or tail of Nietzsche and from whom the music of Shelley was hid, had managed to make a journalistic reputation as a great war and foreign correspondent.  Now the veil of the mystery was drawn an inch or two aside.  I saw him mingle with an alien crowd, and, by what On the surface appeared to be sheer brute full-bloodedness, compel them to his will.  The wedding was not to be a hollow clang of bells but a glad fanfare of trumpets in all hearts.  In order that this wedding of Adrian and Doria should be memorable he had instinctively put out the forces that had carried him unscathed through the wildest and fiercest of the congregations of men.  He could subdue and he could create.  In the most pithless he had started the working of the sap of life.

As for his own definite part of best man, he played it with an Elizabethan spaciousness. . . .  There was no hugger-mugger escape of travel-clad bride and bridegroom.  He contrived a triumphal progress through lines of guests led by a ruddy giant, Master of the Ceremonies, exuding Pantagruelian life.  Joyously he conducted them to their glittering carriage and pair—­and, unconscious of anthropological truth, threw the slipper of woman’s humiliation.  The carriage drove off amid the cheers of the multitude.  Jaffery stood and watched it until it disappeared round the curve.  In my eagerness to throw the unnecessarily symbolic rice I had followed and stayed a foot or two away from him; and then I saw his face change—­just for a few seconds.  All the joyousness was stricken from it; his features puckered up into the familiar twists of a child about to cry.  His huge glazed hands clenched and unclenched themselves.  It was astonishing and very pitiful.  Quickly he gulped something down and turned on me with a grin and shook me by the shoulders.

“Now I’m the only free man of the bunch.  The only one.  Don’t you wish you were a bachelor and could go to Hell or Honolulu—­wherever you chose without a care?  Ho! ho! ho!” He linked his arm in mine, and said in what he thought was a whisper:  “For Heaven’s sake let us go in and try to find a real drink.”

We went into a deserted smoking-room where decanters and siphons were set out.  Jaffery helped himself to a mighty whisky and soda and poured it down his throat.

“You seemed to want that,” said I, drily.

“It’s this infernal kit,” said he, with a gesture including his frock coat and patent leather boots.  “For gossamer comfort give me a suit of armour.  At any rate that’s a man’s kit.”

I made some jesting answer; but it had been given to me to see that transient shadow of pain and despair, and I knew that the discomfort of the garments of civilisation had nothing to do with the swallowing of the huge jorum of alcohol.