The Defenders of Democracy

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It was the evening of October 13, 1915, and Sherston was to be
married to-morrow.

Now, for what most people would have thought a puerile reason, that
with him 13 had always proved a luck number, he had much wished that
to-day should be his wedding day. And Helen Pomeroy, his future
wife, who never thought anything he did or desired to do puerile
or unreasonable, had been quite willing to fall in with his fancy.
The lucky day had actually been chosen. Then a tiresome woman, a
sister of Miss Pomeroy's mother, had said she could not be present
at the marriage if it took place on the thirteenth, as on that day
her son, who had been home on leave, was going back to the Front.
She had also pointed out quite unnecessarily, that 13 is an unlucky
number.

Staring out into the darkness, Sherston's stormy, eager heart began
to quiver with longing, with regret, and with the half-painful
rapture of anticipation. He had suddenly visioned--and Sherston
was a man given to vivid visions--where he would have been now, at
this moment, had his marriage indeed taken place this morning. He
saw himself, on this beautiful starlit, moonless night, standing,
along with his dear love, on the platform of a medieval tower, which,
together with the picturesque farmhouse which had been tacked on to
the tower about a hundred years ago, rose, close to the seashore,
on a lonely stretch of the Sussex coast.

But what was not true tonight would be true to-morrow night,
twenty-four hours from now.

He had bought tower and house three years ago, and he had spent there
many happy holidays, boating and fishing, alone, or in company of
some man chum. Sherston had never thought to bring a woman there,
for the morrow's bridegroom, for some six to seven years past, had
had an impatient contempt for, as well as fear of, women.

Sherston was a widower, though he never used the word, even in his
innermost heart, for to him the term connoted something slightly
absurd, and he was sensitive to ridicule.

Very few of the people at preset acquainted with the brilliant,
pleasantly eccentric architect, knew that he had been married
before. But of course the handful of old Bohemian comrades whom
he had faithfully kept from out of the past, were well aware of
the fact. They were not likely to forget it either, for whenever
it was mentioned, each of them at once remembered that which at
the time it had happened, Sherston had every reason to tell rather
than to conceal, namely, that the woman who had been his wife had
gone down with the Titanic.

But how long ago that now seemed!

The outbreak of war, which caused so much unmerited misfortune to
English artists and their like, and which at one moment had threatened
to wreck his own successful opening career, had brought to Shirley
Sherston a piece of marvelous good fortune..

Early in the memorable August, 1914, at a time when the fabric of
his life and work seemed shattered, and when the lameness which
he had so triumphantly coped with during his grown up life as to
cause those about him scarcely to know it was there, made it out
of the question for him to respond to his country's first call for
men, the architect happened to run across James Pomeroy, a cultivated
millionaire with whom he had once had a slight business relation.
Acting on a kindly impulse which even now Mr. Pomeroy hardly knew
whether to remember with pleasure or regret, the older man had
pressed the younger to spend a week in a country house which he
had taken for the summer near London.

That was now fourteen months ago, but Sherston, standing there,
remembered as if it had happened yesterday, his first sight of
the girl who was to become his wife to-morrow. Helen Pomeroy had
been standing on a brick path bordered with holly hocks, and she
had smiled, a little shyly and gravely, at her father's rather
eccentric-looking guest. But on that war-summer morning she had
appeared to the stranger as does a mirage of spring water to a man
who is dying of thirst in the desert.

Up to that time Sherston had always supposed himself to be attracted
to small women. He was a big, fair man, with loosely hung limbs,
and his wife--poor little baggage--had been a tiny creature, vixenish
at her worst, kittenish at her best. But Helen Pomeroy was tall,
with the noble proportions and tapering limbs of a goddess, and
gradually--not for some time, for all social life was dislocated in
England during that strange summer--Sherston became aware, with a
kind of angry revolt of soul, that he was but one of many worshipers
at the shrine.

Following an irresistible impulse, he early in their acquaintance
told Helen Pomeroy more of himself than he had ever told any other
human being; and his confidences at last included a bowdlerized
account of his wretched marriage. But though they soon became
friends, and though he went on seeing a great deal of her, all
through that autumn and winter, Sherston feared to put his fate
to the touch, and he was jealous--God alone knew how hideously,
intolerably jealous--of the khaki-clad soldiers who came and went
in her father's house in town.

and then, one day, during the second summer of their acquaintance,
a word let drop by Mr. Pomeroy, who had become fond of the odd,
restless fellow, opened a pit before Sherston's feet. It was a
word implying that now, at last, Helen's father and mother hoped
she would "make up her mind." A very distinguished soldier, whom
she had refused as a girl of twenty, had come back unchanged,
after six years, from India, and Helen, or so her parents hoped
and thought, was seriously thinking of him.

Sherston had kept away. He had even left two of her letters--the
rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his
life--unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had
reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why
he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: "If
you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not
been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to
friends who are in Skye, for a good long holiday."

He had gone to Cadogan Square (it was August 13th) as quickly as a
taxi could take him, and by a blessed stroke of luck he had found
Miss Pomeroy alone. In a flash all had come right between them.
That had only been nine weeks ago, and now they were to be married
to-morrow...

Sherston had been standing a long time at that casement of his
which commanded the huge gray mass of Somerset House, when at last
he turned round, and went quickly across the room to the other,
western, window.

Even in the gathering darkness what a faery view was there! Glad
as he was to know that after to-night he would never again see this
living room in its present familiar guise--for he had arranged with
a furniture dealer to come and take everything left in it away,
within an hour of his departure--he told himself that never again
could he hope to live with such a view as that on which he was
gazing out now.

The yellowing branches of the trees which have their roots deep in
the graveyard of the old Savoy Chapel formed, even in mid-October,
a delicious screen of living, moving leaves. Far below, to his
left, ran the river Thames, its rushing waters full of a mysterious,
darksome beauty, and illumined, here and there, with the quivering
reflection of shadowed white, green and red lights. Sherston in
his heart often blessed the Sepelin scare which had banished the
monstrous, flaring signs which, till a few months ago, had so offended
his eyes each time that he looked out into the night, towards the
water.

The lease of a fine old house in Cheyenne Walk had been chosen by
Mr. Pomeroy as his daughter's wedding gift, and already certain of
Sherston's personal possessions had been moved there. But he was
taking with him as little as possible, and practically nothing from
this memory-haunted room.

It was the big, light, airy, loft-like apartment which had attracted
him in these chambers fifteen years ago, when he had first come to
London from the Midlands, at the age of three-and-twenty. It was
here, five years later, that he had come straight back from the
Soho Registry Office with the young woman whom he had quixotically
drawn up out of a world--the nether world--where she had been
happier than she could ever hope to become with him. For Kitty
Brawle--her very surname was symbolic--was one of those doomed
creatures who love the mud, who never really wish to leave the
mud--who feel scraped and sad when clean.

Unhappy Sherston! The noblest thing he had ever done, or was ever
likely to do, in his life, proved, for a time at least, his undoing.
Kitty had made him from generous mean, from unsuspecting suspicious,
and during the wretched year they had spent together she had had
a disastrous effect on his work. At last, acting on the shrewd
advice of one of those instinctive men of the world of which Bohemia
is full, he had bought her a billet in a theatrical touring company.
There, by an extraordinary chance, Kitty made a tiny hit--sufficiently
of a hit to bring her from an American impresario a creditable
offer, contingent on her fare being paid to the States.

Gladly, how gladly only he himself had known--Sherston had taken
her passage in the Titanic, Kitty's own characteristic choice of a
boat. And he had done more. though short of money, he had given
Kitty a hundred pounds.

Four days after their parting had come the astounding news of the
sinking of the liner, followed, by Sherston, by a period of strange,
painful suspense, filled with the eager scanning of lists, cables
to and from America, finally terminated by an official intimation
that poor Kitty had gone down in, and with, the ship.

Sherston's imagination was inconveniently vivid, and for a few
poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a
while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from
there he came back with his nerves in better order than they had
ever been.

Fate, which so seldom interferes with kindly intention in the lives
of men, had cut what had become a strangling knot, and Kitty, from
a dreadful, never-forgotten burden, had become a rather touching,
piteous memory, growing ever dimmer as first the months, and then
the years, slipped by.

Even so, her ghost sufficiently often haunted this large room, and
the other apartments which composed Sherston's set of chambers, to
make him determine that Miss Pomeroy should never come there. And
she, being in this as unlike other, commonplace, young woman as she
was in everything else, had never put him to the pain of finding
an insincere excuse for his unwillingness to show her the place in
which he lived and worked....

The coming night stretched long and bleak before to-morrow's
bridegroom. There were fourteen hours to live through before he
could even see Helen, for the time of the marriage had been fixed
for eleven o'clock.

Sherston was not looking forward to the actual ceremony--no man ever
does; and though it was to be a war wedding, a great many people,
as he was ruefully aware, had been bidden to the ceremony. But
it was comfortable to know that none of the guests had been asked
to go back to the house from which he and his bride were to start
for Sussex at one o'clock, in the motor which was Mrs. Pomeroy's
marriage gift to her daughter.

Suddenly Sherston discovered the he was very hungry! He had lunched
at Cadogan Square at a quarter to two, but he had felt too inwardly
excited in that queer atmosphere of tears and laughter, of trousseau
and wedding presents, to eat.

Even the least earthly of Romantics cannot forget for long the
claims of the flesh, and so, smiling a little wryly in the darkness,
he now told himself that the best thing he could do was to go out
and get some supper. Acquainted with all the eating houses in the
region, he was glad indeed that after to-night he would never have
to enter one again.

Pulling down the green blind in front of him, Sherston walked
across the room and pulled down the blind of the other window, for
the London lighting orders had become much stricter of late. Then
he turned on the electric light switch, took up his hat and stick,
and went out into the little lobby.

Before him was a narrow aperture which opened straight on to the
steep, short flight of steps connecting his chambers with the stone
staircase of the big old house. This latter-like set of steps had
a door top and bottom, but the lower door, which gave on to the
landing, was generally left open. Turning out the light in the
lobby, Sherston put his left hand on the banister and slid down in
the darkness, taking the dozen steps as it were in one stride.

As he reached the bottom he suddenly became aware that the door
before him, that giving on the landing, was shut, and that some
one, almost certainly a child--for there was not room on the mat
for a full-grown person--was crouching down just within the door.

Sherston felt sharply, perhaps unreasonably, irritated. Known
in the neighborhood as open-handed and kindly, it had sometimes
happened, but generally only in wintry weather, that he had come
home to find some poor waif lying in wait for him. Man, woman or
child who had wandered in, maybe, before the big door downstairs
was closed, or who, if still blessed with some outer semblance of
gentility, had managed cunningly to get past the Cerberus who lived
in the basement, and whose duty it was to open the front door,
after eight at night, to non-residents.

He felt in his pocket for a half-a-crown, and then, pretending
still to be unaware that there was any one there, he fumbled for
the spring lock.

The door burst open--he saw before him the shaft of glimmering
whiteness shed by the skylight, for since the Zeppelin raid of the
month before, the staircase was always left in darkness--and the
figure of his unknown guest rolled over, picked itself up, and
stood revealed, a woman, not a child, as he had at first thought.
And then a feeling of sick, shrinking fear came over Sherston, for
there fell on his ears the once horribly familiar accents--plaintive,
wheedling, falsely timorous--of his dead wife's voice....

"Is that you, Shirley? I didn't know that you was at home. The
windows were all dark, and--" In an injured tone this: "I've been
waiting here ever so long for you to come in!"

The wraith-like figure before him was only too clearly flesh and
blood, and, as he stepped forward, it moved quickly across, and
stood, barring his way, on the top stone step of the big staircase.

Sherston remained silent. He could think of nothing to say. But
his mind began to work with extraordinary rapidity and lucidity.

There was only one thing to do, here and now. That was to give
the woman standing there a little money--not much--and tell her to
come back again the next day. Having thus got rid of her--he knew
that on no account must she be allowed to stay here the night--he
must go at once to Mr. Pomeroy and tell him of this terrible, hitherto
unimaginable, calamity. He told himself that it would be, if not
exactly easy, then certainly possible to arrange a divorce.

Determinedly, in these tense, terrible moments, he refused to let
himself face the coming anguish and dismay of the morrow. It was
just a blow, straight between the eyes from fate--that fate who he
had foolishly thought had been kind.

"Well? Are you going to let me stand here all night?"

"No, of course not. Wait a minute--I'm thinking." He spoke in a
quick, hoarse tone, a tone alas! which Kitty at one time in their
joint lives had come to associate with deep feeling on his part,
in those days when she used to come and tell the lonely man of her
sorrows, of her temptations, and of her vague, upward aspirations....

She lurched a little towards him. Everything was going far better
than she could have hoped; why, Sherston did not seem angry, hardly
annoyed, at her unheralded return!

Suddenly he felt her thin, strong arms closing round his body, in
a horrible vice-like grip--

"Don't touch me!" he cried fiercely; and making a greater physical
effort than he would have thought himself capable of, he shook
himself violently free.

He saw her reel backwards and fall, with a queer grotesque movement,
head over heels down the stone steps. The dull thud her body made
as she fell on the half landing echoed up and down the bare well
of the staircase.

Sherston's heart smote him. He had not meant to do THAT. Then
he reminded himself bitterly that drunkards always fall soft. She
could not have hurt herself much, falling that little way.

He waited a few moments; then, as she made no effort to raise
herself, he walked down, slowly, unwillingly, towards her. From
the little he could see in the dim light cast from above, Kitty
was lying very oddly, all in a heap, her head against the wall.

He knelt down by her side.

"Kitty," he said quietly. "Try and get up. I'm sorry if I hurt
you, but you took me by surprise. I--I--"

But there came no word, no moan even, in answer.

He felt for her limp hand, and held it a moment, but it lay in his,
inertly. Filled with a queer, growing fear, he struck a match,
bent down, and saw, for the first time that night, her face. It
looked older, incredibly older, than when he had last seen it, five
years ago! The hair near the temples had turned gray. Her eyes
were wide open--and even as he looked earnestly into her face,
her jaw suddenly dropped. He started back with an extraordinary
feeling of mingled fear and repugnance.

Striking match after match as he went, he rushed up again into his
chambers, and looked about for a hand mirror.... He failed to find
one, and at last he brought down his shaving glass.

With shaking hands he laid it close against that hideous, gaping
mouth, for five long dragging minutes. The glass remained clear,
untarnished.

Putting a great constraint on himself, he forced himself to move
her head. And the truth came to him! In that strange short fall
Kitty had broken her neck. For the second time he was free. But
this time her death, instead of cutting a knot, bound him as with
cords of twisted steel to shame, and yes, to deadly peril.

Slowly he got up from his knees. Unless he went and jumped over
the parapet of the Embankment into the river--a possibility which
he grimly envisaged for a few moments--he knew that the only thing
to do was to go off at once for the police, and make, as the saying
is, a clean breast of it. After all he was innocent--innocent of
even a secret desire of encompassing Kitty's death. But would it
be possible to make even the indifferent, when aware of all the
circumstances, believe that? Yes, there was one such human being--and
as he thought of her his heart glowed with gratitude to God for
having made her known to him. Helen would believe him, Helen would
understand everything--and nothing else really mattered. It was
curious how the thought of Helen, which had been agony an hour ago,
now filled him with a kind of steadfast comfort.

As Sherston turned to go down the staircase, there came the distant
sound of the bursting of a motor tire, and the unhappy man started
violently. His nerves were now in pieces, but he remembered, as
he went down the stone steps, to feel in one of his pockets, to be
sure he had what he so seldom used, a card-case on him.

On reaching the front door he was surprised to find it open, and
to see just within the hall, their white caps and pale faces dimly
illumined by the little light that glimmered in from outside, two
trained nurses with bags in their hands. They were talking eagerly,
and took no notice of him as he passed.

For a moment Sherston wondered whether he ought to tell them of
the terrible accident which had just happened upstairs--but after
a momentary hesitation he decided that it would be better to go
straight off to the Police Station. Already his excited brain saw
a nurse standing in the witness-box at a trial where he himself
stood in the dock on a charge of murder. So, past the two whispering
women, he hurried out into the darkness.

Even in the grievous state of mental distress in which he now found
himself, Sherston noticed that the street lamps were turned so low
that there only shone out, under their green shades, pallid spots
of light. And as he stumbled across the curb of the pavement, he
told himself, with irritation, that that was really rather absurd!
More accidents proceeded from the absence of light than were ever
likely to be caused by the Zeppelins.

Perforce walking warily, he hastened towards the Strand. There
was less traffic than usual, fewer people, too, on the pavement,
but it was just after nine o'clock, the quietest time of the evening.

Suddenly a huge column of flame shot up some thirty yards in front
of him, and then (it seemed to all to happen in a moment) a line of
men, police, and special constables, spread across the thoroughfare
in which he now was, barring off the Strand.

Sherston quickened his footsteps. For a moment his own disturbed
and fearsome thoughts were banished by the extraordinary and exciting
sight before him. Higher and higher mounted the pillar of fire,
throwing a sinister glare on the buildings, high and low, new and
old, round about it. "Good Heavens!" he exclaimed involuntarily.
"Is that the Lyceum on fire?" A policeman near whom he was now
standing, turned round and said shortly, "Can't say, I'm sure,
sir."

He witnessed in the next few minutes a strange scene of confusion,
of hurrying and scurrying hither and thither. Where there had
been almost pitch darkness, was now a glittering, brilliant bath
of light, in which the figures of men and women, moving swiftly to
and fro, appeared like animated silhouettes. But even as he stared
before him at the extraordinary Hogarthian vision, the roadway and
the pavements of the Strand became strangely and suddenly deserted,
while he began to hear the hoot, hoot of the fire-engines galloping
to the scene of the disaster. Before him the line of police and
of special constables remained unbroken, and barred his further
progress.

"I don't want to go past the theater," he whispered urgently. "I
only want to get to Bow Street, as quickly as possible, on a very
important matter." He slipped the half-crown he had meant to give
the waif he had taken Kitty to be, into a policeman's hand, and
though the man shook his head he let him through.

Sherston shot down the Strand, to his left. Almost filling up the
steep, lane-like street which leads down to the Savoy Hotel, were
rows of ambulances, groups of nurses, and Red Cross men, and absorbed
though he was once more in his own sensations, and the thought of
the terrible ordeal that lay in front of him, Sherston yet found
himself admiring the quickness with which they had been rushed
hither.

On he went, and crossed the empty roadway. How strange that so
little attention was being paid to the fire! Instead of a hurrying
mob of men and women, the Strand was now extraordinarily empty,
both of people and of vehicles, and now and again he could hear
the sound of knocking, of urgent knocking, as if some one who has
been locked out, and is determined to be let in.

He strode quickly along, feeling his way somewhat, for apart from
the reflection of the red sky, it was pitch dark in the side streets,
and soon he stood before the Police Station. The big old-fashioned
building was just within the outer circle of light cast by the huge
fire whose fierceness seemed to increase rather than diminish, and
Sherston suddenly espied an Inspector standing half in the open
door. "I've some very urgent business," he said hurriedly. "Could
you come inside for a moment, and take down a statement?"

"What's your business about?" said the man sharply, and in the
wavering light Sherston thought his face looked oddly distraught
and pale.

"There's a woman lying dead at No. 19 Peter the Great Terrace,"
began Sherston curtly--

The man bent forward. "There's many women already lying dead about
here, sir, and likely to be more--babies and children too--before
we're through with this hellish business!" he said grimly. "If
she's dead, poor thing, we can do nothing for her. But if you
think there's any life left in her--well, you'll find plenty of
ambulances, as well as doctors and nurses, down Strand way. But
if I was you, I'd wait a bit before going back. They're still
about--" and even as he uttered the word "about" he started back
into the shelter of the building, pulling Sherston roughly in with
him as he did so, and there came a loud, dull report, curiously
analogous to that which a quarter of an hour ago--it seemed hours
rather than minutes--Sherston had taken for the bursting of a
motor tire. But this time the sound was at once followed by that
of shattered glass, and of falling masonry.

"Good God!" he cried. "What's that?"

"A goodish lot of damage this time, I should think," said the
Inspector thoughtfully. "Though they're doing wonderfully little
considering how they--"

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