sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or waste'--there's a foolish
woman here who evidently has written a foolish book, and has shown me
her silly contract with a publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what
he's thinking of. It's intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to
but you. Do advise me."

I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of concocting
a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to impress the recipient.
It ran:

* * * * *

"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite him."

I was rather pleased at the humour--may I venture to qualify it as
mordant?--of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was
right. Let her fight it out herself with Wittekind.

But I have regretted that telegram ever since.

CHAPTER XXI

Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me from all
quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the voyage of the
_S.S. Vesta_, they were rare phenomena. Ordinarily, if I heard from him
thrice a year I had to consider that he was indulging in an orgy of
correspondence. But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with
Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which
preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the _Vesta_ covered a period of
abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor
found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the
journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque
hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a
University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand
hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances--that is to say in what, to
Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances--he performed these literary
gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the voyage of the _Vesta_
was an exceptional affair. Save incidentally--for he did send
descriptive articles to _The Daily Gazette_--he was not out on
professional business. The gymnastics were performed for my benefit--yet
with an ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to
satisfy a certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the deeper he
plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the cl