XVII.

It was thus that soon after Eva’s departure with the mystical de Jones, Frank found himself one afternoon strolling vacantly down Oxford-street. A crowd of people. Bustling, frolicking folk. Women, gay, charming, so beautiful, so tender, whose arms, if they could guess, might open for the kiss--and who passed him without a look! Flitting by on what was the latest in footwear, thin ankles, swelling into glossy silken calves--oh, rapture! oh, seduction! How lonely one could be in a crowd. For it wasn’t--he reflected--that there was any one cohesive and receptive sensibility in that crowd, which frolicked and enjoyed life while he suffered, into which he could have merged with any profit. Groups of laughing young voices.... Why could he not talk to them without causing them to feel they had been slighted, or landing himself at Marlborough-street Police Station? Why could he not join them without very soon being bored? There they were, groups on the face of it, but really solitary, yearning, suffering souls like himself. There was no sort of one central well in all this diffused accidentally accumulated hilarity from which one could draw. All came out to look at the feast--and all looked without being filled.

He saw rich men in furs and motor-cars, and wished them joy of it; he read the New Year’s Honours list, and sensed no pang; he watched old colleagues overtake him on the road to fame, and felt no jealousy; he had seen his father’s fortune blown to smithereens, without a blink: but that every woman whom he looked at twice did not immediately yield herself to him was something he found hard to bear, harder to forgive. To possess all the comely women in the world, the female portion of the universe, in a sort of cumulative, consummative kiss--it was his dream. For--indisputably--one woman was not like another; and how? how enjoy them all? While lying, as he thought appeased, in one woman’s arms, the thought that there must be another in some particular different from his own would at once renew his restlessness and send him searching, searching round the globe. Content at last, content and happy at Port Said, the thought of what he must be missing in Calcutta was sufficient to uproot him and send him on his onward quest over plain and mountain, dune and sea, continent and ocean, till, with ever greater frequency, he would rebound in London, in Piccadilly Circus, the reputed centre of the world, with his heart still burning, with hot tears in his parched throat. “I can’t bear it,” he said, looking with a kind of stupor at the fountain he had seen before. “I will kill myself....”

A practical man inessentially, Frank was impractical in essentials. He had a kind of vague idea that the whole universe and all that it held could, under favourable conditions, be embraced in a woman’s kiss, the consummation, _das Welt-Alles_! The all-in-all. There was a critic just then who wrote copiously in the _Adelphi_ about the One and the Many. Yes, perhaps the One was to be realised most clearly in one of the many. “Very likely,” he said, “very likely.” Was he already beginning to regret his Eva’s absence? No, he had weighed her kisses in the balance and had found them wanting. Except for that first virgin kiss upon the mountain-top when she came up close, close to him, took a long breath and closed her eyes....

He turned into Piccadilly, steadied his thoughts, and continued in a Tolstoyan mood of honest self-analysis: “Then what am I to do? Renounce the flesh and turn saint? Difficult. Difficult and uncongenial. Essentially the world is good and one ought to know how to be happy. But happiness is a strange thing: it is in two parts and is conditioned by an inner equilibrium. On the surface I oscillate in a kind of twilight, through black night into the dawn and back: but within, my soul sings like a lark and it is morning. And all is well and beyond implication. I knew it long ago. Yet I cannot sit down in the cool quiet of a pillared cathedral as I would by choice, with all my passions and lusts raging in me, raging in me! Essentially all is well. Certainly. Certainly. But that does not do away with the surface things being all wrong. Mere pinpricks. Perhaps. But the skin is a sensitive tissue.”

Tired out, he sat down on a bench in the Green Park and pulled out his _Times_. How it assumed that all was well and orderly in the world. With what propriety it examined and relegated to the requisite sections and columns the haphazard irrelevance of life. But how sane, how quiet and dignified and, withal, informed. Under a rubric headed “Science,” he read:

“ ...In the course of the year Jeans has explored the problem further, and has reached conclusions of immense significance in our conceptions of the universe. These are, in short, that the chemical elements of which we have knowledge are only one end of an indefinite series and that end a degeneration from an indefinitely more complex set of atoms in the distant stars and nebulæ. The conditions in which life is possible are an extreme case, possibly unique, and came about by a destruction of matter through countless aeons of time. The primary physical process of the universe is the conversion of matter into radiation, a process not even suspected until 1904. The primary matter of the universe consists of highly complex atoms, dissociated and incapable of association inasmuch as they change their make-up millions of times in a second.”

He stopped reading and pondered. “Dissociated and incapable of association.” Significant.... Significant and suggestive. “The primary matter of the universe ... consists of atoms incapable of association ... inasmuch as they change their make-up millions of times in a second.... Like me,” he thought. And came to the conclusion that he was, his salvation lay, in the primary matter of the universe.

Calmed down, appeased by a distant hope of merging into the primary matter of the universe and finding peace in changing his make-up with it millions of times in a second with more inward profit than heretofore and more pleasure than he found in his already frequent reboundings in London, he strolled on across the Park and called in to see Lord Ottercove.

Lord Ottercove, as he saw him, looked as though he had no wish to change his make-up millions of times in a second, but was indeed perfectly content with his make-up such as it was and, moreover, dissociated himself from the primary matter of the universe, being content to dwell and act within that end of the indefinite series of chemical elements come about by a destruction of matter through countless aeons of time and described by the paragraph in _The Times_ as an extreme, possibly unique, case in which life (and journalistic activity) was possible.

“Forgive me for not rising,” he said. “But all these things will fall off my lap if I do.”

“What need for me to forgive you,” thought Frank, “since you have already forgiven yourself?”

There was an air about Lord Ottercove as though he knew what a rich and splendid type he was for the imaginative novelist--and he was always ready to help the young and striving artist--but could scarcely comprehend the established novelists’ blindness to the riches lying at their feet. Now that he knew Frank had conceived him as the hero of his new novel he not only proved a willing sitter, but lent his own imagination towards bettering Frank’s plot. And this he did in a way that tended to enhance the prestige and lovableness of the hero by placing him in more favourable situations than those envisaged by the author. Frank, in relating the plot of his new novel, might say: “And here the scientist gets the better of the hero by an ingenious use of the latter’s newspapers to an end the hero cannot at this stage envisage.”

“Quite,” Lord Ottercove would say. “But by pretending not to see the scientist’s game the newspaper proprietor outwits him in the following chapter.”

Frank was grateful to Lord Ottercove for the privilege of seeing him in all his multifarious attitudes from every angle and aspect: in his beautifully fitting tailcoats (there were several of them in the office and in every one of his several town and country houses); in his silk pyjamas; in the heroic act of jumping out of bed; sitting on the edge of it in pensive mood with his bare feet dangling meditatively; in dishabille; in dressing-gown and _en pantoufles_; or shaving in his vest and pants: in all attitudes and from all aspects Lord Ottercove, Frank could but remark, was unequivocally, indubitably great. It seemed as if Lord Ottercove in his unfailing thoughtfulness provided him with these opportunities to study him at all hours and in all attitudes. If Frank had not, as yet, had the opportunity of studying his lordship _au naturel_, it was because such study, both for descriptive purposes in a work of fiction and as a practical opportunity, was, he willingly recognised, in advance of current customs and usages.

“Well, how are you?” said Lord Ottercove. “How are your sales?”

In the first week of January, and having run through some twenty issues of one of Ottercove’s newspapers, _Pale Primroses_ by Frank Septimus Dickin appeared, in a pale jacket liberally sprinkled with flowers of the title, on the bookstalls; yet enjoyed but a melancholy sale which, with rumours of a new European imbroglio, dropped like the jaw of a man astonished. “Completely and utterly stopped,” said Frank.

“Look here,” said Lord Ottercove, “you should get married.”

“Gladly. But who will marry me with my sales stopped? My publisher’s wife’s great aunt died the other day, and he said to me over the telephone: ‘I think it only right to close down the office for a week to commemorate our respect for the dead woman.’”

Lord Ottercove thought deeply, and said:

“You should get married.”

“To whom?”

“I’ll introduce you. A peach of a girl. Beautiful. A wonderful face. I can look at it for hours at a stretch without getting bored. The trouble with her is that she’s got ... too much money.”

“But will she marry me?”

“She would if I gave you ... gave you _The Evening Ensign_.”

There was a pause. “It’s a pity,” said Frank, “that I don’t know her.”

“I will introduce you.”

“When?”

“Come and dine with me to-morrow night at my house.”