Nocturne | Page 3

intense vision of Nocturne. He has also made
two admirable and very shrewd and thorough studies of the work and
lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Like these two,
he has had great experience of illness. He is a young man of so slender
a health, so frequently ill, that even for the most sedentary purposes of
this war, his country will not take him. It was in connection with his
Gissing volume, for which I possessed some material he needed, that I
first made his acquaintance. He has had something of Gissing's
restricted and grey experiences, but he has nothing of Gissing's almost
perverse gloom and despondency. Indeed he is as gay a companion as
he is fragile. He is a twinkling addition to any Christmas party, and the
twinkle is here in the style. And having sported with him "in his times
of happy infancy," I add an intimate and personal satisfaction to my
pleasant task of saluting this fine work that ends a brilliant
apprenticeship and ranks Swinnerton as Master. This is a book that will
not die. It is perfect, authentic, and alive. Whether a large and
immediate popularity will fall to it I cannot say, but certainly the
discriminating will find it and keep it and keep it alive. If Mr.
Swinnerton were never to write another word I think he might count on
this much of his work living, as much of the work of Mary Austen,
W.H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane will live, when many of the more
portentous reputations of to-day may have served their purpose in the
world and become no more than fading names.

DECEMBER, 1917

CONTENTS
PART ONE: EVENING

CHAPTER
I. SIX O'CLOCK
II. THE TREAT
III. ROWS
IV. THE WISH
PART TWO: NIGHT
V. THE ADVENTURE
VI. THE YACHT
VII. MORTALS
VIII. PENALTIES
IX. WHAT FOLLOWED
X. CINDERELLA
PART THREE: MORNING
XI. AFTER THE THEATRE
XII. CONSEQUENCES

PART ONE
EVENING

CHAPTER I
: SIX O'CLOCK
i
Six o'clock was striking. The darkness by Westminster Bridge was
intense; and as the tramcar turned the corner from the Embankment
Jenny craned to look at the thickly running water below. The glistening
of reflected lights which spotted the surface of the Thames gave its
rapid current an air of such mysterious and especially sinister power
that she was for an instant aware of almost uncontrollable terror. She
could feel her heart beating, yet she could not withdraw her gaze. It was
nothing: no danger threatened Jenny but the danger of uneventful life;
and her sense of sudden yielding to unknown force was the merest
fancy, to be quickly forgotten when the occasion had passed. None the
less, for that instant her dread was breathless. It was the fear of one
who walks in a wood, at an inexplicable rustle. The darkness and the
sense of moving water continued to fascinate her, and she slightly
shuddered, not at a thought, but at the sensation of the moment. At last
she closed her eyes, still, however, to see mirrored as in some visual
memory the picture she was trying to ignore. In a faint panic, hardly
conscious to her fear, she stared at her neighbour's newspaper, spelling
out the headings to some of the paragraphs, until the need of such
protection was past.
As the car proceeded over the bridge, grinding its way through the still
rolling echoes of the striking hour, it seemed part of an endless
succession of such cars, all alike crowded with homeward-bound
passengers, and all, to the curious mind, resembling ships that pass very
slowly at night from safe harbourage to the unfathomable elements of
the open sea. It was such a cold still night that the sliding windows of
the car were almost closed, and the atmosphere of the covered upper
deck was heavy with tobacco smoke. It was so dark that one could not
see beyond the fringes of the lamplight upon the bridge. The moon was
in its last quarter, and would not rise for several hours; and while the
glitter of the city lay behind, and the sky was greyed with light from
below, the surrounding blackness spread creeping fingers of night in
every shadow.

The man sitting beside Jenny continued to puff steadfastly at his pipe,
lost in the news, holding mechanically in his further hand the return
ticket which would presently be snatched by the hurrying
tram-conductor. He was a shabby middle-aged clerk with a thin beard,
and so he had not the least interest for Jenny, whose eye was caught by
other beauties than those of assiduous labour. She had not even to look
at him to be quite sure that he did not matter to her. Almost, Jenny did
not care whether he had glanced sideways at herself