ATAXICAB took him in dreary rain through the squalor of Tyneside, now following the dismal tram lines, now cutting through mean streets, until they reached a row of low, bow-windows agglutinated little villas with handkerchief of garden separating them from the road. At No. 17 he dismissed the cab and swung wide the flimsy gate. Before he could enter, the house door opened and a woman appeared, worn and elderly, in a cheap, soiled wrapper. “I suppose that’s you, John. I shouldn’t have recognized you.”
She spoke with a harsh, northern accent, and her face betrayed little emotion.
“You’re Ellen,” said he.
“Aye. I’m Ellen. You didn’t think I was Jane?”
She led the way into a narrow passage and then into the diminutive parlour.
“Of course not,” said he. “Jane died three years ago. But you I haven’t seen since I was a child.”
She looked him up and down: “Quite the gentleman.”
“I hope so. How’s mother?”
She gave the news dully. The sick woman had passed through the night safely and was now asleep.
“She had made up her mind to see you before she died—she always was strong willed—and that has kept her alive. Until I read your telegram I didn’t think you would come.”
He flashed one of his quick glances. “Why not? This isn’t the first time I’ve come to see her since my return. If I’ve made my way in the world, that’s no reason for you to call me undutiful.”
“I don’t want to quarrel, John,” she said wearily. “Yes. I know about your visits and the bit of money you send her. And she’s grateful, poor soul.” She paused. Then: “You’ll be wanting breakfast.”
“Also a wash.”
“Are you too grand for the sink, or must you have hot water in your room?”
“The sink will do. It will be less trouble for you.”
Alexis Triona followed her down the passage, and having washed himself with a bit of yellow soap and dried himself on the coarse towel hung on a stretch of string, went into the tidy kitchen, hung with cheap prints and faded photographs of departed Briggses, his coat over his arm, and conversed with his sister in his shirt sleeves while she fried the eggs and bacon for his meal. His readiness to fall into the household ways somewhat mollified her. Her mother had been full of pride in the great man John had become, and she had expected the airs and graces of the upstart. Living at Sunderland with her husband, a foreman riveter, and her children, and going filially to Newcastle only once a year, she had not met him on his previous visits. Now her mother’s illness had summoned her three or four days before, when the neighbour’s daughter who “did for” Mrs. Briggs, ordinarily a strong and active woman, found the sudden situation beyond her powers and responsibility. So, until the ailing lady discoursed to her of the paragon, she had scarcely given him a thought for the sixteen years they had been separated. Her memories of him as a child who alternated exasperating mischief with bone-idle fits of reading had not endeared him to her practical mind; and when the impish dreamer disappeared into the vast inane of foreign parts, and when she herself was driven by she knew not what idiot romanticalism into the grey worries of wifehood and motherhood, her consciousness recorded the memory of a brother John, but whether he was alive or dead or happy or miserable was a matter of illimitable unconcern. Now, however, he had come to life, very vivid, impressing her with a certain masterfulness in his manner which had nothing to do with the airs and graces she despised. Yet she still regarded him with suspicion; even when, seating himself at the roughly laid end of the kitchen table and devouring bacon and eggs with healthy appetite, he enthusiastically praised her cookery.
“What I can’t understand is,” she said, standing at the other end of the table and watching him eat, “why the name of John Briggs isn’t good enough for you.”
“It’s difficult to explain,” said he. “You see, I’ve written a book. Have you read it?”
She regarded him scornfully. “Do you suppose, with a husband and seven children I’ve time to waste on books? I’ve seen it,” she admitted. “Mother has it bound in brown paper, by the side of her bed.”
“You must read it,” replied Triona, somewhat relieved. “Then you’ll see why I’ve changed my name.” He laughed at her uncomprehending face. “I’ve done nothing criminal, you know, and I’m not hiding from justice.”
“I suppose an outlandish name brings in more money,” she suggested practically.
“That’s so,” said he.
“Fools must be fools.”
He acquiesced gladly, gauging the end of an embarrassing examination, and turned the conversation to her domestic affairs.
Breakfast over, he lit a cigarette and watched her clear away, viewing through the smoke the memories of his childhood. Just so, in that very wooden arm-chair, though in another kitchen, used his father to sit, pipe in mouth, while the women did the household work. It was all so familiar, yet so far away. Between then and now stretched a lifetime—so it seemed—of wide and romantic happenings. There, before him, on the wall hung, as it did years ago, the haunting coloured print, cut from some Christmas Number, of young Amyas Leigh listening to Salvation Yeo. As a child, Salvation Yeo’s long arm and finger pointing out to sea had been his inspiration. He had followed it, and gone to distant lands and gone through the promised adventures, and had returned to the picture, wondering whether all that had been was real and not the figment of a dream.
A little later, after the doctor’s visit, he was admitted to his mother’s room. For an hour or so he sat with her and gave a human being deep happiness. In the afternoon she lost consciousness. For a day or two she lingered on, and then she died.
During the dreary interval between his interview and the funeral, Alexis Triona sat for many hours in his father’s chair, for the North was smitten with a dismal spell of rain and tempest which discouraged rambling out of doors, reconstructing his life, unweaving fact from fiction, tearing aside the veils of self-deception wherein he had enwrapped his soul. Surely there was some basis of fact in the romantic history of Alexis Triona with which for the past year he had identified himself. Surely a man could not dwell so intensely in an imaginary life if none of it were real. Even while tearing open veils and viewing his soul’s nakedness, he sought justification.
Did he not find it in that eagerness of spirit which had sent him, in obedience to Salvation Yeo’s pointing finger, away from the dour and narrow father and the first taste of the Tyneside works, penniless, over the wild North Sea to Archangel, town of fairy wonders, and thence, so as not to be caught on the ship again and taken back to Newcastle, to wanderings he scarce knew whither? Did he not find it in the strange lure of Russia which impelled him, when, after a few voyages, he landed in the port of London, to procure a passport which would make him free for the land of his fascination? Did he not find it in the resourcefulness of brain which, the mariner’s life forsaken, first secured him employment in the English racing establishment of a Russian Prince, and then interested recognition by the Princess herself, so that, after a strenuous while he found himself no longer as an inconsiderable stable hand, but as a human being who counted in the world? Did he not find it in his fond ambitions, when the Princess at his request transferred him from stables to garage, from garage to motor-works for higher training; when he set himself to learn Russian as no Englishman should ever have learned it; when afterwards he steeped his mind in Russian poetry and folk-lore, sleeping four or five hours a night, compelled by dreams of greatness in which there figured as his bride of the golden future the little Princess Tania, whose governess-taught English was as pure as the church bells on a frosty night? Did he not find it in those qualities of practical command of circumstance and of poetic vision which had raised him in a few years from the ragged, semi-ignorant, sea-faring English lout alone in Russia to the trusted chief of a Prince’s fleet of a dozen cars, to the courier-chauffeur, with all the roads and ways and customs and languages of Russia, from Riga to Tobolsk, and from Tobolsk to Tiflis, and from Tiflis to St. Petersburg, at his finger tips; to the Master of Russian Literature, already something of a published poet, admitted into intellectual companionship by the Prince and thereby given undreamed of leisure for further intellectual development? What were those qualities but the qualities of genius differentiating him from the ordinary run of men and absolving him from such judgments as might be passed upon the errant of them? Without this absolving genius could he have marched in and taken his place in the modern world of English letters?
Meanwhile, being of frugal tastes, he had grown rich beyond the dream of the Tyneside urchin’s avarice. He had visions of great motor-works, the manufacture of an all-Russian car, built up by his own resources. The princely family encouraged him. Negotiations had just begun—was his story so devoid of truth?—when the great world cataclysm brought more than his schemes for an all-Russian car toppling to the ground. The Prince’s household was disintegrated; horses and cars were swallowed up in the great convulsion.
He found himself driving generals around the shell-scarred front as a volunteer, for being of British nationality he had not been called up for military service. With them he served in advances and retreats and saw battles and burnings like many millions of other men, but from the comparative safety of a headquarters car. It was not until he ran into the British Armoured Car Column that his patriotism took fire, and he became a combatant in British uniform. He remained with the Column for most of the campaign. Badly wounded towards the end, he was left in a Russian hospital, a British naval rating. He remained there many months; a bullet through his chest had missed a vital part and the wound had soon healed, but his foot had gangrened, and only the star in which he trusted had saved it from amputation. There was no fiction about the three lost toes whose gap he had shown to Olifant.
So far did Alexis Triona, sitting in the kitchen arm-chair, salve his conscience. In his story had he done more than remodel the contour of fact? Beneath it did not the living essence of truth persist? Was he not a highly educated man? Had he not consorted—before the cataclysm, and later in the strangely filled hospital—with the young Russian intelligentsia, who talked and talked and talked——? Who could know better than he how Russia had floundered in their tempestuous ocean of talk? And, finally, had he not gone, stout-hearted, through the perils and hardships and exquisite sufferings of the cataclysm?
So far, so good. But what of the rest? For the rest, was not Fate responsible?
The Revolution came, and Russian organization crumbled like a castle touched with an enchanter’s wand. He went forth healed from the hospital into chaos; Petrograd, where his little fortune lay, his objective. Sometimes he found a foothold on an aimless train. Sometimes he jogged weary miles in a peasant’s cart. Sometimes he walked. When he l............