "Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly. "Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me against a wall." Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in." She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the _Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery, and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again. "You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins. "Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly. "No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a 'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_ men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!" Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and her face brightened. "Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?" "Looking round," said Mr. Polly. "Found a shop?" "One or two likely ones. But it takes time." "You've got the wrong cups, Mother." She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked, and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is." He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. "You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea. "Meditatious," said Mr. Polly. Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered his touch. "Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence friendly. Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work. Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up as he talked. "Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic. "When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for a cat, you know." "What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins. "No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary singing and--Mrs. Polly...." "Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins. "Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--" "But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins. "Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments. Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house." "Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam. "Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly. "You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously. "Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_" He straightened himself up and then they all laughed. "Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the counter. All right." "I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam. "Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly. "Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...." When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away. "I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat 'ere--not with no yard." "Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!" "I'm fond of them," said Minnie. "I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself fond." "I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop." "I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust me. Canary bird and all." She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never mean anything you say." "Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. "Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert. "Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it. He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so escaped. He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front door. He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside. Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?" "What for?" "To go and meet Annie." Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?" "If I may," said Mr. Polly. "You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!" Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed. "There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said. Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's why I said Little Dog. All right now." He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. "You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie. "Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop is opened." He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he said. II When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the house sometimes.... "You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam. "I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master." "That wasn't all talk?" "Not a bit of it." "After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad." "It's a 'ome," said Miriam. "It's a home." Pause. "There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't interfered with." "I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd keep everything tremendously neat." The conversation flagged. "Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where we can see those blue flowers." They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the Recreation Ground. "I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like them. They're handsome." "Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the park at Port Burdock. "Floriferous corner," he added approvingly. He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly's mind. Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she said with a note of unusual softness in her voice. It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were, that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. "A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully. "_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said. His sense of effect made him pause. "If I had the right company," he added. She became very still. Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which he had embarked. "I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I shall do all right." He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that followed. "If you get the right company," said Miriam. "I shall get that all right." "You don't mean you've got someone--" He found himself plunging. "I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said. "Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--" Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said. "Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still. He took the conclusive step. "Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just suppose it!" "You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?" What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!" Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm. They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. "I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Minnie--" "Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly. "I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You didn't seem to mean anything you said. "I _can't_ believe it!" she added. "Nor I," said Mr. Polly. "You mean to marry me and start that little shop--" "Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly. "I had no more idea when I came out with you--" "Nor me!" "It's like a dream." They said no more for a little while. "I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--" For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. "Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I can't imagine." "They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his guns. A clock in the town began striking. "Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and love-making!" She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and evaded her movement. Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. "Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said. "Only mother," said Miriam firmly. III Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black--looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 _ex. div._) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2--78 1/2. It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! So, too, Mr. Polly's happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: "298" instead of the "350" he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence. It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist. "Going down a vortex!" he whispered. By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds. "Funererial baked meats," he said, recalling possible items. The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to. He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson. "It's about time, O' Man, I saw about doing something," he said. "Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O' Man, but it's time I took one for keeps." "What did I tell you?" said Johnson. "How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?" Mr. Polly asked. "You're really meaning it?" "If it's a practable proposition, O' Man. Assuming it's practable. What's your idea of the figures?" Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. "Let's figure it out," he said with solemn satisfaction. "Let's see the lowest you could do it on." He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. "What running expenses have we got to provide for?" said Johnson, wetting his pencil. "Let's have them first. Rent?..." At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: "It's close. But you'll have a chance." "M'm," said Mr. Polly. "What more does a brave man want?" "One thing you can do quite easily. I've asked about it." "What's that, O' Man?" said Mr. Polly. "Take the shop without the house above it." "I suppose I might put my head in to mind it," said Mr. Polly, "and get a job with my body." "Not exactly that. But I thought you'd save a lot if you stayed on here--being all alone as you are." "Never thought of that, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. "We were talking of eighty pounds for stock," said Johnson. "Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn't it? Not much else we can cut." "No," said Mr. Polly. "It's very interesting, all this," said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. "I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You'll have to keep books of course." "One wants to know where one is." "I should do it all by double entry," said Johnson. "A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end." "Lemme see that paper," said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin's neat figures with listless eyes. "Well," said Johnson, rising and stretching. "Bed! Better sleep on it, O' Man." "Right O," said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner's backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at

marvelled

How many times the word 'marvelled' appears in the text?