The Certain Hour. Dizain des Poëtes

with avidity at his first chance to slip away, and did so under cover of a riotous two-step.

He went out upon the Campus.

He found this lawn untenanted, unless you chose to count the marble figure of Lord Penniston, made aerial and fantastic by the moonlight, standing as it it were on guard over the College. Mr. Charteris chose to count him. Whimsically, Mr. Charteris reflected that this battered nobleman's was the one familiar face he had exhumed in all Fairhaven. And what a deal of mirth and folly, too, the old fellow must have witnessed during his two hundred and odd years of sentry-duty! On warm, clear nights like this, in particular, when by ordinary there were only couples on the Campus, each couple discreetly remote from any of the others. Then Penniston would be aware of most portentous pauses (which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences. 'Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!' one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did… Heigho, youth's was a pleasant lunacy…

Thus Charteris reflected, growing drowsy. She said, 'You spoke very well to-night. Is it too late for congratulations?'

Turning, Mr. Charteris remarked, 'As you are perfectly aware, all that I vented was just a deal of skimble- scamble stuff, a verbal syllabub of balderdash. No, upon reflection, I think I should rather describe it as a conglomeration of piffle, patriotism and pyrotechnics. Well, Madam Do-as-you-would-be-done-by, what would you have? You must give people what they want.'

It was characteristic that he faced Pauline Romeyne-or was it still Romeyne? he wondered-precisely as if it had been fifteen minutes, rather than as many years, since they had last spoken together.

'Must one?' she asked. 'Oh, yes, I know you have always thought that, but I do not quite see the necessity of it.'

She sat upon the bench beside Lord Penniston's square marble pedestal. 'And all the while you spoke I was thinking of those Saturday nights when your name was up for an oration or a debate before the Eclectics, and you would stay away and pay the fine rather than brave an audience.'

'The tooth of Time,' he reminded her, 'has since then written wrinkles on my azure brow. The years slip away fugacious, and Time that brings forth her children only to devour them grins most hellishly, for Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony,-and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle? You wouldn't have me put on exhibition as a lusus naturae?'

'Oh, but I wish you had not altered so entirely!' Pauline sighed.

'At least, you haven't,' he declared. 'Of course, I would be compelled to say so, anyhow. But in this happy instance courtesy and veracity come skipping arm-in-arm from my elated lips.' And, indeed, it seemed to him that Pauline was marvelously little altered. 'I wonder now,' he said, and cocked his head, 'I wonder now whose wife I am talking to?'

'No, Jack, I never married,' she said quietly.

'It is selfish of me,' he said, in the same tone, 'but I am glad of that.'

And so they sat a while, each thinking.

'I wonder,' said Pauline, with that small plaintive voice which Charteris so poignantly remembered, 'whether it is always like this? Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death ALWAYS provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?'

And again there was a pause which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent.

'I suppose it is because they know that if it ever did come true, we would be gods like them.' The ordinary associates of John Charteris, most certainly, would not have suspected him to be the speaker. 'So they contrive the obstacle, or else they send false dreams-out of the gates of horn-and make the path smooth, very smooth, so that two dreamers may not be hindered on their way to the divorce-courts.'

'Yes, they are jealous gods! oh, and ironical gods also! They grant the Dream, and chuckle while they grant it, I think, because they know that later they will be bringing their playthings face to face-each married, fat, inclined to optimism, very careful of decorum, and perfectly indifferent to each other. And then they get their fore-planned mirth, these Overlords of Life and Death. 'We gave you,' they chuckle, 'the loveliest and greatest thing infinity contains. And you bartered it because of a clerkship or a lying maxim or perhaps a finger-ring.' I suppose that they must laugh a great deal.'

'Eh, what? But then you never married?' For masculinity in argument starts with the word it has found distasteful.

'Why, no.'

'Nor I.' And his tone implied that the two facts conjoined proved much.

'Miss Willoughby-?' she inquired.

Now, how in heaven's name, could a cloistered Fairhaven have surmised his intention of proposing on the first convenient opportunity to handsome, well-to-do Anne Willoughby? He shrugged his wonder off. 'Oh, people will talk, you know. Let any man once find a woman has a tongue in her head, and the stage-direction is always 'Enter Rumor, painted full of tongues.''

Pauline did not appear to have remarked his protest. 'Yes,-in the end you will marry her. And her money will help, just as you have contrived to make everything else help, toward making John Charteris comfortable. She is not very clever, but she will always worship you, and so you two will not prove uncongenial. That is your real tragedy, if I could make you comprehend.'

'So I am going to develop into a pig,' he said, with relish,-'a lovable, contented, unambitious porcine, who is alike indifferent to the Tariff, the importance of Equal Suffrage and the market-price of hams, for all that he really cares about is to have his sty as comfortable as may be possible. That is exactly what I am going to develop into,- now, isn't it?' And John Charteris, sitting, as was his habitual fashion, with one foot tucked under him, laughed cheerily. Oh, just to be alive (he thought) was ample cause for rejoicing! and how deliciously her eyes, alert with slumbering fires, were peering through the moon-made shadows of her brows!

'Well-! something of the sort.' Pauline was smiling, but restrainedly, and much as a woman does in condoning the naughtiness of her child. 'And, oh, if only-'

'Why, precisely. 'If only!' quotha. Why, there you word the key-note, you touch the cornerstone, you ruthlessly illuminate the mainspring, of an intractable unfeeling universe. For instance, if only

You were the Empress of Ayre and Skye,
And I were Ahkond of Kong,
We could dine every day on apple-pie,
And peddle potatoes, and sleep in a sty,
And people would say when we came to die,
'They never did anything wrong.'

But, as it is, our epitaphs will probably be nothing of the sort. So that there lurks, you see, much virtue in this 'if only.''

Impervious to nonsense, she asked, 'And have I not earned the right to lament that you are changed?'

'I haven't robbed more than six churches up to date,' he grumbled. 'What would you have?'

The answer came, downright, and, as he knew, entirely truthful: 'I would have had you do all that you might have done.'

But he must needs refine. 'Why, no-you would have made me do it, wrung out the last drop. You would have bullied me and shamed me into being all that I might have been. I see that now.' He spoke as if in wonder, with quickening speech. 'Pauline, I haven't been entirely not worth while. Oh, yes, I know! I know I haven't written five- act tragedies which would be immortal, as you probably expected me to do. My books are not quite the books I was to write when you and I were young. But I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales… Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except