The Red Planet | Page 8

the canal by the lock
gates where Althea Fenimore's body was found.
It was high June, in leafy England, in a world at peace. Can one picture
it? With such a wrench of memory does one recall scenes of tender
childhood. In the shelter of a stately house lived Althea Fenimore. She
was twenty-one; pretty, buxom, like her mother, modern, with (to me) a
pathetic touch of mid-Victorian softness and sentimentality;
independent in outward action, what we call "open-air"; yet an anomaly,
fond at once of games and babies. I have seen her in the morning
tearing away across country by the side of her father, the most
passionate and reckless rider to hounds in the county, and in the
evening I have come across her, a pretty mass of pink flesh and
muslin--no, it can't be muslin--say chiffon--anyhow, something white
and filmy and girlish--curled up on a sofa and absorbed in a novel of
Mrs. Henry Wood, borrowed, if one could judge by the state of its
greasy brown paper cover, from the servants' hall. I confess that,
though to her as to her brother I was "Uncle Duncan," and loved her as
a dear, sweet English girl, I found her lacking in spirituality, in
intellectual grasp, in emotional distinction. I should have said that she
was sealed by God to be the chaste, healthy, placid mother of men. She
was forever laughing--just the spontaneous laughter of the gladness of
life.
On the last afternoon of her existence she came to see me, bringing me
a basket of giant strawberries from her own particular bed. We had tea
in the garden, and with her young appetite she consumed half the fruit
she had brought. At the time I did not notice an unusual touch of
depression. I remember her holding by its stalk a great half-eaten
strawberry and asking me whether sometimes I didn't find life rather
rotten. I said idly:

"You can't expect the world to be a peach without a speck on it. Of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The wise person avoids the specks."
"But suppose you've bitten a specky bit by accident?"
"Spit it out," said I.
She laughed. "You think you're like the wise Uncle in the Sunday
School books, don't you?"
"I know I am," I said.
Whereupon she laughed again, finished the strawberry, and changed the
conversation.
There seemed to be no foreshadowing of tragedy in that. I had known
her (like many of her kind) to proclaim the rottenness of the Universe
when she was off her stroke at golf, or when a favourite young man did
not appear at a dance. I attributed no importance to it. But the next day
I remembered. What was she doing after half-past ten o'clock, when
she had bidden her father and mother goodnight, on the steep and
lonely bank of the canal, about a mile and a half away? No one had
seen her leave the house. No one, apparently, had seen her walking
through the town. Nothing was known of her until dawn when they
found her body by the lock gate. She had been dead some hours. It was
a mysterious affair, upon which no light was thrown at the inquest. No
one save myself had observed any sign of depression, and her
half-bantering talk with me was trivial enough. No one could adduce a
reason for her midnight walk on the tow-path. The obvious question
arose. Whom had she gone forth to meet? What man? There was not a
man in the neighbourhood with whom her name could be particularly
associated. Generally, it could be associated with a score or so. The
modern young girl of her position and upbringing has a drove of young
male intimates. With one she rides, with another she golfs, with another
she dances a two-step, with another she Bostons; she will let Tom read
poetry to her, although, as she expresses it, "he bores her stiff," because
her sex responds to the tribute; she plays lady patroness to Dick, and
tries to intrigue him into a soft job; and as for Harry she goes on telling

him month after month that unless he forswears sack and lives cleanly
she will visit him with her high displeasure. Meanwhile, most of these
satellites have affaires de coeur of their own, some respectable, others
not; they regard the young lady with engaging frankness as a woman
and a sister, they have the run of her father's house, and would feel
insulted if anybody questioned the perfect correctness of their
behaviour. Each man has, say, half a dozen houses where he is
welcomed on the same understanding. Of course, when one particular
young man and one particular young woman read lunatic things in each
other's eyes, then the rest