So Well Remembered: A Novel
Date: 1945-01-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Historical Fiction; British Literature; 20th Century; Literature; Novels
Description: As World War I comes to a close, George Boswell looks back on how his fate was inextricably tied to that of his sleepy English hometown As a young man, George Boswell knew he had greater prospects ahead than those offered by his native mill town in the north of England. A respected lawyer and civic leader, he possessed the skill and charisma to shine on the national stage. But ambition is not without a cost. When Boswell must choose between the promise of a bright future or staying behind for the people who have come to depend on him, his decision comes at a shocking price. So Well Remembered
Publisher: Open Road Media
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

James Hilton
Collected Novels

James Hilton

Contents

So Well Remembered

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Random Harvest

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

We Are Not Alone

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Epilogue

Copyright

So Well Remembered

James Hilton

Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part One

THAT DAY SO WELL remembered—a day, indeed, impossible to forget—was the first of September, 1921; on the morning of which George Boswell—then only Councillor Boswell, then sandy-brown-haired with not a trace of gray—woke before dawn, looked at his watch, and promptly slept again till Annie brought in the morning paper, a cup of tea, and some letters that had just arrived. Amongst them was a note from Lord Winslow’s secretary, saying that His Lordship would arrive at Browdley station by the noon train, in good time for the foundation-stone laying; and this made George very happy and proud, because Lord Winslow was not an ordinary kind of lord (a type which George, never having met any, imagined for himself and then proceeded to scorn on principle), but a special kind who had not only devoted a lifetime to public service but had also written several distinguished books.

At half past seven George got up, put out his blue serge suit (the one reserved for big events), and shaved with especial care, scanning meanwhile the cheerful headlines of the paper propped against the mirror, and noting with approval, whenever he looked beyond it, the misty promise of a fine summer day. By eight he was at the breakfast table, eating ham and eggs and exchanging good-humored chatter with Annie, the elderly “help” who looked after the house and did her best to overfeed him during his wife’s absence; by nine he was at his desk, composing an article for the Browdley and District Guardian, which he owned and edited. He did not write easily as a rule, but this time the phrases came on a wave of exhilaration, for though he had a few private doubts that the Treaty of Versailles was all it should be, he was prepared to give the future the benefit of them, the more so as it was natural for him to give the future the benefit of anything. Anyhow by ten George had composed a suitably optimistic editorial; noon saw him at the railway station to welcome Lord Winslow; by one o’clock he had made a short speech at the Town Hall luncheon; and by a quarter to two he was in his seat on the improvised dais at the corner of Mill Street, blinking in the sunshine and beaming his satisfaction to the four winds, one of which, then prevalent, wafted back the concentrated smell of Browdley’s industries. But George did not mind that—indeed, it was the remembered perfume of his childhood, of days spent on the banks of the canal that threaded its way between factory walls, taking waste water hot from each one, so that a fog of steam drifted over the surface and spread a low-hanging reek of oil, chemicals, and machinery. Waiting on the platform for the ceremony to begin, George sniffed and was happy.

A great day for Councillor Boswell and for Browdley, and also (one gathered) for England and for the world. History, George reflected, could not have done a better job of dramatization—August Thirty-first, the Official End of the Great War (some sort of lawyer’s technicality, but it still made good news.)—September First, the Foundation-Stone-Laying of Unit One of the Mill Street Housing Scheme that was to replace some of Browdley’s worst slums. A great day, indeed, George, as his glance roved around, was proud to have the dedicator (a Bishop) on his left, the guest of the occasion (Lord Winslow) on his right, and various local bigwigs beyond and behind; but he was proudest of all to see the crowd, and only wished it as large as it would have been if Browdley folk weren’t such notorious slackers about civic affairs. He said so later, when he got up to speak, and was applauded for his downrightness. George, in fact, was invariably downright; it was natural for him, and a quality which, sometimes disconcerting but always good-humored, did as well in Browdley as the smooth tongue of the diplomat, and perhaps better. There was a legend that when he had wanted a rich local manufacturer to donate a mansion for use as a municipal museum, he had said: “See here, Bob, I’m not asking this—I’m demanding it. You and your folks have exploited this town for the best part of a century—if there was any justice you’d have been hanged long ago. But as there isn’t—let’s have that house.” And he had got it.

Furthermore, George thought, it was a shame that only a few hundreds, instead of thousands, had turned out to welcome a man like Lord Winslow—or was it possible they didn’t know how distinguished Lord Winslow really was? But George’s personal enjoyment of the proceedings was not to be lessened—not even when the town brass band began to play Sousa rather badly in the shadow of a large Union Jack hung upside down—a detail that remained unnoticed save by a solitary busybody who afterwards wrote a letter about it which the Guardian did not print. Altogether the scene was typical of many a quietly happy English occasion during those distant years when Englishmen could be quietly happy.

George’s face was also typically English (which means, perhaps, nothing more than that he might have passed, in their respective countries, for a Dane, a Norwegian, a Swede, a German, or a Norman-Frenchman, but not so easily for an Italian, a Greek, or a Spaniard); at any rate, he was blue-eyed and ruddy-cheeked, the mouth expanding into smiles of shy benevolence as greetings came from the crowd, the chin steady and square, with none of the false dynamism of the acute angle. George, at thirty-five, was a good-looking man, if one cared to call him that, but he seemed to merit some solider adjective than could be applied equally to youthful film actors and tennis champions; there was a touch of earthiness in him that matched well with his wide shoulders and strong hands and genial provincial burr. It was a quiet, almost a humorous touch, behind which, in a sort of ambush, there lurked ambitions and determinations that had already left their mark on Browdley.

This housing development was one of them—a modest triumph (George called it) of practical idealism over the 90 per cent of apathy and 10 per cent of pure selfishness that comprise idealism’s biggest enemy. George could justifiably smile as he stared about him that September afternoon, for this was the first fruit of his Councillorship and the first postwar improvement in Browdley to get beyond the talking stage. Only George knew the struggle it had been through almost incredible thickets of vested interests and government red tape; but here it was at last, something actually begun after all the argument, and his friends and fellow citizens might well give him a cheer. Even the Mayor, who was among his strongest political opponents, could not restrain a reluctantly cordial smile.

George was telling the Bishop that he had been born in one of the slum houses just demolished—Number 24, Mill Street, to be precise—and the Bishop was chaffing him about not having had it preserved as a place of historic interest with a mural tablet to commemorate the great event. George laughed and said he would have taken such an idea far more seriously twenty-odd years ago, and then he confessed as a small boy he had once read how the desks at Harrow School were carved with the names of famous men; and that in order not to disappoint posterity he had carved his own name on the inside of the privy door at the end of the backyard of Number 24—not a very romantic substitute for a desk at Harrow, but the handiest available in his own limited world.

“Ah, dear me,” exclaimed the Bishop, who was a Harrovian and a little shocked at first, but then when he looked at George’s face, so clearly that of a man telling a simple story of something that had very simply happened, he was won over, as people nearly always were by George; so he added with a smile: “Ah well—a harmless occupation, I daresay.”

George went on without realizing the extent of his conquest: “Aye, it was the only place I was ever left alone in those days, because we were a large family, and a four-room house doesn’t allow for much privacy. Fortunately my father started work at six in the morning and didn’t come home till six at night—I hardly saw him except on Sundays when he marched us all off to chapel.”

“Ah, grand folks, those old Nonconformists,” murmured the Bishop, turning on the magnanimity.

“He was a local preacher too,” George continued, pointing suddenly up Mill Street. “There’s the chapel, and there—”swinging his arm in the opposite direction—“there’s Channing’s Mill, where he worked—”

“Channings? Not—er—Channing and Felsby?”

“Aye, that’s what it used to be. You knew of it?”

“I’m afraid so.” The Bishop smiled ruefully. “I—er—I once had a few shares in it.”

“You were better off than my father, then, because he had a lifetime in it. From the age of ten to the day he died—fifty years, and for half of every year, except on Sundays, he only saw daylight through the mill windows.”

“Ah, terrible—terrible—” murmured the Bishop.

George chuckled. “Maybe, but he didn’t feel that way, I don’t believe it ever occurred to him. He was quite content all week looking forward to Sunday.”

“When he enjoyed his preaching, no doubt.”

“You bet he did, and he was a dab hand at it too. I’ve heard him last a couple of hours, without a note, and fluent all the time.”

The Bishop sighed. “Ah, that’s a wonderful thing—to possess the gift of tongues, so that one never has to think for a word—”

“Maybe that’s it,” said George. “It’s the thinking that spoils it.” His eyes twinkled and his voice, as nearly as a voice can, nudged the Bishop in the ribs. “Once I remember my father started off a prayer with ‘Oh God, if there be a God—’ but he said it in such a grand booming voice that nobody noticed it any more than he had.”

“Except you,” interjected Lord Winslow, who had been overhearing the conversation from the other side. George turned, a little startled at first, and then, seeing a smile on His Lordship’s face, smiled back and replied thoughtfully: “Aye, that’s so. I suppose I was always a bit of a one for noticing things.”

By then the band had finished playing and it was time for George to open the proceedings. He did so in a speech that lasted a few minutes only; one of his virtues, innocently acquired because he regarded it as a drawback, was that ceremonial oratory did not come easily to him. But he had a pleasant voice and a knack of using simple words as a first-class workman uses tools; his newspaper editorials were not so good, because he “polished” them too much. There was also a hint of the child in him that appeared now in his unconcealed and quite unconcealable pleasure; he could not help letting Browdley know how pleased he was, not only with the town for having elected him one of its councillors, but doubtless also with himself for having so well merited the honor. A certain inward modesty made tolerable, and even attractive, an outward quality that might have been termed conceit. And when, having briefly introduced Lord Winslow, he sat down amidst another gust of applause, the life of the gathering seemed to center on his still beaming countenance rather than on the tall, thin, pallid stranger who rose to pay him conventional compliments.

Winslow, of course, was a much better speaker by any erudite standards. To the acceptable accent of English aristocracy and officialdom he added an air of slightly bored accomplishment that often goes with it, and the chiefly working-class audience gave him respectful attention throughout an address that was considerably above their heads. Had he been of their own class they might have shouted a few ribald interruptions, but they would not do this to a stranger so clearly of rank; indeed their patient silence implied a half-affectionate tolerance for “one of the nobs” who eccentrically chose to interest himself in Browdley affairs instead of in the far more glamorous ones they imagined must be his own—the sort of tolerance that had evoked an audible exclamation of “Poor little bugger!” from some unknown citizen when, a few years back, a royal prince had passed through the town on an official tour. To Browdley folk, as they looked and listened now, it seemed that Lord Winslow was all the time thinking of something else (as indeed he was), but they did not blame him for it; on the contrary, the cheers when he finished were a friendly concession that he had doubtless done his best and that it was pretty decent of him to have bothered to do anything at all.

Then the Bishop prayed, the foundation stone was well and truly laid, sundry votes of thanks were passed, the band played “God Save the King,” and the ceremony petered out. But Councillor Boswell seemed loth to leave the scene of so much concentrated personal victory. He gripped Winslow’s arm with proprietary zeal, talking about his plans for further slum clearances while from time to time he introduced various local people who hung around; and finally, when most had disappeared to their homes and the Bishop had waved a benign good-bye, George escorted his principal guest to the car that was to take him back to Browdley station. It was not only that he knew Winslow was important and might at some future date do the town a service; nor merely that he already liked him, for he found it easy to like people; the fact was, Winslow was the type that stirred in George a note of genuine hero worship—and in spite, rather than because, of the title. After all, a man couldn’t help what he inherited, and if he were also a high government personage with a string of degrees and academic distinctions after his name, why hold mere blue blood against him? It was the truer aristocracy of intellect that George admired—hence the spell cast over him by Winslow’s scholarly speech, his domelike forehead, and the absent-minded professorial manner that George took to be preoccupation with some abstruse problem. He had already looked him up in Who’s Who, and during the drive in the car through Browdley streets humility transformed itself into naïve delight that an Oxford Doctor of Philosophy had actually accepted an invitation to have tea at his house.

George was also delighted at the success of his own ruse to sidetrack the Mayor and the other councillors and get Winslow on his own, and most delighted of all, as well as astonished, when Winslow said: “Good idea, Boswell—I had been on the point of suggesting such a thing myself. My train is not for an hour or so, I understand.”

“That’s right, no need to hurry,” George replied. “And there’s later trains for that matter.”

Winslow smiled. “Well, we have time for a cup of tea, anyhow.” And after a pause, as if the personality of George really interested him: “So you come of an old Browdley family?”

“As old as we have ’em here, sir, but that’s not so old. My great-great-grandfather was a farm laborer in Kent, and our branch of the family moved north when the cotton mills wanted cheap labor. I haven’t got any famous ancestors, except one who’s supposed to have been transported to Australia for poaching.” He added regretfully: “But I could never get any proof of it.”

Winslow smiled. “At any rate, your father lived it down. He seems to have been a much respected man in Browdley.”

George nodded, pleased by the tribute, but then went on, with that disconcerting frankness that was (if he had only known it, but then of course if he had known it, it wouldn’t have been) one of his principal charms: “Aye, he was much respected, and for twenty years after he died I went about thinking how much I’d respected him myself, but then one day when I was afraid of something, it suddenly occurred to me it was the same feeling I’d had for my father.”

“You mean you didn’t respect him?”

“Oh, I did that as well, but where there’s fear it doesn’t much matter what goes with it. There was a lot of fear in our house—there always is when folks are poor. Either they’re afraid of the landlord or the policeman or employers or unemployment or having another mouth to feed or a son getting wed and taking his wage with him—birth, marriage, and death—it’s all summat to worry about. Even after death, in my father’s case, because he was what he called God-fearing.”

Winslow smiled again. “So you didn’t have a very happy childhood?”

“I suppose it wasn’t, though at the time I took it as natural. There was nothing cruel, mind you—only hardships and stern faces.” George then confessed that during the first six years of his life he was rarely if ever told to do anything without being threatened with what would happen if he didn’t or couldn’t; and the fact that these threats were mostly empty did not prevent the main effect—which was to give him a first impression of the world as a piece of adult property in which children were trespassers. “Only they weren’t prosecuted,” he added, with a laugh. “They were mostly just yelled at…D’you know, one of the biggest shocks of my life was after my parents died and I was sent to live with an uncle I’d never met before—to find out then that grownups could actually talk to me in a cheerful, casual sort of way, even though I was only a boy!”

“Yes, there must have been a big difference.”

“Aye, and I’ll tell you what I’ve often thought the difference was,” George went on, growing bolder and smiling his wide smile. “Just a matter of a few quid a week. You see, my father never earned more than two pound ten at the mill, but my uncle had a little business that brought in about twice that. Not a fortune—but enough to keep away some of the fears.”

“There’s one fear, anyhow, that nobody had in those days,” Winslow commented. “Wars before 1914 were so far off and so far removed from his personal life that the average Englishman had only to read about them in the papers and cheer for his side.”

“Not even that if he didn’t want to,” George replied. “Take my father and the Boers, for instance. Thoroughly approved of them, he did, especially old Kruger, whom he used to pray for as ‘that great President and the victor of Majuba Hill, which, as Thou knowest, Lord, is situated near the border of Natal and the Transvaal

Republic.…’ He always liked to make sure the Lord had all the facts.”

Despite Winslow’s laugh, George checked his flow of reminiscence, for he had begun to feel he had been led into talking too much about himself. Taking advantage, therefore, of a curve in the street that afforded the view of a large derelict weaving shed, he launched into more appropriate chatter about Browdley, its history, geography, trade conditions, and so on, and how, as Councillor, he was seeking to alleviate local unemployment. Winslow began to look preoccupied during all this, so George eventually stopped talking altogether as he neared his house—smiling a little to himself, though. He suspected that Winslow was already on guard against a possible solicitation of favors. “Or else he thinks I’m running after him because he’s a lord,” George thought, scornfully amused at such a plausible error.

The factor George counted on to reveal the error was the room in which they were both to have tea. It was not a very large room (in the small mid-Victorian house adjoining the printing office in Market Street), but its four walls, even over the door and under the windows, were totally covered with books. One of George’s numerous prides was in having the finest personal library in Browdley, and probably he had; it was a genuine collection, anyhow, not an accumulation of sets for the sake of their binding, as could be seen in the mansions of rich local manufacturers. Moreover, George really read his books—thoroughly and studiously, often with pencil in hand for note-taking. Like many men who have suffered deficiencies in early education, he had more than made up for them since; except that he had failed to acquire the really unique thing a good early education can bequeath—the ability to grow up and forget about it. George could never forget—neither on nor off the Education Committee of which he made the best and most energetic chairman Browdley had ever had. What he chiefly hoped was that during the interval before Winslow must catch his train back to London, they might have a serious intellectual talk—or perhaps the latter would talk, Gamaliel-wise, while George sat metaphorically at his feet.

Unfortunately the great man failed to pick up the desired cue from a first sight of the books; indeed, he seemed hardly to notice them, even when George with an expansive wave of the hand bade him make himself at home; though there was consolation in reflecting that Winslow’s own library was probably so huge that this one must appear commonplace.

“Make yourself thoroughly at home, sir,” George repeated, with extra heartiness on account of his disappointment.

“Thank you,” answered the other, striding across the room. He stood for a few seconds, staring through the back window, then murmured meditatively: “H’m—very nice. Quite a show. Wonderful what one can do even in the middle of a town.”

George then realized that Winslow must be referring to the small oblong garden between the house and the wall of the neighboring bus garage. So he replied quickly: “Aye, but it’s gone a bit to pieces lately. Not much in my line, gardening.”

“Must compliment you on your roses, anyhow.”

“My wife, not me—she’s the one for all that if she was here.”

“She’s away?”

“Aye—on the Continent. Likes to travel too—all over the place. But books are more in my line.”

“It’s certainly been a good season for them.”

George wasn’t sure what this referred to until Winslow added, still staring out of the window: “My wife’s another enthusiast—she’s won prizes at our local show.”

George still did not think this a promising beginning to an intellectual conversation, but as Annie was just then bringing in the tea he said no more about books. Winslow, however, could not tear himself away from the spectacle of the roses—which were, indeed, especially beautiful that year. “Too bad,” he murmured, “for anyone who loves a garden to miss England just now…So you’re not keen on foreign holidays, is that it, Boswell?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say no if I had the chance, but I don’t suppose I’d ever be as keen as Livia is. Anyhow, I’ve got too much to do in Browdley to leave the place for months on end.”

“Months? Quite a holiday.”

“Aye, but it’s not all holiday for her. She has a job with one of those travel tours—‘Ten Days in Lovely Lucerne’—that kind of thing. Pays her expenses and a bit over.”

“Convenient.”

“For anyone who likes seeing the same sights with different folks over and over again. I wouldn’t.”

“Sort of guide, is she?”

“I reckon so. She runs the show for ’em, I’ll bet. She’s got a real knack for managing folks when she feels like it.”

“I wouldn’t say you were entirely without it yourself.”

“Ah, but with her it’s an art.” George was too genuinely modest to realize that his own sterling naïveté was just as good a knack, art, or whatever else it was. “Maybe you won’t believe me, but when I was a young fellow I was so scared of meeting folks I could hardly get a word out. And even now I’m not as happy on a platform as I am sitting alone in this room with a good book.” He jerked his head towards the surrounding shelves in another attempt to steer the conversation, and when Winslow did not immediately reply, he added more pointedly: “I expect you’re a great reader yourself?”

“Oh fairly—when I can find the time.”

“Aye, that’s the worst of being in public life.” At least they had that bond in common. “You know, sir, there’s only one reason I’d ever wish to be young again—really young, I mean,” he added, as he saw Winslow smile—“and that’s to have sum-mat I missed years ago—a right-down good education….I’ll never forget when I visited Oxford and saw all those lucky lads in the colleges…” A sincere emotion entered his voice. “And the professors in their libraries—I tell you frankly, I…” He saw that Winslow was still smiling. “Well, I’ll put it this way—there’s only one thing I’d rather be than in politics, and that’s one of those university dons, as they call themselves.”

“Yet I doubt if many of them are doing any better work than you are here—judging by what I’ve seen today.”

George was pleased again, but also slightly shocked by the comparison; he could not believe that Winslow really meant it, and he was surprised that such a distinguished man should stoop to mere flattery. “Oh come now, sir, I’ll never swallow that. After all, think of the books they write—I’ve got shelves of ’em here—heavy stuff I admit, but grand training for the mind.”

“Yes, books are all right.” Winslow gave a little sigh. “Though it’s remarkable how little help they offer in some of the more curious problems of life.” George was thinking this a rather strange remark when an even stranger one followed it. “Look here, Boswell, I’m going to do something I wasn’t sure about before I met you—partly because I wasn’t sure you were the right man, and partly because even if you were, I couldn’t be positive how you’d take it.”

George looked up with a puzzled expression. There flashed through his mind the intoxicating possibility that Winslow might be going to ask his advice about some matter of departmental policy—low-rent housing, say, or an extension of the school-leaving age.

But Winslow continued: “Quite a coincidence meeting you like this. Several months ago when I promised to speak at your ceremony today I hadn’t even heard of you—but when quite recently I did, I decided it might be a good chance to—to approach you—if—if you seemed the sort of man who might be approachable. You see, it’s a somewhat unusual and delicate matter, and there aren’t any rules of etiquette to proceed by.”

And then there flashed through George’s already puzzled mind another though less-welcome possibility—that Winslow was an emissary of the Government deputed to find out in advance whether George would accept a title in recognition of his “public services” to the town of Browdley. It was highly unlikely, of course, since he was a mere town Councillor and did not belong to the Government party, but still, anything could happen when parties and politics were fluid and Lloyd George was reputed to cast a discerning eye upon foes as well as friends. Anyhow, George’s reply would be a straight “no,” because he very simply though a trifle truculently did not believe in titles.

He saw that Winslow was waiting for a remark, so he called his thoughts to order and said guardedly: “I’m afraid I don’t quite catch on so far, but whatever it is, if there’s any way I can help—”

“Thanks, that’s very kind of you. I hope there is. So if you’ll just let me go ahead and explain…”

George nodded, now more puzzled than ever; he could not help thinking that Winslow was terribly slow in getting to the point, whatever it was. Meanwhile the great man had opened up into an account of a semiofficial tour he had lately undertaken to inspect housing projects, mostly on paper, in some of the Continental countries. At this George nodded with enthusiastic comprehension, and to show that, even without foreign travel, he kept himself well abreast of such matters, he reached for a book that happened to be to hand. “You’ll have seen it, I daresay,” he interrupted eagerly. “I got the architect of our local scheme to adopt several of this fellow’s ideas—I’ve always said we should all pool our postwar experience—allies and ex-enemies alike. Take Vienna, for instance, where the Socialists are very strong—”

“Yes, yes indeed,” Winslow agreed, though with a note in his voice to check all chatter. However, he seemed willing enough to take Vienna, for he continued: “That was one of the cities I visited recently. Apart from business, I had a special reason because my son Jeff happens to be there too. He has a job—er—connected with the Embassy.” He paused and pulled out a small pocketbook; in it he found a snapshot which he passed to George. It showed a smiling young man in ski costume in company with several pretty girls against a background panorama of snow-covered mountains. “Taken at Kitzbühel,” he added.

George had not heard of Kitzbühel, but he knew a fine-looking fellow when he saw one, and now quite sincerely expressed his admiration. To reciprocate the intimacy he pointed to one of a number of photographs on top of a revolving bookcase of encyclopedias. “Reminds me a bit of the lad just behind you.”

Winslow turned to look and confirmed after a scrutiny: “Yes, quite a resemblance. Your son? I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough—”

“I’m not…That’s one of my brothers—killed on the Somme on July first, 1916. Fifty thousand killed with him the same day—according to the records. Something for folks to remember when they attack disarmament.”

“And this?” said Winslow, still seemingly preoccupied with the photographs.

“That’s my wife.”

“Ah, yes.”

George then felt it was time to relieve his guest of any further obligation to appear interested in his family, so he returned the snapshot with the comment: “Aye, he’s a bonny lad—and brainy too, by the look of him.”

“They seemed to think so at Oxford.”

“He did well there?”

“Pretty well.”

“What did he get?”

“Get? Oh, a Rowing Blue and he was also President of the Union—”

“And a good degree? A First, I suppose?”

“Er…yes, I think so.”

“Double First?”

Winslow smiled. “I believe he took several Firsts in various subjects, but they don’t seem to use the term ‘Double First’ any more.”

“Gladstone got it.”

“Did he? You seem to know a good deal about these matters, Boswell….”

“Aye, as an outsider. Though it was my father who told me about Gladstone. I think he was the only man except Bible characters whom my father really admired…But go on about your boy.”

“Well, as I said, Jeff did pretty well at Oxford till the war cut into his career. Then he served in Egypt and got a D.S.O., and soon after the Armistice he went to France and Germany for languages, because he was entering the Diplomatic Service and the usual thing is to get attached for a few years to one of the embassies, or legations. He’s only twenty-five.”

“Sounds like a future in front of him.”

“That—er—is what I have hoped. We’ve always got on excellently together—good friends, I mean, as well as father and son. When I arrived in Vienna recently the first thing he did was to take me off to some restaurant where we could talk—because I hadn’t seen him for six months, and that’s a long time for family gossip to accumulate.” Winslow began to smile again. “I thought from the outset he didn’t seem exactly himself—he was preoccupied, somehow, in the way he behaved and talked—and later I asked if there’d been any trouble at the Embassy, but he said no, nothing like that. At last I got out of him what had caused the change.” The smile became suddenly forced and wan. “Perfectly natural, you may think.”

“Been worrying about conditions in Austria? I understand things are pretty bad, what with the famine and inflation—”

“No—not even all that…He’d fallen in love.”

George chuckled. “Well, sir, that quite often happens to good-looking chaps of twenty-five. The only surprising thing is that it hadn’t happened before.”

“Oh, but it had. That’s one of the—er—complications. He was engaged to a very charming girl, a neighbor of ours in Berkshire, but he said he’d already written to her to break it off—on account of the—er—new attraction.”

“I see.” And at this George frowned slightly. A whiff of truculence was generated in him as, momentarily, he saw in Winslow no longer an unworldly scholar but a hidebound aristocrat conforming to type; for already the probable outlines of the story seemed clear—a father anxious for his son to make a socially correct marriage, the son’s romance with some pretty but penniless Austrian girl…and George, of course, was all on the side of the son and the girl, though he would wait to say so till Winslow had finished. All he commented now was a blunt: “Everyone has a right to change his mind.”

“Of course. It wasn’t my place to interfere—provided the supplanter was all right.”

“Not even if you thought she wasn’t. A chap of twenty-five must choose for himself.”

“Yes, in theory, though when—”

“In theory and in practice, sir. I don’t say a father can’t give advice in these matters, but that’s about all he can give. And if a young fellow makes a mistake, well, it’s his mistake, and he can’t blame anyone else. Haven’t we all made mistakes? And besides, even if she is a foreigner and recently an enemy—”

“Oh, that wouldn’t worry me, and anyhow, she isn’t—she’s English.”

“Then what does worry you?”

“Perhaps I’d better go on with what happened. Jeff naturally described her to me in glowing colors and suggested an early meeting, so we all three dined together the next day, and I must admit my first impression was favorable—at any rate, she struck me as both charming and intelligent…”

George was about to pour his guest another cup of tea, but Winslow made a declining gesture. “Very kind of you, Boswell, but—but I really feel in need of something a little stronger—I wonder—if you—if it isn’t too much trouble—if I could have a whisky-and-soda?”

At which George could only in his own turn look embarrassed. “To tell you the truth I don’t have such a thing in the house—you see, I’m teetotal. But if you’re not feeling well I could send Annie out for a drop of brandy—”

“Oh, please no, I’m perfectly well—just tiredness, that’s all. I really shouldn’t have mentioned it. Of no consequence at all, I assure you.” What had really been demonstrated was a social distinction far more revealing than any question of blood or accent—the fact that Winslow, though he drank sparingly, nevertheless belonged to the class for whom whisky is as much a household commonplace as salt or soap; whereas George, though by no means a bigot, had inherited enough of his father’s puritanism to think of liquor in terms of drunkenness and social problems.

After the gulf had been bridged by renewed apologies on both sides, Winslow continued: “To come to the point—” (at last, thought George)—“I told Jeff afterwards that if they’d both made up their minds there was nothing much for me to say. I was just a bit worried, though, because I gathered it had been a very sudden affair, and I didn’t think he could really know enough about her.”

“You mean her family and so on?”

“Partly. You may think me a snob, but I had to ask myself whether, as a diplomat’s wife, she would have the right background.”

“Aye, I suppose that’s what counts.” George’s voice was severe.

“Yes—though not as much as it used to.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I don’t know much about the Diplomatic Service, but I’m all for democracy in these things. And since you have to admit the girl was all right herself—”

“Oh yes, she seemed so. I could imagine her a good hostess, and she certainly had intelligence enough to pull wires.”

“Do diplomats’ wives have to do that?”

“They don’t have to, but it can help. Don’t the wives of your local councillors sometimes do it?”

George grinned. “Not mine, anyhow. I could never get her to take an interest in local affairs at all…But about your son and this girl…So I suppose you consented to the match?”

“I should have done, but for finding out something about her that was—as I think even you will agree—rather insuperable. Simply that she was already married. The fact came out quite accidentally—someone I happened to meet in Switzerland on my way home was able to tell me about her. She had, it appeared—at least there was no other conclusion to be drawn—deliberately misled Jeff. And a rather pointless deception too—unless of course she was prepared to commit bigamy.”

George pondered a moment. “Well, you found out in time, that’s the main thing.”

“Perhaps not in time, though, to stop him from making an utter fool of himself.”

Winslow paused and seemed suddenly aware of the extent of George’s library, though his ranging glance was hardly one of interest in it. At the same moment Annie entered with some letters and was about to hand them to George, but the latter shook his head and gestured her to put them on his desk. Winslow intervened: “Don’t mind me if there’s anything important you ought to attend to.”

“They can wait, whatever they are.”

“It’s good of you to let me take up your time like this.”

George was amazed at the humility of such a remark from a man of Winslow’s age and importance. He could only reply: “Not at all, sir. Besides, you say I can help—though I wouldn’t pretend to be much good at advice about—er—family matters and so on.”

“Perhaps because your own family affairs have been happy?”

“Oh, I’ve had my troubles, same as most folks, I reckon.”

“But you’ve settled them all?”

“I’ve never had any to settle about a grown-up lad.” And George added, wryly: “Worse luck.”

“Perhaps that itself makes a sort of trouble? I mean if—if—of course I don’t know what your—”

“Aye…aye…but let’s get back to your lad. What’s the mistake he made? Surely when you told him—”

Winslow leaned forward with his hands pressed down on his knees; he seemed to be seeking mastery of some strong emotion. “Forgive me for not keeping to the point…Yes, I told him. We had long conversations, but only by telephone, unfortunately, because I was compelled to return to England for an important government conference. That was a further complication—not being in personal touch with him. It was very hard to telephone. Of course if he’d been his normal self the mere facts would have been enough—he’s always been quick to do the right thing. But—you see—he’s not his normal self any more. This emotion—love or whatever you call it—perhaps madness or infatuation’s a better word—”

“Doesn’t seem to matter much what you call it if it’s there.”

“I agree—provided one doesn’t fall into the error of idealizing. I’d say, for instance, that I love my own wife, but I can easily think of things I wouldn’t do to please her—things which, even if she asked me to do them, would destroy the bond between us—like betraying my friends or my country…But infatuation’s different—it seems to glory in doing things in spite of, rather than because of…if you know what I mean.”

George made no comment.

“Well, anyhow, the point is, he hasn’t dropped her, even though he knows the truth and she’s been forced to admit it. He’s behaving, in fact, as if he can’t drop her. The last time I talked to him, which was from Paris, I gathered he’d not only forgiven her for the deception, but she’s made him believe a long story about an unhappy past and a husband she ran away from because she couldn’t stand him…and the upshot of it all is, Jeff’s now urging her to get a divorce so that he can marry her himself.”

“What’s her attitude?”

“I only know through him—and of course he’s so completely prejudiced in her favor that it’s not much to go by. But remember he’s quite a catch, even if it does ruin his career.”

“And it would? Because of the scandal?”

“Possibly…But worst of all, as I see it, is the thing itself—to put himself at the mercy of someone who has such evident power to distort and overthrow his judgment …judgment…the most valuable attribute a man of his profession can have…because if he still had any of it left, he’d drop her. After all, how could he expect a marriage of that sort to turn out a success?…It’s a sad thing, Boswell, to see a first-class intelligence functioning like a baby’s.”

“Why don’t you go out and talk to him personally as soon as you have the time?”

“Yes, I shall do that—I wired him today about it. But somehow I’m not sure that I can do much on my own—that last telephone talk was simply shattering—the most I could get was a promise that he’d think it over, but he can’t think, that’s the trouble—he’s in a world utterly beyond logic and argument—you can’t prove anything to him—he just believes this woman’s a sort of martyr heroine and her husband’s an impossible brute and—”

“How do you know he isn’t?”

Winslow got up suddenly, walked to the window, then came back and touched George on the shoulder with a queerly intimate gesture. “I didn’t know—definitely—until today. But I’m a bit positive at this moment…” And after a second pause, standing in front of George, he stammered unsurely: “I hope I haven’t been so damned tactful that you’re going to ask me what all this has got to do with you….”

Then George looked up and saw in a flash what it had got to do with him.

He felt himself growing cold and sick, as if a fist were grasping him by his insides. Try as one might, he reflected with queer and instant detachment, the actual blow of such a revelation must be sudden; there was no way of leading up that could disperse the shock over a period; one second one did not know, the next second one did know; that was all there was to it, so that all Winslow’s delicacy had been in a sense wasted. He might just as well have blurted out the truth right at the beginning.

George knew he must say something to acknowledge that Oxford had managed to convey with subtlety in an hour what Browdley could have tackled vulgarly in five minutes. After a long pause, he therefore spoke the slow Browdley affirmative that, by its tone, could imply resignation as well as affirmation.

“You mean you do understand, Boswell?”

“Aye,” George repeated.

“I’m terribly sorry—I could think of no other way than to put it to you—”

“Of course, man, of course.”

Winslow gripped George’s arm speechlessly, and for several minutes the two seemed not to know what to say to each other. Presently George mumbled: “Is that—all—you can tell me—about it? No more details of any kind? Not that they’d help much, but still—”

“Honestly, Boswell, I’ve told you just about everything I know myself.”

“I understand…But how about the people on the tour whom she was supposed to be looking after?”

“Maybe she just left them stranded…It would be crazy and irresponsible—but no more so than—than—”

“Than anything else. That’s so.”

“I admit the whole thing sounds—must sound to you, in fact—well, if you were to tell me you simply didn’t believe a word of it, I’d—”

“Aye, it’s a bit of a facer.”

“But you do believe it?”

“Reckon I have to, don’t I? After all, you took a good look at that photograph…”

“Yes, it’s the same. I knew that at once…” Winslow’s voice grew almost pathetically eager. “And you will help me, won’t you—now that you know how it is? What I had in mind was this—if you agreed—that we go out there together—quite soon—immediately, in fact—before there can be any open scandal involving him—you see what I mean?”

“Aye, I see what you mean.”

“And you agree?”

To which George retorted with sudden sharpness: “Why not, for God’s sake? He may be your son, but she’s my wife too. Don’t you think I’m interested?”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I—I—”

“Now, now, don’t apologize. Come to that, we’ve neither of us much to apologize for.”

“I thought we might leave tomorrow—”

“Aye, if we’re going, might as well—”

“Boswell, I can’t tell you how much I—”

“None o’ that either, man. Let’s get down to some details. I’ll need a passport—”

And somehow from then on, in spite of what might have been held more humiliating for George than for Winslow in the situation, it was nevertheless George who took the leadership, a certain staunch four-squareness in his make-up easily dominating the other. They both belonged to a world in which the accomplishment of any suddenly urgent task requires the canceling or postponement of other less urgent ones; and now, as they eased themselves back into chairs, there was nothing left but such routine adjustments. Winslow pulled out a little black notebook and began crossing off this and that; George reached for a sheet of paper on his desk and jotted down a few memoranda. Into the momentary silence there came the distant chiming of the hour on Browdley church clock, and a newsboy shouting familiarly but incoherently along Market Street. Good news, perhaps, about the international situation…but it did not seem to matter so much now, so quickly can world affairs be over-shadowed by personal ones in the life of even the most public man.

Winslow looked up. “You’re optimistic, Boswell? From your own knowledge of her—do you feel that—that somehow or other you’ll be able to persuade her to—to”

George’s face was haggard as he replied: “I wouldn’t call my own knowledge so very reliable—not after this.”

“Then perhaps you could talk to my son—try to influence him—”

“Aren’t you the one for that?”

“But a new angle, Boswell—your point of view in the matter—he may not have realized—”

“All right, all right—no good badgering me.” The first shock had been succeeded by anger—helpless anger, which Winslow’s concern for his own son merely exacerbated. “I’m damned if I know what I’ll do—yet.”

“I’m sorry again.” And the two faced each other, both driven out of character and somehow aware of it, for it was not like

George to be angry, nor was Winslow accustomed to pleading and apologizing. Presently an odd smile came over his face.

“Badger…badger…” he repeated. “It’s a long time since I heard that word, and you’ll never guess why it makes me smile.”

“Why?”

“My nickname at school—Badger.”

Then George smiled too, glad of the momentary side issue. “Because you looked like one or because you did badger people?”

“Both—possibly.”

“They once called me Apple-Pie George in Browdley, but it sort of died out.”

“Apple-Pie George?”

“Aye…because somebody threw some apple pie in my face during an election. The pie stuck but the name didn’t.” He laughed and Winslow laughed, and it was as if one of several barriers between them were from then on let down. “Too bad I haven’t that drop of whisky for you,” George continued. “But how about changing your mind about another cup of tea?”

“Thanks, I will.”

George went to the door and shouted down the corridor to Annie, then came back and began to search a timetable on his desk. “If we’re both going to start in the morning, maybe you’d like to spend the night here?”

“That’s very kind, but I think I’d better go back to London as I planned and join you there tomorrow.”

“Just as you like. There’s a good train at five-eighteen—that still gives you an hour, so take it easy.”

Winslow seemed now better able to do this, and until the time of leaving they both relaxed, arranged further details of their meeting the next day, and talked quite casually on a variety of subjects—some even verging on the intellectual, though George was not in the best mood for appreciation. Then he took Winslow to the train, and only in the final minutes before its departure did they refer to the personal matter again. Winslow muttered, leaning out of a first-class compartment: “I—I must say it, Boswell—I—I really don’t know how to thank you for—for taking all this in the way you have…”

“What other way was there to take it?”

“I know, I know…but it’s such an extraordinary situation for you to have been able to come to terms with.”

“Who says I’ve come to terms with it?”

“Yes, but I mean—when I try to imagine myself in your place—”

“Don’t.” And there was just the ghost of a smile on George’s face to soften the harsh finality of the word.

“All right…but I can’t help feeling more hopeful already—thanks to you.

Of course the affair’s still incomprehensible to me in many ways—for instance, to fathom the kind of person who could do such a thing…of course you know her, but then I know Jeff, and he’s not a fool—that’s what makes his side of it so hard to understand.”

“Oh, maybe not so hard,” George replied. “It’s probably what you said that you couldn’t find a name for.”

“Infatuation?”

“If you like.” And then, abruptly and without caring for the awkwardness of time and place, George began to tell something about Livia that he had never mentioned to anyone before. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of a railway station that reminded him, for it had happened (he said) at the end of their honeymoon when they were to catch a night train from a seaside place back to London. They had spent the last day pottering about the promenade between showers, and during one of these, while sheltering, they had got into conversation with a well-dressed and rather distinguished-looking man of sixty or so. It was one of those chance acquaintanceships that flourish amazingly without either background or future prospects; almost immediately the stranger offered to conduct them through an adjacent art gallery which, though full of very bad canvases, gave him the chance to talk so fascinatingly about paintings that they thought he must belong to that world himself until later he talked with equal fascination about literature, music, and politics. Within an hour they were all chattering together like old friends, and as evening approached it seemed perfectly natural to accept the stranger’s invitation to dine. (He had given them his name and told them he was French, which had further amazed George because of his completely accentless English.) The two newlyweds were presently entertained in a manner to which they were wholly unaccustomed and which they could certainly not have afforded—George smilingly declined to break his temperance pledge, but ate two dozen oysters with gusto while Livia drank champagne and laughed a great deal. After dinner it seemed equally natural that the stranger should drive them back to their hotel in his car and later take them on to the railway station. The train was already drawn up to the platform, so the three of them sat together in an otherwise unoccupied compartment with half an hour to wait. Suddenly George discovered the hotel-room key in his pocket and, excusing himself, walked down the platform to the station office to arrange for its return. He wasn’t away more than ten minutes, and when he got back the three resumed their conversation until the train’s departure.

About a year later (George went on), Livia exclaimed suddenly, during a rather trivial quarrel: “That Frenchman sized you up all right—he said I oughtn’t ever to have married you!” More startled than angry, George then asked for an explanation. She wouldn’t give any at first, but on being pressed said that during the few minutes he had left her alone in the train with the stranger, the latter had made her an ardent profession of love and had actually implored her to run off with him.

When George reached this point in the story he commented rather naïvely: “I suppose that could happen, with a Frenchman, even though he’d only set eyes on her a few hours before.”

“Perhaps in that particular way he was unbalanced.”

“No—or at least there wasn’t much other evidence of it. You see, having once got interested in the man, I’d found out a few things about him and followed his career. He’d been married and raised a family long before his meeting with us, and recently he’s become fairly well known as one of the financial experts to the Peace Conference. You’d recognize the name if I told you, but I don’t think that would be quite fair because a few months ago he and his wife came to London on some official mission, and there were photographs of them in the papers looking as if they’d both had a lifetime of happiness.”

“Maybe they had.”

A sudden commotion of door banging and engine whistling drowned George’s reply and caused him to repeat, more loudly: “I shouldn’t wonder.”

“There’s one other thing that occurs to me, Boswell, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it—”

“Of course—”

“How do you know the incident really happened?”

The train began to move and George walked with it for a few seconds, hastily pondering before he answered: “Aye…I can see what you mean…Funny—I hadn’t ever thought of that. And yet I should have, I know.” His walk accelerated to a scamper; there was now only time to wave and call out: “Good-bye…see you tomorrow…Good-bye….”

When the train had left he stood for a moment as if watching it out of sight, but actually watching nothing, seeing nothing. A porter wheeling a truck along the platform halted and half-turned. “’Night, George.”

“Good night,” responded George mechanically, then pulled himself together and walked down the ramp to the station yard.

He felt he must at all costs avoid the main streets where people would stop him with congratulations on the success of the day’s events. There was a footpath skirting the edge of the town that meant an extra half-mile but led unobtrusively towards the far end of Market Street. Nobody went this way at night except lovers seeking darkness, and darkness alone obscured the ugliness of the scene—a cindery wasteland between town and countryside and possessing the amenities of neither; it had long been a dream of his to beautify the whole area with shrubs and lawns, to provide the youth of Browdley with a more fitting background for its romance. But Browdley youth seemed not to care, while those in Browdley who were no longer youthful objected to the cost. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life George now traversed the wasteland without reflecting ruefully upon its continued existence; he had far more exacting thoughts to assemble, and in truth he hardly knew where he was. The day that had begun so well was ending in trouble whose magnitude he had only just begun to explore, and with every further step came the deepening of a pain that touched him physically as well as in every other way, so that he felt sick and ill as he stumbled along. He was appalled by the realization that Livia still had such power to hurt him.

Somberly he reached his house and, as he entered it, suddenly felt alone. Which made him think; for he had been just as alone ever since Livia had left six months before; and if he had not felt it so much, that proved how hopefully, in his heart, he had looked upon the separation. She would come back, he must all along have secretly believed; or at least the bare possibility had been enough to encourage his ever-ready optimism about the future. Night after night he had entered his empty house, made himself a cup of tea, spent a last hour with a book or the evening paper, and gone to bed with the comforting feeling that anything could be endured provided it might not last forever. There was even a half-ascetic sense in which he had found tolerable his enforced return to bachelorhood, and there was certainly a peace of mind that he knew her return would disturb—yet how welcome that disturbance would be! And how insidiously, behind the logic of his thoughts, he had counted on it!…He was aware of that now, as he entered his house and felt the aloneness all-enveloping. Heavily he climbed the stairs to his bedroom and began to throw a few necessary articles into a suitcase. Even that he did with an extra pang, for it reminded him of times when Livia had packed for him to attend meetings or conferences in other parts of the country; she was an expert packer as well as very particular about his clothes. And the first thing she did when he returned was to unpack and repair the ravages of his own carelessness about such things. There was that odd streak of practicality in her, running parallel to other streaks; so that she not only loved classical music but could repair the phonograph when something went wrong with it. And the garden that Winslow had admired was further evidence; it had been a dumping ground for wastepaper and old tin cans before she started work on it. Recent months without her attention had given the weeds a chance, but still her hand was in everything, and the roses seemed to have come into special bloom that week as if expecting her return. In a sort of way she had done for that patch of wasteland what George himself had tried to do for Browdley as a whole (yet would never have bothered to do for his own back garden); but of course she had done it without any civic sense, and for the simple reason that the place belonged to her. George sighed as he thought of that, recognizing motives that were so strong in her and so absent in him; but with the sigh came a wave of tolerance, as for someone who does simple natural things that are the world’s curse, doubtless, but since they cannot be changed, how pointless it is to try. Yet the world must be changed…and so George’s mind ran on, facing an old dilemma as he snapped the locks on his suitcase. All at once the house, without Livia in it, became unbearable to him; he knew he would not sleep that night, and as his train left early in the morning he might as well not even go to bed; he would take a walk, a long walk that would tire him physically as well as clarify some of the problems in his mind. He went downstairs and put on a hat, then passed through the partition doorway that separated the house from the printing office. It was the middle of the week, the slack time between issues; copy for the next one lay littered on his desk—mostly local affairs—council meetings, church activities, births, marriages, and funerals. Occasionally he wrote an editorial about some national or international event, and the one he had composed that morning faced him from the copy desk as unfathomably as if someone else had written it in another language. It read:—

These are times when the clouds of war roll back and THE SUN OF HUMAN BETTERMENT shines out to be a lamp of memory for the future. Let us hope, therefore, that AUGUST 31st, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE, the date selected as that of the official end of the Great War, will have more than a merely legal significance, that it will symbolize the actual dying out of hatreds and bitterness both at home and abroad. In this connection it is good news that the Washington Conference is soon to convene, and that the problem of world-wide DISARMAMENT will then be tackled in real earnest. We of this town, who have just dedicated our first postwar plan for a BETTER BROWDLEY, can feel especially proud, for our own achievement makes us part of a mighty movement in which men of goodwill all over the world are straining to participate.

(A pretty fair example, incidentally, of George’s editorial writing—typical, at any rate, in its use of capitals, in its opening metaphor that almost gets out of hand, and in its tendency to glib phrases. Typical also of George’s fondness for linking local and world affairs into a pleasing dish of optimism.)

But now, reading it over, he had difficulty in gathering what it was all about. Disarmament? Disarmament?…The word echoed meaninglessly in his mind as he sought, even for a moment, to concentrate on something nonpersonal. What did he know about disarmament? And at the form of that question he smiled, because of the oddest recollection that came to him there and then, as he crossed the printing office to the door leading into Market Street.

It was of something that had happened several years before, when he had just acquired the almost bankrupt Guardian and was full of visions of the kind of influence a small-town paper could wield, perhaps even nationally, if its editor were the right sort, and surely the right sort must be well-educated, which surely in its turn could mean nothing less than a university degree. So that had become one of his numerous ambitions, and since Oxford and Cambridge were out of the question for a man who had a job to do, he had concentrated on a near-by provincial foundation of decent repute that offered degrees by examination only. It had been a hard struggle, even so, for he had originally left school at the age of thirteen, and though the following decade and a half had contained a good deal of self-education there were many deplorable gaps. He could write and speak forcefully, for instance, but before beginning to study he had scarcely heard of the technicalities of grammar, he had small knowledge of history, and none at all of any foreign language. At the first of the two necessary examinations he was baffled by the academic atmosphere, by the courtesy bordering on indifference of the pedagogue in charge (so unlike the nagging, shouting schoolmasters of his boyhood days), and he was rather dashed by an English paper which, though offering the most generous choice of questions, could not avoid the discovery of so much that he did not know. To one question, couched in that very phrase—“What do you know of the Pathetic Fallacy?”—he had replied, pathetically enough: “Nothing”; and there were other matters nearly as hopeless. Leaving the examination hall after that three-hour battle he had been fairly certain of failure.

But a few weeks later he received a note asking him to appear at the same place for oral questioning—which, he was cautioned, did not necessarily imply that he had passed the written tests. The coolness of the warning reinforced his pessimism, so that he was in a thoroughly black mood by the time he faced the ordeal. A tall, thin, spectacled man with a domelike forehead and very precise clipped speech presided at the interview. (Ever afterwards he was the personification of an ideal in George’s mind—the pure scholar, unworldly, incomparable, serenely aloof; so that on meeting Lord Winslow, for instance, he felt he already knew the type.)

The prototype had talked pleasantly and informally with George’s examination papers before him, and also (though George had not known this) notes of reminder that the examinee was thirty-one years old, had had nothing but an elementary-school education, but was already owner and editor of a local newspaper as well as a town Councillor with reputedly advanced views—altogether a rather remarkable specimen. Clearly George both puzzled and attracted him, though he gave no sign of it; he merely steered the conversation from one subject to another—which was not difficult, for George loved to talk. After half an hour or so the older man nodded, picked up the examination papers, cleared his throat, and began rather uncomfortably: “A pity, Mr. Boswell, that you have done so badly in one paper—English—that your total marks do not reach the required minimum.”

George’s conviction of failure, which had somehow become suspended during the conversation, now returned with a hard hit to the pit of the stomach. “Aye,” he said heavily. “I guessed as much.”

“Do you think you will try again, Mr. Boswell?”

“I dunno, sir. I dunno if I’ll have the time to.”

“Why not?”

“You see I’m on the local Council and I run a newspaper—there’s a heap of work in all that—work that I can’t cut down on. If it was just a question of giving up fun or a hobby I wouldn’t mind, but when it means important things…”

“Such as?”

“Well, sir, I doubt if you’d be interested in all the details, but I’m trying to get a postwar slum-clearance scheme adopted by the Council, and that’s a job, I can tell you—if you knew the sort of place Browdley is.”

“H’m, yes… I understand. And I do not dispute the importance of such work, or the priority you feel you must give to it. What does puzzle me—a little—is your motive in entering for this examination at all. Did you feel that a university degree would help you politically—or professionally?”

“No sir, it isn’t that. But I thought it might help me—sometimes—inside myself—to feel I was properly educated.”

“And what do you mean by ‘properly educated’?”

George pondered a moment, then replied: “I’ll put it this way, sir—sometimes I read a book that seems to me just plain stupid, but because I’m not properly educated I can’t be sure whether it’s stupid or whether I’m stupid.”

A smile creased over the older man’s face as he burrowed afresh among the papers, finally discovering one and holding it up before his spectacles. “H’m… h’m…Such a pity, Mr. Boswell—such a pity…Mind you, I didn’t mark these English papers myself, so of course I don’t know whether…” And then a long pause, punctuated by more throat clearings and spectacle fìdgetings. “Take this question, for instance—‘What do you know of the Pathetic Fallacy?’ I see, Mr. Boswell, that your answer is ‘Nothing,’ for which you have been given no marks at all.”

George felt it was rather unfair to rub it in; if he had failed, he had failed; and when (since the examination) he had found out what the Pathetic Fallacy really was, it had turned out to be so different from anything he could possibly have guessed that he thought he had at least done well not to try. So with this vague self-justification in mind he now blurted out:

“Well, sir, it was the truth, anyway. I did know nothing and I said so.”

“Precisely, Mr. Boswell. I have no reason to suppose that your answer was not a perfectly correct one to the question as asked, and if the questioner had wished to judge your answer on any other merits it seems to me he should have used the formula ‘State what you know’—not ‘What do you know?’ I shall therefore revise your rating and give you full marks for that particular question—which, I think, will just enable you to reach the minimum standard for the examination…My congratulations…I hope you will find time to work for the final examination next year….”

“Oh yes, sir—yes, indeed, sir!”

But George hadn’t found time, after all, because the year ahead was the one during which he had met and married Livia.

And what did he know of Livia, for that matter?

Browdley streets were deserted as he closed the door of the newspaper office behind him. From Market Street he turned into Shawgate, which is Browdley’s chief business thoroughfare; he walked on past all the shops, then through the suburban fringe of the town—“the best part of Browdley,” people sometimes called it. But the best part of Browdley isn’t, and never was, so good. The town consists mainly of four-roomed bathroomless houses built in long parallel rows, dormitories of miners and cotton operatives who (in George’s words to Lord Winslow) had piled up money like muck for a few local families. George had not added that his wife belonged to one of those families, even when the mention of Channing and Felsby’s Mill would have given him a cue. For Livia was a Channing—one of the Channings of Stoneclough…and suddenly he decided that, since he was trying to kill time by walking, he would walk to Stoneclough. It was even appropriate that he should take there his problem, his distress, and that brooding subcurrent of anger.

Presently his walk quickened and his head lifted as if to meet a challenge; and in this new mood he reached the top of a small rise from which Browdley could be seen more magically at night than ever in the daytime; for at night, especially under a moon, the observer might be unaware that those glinting windows were factories and not palaces, and that the shimmer beneath them was no fabled stream, but a stagnant, stinking canal. Yet to George, who had known all this since childhood, there were still fables and palaces in Browdley, palaces he would build and fables he would never surrender; and as he walked to Stoneclough that night and looked back on the roofs of the town, he had a renewal of faith that certain things were on his side.

The trouble with Livia, he told himself for the fiftieth time, was that there was no reason in so many things she did; or was there a reason this time—the reason he had been reluctant to face?

He climbed steadily along the upland road; it was past one in the morning when he came within sight of Stoneclough. The foothills of the Pennines begin there; there is a river also, the same one that flows dirty and sluggish through Browdley, but clean and swift in its fall from the moorland, where it cuts a steep fissure called a “clough,” and in so doing gives the place a name and provides Browdley citizens with a near-by excursion and picnic ground. The first cotton mills, driven from a water wheel, were set up in such places towards the end of the eighteenth century, and one of them belonged to a certain John Channing of whom little is known save that he died rich in the year of Waterloo. The shell of the old graystone mill that made his fortune still stands astride the tumbling stream; but the rows of hovels in which the workpeople lived have long since disappeared, though there are traces of them on neighboring slopes, where sheep huddle in rain against weed-grown fireplaces.

Gone too is the first Channing house that adjoined the mill; it was demolished about the time of Queen Victoria’s accession, when the Channing family, by then not only rich but numerous, built a new and much more pretentious house on higher ground where the clough meets the moorland. About this time also it became clear that steam would oust water power in the cotton industry, and with this in their shrewd minds the Channings took another plunge; five miles away, on meadows near what was then the small village of Browdley, and in partnership with another mill-owner named Felsby, they built one of the first large steam-driven mills in Lancashire. Other speculators obligingly built Mill Street for the new workers to live in, and the same process, repeated during succeeding decades with other mills and other streets, made Browdley what it is and what it shouldn’t be—as George said (and then waited for the cheer) in his popular lecture “Browdley Past and Present,” delivered fairly frequently to local literary, antiquarian, and similar societies. Yes, there was one question at any rate to which he could return a convincing answer—“What do you know of Browdley?”—and that answer might well be: “More than anyone else in the world.”

Suddenly George saw the house—the house which, like the locality, was called Stoneclough. It showed wanly in the moonlight against the background of moorland and foreground of treetops. The moon was flattering to it, softening its heavy Victorian stolidity, concealing the grim under-shadow that Browdley’s smoke had contributed in the course of half a century of west winds. This was the house the Channings had lived in, the Channings of Stoneclough. A succession of Channings had traveled the five miles between Stoneclough and the Browdley mill on foot, on horseback, by pony carriage and landau, by bicycle and motorcycle and car, according to taste and period; and the same succession had added to the house a hodgepodge of excrescences and outbuildings that had nothing in common save evidence of the prevalent Channing trait throughout several generations; one of them might construct a billiard room, another remodel the stables, yet another add terraces to the garden or a bow window to the drawing room—but whatever was done at all was done conscientiously, always with the best materials, and with a rooted assumption of permanence in the scheme of things.

George saw Stoneclough as a symbol of that assumption, and—because the house was now empty and derelict—as a hint that such permanence would have received its virtual deathblow in 1914, even apart from the special fate of the Channings. Only the gardens had any surviving life, the shrubs growing together till they made an almost unbroken thicket around the house, the fences down so that any straggler from the clough could enter the once-sacred precincts out of curiosity or to gather fuel for a picnic fire. All the windows were broken or boarded up; everything lootable from the interior had long ago been looted. Yet the fabric of the house still stood, too massive to have suffered, and in moonlight and from a distance almost beautiful. George wondered, not for the first time, what could be done with such a property. No one would buy it; no one who could afford repairs and taxes would want to live there or anywhere near Browdley, for that matter. Once or twice he had thought of suggesting that the Council take it over for conversion into a municipal rest home, sanatorium, or something of the kind—but then he had cautioned himself not to give his opponents the chance for another jibe—that he had made Browdley buy his wife’s birthplace.

He did not walk up to the house, but turned back where the road began its last steep ascent; here, for a space of a few acres, were the older relics—the original Channing Mill, the broken walls of cottages that had not been lived in for a hundred years. George never saw them without reflecting on the iniquity of that early industrial age—eight-year-old children slaving at machines for fourteen hours out of the twenty-four, sunlight falling on the treetops in the clough as later on rubber forests of the Congo and the Amazon. Thus had the first Channings flourished; and it might be nemesis, of a kind, that had given their grand house to the bats and the rats. But its quality showed even in ruin; it was a substantial ruin.

By four o’clock George was back in Browdley, tired and a little footsore. As he turned into Market Street and fished in his pocket for the door key there came a voice from the pavement near his house. “’Ow do, George. Nice night—but I’d rather be in bed all the same.”

“Aye,” answered George mechanically. Then, recognizing the policeman on his beat, a friendly fellow always ready with a joke and (at election times) with a vote, George pulled himself together and made the necessary response. “How do, Tom.”

“Fine, thanks—bar a touch of rheumatics…I was at the stone layin’. It’s bin a grand day for ye, and I wouldn’t say ye don’t deserve it.”

“Thanks, Tom.”

“Ye’ve worked for it hard enough. I can remember when ye used to swear ye’d have those Mill Street houses pulled down, and folks’d laugh at ye then, but I’ll bet they can see it’s no joke now. Aye, ye’ve made a grand start. How long d’you reckon the whole job’ll take?”

“Years,” George answered (but he would have been shocked if he could have been told how many). His voice was rather grim, and he did not amplify as he usually did when anyone encouraged him to discuss his plans. Tom noticed this and muttered sympathetically: “Well, I’ll be gettin’ along—mustn’t keep you talkin’ this hour…’Night, George—or rather, good mornin’.”

George fumbled the key in the lock and re-entered his house. He felt as he had hoped, exhausted, but not, as he had also hoped, insensitive to the aloneness. It flew at him now like a wild thing as he strode along the lobby and heard, in imagination, Livia’s call from upstairs that had so often greeted him when he came home late from meetings—“That you, George?” Who else did she expect it to be, he would ask her waggishly, and feel sorry that she was such a light sleeper, since his meetings were so often late and the late meetings so frequent….

He went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea, sitting there at the small scrubbed table till dawn showed gray through the windows; then he went to the room with the books in it which he called his “study.” The timetable lay open on the desk, reminding him of the impending journey for which his tiredness now gave him even physical distaste; and next to the timetable was the small pile of letters that Annie had brought in during the interview with Winslow. George glanced through them idly, and with equal distaste. Suddenly then his glance changed to a gaze and his gaze to a stare, for the writing on one of the envelopes was Livia’s and the postmark was Vienna.

He read it through, and through again, stumbling to his armchair with the aloneness all around him as he faced the issue. Time passed in a curious vacuum of sensation; he did not realize it was so long until he saw the sunlight brightly shining, glinting already on the gilt titles of his books. Then he crossed the room to his desk and reached for pen and paper.

He wrote out a wire first of all: REGRET MUST CANCEL VIENNA TRIP FOR REASONS WILL EXPLAIN FULLY IN LETTER.

Then he wrote the letter without pause as follows:—

DEAR LORD WINSLOW—By now you will have got my wire, and are probably surprised by my change of mind. The reason for it is simply that I have just read a letter from my wife. It came yesterday—actually while you and I were discussing things. I put it aside with other letters and only noticed it an hour ago. Though short, it is a very frank letter, and in view of what it says there seems little that I can do now—except what Livia asks. I do not pretend to understand how these things happen, and why, but I have to take into account her age, which was not much more than half mine when I married her, so that if it was a mistake, I’d blame myself more than her. Anyhow, it would be unjust and stupid to expect her to cling to it for the rest of her life. Maybe she is old enough now to know what she really does want, and if your son is also, I won’t stand in their way—no, I can’t—neither on moral grounds nor for social and professional reasons such as you might have. So there’s nothing I could do in Vienna except make the whole thing more troublesome for all concerned. Please excuse what may strike you as a hasty reconsideration and perhaps even the breaking of a promise, but I’ve already thought it all over as much as a thing like this can be thought over. As for what I feel, that matters to no one except myself, but I would like to say how deeply I appreciate the way you approached me yesterday. No one could have been kinder and I shall never forget it.

Yours sincerely,

GEO. BOSWELL

George always signed himself “Geo.” in important or official letters because that was how Will Spivey set up his business letterheads—“Geo. Boswell, Printer and Bookbinder.” And under that, in smaller type: “Proprietor of the Guardian Press, Market Street, Browdley.” And under that, in even smaller type: “Estimates Free. Good Work Guaranteed.”

About seven o’clock he went to the corner, posted the letter, and re-entered his house to find that Annie had returned from spending a night with her mother across the town and had already noticed his bag half-packed on the bed upstairs. “Another conference?” she exclaimed. “Why, it’s only last week end you was away at the last one….”

“It’s canceled,” George answered. “I’m not going after all.”

“Then I’ll unpack your things and have breakfast ready in a jiffy.”

George was suddenly aware that he had none of his usual healthy early morning appetite, but she was in the kitchen before he could say so, and by the time he followed her there he had decided he might as well say everything else that had to be said and get it over.

He stood in the kitchen doorway wondering how to make it sound not too dramatic, yet not so commonplace that she would miss the full significance. He began: “By the way, I’ve had news of Livia.” (He always called her “Livia” to Annie.)

“You have?…Well, that’s nice. Did she say when she was coming home?”

That was a good opening. “I’m—er—afraid she’s—she’s not coming home.”

“What?” Annie swung round in consternation as she interpreted the remark in the only way that occurred to her. “Oh, my goodness, she’s not—she’s not—you don’t mean—” And then a flood of tears.

It was quite a minute before George realized what was in Annie’s mind. Then he had to comfort her and meanwhile explain matters more specifically. “Good heavens, no—she’s all right—she’s quite well—nothing at all’s happened to her. She’s just not coming home…She’s decided to—to leave me. It does happen, sometimes—that people don’t hit it off together…I just wanted you to know, so that you can get her clothes in order—I expect she’ll be sending for them soon. No need to talk about it in the town yet, though of course people will have to know sooner or later.” (And no need, yet, to tell even Annie the other details.)

Annie, having been heartbroken, now became furious. She belonged to a world in which women do not leave their husbands, but regard themselves as lucky to get and keep any man who does not drink, gamble, or beat them. And George not only possessed these negative virtues, but others to which Annie had for years accorded increasing admiration. She really believed him to be a great man, and for a wife to be dissatisfied with such a paragon seemed to her incomprehensible as well as shocking. She had never liked Livia as much as George, and that made her now feel that she had never liked Livia at all. “She’s a bad lot,” she whimpered scornfully. “And it’s all you could expect from where she comes from.”

“Nay…nay…” said George pacifyingly. “She’s all right, in her own way. And maybe I’m all right in mine.”

“I never really took to her,” Annie continued. “And I’m not the only one.…There was something queer about her, or folks wouldn’t have talked the way they did about her father’s death and what she had to do with it—because there’s never no smoke without fire—”

“Oh yes, there is, often enough,” George interrupted sharply.

“Well, anyhow, there was something queer about Stoneclough altogether—what with ghosts and drownings and every-thing—and I’m sorry if I’ve let out something I wasn’t supposed to….”

She was on the point of weeping again, so George made haste to reassure her. “Oh, that’s all right, Annie. I don’t think you could tell me much that I didn’t hear at the time. But it was all gossip—not worth repeating now or even remembering—that’s the way I look at it. I doubt if we’ll ever know the whole truth about what really happened.” He found something he could force a smile at. “And as for the ghosts—why, that’s only an old yarn—a sort of local legend…I heard it long before Livia was born.…”

Part Two

LIVIA HAD FIRST HEARD it from Sarah (combined cook, nurse, and housekeeper to the Channing family for half a century); it was the story of three girls who had lived about a hundred years ago in the cottages in the clough. They had been little girls, not more than nine or ten, and in those days children of that age went to work at the Channing Mill (the original one that straddles the stream where the water wheel used to be); and what was more, they had to get up in the dark of early morning to be at their machines by half-past five. Because they were always so sleepy at that hour the three had an arrangement among themselves that while they hurried from their homes they should link arms together, so that only the middle girl need keep awake; the two others could then run with eyes closed, half sleeping for those few extra minutes. They took it in turns, of course, to be the unlucky one. But one winter’s morning the middle girl was so sleepy herself that she couldn’t help closing her eyes too, with the result that all ran over the edge of the path into the river and were drowned. And so (according to legend—the story itself might well have been true) the ghosts of the three are sometimes to be seen after dark in the clough, scampering with linked arms along the path towards the old mill.

Sarah told this to Livia by way of warning to the child never to stray out of the garden into the clough, for it was always dark there under the trees, and also, added Sarah, improving the legend to suit the occasion, the ghosts were really liable to be seen at any time of the day or night. But that made Livia all the more eager to stray. She was an only child, without playmates, and it would surely be breathlessly exciting to meet three possible playmates all at once, even if they were only ghosts. She was not afraid of ghosts. In fact she was not then, or ever, afraid of anything, but she had a precocious aversion to being bored, and it was boring to sit in the Stoneclough drawing room with her nose pressed to the windowpane, staring beyond the shrubs of the garden to that downward distance whence she believed her father, in some mysterious way, would return, since that was the way Sarah said he had gone.

One gray October afternoon she managed to elude Sarah and escape from the house. There was a wet mist over the moorland; the shrubs of the garden dripped noisily as she ran among them and through the gate into the forbidden clough. She ran on, under the drenched trees, keeping watch for the ghosts, and presently the moisture that had been mist higher up turned to heavy rain; then she grew tired and cold, and—though still not in the least afraid—considerably disheartened by not meeting anyone. At last she came to the road to Browdley, though she did not recognize it, never having been walked so far by Sarah or her mother; but as she stared round, a horse and carriage came along which she did recognize. The horse was William, and Watson was driving, and inside the carriage, calling to her from the window, was her mother.

So she was promptly rescued and made to sit on the familiar black cushions through which the ends of hairs stuck out and pricked her legs. It was an unfortunate encounter, for it doubtless meant that her mother would tell Sarah and Sarah would be cross (which Livia did not fear, but it was tiresome to anticipate), and worst of all, she would be watched henceforward more carefully than ever. So she made a quick and, for a child, a rather remarkable decision; she would say she had met the three little girls—the ghostly ones—in the clough, and had run after them because they beckoned her. That could serve, at worst, as an excuse; at best, it might completely divert attention from her own misdeed. Yet as she began, a moment later, she was curiously aware that her mother was showing little interest in the story; nor did she seem angry, or startled, or impressed, or any of the other things that Livia, aged four, had ideas but no words for. Her mother merely said: “Livia, you’re wet through—you must have a bath and change all your clothes as soon as you get home.”

Nor later on was there any crossness even from Sarah, but instead a strange unhappy vagueness, as if she were thinking of something else all the time. When Livia retold her yarn, Sarah answered disappointingly: “It’s only a story, Livia, you mustn’t really believe it. There aren’t any such things as ghosts.”

“Isn’t there the Holy Ghost?” Livia asked, remembering religious instruction imparted by Miss Fortescue, who came to the house every weekday morning, and seemed already to Livia the repository of everything knowable that one did not particularly want to know.

“That’s different…Go to sleep now.”

Not till the following morning was Livia told that her father was dead; and this was not true.

She had been a baby at the time of her father’s trial and sentence, so that the problem of how much to tell her, and how to explain his absence or her mother’s distress, had not immediately arisen. The year had been the last one of the nineteenth century or the first of the twentieth (according to taste and argument); events in South Africa had gone badly, and men were being recruited for the least romantic, though by its supporters and contemporaries the most romanticized, of all England’s wars. Emily Channing, who was a romanticist about that and everything else, had concocted a dream in which her husband obtained his release to enlist, and eventually, on kop or veldt, “made good” by some extraordinary act of gallantry which would earn him the King’s pardon and possibly a V.C. as well. It was an absurd idea, for British justice is unsentimental to the point of irony, preferring to keep the criminal fed, clothed, and housed in perfect safety at the country’s expense, while the noncriminals risk and lose their lives on foreign fields. Channing knew this, and was not in the least surprised when the appeal his wife had persuaded him to make was turned down. But Emily was heartbroken, the more so as she had already told Livia that her father was “at the war.” It was a simple explanation in tune with the spirit of the times; Emily had found no difficulty in giving it, but Livia was really too young to know what or where “the war” was, and only gradually absorbed her father’s absence into a private imagery of her own.

A couple of years later, however, the South African War was history, and there came that gray October day in 1903 when even a prison interview between husband and wife could not avoid discussion of the matter. For John Channing, after several years to think things over, was in a somewhat changed mood. Till then Emily and he had always comforted each other with talk of her waiting for him and the ultimate joys of reunion; but now, during the half hour that was all they were allowed once a month, he suddenly told her they must both face facts. And the facts, he pointed out, were that with the utmost remission of sentence for good conduct he would not be released until 1913, by which time he would be fifty, she would be thirty-eight, and Livia fourteen.

But Emily (as before remarked) was a romanticist, and the interview was distressing in a way that no earlier one had been. Sincerely loving her husband, she could accept only two attitudes as proof of his continued love for her; that he should, as heretofore, expect her to wait for him, or that he should melodramatically beg her to “try to forget” him. And now, in this changed mood, he was doing neither. He was merely advising her that she should live her life realistically, feel free to make any association elsewhere that might at any time promise happiness, and forget him without feeling guilty if that should seem the easiest thing to do. If, on the other hand, this did not happen, and at the end of the long interval they both felt they could resume their lives together, then that would clearly be an experiment to be attempted. As for Livia, the suggestion he made was equally realistic—that the child should be told the plain truth as soon as she was old enough to understand it. “Why not? You certainly won’t be able to carry on with the war story now that there isn’t a war.”

“I could tell her you were abroad,” Emily suggested, “doing some important work. Or I could say you were an explorer…And perhaps there will be another war somewhere soon.”

John Channing smiled—and his smile, Emily felt, was also different from usual. It was a slanting, uncomfortable smile, and it lasted a long time before he answered: “No, Emily—just tell her the truth. Of course you’ll have to be judge of the right moment, but there’s really no way out of telling her, once she begins to have school friends. And it would be far better for her to learn the facts from you than to pick them up in garbled scraps from other children.”

“I shall tell her you’re innocent, of course.”

The smile recurred. “Oh no, no, Emily—don’t ever do that. First, because I’m not, and second, because it would give her a grudge to go through life with—the worst possible thing for a youngster. Say that I’m guilty of what I’m here for, but you can add, if you like, that I’m not personally a vile character…That is, if you agree that I’m not.”

“Wouldn’t that be very hard for her to understand at her age?”

“At any age, Emily. Sometimes even I find it hard to grasp. But I’d rather have her puzzled about me than indignant on my behalf.”

But Emily, distressed as she was, nevertheless declined to accept that alternative herself. To be puzzled was the one thing she abhorred, and to avoid it she could almost always discover a romantic formula. That accounted for her mood when, towards twilight as she returned home after the interview, she saw Livia wandering in the road below the clough; it was why she failed to scold her, or to listen to her prattle about ghosts; and it was why, next morning, after long consultations with Sarah and Miss Fortescue, she told Livia the only possible romantic lie about her father except that he was innocent—and that was, that he was dead. He had been killed, she said, in South Africa, and the war for which he had given his life had ended in victory. Emily found it possible to say all this convincingly, with genuine tears, and without going into awkward details. Doubtless in a few years (she reckoned) the truth would have to come out, but when it did it might even seem relatively good news to a child of maturer intelligence; while for the time being it surely could not upset Livia too much to think that a father whom she did not remember had died a hero. Pride more than grief seemed the likely emotion.

Livia felt neither, however, so much as a queer kind of relief. She wept easily when her mother wept, for much the same reason that she made imitative noises when the dog barked or the cat mewed; but she had stared out of the drawing-room window with such protracted hopes of her father’s return that it was almost pleasanter not to have to expect him any more. Instead, she promptly added a new legend to that of the three little girls whose ghosts were supposed to haunt the neighborhood. She persisted in telling people (the people at Stoneclough, for she never met anyone else) that she often saw her father’s ghost in the clough, smoking and walking slowly and looking at the trees. She was so circumstantial in describing all this that Miss Fortescue grew nervous about driving to Browdley after dark, though there were several flaws in Livia’s story when Miss Fortescue analyzed it. For instance, how could Livia, who did not remember her father, even pretend to recognize his ghost? And then, too, the detail about the smoking. Not only had John Channing been a non-smoker, but Miss Fortescue was also sure that ghosts could not smoke. Livia, however, replied stoutly: “My daddy’s ghost does.”

Which presented a problem that Emily, Miss Fortescue, Sarah, Dr. Whiteside (the family physician), and a few others were wholly unable to evaluate, much less to solve. Could it be that the child, in addition to believing a lie (which was only right and proper, in the circumstances), was also capable of telling one? Miss Fortescue thought not, again adducing the “smoking” detail. If Livia had uttered a falsehood with deliberate intent to deceive, surely she would not have invented such an incongruity; therefore, did it not prove that she was speaking what at least she regarded as the truth?

In fact, it was neither a lie nor the truth, but some half-way vision in a child’s-eye view of the world, a vision that could start as easily from a lie deliberately told, and as easily end by sincerely believing it. Those three children, for instance; Livia had undoubtedly lied in claiming to have seen them, but later her fancy convinced her that she did see them, more than once; and this made her forget that she had lied in the first place. Nor was it ever a conscious lie that she saw her father, for by that time the clough was a place where she could see anything and anybody. The high trees arching over the stream as it tumbled from the moorland, the ruins of the old cottages where grass grew through the cracks of the hearthstones, the winding path leading down from the Stoneclough garden to the road—these were the limits of a world that did not exist elsewhere save in Grimm and Hans Andersen and the Tanglewood Tales—a world as young as the children who lived in it and the belief that alone made it real. And in the other world, meanwhile, she continued to learn mathematics, spelling, geography, history, and “Scripture” from Miss Fortescue, who was everlastingly thrilled by the secret that could not yet be told and by her own forbearance in not telling it; she also understood children just enough to feel quite certain that she understood Livia completely, which she never did. Old Sarah, who professed no subtleties, came much closer when she remarked, leaning over the child’s first attempts at arithmetic—“Queer stuff they put into your head, Livia—no wonder you see ghosts after it.” And it was Sarah who saw nothing queer at all in Livia’s question, when Miss Fortescue had informed her that Ben Nevis was the highest mountain in the United Kingdom: “Please, Miss Fortescue, what’s the lowest?”

Another war did begin, as Emily had envisaged (but it was between Russia and Japan, and so not one in which an English household had to take sides); meanwhile Livia passed her sixth birthday; meanwhile also the cotton trade boomed and then slumped. This would have mattered more at Stoneclough had not Emily possessed a little money of her own; indeed, it was a subject of bitter comment throughout Browdley, where hundreds had been ruined as a result of the Channing crash, that the family responsible for it seemed to be flourishing just as formerly. But this was not quite accurate. Browdley did not realize how much had been abandoned—the town house in London, the holidays at Marienbad, the platoon of servants; and while to Browdley life at Stoneclough was itself a luxury, to Emily it was an economy enforced by the fact that the house was of a size and style that made it practically unsalable, and thus cheaper to stay in than to give up. So they stayed—she and Livia and Miss Fortescue and Watson the gardener-coachman-handyman (a truly skeleton staff for such an establishment); and the blacker the looks of Browdley people, as trade worsened and times became harder, the more advantageous it seemed that Stoneclough was so remote although so close—a moorland fastness that no one from the town need approach save in the mood and on the occasions of holidays. All of which, in its own way, conditioned Livia’s childhood. Sundays in summertime were the days when she must, above all things, remain within the half-mile of garden fence; weekdays in wintertime permitted her the greatest amount of freedom. It was easy, by this means, to keep her ignorant of everything except Miss Fortescue’s teachings and a general impression that all nature was kind and all humanity to be avoided.

And Emily, who liked to put things off anyway, kept putting off the time for correcting all this. “Next year perhaps,” she would say, whenever Dr. Whiteside mentioned the matter. He was an old man who had brought both Livia and Livia’s father into the world; he did not greatly care for Emily and doubted the wisdom of most things that she did. “It’s time the child went to school and mixed with people,” he kept urging. “Why don’t you tell her the truth and get it over? You’ll have her self-centered and neurotic if she stays here seeing nobody but you and Sarah and Miss Fortescue…What does John think about it?”

“He left it to me to tell her when I think the moment is right,” replied Emily, with strained accuracy. “She’s only eight, remember.”

But it was just the same when Emily was able to say “She’s only nine” and “She’s only ten.” And by that time also another thing had happened. John had been transferred to a prison in the South of England, and Emily no longer saw him every month. After all, it was a long journey just for the sake of one short interview, and it was possible also to wonder what good it did, either to him or to her; letters were much easier.

Not that Emily was a hardhearted woman—far from it. She had no bitterness against her husband for either the crash or the crime, or even against the country for having jailed him; she had no conviction that he deserved his punishment—nor, on the other hand, that he had been monstrously overpunished. The whole situation was one she could no longer come to terms with at all, since it had passed the stage of romantic interpretation. She was still able to weep whenever she thought of him, but equally able to do without thinking of him for long periods, and the idea of raking the whole thing up by telling Livia was not only distasteful, but something she was a little scared of. Already she was aware of something in Livia—character or personality or whatever one called it—that outclassed her own. For one thing, Livia had no fear—of ghosts, or being alone, or anything else. And also she would sometimes make scenes—curious, nerve-racking scenes that made Emily feel peculiarly helpless. Perhaps Dr. Whiteside was right and the child was neurotic—but would the knowledge that her father was in prison make her any less so? It was easy to think not.

Nor was it clear that Livia would be made happier by school, for in addition to hating the idea of it, the child also seemed perfectly happy at Stoneclough. She had far more freedom than children have in many homes; she could play with dogs, cats, chickens, tame rabbits, and William the horse; she liked and was permitted to make cooking experiments in the kitchen and planting experiments in the garden; she could walk endlessly over nearby moorland and through the clough on weekdays; she could read library books sent up from Mudie’s in London, and there was that new invention, the phonograph, to amuse her. And on Sundays, to brighten the one day of restriction, old Mr. Felsby usually called. But it did not brighten things so much for Livia, who early formed the opinion that Mr. Felsby was a bore.

Richard Felsby was seventy-eight, oaken in physique, the last of a generation destined to glower (within gilt frames) from above thousands of mantelpieces upon dwindling families. Both the Channings and the Felsbys were, in this matter, typical; once so prolific, they seemed now in danger of reaching a complete full stop, for only the surviving Richard, the absent John, and the infant Livia could claim direct descent from the original Channing and Felsby who had built up the firm. The last of the Felsbys could not forgive the last of the John Channings—not so much on personal grounds (for Richard, disliking John’s newfangled business ideas long before the crash came, had dissolved partnership and retired a rich man), but because of the disgrace to the Channing name in a world that still associated a Channing with a Felsby. It was said that the trial and the scandal connected with it had aged Richard considerably, and if so, there were many in Browdley who wished it had done more, for the old man was generally disliked. When younger he had been against drinking, smoking, gambling, dancing, and theatergoing (anything, indeed, that might lessen the weekday efficiency of his employees); but of later years he had mellowed to the extent that he only scowled wordlessly if he came across Livia sewing or reading a novel during one of his Sunday visits. He did not much care for Emily, though he felt he ought to keep an eye on her; he was disappointed in Livia, because she was not a boy to carry on and rehabilitate the Channing name; and, as before remarked, he could not forgive John. But he was old enough both to remember and to revere the memory of John’s father, who had died some years before the turn of the century. Friend, partner, and contemporary, this earlier John had been, in Richard’s opinion, the last of the “good” Channings; and it was for his sake, chiefly, that the old man now visited Stoneclough.

Besides being thus a tribute to the dead, the weekly visits were an undoubted trial to the living, for Richard honestly believed he conferred great benefits by patting Livia on the head and by discussing the state of the cotton trade in a loud voice with Emily. He discussed this because, with Livia hovering about, and in his usual mood by the time he arrived at the house, it was practically the only thing he dared discuss; for Dr. Whiteside had warned him against undue excitement, however caused. If he had anything to say about John he would therefore take Emily into a corner for a session of mysterious sibilant whispering, and sometimes in the middle of this Livia would burst into the room, whereupon Richard would boom out again about the state of the cotton trade. After this sort of thing had happened a few times Livia grew convinced that there was a “mystery” about her mother and old Mr. Felsby, and once the idea got into her head she was quick to notice other evidences of mystery—certain occasions, for instance, just before and just after her mother went away for a few days, when a curious air of tension filled the entire house, when even Sarah and Miss Fortescue seemed to rush from room to room with secrets as well as pins filling their mouths. Livia noted too the almost guilty look they had if she interrupted them at such times; it made her determined to discover what everything was all about, like the detective in some of her favorite stories. Actually “the Mystery of Stoneclough” (as she privately decided to call it) gave her an added interest in life, since it was clearly more exciting to live in a detective story than merely to read one, especially when the detective was herself. For that matter, she sometimes imagined she was the criminal also, or the suspected person who was really innocent, or the stupid policeman who made all the mistakes, or any other of the familiar characters…it was so easy, and so fascinating, to climb on the moors and lie down and imagine things.

On the afternoon of Christmas Day, 1910, Livia entered the drawing room just in time to catch Mr. Felsby inveighing against “any man who makes a proposal of that kind.” In truth, there was nothing particularly mysterious about the words, since they referred to the wickedness of the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Lloyd George, who was still bent on increasing taxes), but from force of habit Emily shot the old man a warning look, whereat Richard assumed his glassiest Christmas smile and reached out his less arthritic hand. Livia then allowed herself to be patted on the head as usual; but later, while Mr. Felsby enjoyed his usual nap, she pondered alone in the downstairs room which was her own whenever Miss Fortescue was away, since it was there that she received lessons, played quiet games, and felt entrenched in extra-special privacy. She was still pondering, with a book on her knee, when she overheard something else—her mother telephoning from the hall outside. Without any intention to eaves-drop at first, she gathered it was a long-distance call from London, and after that she listened deliberately. The talk continued, with long pauses and a lowering of her mother’s voice in short staccato replies; at last she heard her end up—“I can’t hear you—yes—no—I still can’t hear you—I’ll write…yes, I’ll think about it…yes, dear, happy Christmas to you too….Good-bye….” Livia then put aside her book and abandoned herself to wondering who “dear” was and what “it” was that her mother had promised to think about; and suddenly, as she speculated, an idea came that she instantly labeled as absurd, yet instantly allowed to take possession of her; supposing “it” had been a proposal of marriage? Doubtless the remark of Mr. Felsby’s she had overheard was really responsible; anyhow, during the next few minutes the idea became a perfectly tenable theory, and by the time her mother called her to tea the theory had developed into a near-certainty, strengthened by the absence of any comment about the telephone call. It would have been natural, Livia thought, for her mother to say, “Guess who rang up just now?”—and because this did not happen Livia stifled her own natural impulse, which was to ask.

Presently, however, the near-certainty slipped back into a mere theory again, and then into its proper place as an absurd idea; a few guests began to arrive for the Christmas dinner, and the whole thing passed out of mind till it was revived hours later by a remark of Mr. Felsby’s about something else altogether—he was discussing the state of the cotton trade and trying to be seasonably cheerful about it. “There’s only one thing I can say, Whiteside—booms come after slumps just as slumps come after booms.”

Dr. Whiteside, who wasn’t particularly interested in the cotton trade, though indirectly, like any other Browdley professional man, he depended on it for the quality of his living, responded absently: “That’s about it, Richard. It’s always been the same.”

“How do you know it always will be the same?” Livia asked, with an air of casualness. “How do you know that this time it isn’t different?”

Every eye was turned on a girl of eleven who could put such a question; Dr. Whiteside blinked quizzically, and after a rather awkward pause Mr. Felsby cleared his throat and snorted: “Never you mind. You’ll know what we mean when you grow up.”

All at once Livia became really interested, but with a faraway rapt look that drew even more curious stares around the table. “But I know what you mean now,” she said quietly. “And I don’t think it’s right.”

Richard Felsby snorted again, then gave a cross look to Emily, as if this were all her fault for not bringing up the child to have better manners; while Emily, with her own typical gesture of helplessness, began to expostulate: “Now, Livia dear, how can you contradict Mr. Felsby?”

“Nothing’s ever just the same,” Livia repeated, cryptically and with the utmost adult solemnity. She had an odd feeling of being actually adult at that moment, of being carried along by an emotion that grew with its own momentum—as if she were dramatizing something in a rather marvelous extempore way. The drama she had constructed that afternoon was now an even bigger one in which she heard herself speaking lines as if they were being dictated by some inner yet half-random compulsion.

“Livia dear—what on earth do you mean?”

“Nothing can be just the same, even if it does happen again. It can’t, Mother.” Gradually, inexorably, the words moved to the vital point of attack, and her eyes flashed as she challenged the other eyes across the table—no, across the footlights that she had read about and imagined, but so far never seen. She knew she was acting, yet she could have vowed that her emotion was not wholly counterfeit.

“But—Livia—whatever’s the matter? Has anything upset you?”

“Nothing, Mother, except that…Oh, how could you even think of such a thing?…After being married to Father…”

And at that moment she really meant it; the man whom she did not remember was now more than a ghost, he was at last a holy ghost, in his daughter’s imagination.

A short time afterwards Livia, weeping and exhausted in her bedroom, gave way to equally sincere remorse. She knew that the strange scene had spoilt the evening, that it had distressed her mother, embarrassed Dr. Whiteside, infuriated Mr. Felsby, and caused the party to break up early; she knew she had in some way been rather wicked. “Oh Mother, I’m so terribly sorry. I don’t know what could have possessed me. I’ll never, never say such things again…It all sprang out of nothing—I just heard you talking on the telephone to someone, and the idea got hold of me that it was a man proposing to you.…”

Livia felt her mother’s hand tighten over her own. “But—darling…”

“Yes, I know, Mother, I know it’s silly.”

But Emily didn’t think it was silly so much as uncanny. There was, of course, no question of her marrying; that was impossible under the existing conditions of British law. But she had fallen in love, and it was that man who had telephoned, begging her to come to London again as early as possible in the New Year. His name was Standon, and he had met Emily by chance in a London restaurant on her return north from one of those no longer monthly visits. He was several years her junior, and lived in a studio in Baron’s Court, painting portraits when he could get commissions, and idling when he could not. He liked Emily because she was easygoing and had money; she loved him because he was attractive and also (though she did not realize this) because she was starved for the kind of attention he was always most happy to provide. It was not a bad bargain, in the circumstances.

After the scene at the Stoneclough Christmas dinner table of which Dr. Whiteside had been a witness, he pressed his argument that Livia should be told the truth and then allowed to mix with children of her own age; and even Emily (thinking of Mr. Standon) realized that something had to be done. However, a solution occurred to her of a kind that she delighted in—one that really solved nothing, but merely delayed the issue. Why not send Livia to a good boarding school in another part of the country? In such surroundings could she not mix with children of her own age as well as remain in happy ignorance about her father? If the headmistress were let into the secret beforehand, surely there was no reason why the plan should not work out perfectly?

So Livia went to Cheldean, in Sussex, where for the first time in her life she was thoroughly unhappy. She had tried to look forward to meeting other girls, imagining that they would all be eager to know her; but the facts of school life, and even more the fictions, brought quick disillusionment. She could not fit herself easily into the patterns of school-girl right and wrong, of not doing things that were “not done,” of avoiding taboos. And questions that Miss Fortescue would have tried to answer even though they were unanswerable were thought merely exhibitionist or absurd at Cheldean; so after a few unwelcome experiences Livia ceased to ask them. That helped to lessen her initial unpopularity, the more so as she was growing up rather personably; she was a girl one would look at twice, even if one did not agree that she was beautiful.

Meanwhile the cotton trade in and around Browdley slumped further, giving Mr. Felsby more to shout about during family dinners that took place at least once during every school vacation. And also during one of these vacations Livia was introduced to this man called Standon, who spent a week end at Stoneclough for the ostensible purpose of advising Emily about a color scheme for the drawing room. The visit was not an entire success, for Sarah thought it nonsense that a man should travel all the way from London to tell anyone how to paint a house, while Miss Fortescue could not believe that a youth with such exquisite manners was not somehow a deceiver. Livia simply did not like him. All this was a rather poor reward for Mr. Standon’s efforts to be agreeable to everybody, as well as for Emily’s carefully planned scheme to introduce him to the family without causing too much comment. But it was impossible for Mr. Standon not to cause comment, and though Mr. Felsby did not meet him, rumors of his visit got through to the old man and gave him material for unlimited banter afterwards. “And how’s your painter friend?” he would ask, nudging Emily in the ribs. “Still sleeping with nothing on?” (This was according to a horrified report made by Sarah after taking a cup of tea up to Mr. Standon’s bedroom early one morning.) Of course Mr. Felsby did not for a moment suspect that Emily was privileged to know how Mr. Standon slept.

Standon, on his side, also realized that the visit had not worked out as well as had been hoped, but he was less disappointed than Emily because he had found the entire week end rather a bore—awful house, undistinguished food, uncouth servants, wet days, bleak scenery, and a precocious brat of a girl on holiday from a boarding school who (he could see) continually got on her mother’s nerves. Altogether he thought Emily much more fun in Baron’s Court, and hoped that all their subsequent meetings would be on his own ground. He really did like her, and forbore to sponge more than a poor artist must on a better-off woman. (For instance, she was going to buy him a motorcar, but in return he had promised to teach her to drive.) Knowing all about her past, having investigated it from newspaper files long before she told him, he could feel with some justification that he was being as good to her as to himself.

As for Livia, she immediately connected Mr. Standon in her mind with the secret, or the mystery, or whatever it was; the more so as he was always whispering privately to her mother—more secrets, more mystery. And Emily, who had romantically set store on Livia liking him, was chagrined that the girl didn’t, and told her (truthfully but far too outspokenly on one occasion) that of course she wasn’t going to marry Mr. Standon. Whereupon Livia, surprised at the denial of something that had not been suggested, could feel only extra certainty that there was something between them—something, at any rate. A few terms of Cheldean had even given her a vague idea of what, and because she did not like Mr. Standon, she did not like the idea of that either. Whereupon a rift opened between mother and daughter, more insidious because neither would tackle it frankly; it was as if they understood each other too well, but also not enough. Anyhow, Livia went back to Cheldean with thoughts that cast a shadow over a term that happened to be her last. The shadow made it hard for her to write home, and once, when she had composed a letter in which she tried to be affectionate, a feeling of guilt, almost of shame, made her tear it up.

It was Livia’s last term at Cheldean because of another unpleasant thing that happened.

For some time there had been an epidemic of minor thieving on the school premises—money and small articles missing from dormitories, coats left in the locker room, and so on; the sort of thing that, if it for long goes undetected, can poison the relationships of all concerned—pupils, teaching staff, and school servants. Miss Williams, the Cheldean headmistress, had done all she could to probe and investigate, yet the thefts continued, culminating in the disappearance of a wrist watch belonging to Livia’s best friend. When news of this reached Miss Williams she summoned the whole school into the main hall—an event which, from its rarity, evoked an atmosphere of heightened tension.

Miss Williams began by saying that, being convinced the thefts had been perpetrated by one of the girls, she had decided to call in a detective who would doubtless discover the culprit, whoever she was, without delay. She (Miss Williams) therefore appealed to this culprit (again whoever she was) to come forward and confess, thus avoiding the need for distasteful outside publicity, and also—here Miss Williams began to glare round the room—earning perhaps some remission of penalty.

This appeal was followed by a long and, to Livia, terribly dramatic silence during which the word “detective,” as spoken by Miss Williams, turned somersaults in her mind.

Then: “Well, girls? How long is one of you going to keep me waiting?”

Still silence.

Miss Williams glared round again before raising her voice a notch higher. “Girls…girls…I simply cannot believe this. Surely I am to get an answer?…Remember—I am particularly addressing myself to one of you—to one of you who is a Thief—here—now—in this hall! Some of you must be so close that you could touch her….”

Suddenly Livia felt herself melting into a warmth that seemed to run liquid in her limbs; she could not check it, and in excitement let go a book she was carrying; everyone near her turned to stare, and she knew that her face was already brick-red.

“Come now, girls…I will wait for sixty seconds and no longer…” Miss Williams then pulled an old-fashioned gold watch on a long chain from some pocket of her mannish attire and held it conspicuously in the palm of her hand. “Ten seconds already…twenty…thirty…” And then, in a quite different voice: “Dear me…will somebody go after Olivia?”

Somebody did, and presently Livia was sitting, limp and still, on the couch in Miss Williams’s study, while Miss Williams, stiff and fidgety, drummed her bony fingers on the desk top.

“But, Olivia…why do you keep on saying you didn’t do it?”

“I didn’t, Miss Williams. You can punish me if you like—I’m not afraid. But I really didn’t do it.”

“But nobody’s even accusing you—nobody ever has accused you!”

“They thought it was me—they all saw how I looked—and then when I dropped the book—”

“My dear child, if they did think you behaved suspiciously, whom have you to blame but yourself? What made you run out of the hall like that? Surely, if you knew you weren’t guilty—”

“I knew, Miss Williams, but I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t guilty, and yet—and yet—”

“Yes, Olivia?”

“I felt guilty.”

Miss Williams’s eyes and voice, till then sympathetic, now chilled over. “I cannot understand how you could feel guilty unless you were guilty,” she said after a pause.

“But I did, Miss Williams. I feel guilty—often—like that…Punish me if you like, though. I don’t care.”

After another pause Miss Williams replied: “Suppose we say no more about it for the time being.”

And there the matter had to remain, for the plain fact was that Miss Williams did not know whether Livia was guilty or not. She rather liked the girl, who had never been in any serious trouble before; yet there was something odd about her, something unpredictable; yet also something stoic—which was another thing Miss Williams rather liked. She could not avoid thinking of the secret that Livia did not know, and perhaps ought to know, at her age…or did she know already…partly…in the half-guessing way that was the worst way to get to know anything? That feeling of guilt, for instance (assuming there had been no grounds for it at Cheldean)—could it be that Livia suspected something in her own family to which guilt attached, and (by a curious psychological twist) was becoming herself infected by it? Miss Williams had not received a very good impression of Mrs. Channing from the correspondence they had had; she seemed a weak, dilatory person, incapable of facing her own or her daughter’s problems with any land of fortitude. Whereas fortitude, and problems, were Miss Williams’s specialties—whether, for instance, a headmistress should tell one of her girls something she had promised not to tell, if she believed it was in the girl’s best interest? For several weeks Miss Williams debated this problem with herself, while she continued to find things likeable in Livia; she even admired the girl for the way she faced up to the deepening mistrust with which the school as a whole regarded her; she admired the girl’s proud yet stricken eyes as she continued to take part in games and lessons; but she had had enough experience as a schoolmistress to know that nothing but absolute proof of someone else’s guilt could ever put things right, and if this did not soon appear, then there would arise a final problem—could Livia remain at Cheldean without harm to herself and to the morale of the school?

One day towards the end of term Miss Williams reached a decision. She called the girl into her room and very simply told her the plain truth about her father. There was no scene, but after a long pause Livia said: “Can I go home now, Miss Williams?”

“Home? You mean—to your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want to go home?”

“I—I must go. Everything’s different. I said it would be. Nothing can ever be the same again.”

Miss Williams did not ask when Livia had made this cryptic prophecy; she merely remarked: “I hope you’re not angry with your mother—she did what she thought was for the best.”

“I’m not angry with anybody. Not even with Mr. Standon any more.”

“And who’s Mr. Standon?”

“The man my mother goes with.”

“Oh come now…” And Miss Williams, coloring a little, felt the ice getting thin even under her own experienced feet. (But not, perhaps, so experienced in certain directions.) She added hastily: “Livia…I think we had better not discuss this any further for the present. And I’m not sure whether you ought to go home now or wait till the end of term. I’ll think it over and let you know in a few days.”

Miss Williams planned to write Mrs. Channing a long letter of explanation which would arrive ahead of Livia; but this intention was frustrated by a much simpler act by the girl herself. She ran away from the school that same evening, taking nobody into her confidence, but leaving for Miss Williams a note in which there was, perhaps, just a whiff of histrionics:—

DEAR MISS WILLIAMS—I am going home, and since you think I am a thief, I have stolen money for the fare from Joan Martin’s locker. I took a pound. Please give it back to her out of my bank money.

Olivia

The note was not discovered till the next morning, by which time Livia would have reached home. All Miss Williams could do, and with great luck, was to replace the pound before the loss of that was discovered also. She knew that Joan was Livia’s best friend and would willingly have lent the money had she been asked…A strange girl, Livia—perhaps not a bad girl; but still, it was just as well not to have her back at Cheldean.

Livia reached Browdley before six o’clock on a windy March morning. Throughout the night-long train journey she had thought out the things she would immediately ask her mother; she wanted to know all the secrets, all the details that Miss Williams had not told because she probably had not known them herself. The list of these was mountainous by the time the cab came within sight of Stoneclough, gray and ghostly in the first light of dawn. In the yard beside the stables she was startled to see a new motorcar, with her mother in the driver’s seat and Mr. Standon hastily stowing bags into the back.

“Livia! Livia! What on earth are you doing here?”

As her mother spoke Livia noted the exchange of glances between her and Mr. Standon. The latter dropped the bags and came over with a smile of rather weary astonishment. He was a very elegant young man, but he did not look his best at six in the morning; and he had, indeed, received so many astonishments during the past twelve hours that he felt incapable of responding to any more. “Hello, Livia,” he remarked; it was all he could think of to say.

Livia ignored him. “Mother—I’ve left Cheldean—I’ve run away—I’m never going back there—and I want to talk to you—I’ve got things to ask you—”

“But Livia…not now…Oh, not now…” And a look of panic came over Emily’s face as she turned again to Mr. Standon. “Lawrence, do make haste…we can’t stop because of—because of anything…” Then: “We’ve—that is, dear—your mother’s in a hurry—”

Livia knew from experience that Emily always called herself “your mother” to put distance between herself and the facing of any issue; it was like a shield behind which she could retire from a battlefield before the battle had begun.

“Mother, you can’t go away yet. I’ve got most important things to talk to you about…alone.”

“No, no, dear…Lawrence, put those bags in and let’s be off…If you’ve got into any trouble at Cheldean, don’t worry…Mother will write to Miss Williams and have it all put right.”

“It isn’t that, Mother…Mother, please—please will you come into the house and let me talk to you for a while.”

“Darling, I can’t—I just can’t—”

But this was too much even for Mr. Standon. “Perhaps you’d better, Emily,” he advised. “You can’t let her go in without—without—” And the look between them was exchanged again.

Emily slowly climbed out of the car, her face pale and distraught. She walked with Livia a few paces towards the side door leading through the kitchen into the house. They did not speak, but from the doorstep Emily gave one despairing look over her shoulder towards Mr. Standon, as if scared of going out of his sight. Then suddenly and hysterically she cried out: “Lawrence, I can’t tell her—I can’t, I can’t…You’ll have to.” Whereupon she ran back to the car and with almost absurd alacrity jumped in and drove off, leaving him to shout after her in vain and to turn to Livia with the faintest possible shrug.

“Your mother’s upset,” he remarked mildly; and then, detaining her as she stepped towards the house: “I wouldn’t go in yet if I were you. Let’s have a little chat first.”

Livia shook her head. “It’s cold here. And it’s my mother I wanted to talk to, not you.”

“I know…but there’s something I can tell you, perhaps.”

“You don’t have to. I know. And I don’t think it’s any of my business.”

Mr. Standon looked nonplused for a moment, then shifted uncomfortably. “That isn’t what I…er…well, what I do mean is your business. It’s about your father.”

He draped his hand over her shoulder at that word, as if to lessen the shock, but the fact that there was none made him so uncomfortable that he took away his hand before Livia could reply: “I know about that too. Miss Williams told me. He’s not dead as my mother always said. He’s in a prison.”

Mr. Standon gulped hard. “No…Not any more.”

This time there was a shock, perceptible but well-controlled; the girl looked up at him inquiringly. “You mean he is dead now? He’s died?”

“No, Livia. He’s—he’s been released. And—he’s here—now—in the house. He got here a few hours ago.”

“But…but…my mother…why…”

“I can’t explain all that.”

She stared at him, incredulously, and while she did, the sound of a motor horn echoed from the road down below.

He said hastily: “I’m sorry, Livia, but you see…well, that’s how it is.”

The horn sounded again, peremptorily. Mr. Standon fidgeted as he went on: “Perhaps you’d like to come along…”

“Come along? Where? With you?”

“Not with me, exactly—with your mother. I’m sure that would be all right—”

“But with you?”

“Well…only in case…in case you wanted to be with her.”

“But where’s she going? When is she coming back? Why must she go away at all?”

“Livia, it’s no use asking me these questions. If you want to walk down the road and talk to her about it, come with me now.”

“With you?”

And the horn sounded a third time, causing Standon to exclaim, under his breath: “Damnation, she shouldn’t have run off like this…”

Livia added quietly: “I don’t want to go anywhere with you.”

“Well, then…I’m afraid that settles it.” He walked a few steps away, then turned again for a last appeal. “But what are you going to do?”

“Stay here.”

“But—but your father’s here.”

“That’s all right.”

“You mean you don’t mind?”

“I mind my mother going away, but if she goes away I don’t mind anything else.”

“Livia…I wish there were something I could…” She was moving towards the door. He continued, for he was not an entirely insensitive young man: “Livia, you want to see him? You’re sure of that?”

“Where is he? Is he in bed?”

“No…he’s been up all night. That’s why, if you’d like to think things over first…”

“What is there to think over? Anything else?”

The question was so direct, yet so free from irony, that he could only reply: “Maybe I’d better come in with you and—and—er—” It sounded idiotic to say “introduce you,” but for the life of him he could not think of another way to finish the sentence.

“No, I’ll know where to go.”

“In the drawing room, I think. That’s where he was.” Livia then went in without another word, while Mr. Standon, after staring at her retreating figure for a moment, slowly lit a cigarette and began to walk down the driveway towards the road, quickening his pace when he heard the horn a fourth time. He still felt extremely uncomfortable.

The lights throughout the house were unlit, but a flickering glow, as of firelight, showed beneath the drawing-room door where the carpet had worn; everything else was dark, except the high window at the end of the corridor, which showed the dawn in a gray oblong. Livia turned the door handle and entered. Her eyes were dazzled at first by the firelight, but she was somehow aware of a person in the room.

“I can’t see you,” she said—the first words she ever spoke to him.

She saw then a tall shape striding across the floor to the light switch; next she saw his shoulders, a little stooping; then, when he turned, all such details as his gray thinning hair, wide forehead, and odd smile merged into a general first impression that he was tired.

“Livia, isn’t it?”

“Hello,” she answered; and they shook hands.

When one is young, everything has a stereoscopic clarity, even if it is not properly understood; no hoard of experience both makes and compensates for a blurred background. To Livia as she shook hands with the stranger who was her father, it seemed that her life hinged in a new direction, terrifyingly new, puzzling, even shattering, yet somehow not to be feared. But for the moment she thought her mind would break with such a mixture of emotions as she began to feel: angry love for her mother, cold dislike for Mr. Standon, and a growing shock over the entire situation, as if her physical existence were coming out of numbness. I shall never be the same again, because nothing can ever be the same again, and I am not nothing—she reflected suddenly, remembering the first lesson in logic that had been almost the last thing she learned at Cheldean. But the frantic syllogism comforted her, all the more because it had not occurred to her till just that moment; and as she stared from the firelight to the tired face of the man standing before her, she repeated it to herself: Whatever happens, whatever they do to me, however much I am torn apart, I am not nothing.

She saw that he was still smiling, waiting perhaps for her to speak. She wondered how long she had been silent—minutes or only seconds? But the words could come now; she began abruptly: “Are you hungry? I am.”

He answered: “Not very. But don’t let me stop you—”

“Wouldn’t you even like a cup of tea?”

“Well…er…hadn’t we better wait till Sarah—”

“Oh, I’ll make it. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

“All right.”

She made not only a cup of tea, but a substantial meal of eggs and bacon, which they both ate, talking of nothing in particular meanwhile—just the weather, and the sharp frost that morning, and how they liked their eggs done. It was beginning to be easier now—like the first morning of term when you go into a new class with a new teacher and you do not exactly expect to get on with her at first—in fact you pine for the old one all the time, though you would not, if the choice were given, stay down in the lower class just to escape the trials of newness.

When he lit a pipe she commented: “They said you never used to smoke.”

He did not ask who “they” were, or why the matter should ever have been mentioned. He answered lightly: “Oh yes, I have most bad habits.”

“You mean you drink too?”

“Well… I have been known to touch a drop.”

She laughed, because the phrase “touch a drop” had amused her when she was a child; it was so funny to touch a drop, if you ever went to the trouble of doing it, and she had often in those days puzzled over why old Mr. Felsby should boast so much about never having done it in his life.

“I don’t suppose there’s anything here,” she went on. “I think Watson takes whisky, though—on the sly. Perhaps he keeps a bottle somewhere—I can ask him—”

He smiled again. “Don’t worry—I never did drink at breakfast. For that matter, I never drank much at any time. Not to excess, that is.”

“Then it’s not a bad habit.”

“All right—so long as you don’t think too well of me.”

They talked on, as unimportantly as that. She did not ask him any direct questions, nor he her, but by the time the first rays of sunshine poured in through the kitchen window they knew a few things about each other—such as, for instance, that they had both arrived at Stoneclough before their time; she from school, having run away, he from prison, having been released a few months earlier than he had counted on, owing to a technicality in the reckoning. She gathered also that his arrival had led to other events in which her mother and Mr. Standon were involved. He did not tell her much about that, but said it was an odd coincidence that she should have come that morning, an odd and perhaps an awkward one, but not so awkward as if she had come a few hours sooner.

“I don’t know why she didn’t tell me everything before,” he added, as if thinking aloud. “It would have been all right I wouldn’t have blamed her…I don’t blame her now, for that matter. She just couldn’t face facts—never could…

Oh well, give me another cup of tea.”

While Livia did so he puffed at his pipe and went on: “Things never turn out quite how you expect, do they?”

She knew that he was addressing her as an adult, either deliberately or absent-mindedly, and in order not to break the spell she said nothing in reply. But he relapsed into silence, and presently, still under the spell herself, she said brightly: “Don’t I make good tea?”

He seemed to wake himself up. “You certainly do.” Then he yawned. “Very good.”

“I expect you’re tired.”

“Yes. Dead tired. I was up all night.”

“So was I—in the train.”

“Perhaps we’d both better get some sleep.”

She nodded. “Sarah knows you’re here, of course?”

“Oh yes. And Miss Fortescue and Watson. We’ll meet at dinner, then.”

He walked out of the kitchen and a few seconds later she heard him climbing the stairs. It was odd to reflect that he knew his way about the house.

She slept soundly most of the day and was wakened during the afternoon by the sound of commotion in the yard. When she ran to the window, with almost every possibility in mind, she saw it was only Miss Fortescue driving off in a cab. Somehow it did not seem to matter what Miss Fortescue did, but it gave her something to begin the conversation with when she went down to the dinner table that evening.

“She left,” he said, “because the whole situation was revolting to her sensibilities.”

Again he was talking to her as to an adult; and she knew what he meant, if not all the individual words. Throughout the rest of the meal he veered between more trivial gossip and silence, but when Sarah had left the room for good he said: “I don’t know what your plans are, Livia….”

“Plans? I haven’t any.”

“I mean—what are you going to do?”

“I’m not going to go back to Cheldean.”

“Well…” And he began to light his pipe. “Some other school, perhaps?”

“You mean you don’t want me here?”

“Livia…it isn’t that. It hasn’t much to do with what I want. Let’s not discuss it yet, though. All kinds of things can happen.”

Which was the kind of world that Livia dreamed of—one in which all kinds of things could happen.

She said cheerfully: “The school holidays begin next week,
so I’d have been here soon anyway.”

He smiled. “Naturally…and—er—while you are here, there’s another thing…you mustn’t feel you have to entertain me. I don’t want to interrupt any of your habits…What do you usually do after dinner?”

“Sometimes I take a walk in the garden, but I think it’s already begun to rain. Sometimes I read, or play records.”

“Then please do just what you like—as usual.”

Without another word she went to the phonograph and put on Mozart; after it finished she closed the instrument and called from the doorway: “Good night.” When he gave no answer she went back to his chair and saw that he was asleep, so she took the warm pipe out of his hand in case it set fire to something; then she laid another cob of coal on the reddened embers in the grate.

It was all very easy the next morning, so far as Livia was concerned. But as the day proceeded it became clear that other people were bent on making difficulties. First there arrived Richard Felsby, and a somewhat stormy scene took place from which Livia was excluded, though she tried to listen at the door and gathered that the old man was just as shocked as Miss Fortescue. She was also vaguely aware that matters of importance were being arranged over her head, and decided there and then to insert her own personal clause into whatever plans were being concocted. And that was simply that she would not, in any circumstances, go back to Cheldean. As soon as the chance came she reiterated this. “And if you send me,” she added, “I’ll run away again.” Neither she nor her father knew that Miss Williams would not have had
her back in any event; it would have saved them an argument. “Very well,” he said at length, “I’ll see about somewhere else.” But it was already too late for the girl to begin the new term at any other school.

And the sensation of John Channing’s return, combined with the scandal of Emily Channing’s departure, raged like a hurricane through Browdley and neighborhood for several weeks, then slowly sank to the dimensions of a zephyr.

They became good friends. It was not that Livia liked him instantly, still less was she aware of any submerged filial emotions, nor was there any conscious effort to like him; but a moment came, quite a casual one, when she realized that she had already been liking him a good deal for some time.

She did not call him “Father.” It was hard to begin, and since she did not begin soon enough, it became impossible to begin. Eventually, since she had to call him something, she asked if he would mind “Martin.”

“Martin? Why Martin?”

“I like the name. I used to have a friend at school called Martin…Joan Martin.”

“Used to have? It’s not so long ago.” He was rather relieved to find she had had a friend, after what Dr. Whiteside had said when they met a few days before. “Don’t you keep in touch with her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she thinks I stole her watch.”

The answer was devastating, and out of it came the story of the Cheldean incident. After she had given him the somewhat curious details he said quizzically: “And did you?”

“Good heavens, no—what do you think I am?”

“Well, what do you think I am?”

She pondered gravely for a moment, whereupon he laughed, not because there was anything to laugh at, but because he had at last found a way of introducing a matter which he wanted to clear up once and for all. “You see, Livia, I don’t wish you to get any false ideas. Don’t think up excuses for me. Don’t dramatize me innocent, for instance, as you dramatized yourself guilty…On the other hand—don’t believe everything you read about me in the papers…Know what I mean?”

She nodded and he knew she did.

She added hastily: “I must tell you something else though…I didn’t steal her watch, but I did steal her money afterwards.”

“What?”

Then more explanations. He finally laughed again and said: “That’s all right. Perhaps we’re neither of us quite as bad as we’re painted—or as good as we ought to be. And I still think you ought to keep in touch with Joan. Mustn’t center yourself on Stoneclough altogether…Get out more. Meet people. What did you think of doing this afternoon, for instance?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“There’s a farm sale I’m going to. Watson said he wanted more tools for the garden and I thought I might pick up a few bargains…Come with me if you like.”

“Oh yes, Martin…I can call you that? You don’t mind?”

“Not a bit…On the contrary, you’ve settled what name I give if I bid for anything.”

It wasn’t only his name, however, so far as Browdley itself was concerned. He was recognized by many in the town, despite the long interval, and one day, after he had called on Dr. Whiteside at his house in Shawgate, a stranger accosted him in the street and made offensive remarks. After that he never visited Browdley again, but in the other direction, at a somewhat greater distance, lay country towns and villages where no one knew him by sight; and here he liked to take Livia with him on casual expeditions—to that farm sale, for instance (at which he bought some spades and hoes, and quietly said “Martin” to the auctioneer); or on other occasions to an agricultural show, or a cricket match, or a local fair. He liked outdoor scenes and functions—the smell of moist, well-trodden earth, the hum of rural voices blown full and then faint on a veering wind, the pageantry of flags and bunting against low-scudding clouds. Frankly he did not much care whether Livia enjoyed every moment of these occasions or not; she took the chance when she agreed to accompany him, and if she were bored, that was her lookout. Sometimes she admitted afterwards that she had been. “But I don’t mind being bored, with you, Martin.” To which she added quickly: “I mean I don’t mind being bored when I’m with you…no, no, not even that exactly—what I really mean is, I don’t mind being bored provided I’m with you.”

Of the schools to which he wrote, all declared they had no vacancies. Whether they had received unsatisfactory reports from Miss Williams, or whether the newspaper scandal had scared them off, was hard to determine; they gave no such reasons, of course, but after the same kind of letter had arrived from half a dozen headmistresses he felt there was not much use continuing. Perhaps there were schools in France or Switzerland; he would have to look the matter up. He did not tell Livia of his lack of success so far, preferring her to think he had merely dropped the matter; which she did, without much delay and with great satisfaction.

For it was very pleasant to be at Stoneclough as the seasons rounded and another spring brought new green to the trees. After the battles and scandals of the previous year, peace seemed to have descended on the house and its occupants; even Sarah, shrill-voiced as she shared the domestic work with Livia, nagged less if only for the prosaic reason that she was getting deaf and could hear less. She too had made her truce, whether of God or of the Devil; without giving up one jot of her religious scruples, which were of the strictest kind, she nevertheless contrived to mate them with an old conviction that a Channing could do no wrong. He could, and had done, obviously; and yet, in another sense, it was not so. Surely that was no harder to believe than some of the things she heard, and with relish, from her favorite pulpit every Sunday? She was a devout attender at one of the Browdley Methodist chapels, where, as deafness slowly gained on unobtrusiveness over a period of years, she had worked her way up to the front pew immediately beneath the preacher’s oratory. She liked the preacher in a grim, prim way—the same way that she liked Mr. Felsby. She had never liked Emily, or Miss Fortescue, or Watson, or anyone at Stoneclough who was not a Channing. And she only half-liked Livia, who was only half a Channing. Livia wrangled with her, tolerated her, and thought her at times insufferable—which she was. She was also stupid, hard-working, not very clean, and intensely loyal.

Whereas Watson was not so loyal, rather lazy, and occasionally drunk. But he had a knack with plants and machines, and an affection for the place he worked at rather than for the people he worked for. He liked his employer well enough, did not much care for Livia, whom he thought arrogant, and hated Sarah, who had once floored him with a saucepan when he came into her kitchen tipsy.

And yet, out of these strains and stresses, a queer equilibrium emerged—a fadeless sea in which all the storms were in teacups. It was Browdley, that almost foreign land five miles away, where rancors increased as trade worsened and mill after mill closed down. Even Mr. Felsby was rumored to be losing a small part of his fortune; one could not be sure, however, since he forbore to come up the hill and grumble about it. And Dr. Whiteside, his closest friend, gradually absented himself also, though he was cordial enough with Livia when they met, as they sometimes did, in the streets of the town.

Livia shopped, kept house, and helped with the cooking; while Martin (since he may as well be called that) spent hours in the garden, turning wasteland into vegetable patches, thinning trees, repairing terraces and fences. There was much to be done after so many years of Watson’s neglect and Emily’s indifference.

One day he told her she was to go to a school in Switzerland, and that she would like it very much because Geneva was a very beautiful city. Livia was surprised and disappointed; she had hoped that the whole idea of school might be dropped, but of course it was quite exciting to be going abroad for the first time, and doubtless a Swiss school would be nothing like Cheldean. So there followed a great scurry of preparation—travel tickets had to be obtained, clothes to be bought, and the old Cheldean trunk taken down from the attic over the stables. Martin, who had visited Geneva in his youth, told her what she would see and what she must on no account miss, and that part of the value of being at a foreign school was merely to be living in a foreign country.

Livia was to leave by a night train on the Wednesday after Easter week. During the afternoon she had some last-minute shopping in Browdley, and returned towards dusk in the rather shabby old car that Martin had picked up at a bargain price and that only Watson’s constant attention kept in going order. The trunk was in the hall, roped and labeled; it was understood that there would be early dinner while Watson loaded up the car for the drive to the station. Livia, excited in a way she could not exactly diagnose, walked into the drawing room where she found Martin standing in front of the fireplace reading the paper. There was nothing odd in that, but when he put the paper aside to talk to her, Livia was transfixed by the sight of tears in his eyes.

The conclusion she reached was inescapable. “Oh Martin, Martin—what’s the matter? If you don’t want me to go, I won’t. I don’t really care about Geneva or Switzerland or any place except here! I’d rather stay with you, Martin—”

“Come here—” he interrupted. And then he stepped towards the girl and took her arm with a curious nervous pressure. “It isn’t that….”

“Martin—what’s happened?”

He picked up the paper, folded it to a certain place, and handed it to her. But she did not look at it; she kept staring at him till he had to say: “I’m afraid it’s bad news …Or would you rather have me tell you?”

She looked at the paper then. It was a small paragraph on an inside page, reporting that Mrs. John Channing had been killed instantly when the car she was driving overturned on the road between Chartres and Orléans, and that a Mr. Standon, who was a passenger, had been severely injured. The reading public was further reminded that Mrs. John Channing was the wife of the same John Channing who, etc., etc.

Livia did not speak. She read the paragraph over and over, trying to grasp not only what it meant, but what it signified in her own life; and then, because of the tears in Martin’s eyes, she began to weep herself. “Oh Mother…Mother…” she sobbed. But even while she did so a thought came to her in such a guise that she felt dreadful for having the kind of mind in which it could even exist—the thought that in his distress, which was also hers, Martin might now want her to stay at Stoneclough for company’s sake. Yet how could one help one’s thoughts, whatever they were? And she was distressed; her tears, imitative at first, were perfectly genuine as they proceeded. But she knew now, for certain, how much she wanted not to leave Stoneclough, and that all the excitement of packing to go abroad would be nothing to the quiet relief, even the sad relief, of unpacking.

But it was not to be. As soon as she hinted at it, he said no; if the news had upset her very much she could postpone departure for a day or two, but that was all; and really, he thought it best for her to go; the change of scene and new companions would prove a great help, he assured her.

“And it wouldn’t help you, Martin, if I stayed?”

He half-smiled. “That’s very kind of you, my dear, but I really don’t think it would.”

After that she was proud enough to leave that night, as had been planned, and not accept the short delay that was so pitiable a substitute for what she had hoped.

But she was not long away from Stoneclough. The time was April 1914; she had one term at the Geneva school, then returned to England for the summer holidays just before the war broke out. And when the next term began, in September, the Germans were on the Marne and it was thought inadvisable to send English girls across France, even to the best Swiss finishing schools.

One day, to escape a heavy shower, Livia entered the Browdley Public Library, and by sheer chance as she wandered in and out of the alcoves came upon a section dealing with law cases and jurisprudence; one of the books, conspicuous by its worn condition, proved to be a verbatim report of the Channing case. The name was a shock that set her heart beating, but a greater one came when she opened the book and found, against the title page, a photograph of her father as he had been at the time of the trial all those years before. So young, so handsome, so dashing; she could hardly believe it was the same man…and against the photograph, scrawled in pencil, was a word unknown to her, but which she guessed to be foul. It brought a flush to her face that she thought everyone in the library must notice, but no one did, and with a curious hypnotized fascination she took the book to a secluded table and began to read carefully. Later, when she had to leave, she hid it behind some other books, so that nobody should borrow it before she continued reading the next day. Not being a library member she could not borrow it herself, nor did she want to order a copy from a bookseller. But every afternoon for a week she spent an hour or two in the library alcove, trying to understand the crime that her father had committed. And for the most part she was mystified. It was all to do with another world—a world of complicated details and strange jargon—false estimates of reserves, duplicated stock certificates, and so on. What puzzled her was the intention behind it all, and to this she found no positive clue until she came to the defending counsel’s speech, in which her father was portrayed as a brilliant visionary who had wished to amalgamate a large group of cotton mills with a view to preventing their eventual bankruptcies as separate competitors. But then, when she came to the judge’s summing-up, the whole picture was different—that of an ambitious, unscrupulous adventurer, greedy for power, employing deliberate deceit to tempt unwary investors…The two pictures made the problem harder than ever, the more so as neither bore the slightest resemblance to the man she herself knew. She then reread the examinations and cross-examinations, seeking to disentangle some corroboration of one or other viewpoint out of the mass of opposite and bewildering evidence. The main thing she gathered was that her father had once been in a position to deal with vast sums of money, whereas now he could hardly afford the extra hundred pounds by which the taxes on Stoneclough had lately been increased.

Some day, she thought, he would tell her all about it; and then he would be surprised to find out how much she knew already. But what did she know? The chief clue was missing…why had he done whatever it was that he had done? Not only why had he defrauded people, for that question had already been given two conflicting answers, but why had he been either the adventurer greedy for power, or the visionary with dreams of reorganizing an industry? Why? For it had been stated over and over again during the trial, as if it were against him, that the Channing Mill itself was sound until his own course of action ruined it; everything would have been all right, therefore, if he had let things alone. Only he hadn’t let things alone.

And then, too, she realized with a sense of discovery, though it was obvious by simple arithmetic, that he had spent many years in the industrial and financial world before the crash. His career was referred to at the trial as having been an “honorable” one; distinguished connections were cited with a number of companies besides his own. Why, then, had he suddenly broken whatever were the rules of the game?

There was yet a third character reading, scattered throughout the book in sundry penciled remarks. “Liar,” “Thief,” “Swindler,” were among the mildest of them; but on the last page was a clue, if not to her father’s motives, at any rate to his anonymous accuser’s. For in the margin alongside the judge’s pronouncement of sentence was the scribbled comment: “And not half of what the —deserved for ruining me and hundreds more.”

Long after she had finished the book and had learned all she could learn from it she found that even passing the library gave her an itch of curiosity—was it still being read, was some other unknown borrower adding new penciled insults to the printed lines? She would sometimes dash into the building just to see, and one day she reflected how simple it would be to put the book under her coat and take it away as she walked out. But she could not make up her mind to do this. It was no question of the morals of stealing, or of risk in being discovered, but rather of her personal attitude towards Browdley: to remove the book would somehow be accepting defeat, whereas to leave it was—if not victory—at least a challenge and a defiance. So she left it, and the library took on a curious significance in her mind: the place where the book was, and where people went who hated Martin.

He never spoke to her about the past, or gave her any opening to ask him direct questions about it; but sometimes, apropos of other things, he made remarks that connected themselves with it in her mind—remarks that did not so much reveal the light as illumine the darkness. Once he said: “The hardest thing in the world is to understand how you were once interested in something that no longer interests you at all.” And another time, standing with her in the garden on one of those rare clear days when all Browdley could be seen in the distance, he said: “The factories look big, don’t they? They dominate the town like the cathedrals at Cologne or Amiens…perhaps they are cathedrals, in a way, if enough people believe in them.” And then he mentioned a lecture by a young fellow named Boswell who was trying to get on the Browdley Council—a lecture Richard Felsby had told him about in great indignation because it had blamed the Channing and Felsby families for much that was wrong about the state of Browdley. “There’s some truth in it, though. Whenever I think of those rows and rows of drab streets huddling under the cathedrals I have the feeling that if somebody were to send me to jail for that, I’d consider it a just sentence…We’re all guilty, Livia, of everything that happens. Read the papers and see how.” (It was the autumn of 1917, the blackest time of the war.) “And if guilt had to be paid for by punishment, then the earth would be one vast prison. Perhaps that’s what it is.”

“The animals would have a good time if everybody was in prison,” Livia commented cheerfully. “They aren’t guilty, anyhow. In fact they don’t know anything about our wars and peaces—how can they? What does it matter to a worm whether he gets cut in half by a garden spade or by a shell bursting?”

He smiled. “It would certainly be hard to convince him of the difference. Probably about as hard as to explain to Man the mind of God.” He turned with her into the clough. “By the way, I’m going to London for a few days. Anything you’d like me to get for you there?”

“Can’t I come with you?”

“Wouldn’t be much fun for you. It’s—it’s mostly a business trip.”

“You mean—you’re going to—to start doing financial things again?” That was the nearest she ever came to a direct question.

“Good God, no. Don’t you think I had enough?”

That was the nearest he ever came to a direct answer.

While he was gone she realized she was enjoying even the loneliness, because of the image of his return. That image hovered over the edge of every page of every book she turned to, was called to life by every loved phonograph record. Her eighteenth birthday came during his absence, and somehow she was not even disappointed that he had chosen to be away at such a time; maybe he had had no choice; there were still many things in his life of which she knew nothing. The long interval of the prison years, for instance. He never even hinted at them, yet—she argued—what else could have caused the disconnection between the kind of person he had been and the kind he now was? Some day, perhaps, he would tell her about that also. Some day, when she was old enough, he would think of her as a complete adult, within range of every possible adult confidence. She already felt she was, however little it might have occurred to him so far. She was also beginning to appraise herself physically, though without vanity, for she considered her body too small and her mouth too big; but in being thus ruthless she was merely, of course, denying herself what she did not want. She knew no boys or young men, and when sometimes in Browdley they would stare at her as if she attracted them, she herself was aware only of disinterest. She did not want—was sure she would never want—to attract anyone that way. There were other ways for which she felt herself far better equipped; she liked to think there was something rare and talismanic about her that could appeal to an older man.

Yet she must not dramatize; he had once cautioned her about that, and ever afterwards she had known she had better not act before him; and this, by a subtle transition, meant that she need not act before him, thus (if she chose to look at it that way) relieving her of a burden rather than imposing on her a restriction. It was pleasant, anyhow, to think of the future that stretched ahead; she and Martin at Stoneclough, pottering about the garden, taking walks in the clough and on the moorland, visiting places together—the eventless days, the long firelit evenings. And, of course, to complete such felicity, the war would end sometime.

Sarah, growing deafer and more asthmatic in her old age, seized the chance of Martin’s absence to urge her to “get out” oftener, to make friends with young people, to enjoy herself more. And this, from Sarah, who had always connected “enjoyment” with the Devil, was an amazing suggestion if Livia had been interested enough to think about it.

But she merely replied, offhandedly as she always did to Sarah: “I do enjoy myself. I’m perfectly happy.”

“It’s a pity you gave up school,” said Sarah.

“Well, I never enjoyed myself much there, anyhow. And besides, I didn’t give it up—the school gave me up. Didn’t you know that? I was practically expelled, and then other schools wouldn’t have me—Martin didn’t tell me that, but I once saw some letters on his desk saying they couldn’t take me…I knew why even if he didn’t…You see, I’m a bad lot—like father, like daughter—isn’t that rather natural?”

She knew, of course, that she was acting then; she was always ready to do so in order to shock old Sarah.

When Martin came back she had been waiting for him for hours, but without urgency. Snow had fallen during the day, and this presumably had made his train late. It had also covered the drive as far as the road so thickly that Watson could not clear it in time to take the car to the station; so Martin would doubtless arrive by taxi. Earlier in the evening she had put on galoshes to enjoy the garden, where the snow lay piled in knee-high drifts—a rare enough sight to be novel, and so were the white slopes of the clough, through which the path ran untraceably except to one as familiar with it as she. The sky was blue-black and full of stars; they and the snow made a paleness bright enough to read by. And all around, especially when she listened for any car noise, there was a great blanket of silence that seemed to follow her into the house when she re-entered.

He arrived about ten o’clock, having walked the last mile along the road because the taxi couldn’t get any further.

“And with those thin shoes, Martin? You must be soaking wet…And carrying that bag all the way…”

“It’s not heavy. I’ll go up and change immediately.”

“Let me carry it for you.”

“No, no…I’m all right. If I want anything I’ll ring for Sarah.”

“She’s got a bad cough and went to bed hours ago.”

“All right…I won’t want anything.”

By the time he came down she had the drawing-room fire roaring high, and a tray of refreshments by the side of his favorite armchair—hot soup, sandwiches, whisky and soda.

“Nice of you, Livia, but really and truly I don’t want anything—except the fire.”

“But I’m sure you didn’t have any dinner—”

“I managed all right. Don’t worry about me. Please don’t worry about me.”

The way he said that made her instantly begin to do so. She noticed how more than usually tired he looked, his whole face drawn a little, hands trembling as he held them to the fire.

“When you were so late I wondered if perhaps you weren’t coming back
till tomorrow.”

“No…it was just the weather.”

“I thought perhaps your business had taken longer than you expected.”

“No…there wasn’t much business.” His face lightened as he added: “I didn’t forget your birthday, but—I have an awful confession—I left what I bought you in the train. They were some special records—of Mozart. I knew you’d like them. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid, but it’s quite possible they’ll be turned in by the finder. Unless he’s so disappointed when he unwraps the parcel that he smashes them in disgust.”

“Oh no—nobody could deliberately smash Mozart records!”

He smiled. “Maybe not. Anyhow, I left word about it—and if we don’t get them back I’ll buy you some more.”

“Martin…I’m so sorry…don’t worry about it.”

“Who said I was worrying about it?”

“Well, you’re worrying about something—I can see from your face.”

“I told you not to worry.”

Suddenly, leaning forward to warm his hands, he slipped and fell to his knees. Only her nearness and quickness saved him; another few inches, another second, and he would have been burned. As it was, she managed to pull him back and saw then that it had been more than a slip, more than just tiredness. She was calm, yet uncertain what to do—call Sarah?—call a doctor?—but first, anyhow, there was the whisky. She forced a stiff drink between his lips, then began loosening his collar. While she was doing this his eyes refocused themselves.

“I think you fainted, Martin.”

He nodded, gulping over the taste of the whisky.

“Seems so…and by the way, I shouldn’t have had that.”

“Why not? It pulled you round.”

“Maybe…only I’m not supposed to have it—now.”

“Why now?”

“Well, any time for that matter.”

“You said now! Martin, what’s wrong? What’s happened? Are you ill?…Shall I call a doctor?”

He shook his head. “No, I’ve had a doctor. That’s really what I went to London for. It’s nothing you need worry about…But perhaps I’d better go to bed now—and rest. I assure you it’s nothing you need worry about.…It’s—er—to do with my eyes. I’ve known for some time they weren’t quite as they should be. Old Whiteside diagnosed it wrong, of course…Well, anyhow, let’s hope those records turn up. At least I can hear properly.”

He got up and walked to the door, while she ran past him to open it.

“Martin…”

“I’m really all right, Livia—I didn’t even intend to tell you but for—”

“Martin, I’ll look after you. You know that?”

“Why, yes, but—”

“Even if you were to go blind—”

“Oh come now, there’s no question of that…” And then a laugh. “You do like to dramatize, don’t you?…But you’re very kind. I sometimes wonder why. I never did anything for you—except bring you into the world, and God knows whether you thank me for that, in the end…Yes, it puzzles me sometimes—why you are so kind to me.”

“Because I love you,” she answered simply, and then she laughed too, as if to join him in any joke there was. “Good night, Martin.”

“Good night.”

Back in the drawing room she listened to his footsteps creaking on the floor above. Then she ate a sandwich and walked to the window, opened it, and breathed the cold air. The blanket of silence was still covering the world.

The next morning he asked her not to tell Sarah anything about his fainting, or the trouble he had mentioned, because Sarah would fuss, and fussing was just as bad as worrying. And it was useless to tell Sarah not to fuss, because she would do so anyway; whereas if he told Livia not to worry, then he was sure of her compliance. Livia said she was far too happy to worry about anything, which was the truth, and it puzzled her. Perhaps it was because he looked so much better after his night’s sleep. Or perhaps it was just that he was home again. Or perhaps it was her own penchant for having the oddest emotions at the oddest times.

Anyhow, she was so happy she decided to put the old work horse between the shafts of the garden cart and drive over the hill to fetch eggs and butter from one of the farms; Watson usually did this in the car, but he was afraid the snow might be too deep in places, though the horse would manage all right. So she sat on the plank seat, surrounded by the rich smells of the empty cart, and jogged down the road as far as the side turning that climbed again steeply to the moorland. The sky over the snow was an incredible deep blue, and when she had gone a little way and looked back, there was Stoneclough, a huddle of white roofs against the black-and-white trees. And above her now, the mountain lifted up. In that strange snow-blue light it seemed to her that she had never been so near it before, though actually she had climbed to the summit many times; she felt a sudden wild ecstasy that made her lie down on the floor of the cart amidst the smells of hay and manure, to exult in the whole matchless beauty of that moment. The horse jogged on, presently stopping before a closed gate. She jumped down to open it, laughing aloud. Then the lane narrowed to a stony track, and there were other gates. At last she reached a farmhouse and saw a fat woman standing at the doorway wiping her arms on an apron and smiling. “Laws amussy,” she cried, as Livia approached, “I didn’t expect anybody’d come up this morning. Are you from Stoneclough?”

Livia said she was, and had the impression she was being taken for a servant girl; and that, somehow, added to the pleasantness of the occasion. Smiling also, she handed over the note on which Sarah had written out so much butter, so many eggs, and so on; but then another strange and pleasant thing happened. The fat woman pushed back the note with a loud chuckle. “Nay, that’s no use to me, girl—ye’ll have to tell me what it says. I never was a scholar.”

“You mean you can’t read?” queried Livia.

“That’s so—and I don’t know as I’ll ever bother to learn, now I’ve let it go so long.”

Livia then told her what she wanted, whereupon the woman disappeared
into the farmhouse, returning after a few minutes with the various items, a handful of carrots for the horse, and a jug containing a pale frothing liquid. “Nettle drink,” she cried, triumphantly, “and it’ll be the best ye’ve ever tasted.”

That could be easy, thought Livia, who had never tasted any before. But it was delicious, whether because of the woman’s special brew, or for some curious extra congeniality of time and place…but the truth was, everything that morning was to Livia miraculously right—the drive, the sky, the sunshine, the mountain, the nettle drink, and the fact that the woman could not read. Never again, as long as she lived, was she quite so happy.

She would hold his arm firmly (for he was apt to stumble a little), and walk with him up and down the level paths along the terraces, sometimes as far as the fence, but not much beyond, because there might be strangers in the clough, and he did not want to be seen. All at once a secret between them was removed, so far as this was concerned; he made no more effort to conceal from her certain things that he still wished to conceal from others. She was a co-conspirator in a small but necessary deception. For some reason he did not want outsiders to know that his eyes were bad; he seemed not to realize that few would care, or even think that a man walking slowly along with a girl holding his arm was behaving in any abnormal way for father with daughter. But she did not mind the pretense, if it satisfied him. And inside the garden, with no one to see or hear, with the empty moorland above and the dark clough below, she learned the special trick of sharing whatever mood he was in, even to extremes; if he wanted to laugh, she would laugh too, and if he had wanted to cry she believed she could have done that also. Sometimes she would tell him the only funny stories she knew, which were about Cheldean or the Geneva school; they were mostly rather silly yarns, even if they were funny at all, and it was odd to feel their schoolgirl importance dwindling in retrospect while she narrated them, so that she could tick them off afterwards as things never to be told again. He seemed interested, however, and often asked about her school friend, Joan Martin, suggesting again that she should write and try to re-establish the friendship. But Livia said it was no use now; she was sure they wouldn’t have a thing in common, even apart from the doubtful incident of the watch.

“But you ought to have friends, Livia—young friends. I know it would be hard for you to make them in Browdley—for various reasons…but you ought to have them—there ought to be people of your own age whom you could spend holidays with at their homes.”

“Or they could come here to spend holidays with me—how would you like that?”

The point was taken. He replied: “I wouldn’t mind it so much. I wouldn’t have to see a great deal of them, and if they were your friends, I’d do my best to make them feel at home.”

She smiled. “But they wouldn’t be, they couldn’t be, and I’d mind them here, anyway. Martin, don’t you worry about me, either.” And then sharply: “Who’s been talking to you? Sarah? She had no business to…Why should she interfere?”

He did not deny that Sarah had talked to him.

“All right,” he said temporizingly, “but don’t go and nag Sarah about it. She means well.”

“That’s not always a good defense,” she said, thinking of it suddenly, “when people do the wrong thing.”

She often gave him cues like that, as they occurred to her on the spur of the moment, hoping they might lead him into talk of the past. But they never did, and she wondered if he ever guessed that they were deliberately put out, and if he just as deliberately ignored them. One evening, however, without any cue at all, he began to talk of his years in prison. They were walking in the garden, with the stars especially bright in the frosty air, and that drew him to remark that the books he had read in prison were mostly about astronomy and philosophy. “You see, in prison after the first period of getting used to it, which is rather dreadful, you slip into a mood of timelessness that isn’t either happy or unhappy, and in that mood—for me, at any rate—the things to think about were the tuneless ones—the mysteries of life and existence that have sent many men into cells not very different from mine…the cells of monasteries, or the other kind where mad people are put. Not that I invented any special philosophy or had any special vision to match those I read about. I don’t have the right quality of mind.”

“Neither do I,” she answered. “You liked that kind of book because you were in prison, but I’d feel in prison if I had to read that kind of book.”

“I know,” he smiled. “But a very kind and gentle prison. A prison within the other prison. It wasn’t so bad—although, as I said, my mind wasn’t exactly equal to it—because, after all, I’d only been a smart business man most of my life.”

“And not even so smart,” she said softly, taking his arm.

“That’s so. Well, let’s say just a businessman. Perhaps that’s why I think now of the end of a man’s life as a sort of taking over by a junior partner—some cheeky young fellow whom at first you thought of no account, but he grows and grows inside your affairs till he begins to touch them all—you’d like to get rid of him but you can’t, he’s the fellow you try to forget when you go to sleep, but he wakes you in the morning with his nagging and needling…the first step you take you know he’s still there, at your elbow, jogging and shoving and hurting like the devil…you’re at his mercy—his strength grows all the time at the expense of yours—he knows he’s going to have his own way in the end—it’s only a matter of time, and a horrible time at that…and from his point of view, of course, everything’s going exactly as it should—he is healthy, striving, spreading—you are just an old decaying out-of-date thing he feeds on.” He checked himself. “Am I talking too much?”

“No,” she answered, transfixed.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Not altogether.” She added quickly: “But I don’t mind not knowing altogether. You remember once I said I didn’t mind being bored. When you don’t mind being bored, it isn’t boredom, really. And it’s like that when you don’t mind not understanding—perhaps it means that you do understand—a little.”

“I hope so,” he said, holding closely to her as they reached an uphill part of the path. “Now tell me some more about Cheldean.”

She racked her brains to think of a story because she knew that in some obscure way those yarns about school life took his mind in a pleasant direction, even if he did not always listen carefully; but she had already told him most that had happened, and now she could only think of something that had not happened. It was an incident she had once invented during a rather dull service in the Cheldean School chapel. The preacher was a local divine who came regularly and always devoted a large part of his extempore prayer to the weather; he was never satisfied with it and always wanted God to change it to something else, so that the slightest sign of floods, drought, a cold wave or a heat wave, gave him an excuse. One sunny Sunday after a week of consecutive fine days, he prayed most eloquently for rain—which the girls definitely did not want, since there was a school holiday the next day; and Livia, sharing this resentment, suddenly noticed a sort of trap door in the roof of the chapel just over the pulpit.

What fun, she thought, if one had climbed up there with a bucket of water and, at the moment of the appeal, had poured it down over the preacher’s head! The thought was so beguiling that she had giggled quietly in the pew; but now, telling the story to Martin as a true one, she had him laughing aloud.

“What really made you do it?” he asked. “Just for a lark?”

“I wanted to see his face when he looked up,” she said, still using her imagination. “I thought he might think I was God.”

She had to invent the sequel of her own discovery and punishment, at which he kept on laughing. In doing so he half stumbled to his knees; and while she was helping him up Watson entered the garden from the yard. He gave them both a rather long and curious stare, and a few hours afterwards, catching Livia alone, asked how her father was. She answered “All right,” as she always did to that question.

Watson grinned. “Just a little drop too much sometimes, eh?”

“What do you mean?” Then Livia realized what he did mean and was immensely relieved. She had been afraid for a moment that he might have deduced some real illness, and his mistake seemed the happiest and simplest alibi, not only for past but possibly future events also.

She therefore smiled and retorted: “You ought to know the symptoms, Watson, if anyone does.”

From then on, Livia cared less about what was seen and heard, even though Watson’s knowing impertinences increased.

One evening Martin called her attention to a white dog walking along the path towards them, but she saw it was not a dog, but a piece of newspaper blown in the wind; but he still insisted it was a dog and stopped to touch it, then said it had run away. That made her realize how bad his sight was becoming, and she begged him to see some other eye doctor; perhaps a special kind of glasses or treatment would help; even if Dr. Whiteside were no use, surely there must be someone in Mulcaster or London…But he said no; it had all been diagnosed and prescribed for before; there was really nothing anyone could do about it—perhaps it would not get any worse. And he could still see many things perfectly well—colors, for instance. The red geraniums, the blue lobelias, the yellow sunflowers; he welcomed them all each day. That gave her the idea to put on a scarlet dress the next time she walked with him, and he was delighted. From which she promptly derived another idea, and that evening, though she was poor at sewing, she worked hard after he had gone to bed, cutting up an old patchwork quilt and making it into a multicolored dress to wear the following day. And he was delighted again.

She then thought he might like a real white dog, and asked Watson to get one; but when the dog appeared and was duly presented to his master in the garden, he wriggled loose and scampered into the the clough. “There you are,” Martin laughed, when she fetched the animal back. “That’s what happened before. The white dog will have nothing to do with me.”

“Then I must be a white cat,” she answered, breathlessly. She had noticed before that the silliest repartee of this kind seemed to lift his mood; it was strange, indeed, how much of their talk had recently been either silly or abstruse, seeming to skip the ordinary world in between. And as usual, the silliness worked; he was lifted. “Come along, little white cat,” he laughed again.

“Yes—and the white cat won’t run away,” she answered.

She could see that he was recalling something. “But a holiday, though…that would be all right. Why don’t you take one?”

“A holiday?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Away…from you?”

“Well, only for a time…”

Suspicion filled her mind. “One of Sarah’s ideas?”

“Now, now, don’t get cross with Sarah. She’s not the only one who thinks you need a holiday.”

“Who else, then?”

“Oh…several people…”

“Who? Who?”

He wouldn’t tell her, but it was easy to worm the truth out of Sarah, and the full truth proved even darker than her suspicion. For it seemed that old Richard Felsby (he of all people) had visited Stoneclough recently and talked to Martin not merely about her taking a holiday, but about her leaving Stoneclough altogether. Some friends of Richard’s who lived on the coast of North Wales had been approached and had agreed to have her stay with them indefinitely; Richard had offered to pay all expenses, and Martin had actually approved the idea. This was the biggest blow of all; yet after a wild scene with Sarah she could only reproach him somberly. How could he have even considered such a thing? And that awful old man, Richard Felsby—how dared he interfere with her and her affairs? “Oh, Martin, I thought he never visited you any more. I thought you’d quarreled. I hoped you were enemies forever.”

“Livia, he just called on business the other day—while you were out. Something about a new mortgage on the house.”

“But he talked about me—you both did—planning to have me sent away—and Sarah already getting my clothes ready—all of you—behind my back—against me—plotting—and then pretending it was just a holiday—”

“Livia, please—it wasn’t like that at all—”

“Do you know what I’ll do? I’ll hate them both as long as I live—I’ll never forgive them—either of them—”

“They were only thinking of what might be your own best interests—”

“To send me away from you? Is that what you think too? You don’t want me here?”

“Livia, please…You know how much I like you—”

“I like you too. I love you. I’ve told you that before. And I wouldn’t go, even for a holiday. I’ll never leave you. They’d have to drag me out of the house and if they took me anywhere else I’d run away and I’d fight them all the time. I’d kill anybody who tried to send me away from you.”

“Now, Livia, Livia…why should you talk like that?”

“Because I’m so happy here. What on earth would I do alone in a strange place?”

“You wouldn’t be alone—”

“I’d be alone if I left you alone. I won’t go anywhere unless you go with me. Then I’ll go—wherever it is. Even if you went out of your mind I’d go out of mine too. That’s a bargain…So don’t try to get rid of me.” She put her hands up to his face and clawed him gently with her fingernails, suddenly and rather hysterically laughing. “The little white cat will scratch you to death if you even think of it.”

***

Dr. Whiteside happened to meet Livia in Browdley one afternoon. She did not mention her father, until asked, and then she said he was “all right.” The doctor was an old man now, long retired from practice, and for that reason even readier to think out the problems of the families he had once attended. He well remembered advising Emily to tell Livia the truth and send her to school lest the life at Stoneclough, without playmates of her own age, should make her grow up neurotic and self-centered; he had not seen the girl often since then, but now, even to his dimmed perceptions, she looked as if everything had happened just as he had feared. There was the peculiar rapt expression, the angular tension of her whole body as she stopped to speak to him in the street. And he made up his mind there and then to visit Stoneclough unasked; he did not care how John received him, it was the girl he was thinking about. She ought to be sent away, and he would tell John this and be damned to the fellow.

So a few days later, amidst pouring rain that had already flooded the low-lying districts of Browdley, Dr. Whiteside had his old coachman-chauffeur drive him up to Stoneclough. Admitted by Watson, he was glad to find Livia out, and made his own way across the hall to the drawing room. He walked in without ceremony, being both in the mood and at an age when such things were possible. John Channing sat alone by the fireside, with a white wire-haired terrier on his lap. It was one of the almost lucid intervals, less frequent now and more fragmentary; the younger man shook hands, invited the doctor to sit down, remarked on the weather, and in all ways but one seemed perfectly normal. The exception lay in the fact that though he clearly did not recognize Dr. Whiteside, he showed no surprise that a stranger should walk in unannounced.

It would have puzzled a man less subject to freaks of behavior than Dr. Whiteside himself. “Good God, man, don’t you remember me?” was all he exclaimed. “Whiteside…Doctor Whiteside. I’ve been meaning to look you up for a long while…How are you getting on?”

“Oh not so badly, thanks. Yes, of course I remember you now. It’s—it’s just that I don’t see very well.”

“Still the same trouble?”

“No. It never was what you diagnosed.”

“You don’t say?” Dr. Whiteside was somewhat discomfited. “Well, of course, I’m not a specialist. I hope you consulted one.”

“I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“That’s my business, if you don’t mind.”

“Why…certainly. I beg your pardon.” But by this time Dr. Whiteside’s interest, both private and professional, was thoroughly aroused. He was not really a stupid doctor, only a rather perfunctory one when people came to him with vague complaints, such as “a little trouble with my eyes.” On the occasion of that visit several years before, he had discovered a few symptoms of strain and had recommended a local oculist who would make a more detailed examination. As he never heard that Channing visited the oculist, he had concluded that whatever was wrong had got right of its own accord, as so many ailments do; but now, staring closely, he detected other symptoms—much more serious ones. Of course he couldn’t be sure, but if what he instantly thought of were possible, then it was rather appalling…

He continued, automatically turning on the jaunty air that he always adopted at such moments, yet at the same time reflecting that the real object of his visit was now more necessary than ever: “Matter of fact, I didn’t come to talk about you at all.”

“Good—because it’s the one subject I try not to be interested in. What did you come to talk about?”

Dr. Whiteside answered bluntly: “Livia.”

“Livia? Fine—go ahead. Too bad she’s out shopping now, or you could talk to her yourself…What about her, though?” Then with sudden darkening urgency: “She’s not ill, is she? There’s nothing happened to her?”

Dr. Whiteside saw a loophole into the argument which he knew had to come. “If she were ill, John, or if anything were to happen to her…and I’m telling you this frankly, mind…it would be nobody’s fault but yours.”

“But she’s not ill…tell me…tell me…”

“No, she’s not exactly ill. She’s just in a rather nervous state…”

“I know—she ought to go away. Matter of fact it was all arranged—”

“Yes, Richard told me, but he didn’t tell me she hadn’t gone.”

“He doesn’t know that yet…But she’s not ill?…You’re not keeping something from me?”

“I’ve said she’s in a rather nervous state. That describes it pretty well. A very nervous state…as apparently you are yourself.”

“Oh never mind me. Leave me out of it.”

“But I can’t entirely—in what I have to say.”

“Then for God’s sake get on with saying it!”

After a pause Dr. Whiteside resumed: “She’s very fond of you, isn’t she?”

The question seemed to bring instant calm to the discussion.

“I daresay. I am of her too. She’s kind to me. You’d never believe how kind to me she is. I often wonder why, because—as I’ve told her—I never did anything for her except bring her into the world, and that’s a doubtful privilege…but she’s so kind—so wonderfully kind.”

Dr. Whiteside cleared his throat; he would soon be on delicate ground. “Has it ever occurred to you…” He hesitated, then leaned forward to pat the head of the terrier and was disconcerted when the animal growled at him. “A faithful dog, I can see.”

“Livia gave him to me. Becky, his name is. She gave me this pipe too—though I can’t smoke any more—it hurts my head to have a pipe in my mouth. She doesn’t know that—please don’t tell her. She’s always giving me things. I give her things too, but I can afford so little nowadays…and those records were never returned. The railway people never found them. They were Mozart records—she loves Mozart.”

Dr. Whiteside nodded grimly. Presently he said, beginning afresh: “Has it ever occurred to you that she never remembered you as a child…so that when she saw you a few years ago it was like meeting a stranger for the first time?”

“Why, of course. That’s what makes it so remarkable. Two strangers. And very much at odds with the world—both of us. We’ve managed to get along pretty well. But I agree with you—that is, if the point you’re making is about her health…a long holiday…Richard’s right…she needs it. Sarah says so too…” Then suddenly, in a changed voice: “Dr. Whiteside, I’m not well—I have to admit that. In fact, there are times when I’m very far from well. Will you please tell me—quickly, please—because there’s not a great deal of time…exactly what are you driving at?”

Half an hour later Dr. Whiteside left the house, having discovered a great deal more than he had allowed the other to realize, and having said perhaps more than he himself had intended.

Livia’s shopping was considerably delayed that afternoon. She was not temperamentally a very good driver of a car, and after such rain as had fallen during several consecutive days there were extra hazards in traveling to and from Stoneclough. It was quite a phenomenal rain; all the streets near the river were under water, with basements engulfed and families living in upper floors; the Advertiser and the Guardian both reported it as the worst flood within living memory. This would have been enough for Browdley to gossip about, yet when Livia entered shops to make her purchases she could feel she was changing the subject of scores of conversations. For the town was already full of rumors about Stoneclough. A few words from Watson had been sufficient; their very fewness gave larger scope to theory, interpretation, pure invention. The whole history of the Channing family, their crimes, scandals, and downfall, was revived under a new spotlight. It was impossible not to wonder what secrets lay behind the eyes of a girl who looked and talked as if she were half a child and half an adult, but nothing at all of an eighteen-year-old.

She shopped at the butcher’s, the grocer’s, the pastry cook’s. It was remembered afterwards (by individuals) that she had bought some pipe tobacco at the tobacconist’s, and some lengths of colored ribbon in the drapery department of the Co-operative shop. She was quick-spoken, as always; knew exactly what she wanted, what it should cost, and if it were of good quality. A true Channing in that respect, at least.

After dusk she set out on the return journey. The old Citroen spluttered slowly uphill with water leaking under the hood; it was a car that did not take the hill too easily at the best of times, but now both wind and rain were beating against its progress, and every cross street sent rivers of muddy flood waters swirling against the wheels. It was all she could do to hold the road, and no more easily as she climbed, because the stream through the clough had become a torrent breaking bounds in places. She hoped Martin would be asleep by the time she reached the house, because if not, he might be worrying about her safe arrival. He usually dozed off about dusk and would often wake again past midnight, when it was her habit to cook a small meal which they would eat in the kitchen; after which they would talk until he felt like dozing again, or sometimes, in fine weather, they would pace upland down the garden in the darkness.

The strain of the drive had tired her, and when she finally slewed the car into the garage she saw with relief that there was no chink of light at the drawing-room window. That meant he had already gone to bed and might well be asleep. Suddenly as she closed the garage door she noticed tire marks in the yard that were not from the car, or from Watson’s motorcycle; and a moment later, seeing Watson wheeling his machine out of the shed where he kept it, she asked if anyone had called during the day.

“Only Dr. Whiteside.”

“He called? Why?”

“Oh, for a chat, I suppose. He didn’t stay long.”

She remembered then that when she had recently met the doctor in Browdley he had said something about calling round to see her father; though she hadn’t expected him to do so with such promptness, especially during the rain. “You’d better be careful,” she warned Watson. “The road’s nearly washed out down the hill.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right, miss.”

He jumped on his machine and was off. She idly wondered where he could think of going on such a night; she was as far as ever from guessing that Stoneclough’s inhabitants were beginning to get on his nerves.

She entered the house through the kitchen. As she passed Sarah’s room, near by, she heard a voice and listened; but it was only Sarah herself, praying aloud in a curious wheezy whine. The whine was based on jumbled recollections of Methodist local preachers whom Sarah, in the past, had admired; the wheeze was merely asthmatic. Sarah had always prayed aloud before going to bed, and it brought back to Livia memories of a thousand childhood nights when she herself (at Sarah’s command) had done the same, kneeling and shivering in a nightdress, and how the nightdress popping over her head just before she began had become a symbol of prayer, so that the words “Night is drawing nigh” in the hymn had meant “Nighties drawing nigh” to her until long after she began to read.

She went upstairs to her own bedroom and was asleep within minutes. She did not pray; somehow the act of prayer seemed more fitting before a whole night’s sleep, not just a few hours until midnight. And besides, she was apt to pray harder during the day, while she was doing other things as well.

But that night, had she known, she might have said an extra prayer, for when she awoke it was almost dawn; from utter exhaustion she had slept eight hours. Immediately—and perhaps it had wakened her—she heard the bark of a dog in the distance, the little white dog whom Martin had called Becky, because (they had both noticed) it never seemed to follow them when they walked, but liked to run on ahead and then turn round, as if beckoning.

The bark continued, giving her a sudden premonition of tragedy. She hurried through the dark house and across the garden, following the sound, and Becky came running forward to meet her at the top of the clough.

Martin’s body was wedged between rocks where the river poured in spate; she made the discovery quickly because Becky jumped into the torrent near the exact spot. She tried to drag the body out of the water, but lacked the strength. She noticed later that where the path came nearest to the rocks there had been a small landslide.

It was full dawn as she returned to Stoneclough. Sarah was still asleep, Watson had been out all night; the house was cold and gray and silent. Entering it she knew she could not tell anyone yet; she felt herself spinning into unconsciousness as she flung herself on a couch in the drawing room. Just a little while to gain control, and then hold it for a lifetime—just half an hour, maybe, until the sun was up, until Sarah, taking tea to his room, would herself discover the absence. Presently she noticed that Becky was wet and shivering, and the dog’s simple need roused her to equally simple action. But a moment later, while she was in the kitchen rubbing him with a towel, some men appeared in the yard outside. They were Browdley Council workmen, in charge of an engineer; they had walked up the clough to see if the flood water was abating; and in so doing they had found Martin’s body.

One of the workmen claimed afterwards that when Livia was given the news she said in a low voice “Yes, I know—” but she denied this later in the morning to Dr. Whiteside, and under his tactful handling the matter was not raised at the inquest, though it was freely gossiped about in the town. She was so distracted, anyhow, that (as all the men agreed) she might not have known what she was saying even if she had said it. But it was still a little odd, as were a great many other things.

Part Three

CHRISTMAS AND THE CHRISTMAS number of the Guardian came a few weeks later, and George Boswell summarizing the local events of the year in a special article, then wrote as follows:—

…In November Browdley suffered its worst floods within living memory, while in the same month the death, under suspicious circumstances, of Mr. John Channing, of Stoneclough, recalled the Channing Mill crash of a generation ago—an event notable in the history of our town both on account of the number of its victims and the sensational criminal trial that followed it…

When George handed this to Will Spivey, his sub-editor, printer, proofreader, ad salesman, and general all-purposes assistant, the latter scrutinized it, grunted, then carefully blue-penciled the word “suspicious.”

“You can’t say that, George.”

“Why not? Isn’t it true?”

“Have ye never heard ‘the greater the truth the greater the libel’?”

“Libel? Who’s libeling who?”

“The verdict at the inquest was ‘accidental death.’ ”

“Aye, and everybody knows why—because old Whiteside was coroner and made ’em believe what the girl said…As if anyone sober or in his right mind would be taking walks in the clough at night during the worst storm for years—”

“I know, George. And there’s some say he wasn’t sober and there’s others say he wasn’t in his right mind and I’ve even heard it whispered that—”

“Nay—I’m not saying or whispering anything, because I simply don’t know and I refuse to believe gossip. I’m just content with the word ‘suspicious.’”

“No good, George. The jury found it was accidental—you can’t contradict ’em. Change to ‘tragic’ and you’ll be safe.”

George reluctantly made the substitution. It was his first year as editor and he did not want trouble. Already he had discovered that the written word had more pitfalls than the spoken, and that the Guardian was a rather sickly infant whose survival could only be contrived from week to week by the most delicate nursing.

“There you are then,” he muttered, handing back the corrected copy. “And if I’m safe, that’s more than Channing’s ever was….”

Ever since he could remember, the Channing name had been part of his life. He had known that his father worked at “Channing’s” before he had any idea what Channing’s was, and when he was old enough to associate the word with the humming three-storied soot-blackened cotton mill at the end of the street, it had taken shape in his mind as something fixed, universal, and eternal. As a child the rows of windows had seemed endless to him as he walked under their sills, and it became an exciting dream to think that as he grew up he would presently be tall enough to see through them. When that time did come he found there was nothing to see—just the faint suggestion of moving wheels behind the wired and murky glass, with the humming louder when he put his ears to it. He had grown up to feel that work at Channing’s was in the natural order of events, like play along the canal bank and chapel on Sundays. Indeed, it was the shrill Channing’s “buzzer” that marked Time, and the Channing’s brick wall that marked Space, in his own small boy’s world.

Even after the death of his parents, when he had gone to live with his uncle in another part of the town, Channing’s merely acquired an extra attribute, for Uncle Joe called it “safe.” George soon learned that it paid his uncle, who did not work there, just as regularly as it had paid his father, who had worked; though why this should be, he could not imagine. It was, however, of importance because his uncle had promised to send him to Browdley Grammar School and pay the fees out of “the Channing’s money.” Then suddenly disaster struck. Even to an intelligent schoolboy it was all rather incomprehensible, for the mill still stood, not a brick disturbed, not a cadence lost from the call of its early morning and late afternoon siren; and yet, in a way that undoubtedly hurried Uncle Joe to his grave, Channing’s proved no longer “safe.”

So George, because of this, had left an elementary school when he was thirteen, and had taken various jobs that gave him nothing but a series of pointless and not always pleasant experiences, and then had come the war, with more pointless and not always pleasant experiences—in France and elsewhere. During this time, however, his dissatisfactions had acquired a pattern, and the pattern had acquired a trend; so that on seeing Browdley again, war-injured but recovering, at the age of thirty-one, he had known what he wanted to do and had begun right away to do it. At a Council by-election he won a victory that surprised even himself, while about the same time he took over the almost bankrupt Guardian.

And after several months the Guardian was still almost bankrupt. For one reason, it had no monopoly (the Browdley Advertiser, one of a chain of local papers, enjoyed a far bigger circulation), and Browdley folk remained obstinately fixed in their reading habits even when an increasing number of them favored George’s political opinions. He would have been badly off indeed but for the small printing establishment (two hand-presses with three employees), which not only put out the regular weekly edition but also received official printing jobs from the Browdley municipality. And here, of course, lay an obvious opening for George’s political opponents, some of whom whispered “graft” whenever the Council (George scrupulously absenting himself from the vote) decided to hand him another contract. That they did so at all, however, testified to his rising popularity as well as to the fact that the enmities he made were rarely bitter or lasting. The truth was, as an enemy once remarked, it was damned hard to hate George, and whispers of graft did not stick very well because, graft or no graft, it really was quite obvious that he was not lining his pockets with any considerable success. He lived modestly in the oldish, inconvenient house which, adjoining the printing works, he had acquired when nobody else wanted either; and he often found it as hard to pay his newsprint bills as to collect from some of his customers. He dressed rather shabbily and rode a bicycle except when official business entitled him to the use of a municipal car. The local bank manager and income-tax assessor knew all these and other pertinent details, but as they belonged to the opposition party they were constrained to attack him in reverse: if, they argued, George succeeded so meagerly with his own small business, how could Browdley feel confidence in his capacity to run the town? But humbler citizens were not much influenced by this. Most of them knew George personally and felt that his total lack of prosperity made him all the more human, municipal contracts or not. They liked him, in fact, and a great many fought his battle, and if a few of them fought it bitterly, he would sometimes reward them with a speech that made them think he was secretly as bitter as they were. But in that they were wrong, for George was just fiery, effervescent, genuinely indignant over much that he saw around him, but incurably romantic about what he saw in his own mind. He was also naïve in the way he tackled his opponents—first of all overwhelming them with a sort of Galahad impetuosity, then wondering if perhaps he had been a little unfair, and later—as often as not—making some quixotic gesture of retraction or conciliation.

There was that Council meeting, for instance, in the spring of 1918, at which he first spoke Livia’s name—and with a ring of challenge as he pitched his voice to the public gallery. “I’ve always held,” he began, “that no accident of birth should ever stand in the way of merit (cheers)—in fact it’s one of the few things I’m prepared to be thoroughly consistent about. (Laughter.) Councillor Whaley has just referred to the great injustice done to our fellow citizens many years ago by one whose name has a certain prominence in the history of this town. I think Councillor Whaley put the matter far too mildly in using the word ‘injustice.’ I’d prefer myself to call it the most damnable piece of financial knavery ever perpetrated by a self-acknowledged crook at the expense of thousands of honest hard-working folks. (Loud cheers.) Oh yes, I know the saying De mortuis nil nisi bonum—if I’ve got the pronunciation wrong perhaps some of the gentlemen on the other side who have had the advantage of a better education than mine will correct me (laughter)—at any rate, they’ll agree with me that the Latin words mean that you should speak no evil of the dead…But may I ask this question of Councillor Whaley—suppose the dead reach out from their graves to continue the harm they did during their lives—are we still to keep silent about them? (Loud and prolonged cheers.) Gentlemen…I wouldn’t have referred to such a matter unless the other side had thought fit to mention it first. But since they did, I’ll say this much—that in my opinion our town is still suffering from the effects of the Channing Mill crash and the iniquitous swindle that caused it! Its victims are to be found in every street—nay, almost in every house. Certainly in one of our houses—the workhouse. (Cheers.) What shall we say of any man, living or dead, who can be accounted personally responsible for such a thing? To inherit control of an industrial concern and then behave with such callous dishonesty that working people lose jobs and life savings together, so that hundreds of homes are sacrificed and broken up, so that health is imperiled and countless lives are embittered, so that children have their educations interrupted and old folks are hastened to their graves—if one causes all this havoc, then in God’s name what shall we call him, or the system that gave him such power and opportunity?”

Here the cheers and shouts of the gallery were interrupted by a shabby little man in the back row who yelled out with piercing distinctness: “Don’t matter what you call ’im now, George. The bugger’s dead.” Whereupon cheers dissolved into laughter and George sensing the moment for a change of mood, dropped his voice to a much more prosaic level and continued:—

“Aye…let’s cut the cackle and get down to the business in hand. There’s a war still on, and we must save a bit of our bad language for the Germans. (Laughter.) I was just then tempted—as we all are sometimes—to speak my mind. (Laughter.) I couldn’t help it, and I think those who elected me to this Council didn’t really expect me ever to do anything else. (Cheers and laughter.) And that’s why I’m urging you now, as a man still speaking his mind, not to pay off an old score on an innocent person. To begin with, the score’s too big. And then also, though we’re often told that the sins of the fathers get visited on the children, there isn’t one of us who thinks that’s really a fair thing, or ought to be encouraged…Well, now let me really come to the facts of the matter. We have tonight a subordinate municipal post to fill for which we invited public applications. As I see it—and not as some folks here seem to see it—there’s only one thing we ought to do, and that’s what we always have done—choose the best person for the job and let no other consideration matter. It’s a simple method, and I’m all against changing it.” And then, dropping his voice to a monotone as he consulted a sheet of paper: “I have here the list of applicants for the position of junior library assistant, together with their qualifications. On the basis of these facts, and these alone, I move that the application of Miss Olivia Channing be accepted.” (Cheers and some cries of dissent.)

The foregoing has been worth quoting verbatim, not only because it was one of the events that shaped George’s destiny, but as a sample of his speechmaking in those days. He always said he was no orator, and sincerely believed it, but his opponents, though reluctant to use the complimentary term, were not so sure; at any rate they could call him a rabble-rouser. The speech is typical in its astute and somewhat excessive preliminary agreement with the other side (in this case his own side), putting them in a good humor by stating their case better than they could themselves, so that afterwards George’s real point came as an intended anticlimax. He had often by this means won victories almost by default. The jibe about his fellow members’ superior education was also typical; it was true that many of them had been to better schools, but extremely unlikely that any could remember as much Latin as George had recently learned.

But most typical of all was his quixotic impulse to be fair; it was as if, having called the father a crook, he felt in duty bound to find the daughter a job.

On this occasion victory was anything but by default. His speech failed to silence objectors, and there was further argument, some of it rancorous. But the motion was eventually passed by a narrow margin, with much cross voting; so that in due course Miss Olivia Channing did indeed become junior assistant in the Browdley Public Library at a commencing salary of forty-five shillings a week.

“And a nice problem you’ve handed me,” Dick Jordan remarked, meeting George a few days later in Shawgate. The librarian was one of George’s closest friends and political supporters.

“Why, Dick, isn’t she any good?”

“She does the work all right, but—well, when you remember her father there’s a lot of things you can’t feel sure of.”

“Aye, and one of them’s heredity,” declared George, advancing stoutly to a favorite topic. “Thank goodness it’s not as important as environment, because environment’s something you can change.”

“Not when you’ve already had it. What d’you think her environment was like at Stoneclough—up there with a man who’d done a stretch in prison and drank heavily and was so impossible to live with that…oh well, you’ve heard some of the rumors, I daresay.”

“I’ve heard ’em, but I don’t see why they should make us condemn the girl. Seems to me it’s more a case for sympathy.”

“She’ll not find much of that in Browdley, George. It’s one thing to swing the Council by a speech, but when it comes to changing the minds of ordinary folks who’ve lost their hard cash—”

“But she didn’t steal it—”

“No, but she lived at Stoneclough, and for years that’s been the symbol in this town of being luckier than you deserve. And it’s still the symbol, George, in spite of all the mortgages on the place and no matter what the girl herself had to put up with there…”

George did not meet her till some weeks after she had begun work. He was then studying hard for the final examination that might earn him a university degree, and it was this that occupied his mind when he entered the Reference Department of the library on a sunny April afternoon. But when he left, a couple of hours after, he could only think of the girl who had brought him Volume Four of the Cambridge Modern History.

He always remembered her first words to him as she took his slip of paper, scanned it, then him, then stepped back a pace. “Councillor Boswell?”

And his own first words as he stared at her for the first time: “Aye, that’s me.”

“Then I want to thank you for—for—”

“Oh…so you’re Olivia Channing?”

“Yes, that’s why I want to thank you. It was kind of you to put in a word for me.”

“I didn’t mean it as kindness—just fairness, that’s all. But I’m glad it turned out the way it did. How are you managing?”

“You mean the work? Oh, it’s easy.”

“Like it?”

“Pretty well.”

“Only that?”

She smiled—a curious smile, for which George, who saw it often afterwards, long sought an adjective, and in the end could only use Jordan’s description of the girl—he had said she looked “haunted.”

She said now, with this smile: “People don’t like me, that’s the trouble.”

He smiled back, robustly, cheerfully. “Can’t expect them to, yet awhile. You’ll just have to live things down a bit.”

“Live things down?”

“Aye…If you know what I mean.”

He wondered if, or how much she did, especially as that ended their conversation rather abruptly. She fetched him his book and did not resume it.

After that first meeting he began to feel emotionally the full force of the argument he had stated in abstract terms at the Council meeting—that the child should not suffer for the sins of the father. In this case the sins of the father had been so considerable that the sufferings of the daughter might well be on the same scale unless someone intervened on her behalf; and George, having intervened once, could not help the growth of a feeling of personal responsibility to match his awakening interest. He knew that John Channing had died practically without means, despite the fact that he had lived at Stoneclough from the time of his release from prison until his death; and though the daughter’s need to go out and earn her own living did not stir George to any particular pity (for, after all, that was what most Browdley girls had to do), he was nevertheless concerned that she should be happy in her job, the more so as he had obtained it for her. Not till he met her for the second time did it occur to him to wonder why on earth she had applied for any job at all in a place where there was so much local feeling against her family.

He spoke this thought aloud when (on a bus top where he found himself next to her) she admitted having encountered a good deal of coldness and even a few personal insults at the library.

“Then how about giving it up?” he asked, suddenly seeing things from her angle and becoming indignant about them. “Would you be happier?”

“I need the money,” she said simply.

“Aye, but there’d be other jobs in other places—why not try London, for instance?”

“I’d rather stay here.”

“You mean you like Browdley?”

She shook her head.

“Then why?”

“It’s my home—Stoneclough.”

“Stoneclough? You mean the actual house? It means so much to you? You still live there?”

“Yes, it’s my home.”

“I should have thought you’d have been glad to leave a place that had such—er—unhappy associations.”

She shook her head again.

After an awkward pause George continued: “Well, don’t worry. Most people have short memories.”

“I haven’t.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that…I meant other people—they’ll change their minds about you if you stick it out.”

(And yet as he said this he was aware of another phenomenon that became familiar to him later—the ease with which, to her or in her presence, he said things he did not really mean, or that his own judgment did not support. For instance, it simply was not true that Browdley people had short memories—on the contrary, though the Channing crash had taken place a generation before, it was still remembered with bitterness, and the fact that the girl had had unpleasant experiences at the library proved it.)

She said: “Please don’t think I’m complaining about the job. It was you who asked me what it was like, otherwise I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Well, I’m glad it doesn’t bother you much. If it does, let me know.”

(But that also was absurd. What could he do, even if she did let him know? Any other job in Browdley would have the same drawbacks, and outside Browdley he had no influence to find her a job at all.)

She said, smiling: “Thanks. It’s very kind of you…I’m afraid this is my stop…Good night.”

It was at the corner where the lane to Stoneclough left the main road. He suddenly realized that and detained her for a few seconds with an astonished: “But—but—are you going home now? How do you get there from here?”

“I walk.”

“But it’s three miles.”

“I don’t mind. I love walking…Good night.”

After she had gone and the bus had restarted he began to think it over. Six miles a day on foot oughtn’t to have shocked him (he was a good walker himself and had often, when he was her age, walked to and from jobs to save bus fares), but it was strange to realize that till then he had never wondered how or where the girl did live, travel to her work, and so on. So she was still at Stoneclough?…Too bad there were no other houses in that direction, or he might have asked the Transport Committee, of which he was a member, to start a new bus route.

He met her several times again on that same trip and each time he found himself more interested. Up to a point they seemed to get along excellently; she was quick-minded and charmingly friendly, and when she spoke it was with a sort of grave ardor that made even chatter sound significant; yet beyond that a shadow seemed to fall between them. After thinking it over with some deliberation he decided what the shadow was; it must be the fact (doubtless known to her) that he had publicly attacked her father and family. He was prepared for some inevitable mention of this sooner or later, and planned to be completely frank and outspoken. “Now please,” he would say, “let’s not waste time over that. I said what I meant and I still mean it. But I don’t expect you to see things my way—after all, he was your father, whatever else he was.”

But she never gave him the cue. One day, however, he met Dick Jordan in the street again and heard the story of a rather odd incident that had taken place at the library.

“Iwas in my office, George, when I heard a bit of a row going on at the counter, so I went out to see what it was, and there was old Horncastle calling the girl names and shouting about her father having ruined him. You know Bob Horncastle?”

Yes, George knew him. He was a gnarled industrial veteran who had lost both job and money in the Channing crash and had lived ever since on the verge of penury, his embitterment becoming a shade nearer lunacy each year. Browdley knew all about him. His was a hard case, but no harder than some others.

“The girl was standing there, George, pale and not saying a word and with that haunted look I told you about, while the old chap poured out a stream of abuse. When he saw me approaching he stopped, and then the girl said very quietly—‘I’m sorry, Mr. Horncastle.’ She had to get his name from the library card she was holding, and the way she did that—the way she looked down, I mean, and then looked up again and spoke his name…well, it was just like a play, especially when she went on—‘But why don’t you scribble it in the margins of the book, as all the other people do?’ Then she just walked off and left him to me to calm down. Of course there wasn’t much I could say—he’s too old, for one thing, and the way he was carrying on I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack. Finally I got him to go, and then I went back to my office and nearly had a heart attack myself. That kind of thing upsets me.”

George was troubled. “I must admit I didn’t think folks would take it out of the girl so much. And from what you say, Dick, it wasn’t her fault—she gave no provocation.”

“The bare fact of her being there was provocation enough to Horncastle…But there’s a sequel. After he’d gone I was curious about the girl’s remark about people scribbling in the margins of the book…What book? There’s only one it could have been, and that’s the detailed report of Channing’s trial, so I thought I’d look to see if it was on the shelves. It was, and sure enough, the margins were messed up with penciled comments—including just about the foulest language I ever heard of—and in different handwritings too. Looked as if a good many Browdley readers had had a go at expressing their opinions…Of course it was our own negligence not to have spotted it earlier—we’re supposed to go through all the books at the annual stocktaking and rub out anything of that sort, but apparently this book had been overlooked. So I put it aside and thought I’d do the job myself as soon as I had the time. But then another queer thing happened. Later in the afternoon the girl came to my office and asked where the book was. Seems rather as if she kept an eye on it and had already noticed it was gone—for of course she could check to see it hadn’t been lent out. I told her I’d taken it and that I intended to have the objectionable remarks removed, and then she said—and again I thought of somebody in a play—she said: ‘Oh please don’t on my account.’ I gave her a bit of a sharp answer—I said—‘It’s not on your account at all, young lady, it’s simply a library rule.’ And that ended the matter…But I must say, she’s a queer customer. You’d have thought she’d be glad I was going to do it. Frankly, I can’t make her out.”

George nodded thoughtfully. “Aye, she’s a problem, I can see that. Maybe I made a mistake in getting her the job, but it’s done now and can’t be undone. If I were you, though, I’d try to find her some kind of work where she doesn’t have to meet folks so much…Isn’t there something?”

“She might tackle the indexing. Yes, that’s not a bad idea, George. I daresay she’s smart enough.”

“Attractive-looking too, don’t you think?”

Jordan gave George a shrewd glance. “Can’t say. Maybe I’m no judge, or maybe she’s just not my style. She attracts attention, if that’s what you mean, but whether it’s by her looks or a sort of personality, or something else, I can’t be sure. I know I wouldn’t want her in my office.”

“She’d give you more heart attacks, is that it?” said George, laughing.

The librarian joined in the joke, as boisterously as a man may who actually does have a weak heart as well as a nagging wife.

So it was arranged that the girl should tackle the indexing, and George wondered how it had worked out when next he met her, for she certainly seemed happier and greeted him with a smile whose warmth he felt, for the first time, was somehow intimate and personal. They chatted—on the bus top as usual—without mentioning anything important till she said, apropos of nothing in particular: “Aren’t you soon taking a university degree?”

“Aye, if I can pass the exam, and that’s a pretty big ‘if.’ Who told you?”

“I heard someone saying something about it at the library. You see, you ask for so many books.” She added: “Such difficult books too…and yet…” And then she hesitated.

“And yet what?”

“Those ‘ayes’ of yours.”

“My eyes?”

“I mean the ‘ayes’ you say instead of ‘yes.’ ”

He flushed, and for a moment fought down a humorless impulse to be offended. Then he laughed. “Aye,” he answered, with slow deliberation. “I daresay I could drop them if I disliked them enough. But I don’t. And if anybody else does…well, let ’em.” And then he suddenly gave himself the cue that he had waited for in vain from her. “Maybe you feel about your dad like that. You just don’t care what other people think—because it’s what you yourself feel that matters. I don’t blame you. I’ve done my share in attacking your family in this town—you probably know about that—and I’m not going to make any apologies or take back a single word. But I can’t see why that should come between you and me, and for my part it doesn’t have to.”

He paused to give her a chance to say something, but she said nothing, so he went on: “Well, thank goodness that’s off my chest. I’ve been looking for the chance to say it, because if you and I are going to get to know each other well there has to be some sort of understanding about how we both feel about ancient history. Aye, ancient history, that’s what it is.” He was relieved to have found the phrase until he saw her face, turned to him with a look so uninterpretable that it might have been slight amusement or slight horror, but mixed, in either case, with a preponderance of simple curiosity. She seemed to be waiting to hear what he would say next, and that, of course, put him off so that he stopped talking altogether. Just then the bus reached the corner of the Stoneclough lane, surprising them both, and as she sprang down the steps with a quick smile and a good-night he had an overmastering urge to follow her, if only not to leave the conversation poised for days, perhaps, at such an impossible angle. So he ran after her and overtook her a little way along the lane. “I don’t need to study tonight,” he said breathlessly (she knew that he spent most of his evenings with the difficult library books). “I can walk part of the way with you—that is, if you don’t mind…”

“Why, of course not. I don’t mind at all. But on one condition.”

“Yes?”

“Let’s not mention my father again… please.”

“All right.”

“Ever again? You promise?”

“Why, certainly—if that’s what you wish, but I assure you I do understand how you feel—”

“No, no, you don’t—you can’t…but you’ve promised, remember that. From now on. From this minute on.” And over the strained emphasis of her words there came, like a veil slowly drawn, that curious “haunted” smile.

So he walked with her, puzzled and somewhat discomfited at first, as he changed the subject to Browdley and its affairs. He did so because, after his promise, that seemed the easiest way to keep it; and sure enough, he was soon at ease amidst the torrent of his own plans and ambitions, both personal and for the town. She made few comments and when they said good-bye at the gates of Stoneclough he could not forbear the somewhat chastened afterthought: “I hope that didn’t bore you. Or weren’t you listening?”

She answered, smiling again, but this time differently: “Well, not all the time. But I don’t have to, do I? Can’t I like you without liking the new gas works?”

“Aye,” he said, smiling back as he gave her arm a farewell squeeze. “But I can like you and still like the new gas works. Why not?”

But could he? That was to some extent, both then and afterwards, the question.

He soon realized that he loved her—probably on the way home after that first walk to Stoneclough. And immediately, of course, she became the object of a crusade, for in those days that was the pattern of all George’s emotions, his passion for education, his eagerness to tear down the slums of Browdley (already he had a scheme), his secret ambition to become the town’s Member of Parliament—all were for the ultimate benefit of others as well as to satisfy personal desire. And soon, eclipsing everything else in intensity, came his desire to marry Livia—that is to say, to rescue her. To rescue her from Stoneclough, from the thraldom of ancient history; and now, additionally, to rescue her from a situation he had himself got her into, where she was at the mercy of casual insults from strangers as well as of her own morbid preoccupation with a book about her father’s trial. All this, as George had to admit, totaled up to a rather substantial piece of rescue work, but he had the urge to do it, and his Galahad mood rose as always to put desire into action. It did not take more than a few weeks to bring that desire to fever point, especially when the chance of prompt action was denied. For she refused his first proposal of marriage. She seemed genuinely bewildered, as if it were the last thing she had ever expected. She liked him, she admitted—oh yes, she liked him a great deal; but as for marrying—well, she thought she was far too young, and anyhow, she didn’t think she would ever want to marry anybody. And she was quite happy where and how she was—at Stoneclough. In fact, to bring the matter to its apparently crucial issue, she couldn’t and wouldn’t leave Stoneclough.

George took his “no” for an answer exactly as he had begun to do on the Council whenever he brought up his housing scheme—that is to say, he seemed to accept it good-humoredly and as final while all the time he was planning how he could best bring the matter up again. Besides which, in this case, he was in love. He had supposed he had been in love before, on several occasions, but the difference in what he felt for Livia convinced him that this was love; because why else should he begin to neglect his Council work—not much, not even in a way that could be noticed by anyone else, but enough to give him qualms of conscience only to be stifled by reflecting that as soon as he had won her he would make up for lost time. He gave himself the same consolation over similar neglect of his examination studies. After all, even in battles, the first must come first. He had confidence that he would win her eventually, not only because he had confidence about most things in those days, but because—as he saw it—there was no considerable rival in the field—only Stoneclough, and he felt himself more than a match for bricks and mortar, however darkly consecrated. How could she long hesitate between the past and the future, especially as there were moments when he felt so sure of her—physical moments when she seemed to withdraw into a world of her own sensations that offered neither criticism nor restraint, in contrast to her usual behavior, which was to make of most contacts a struggle for mastery? He was a clumsy lover, and ruefully aware of it; as he said once, when she emerged from her private world to laugh at him: “Aye, I’m a bit better on committees…”

The fact that she would never say, in words, that she loved him mattered less after she had said, both doubtfully and hopefully, in reply to his fifth or sixth proposal: “I might marry you, George, some day. If I ever marry anyone at all…”

He never passed beyond the gates of Stoneclough; she never invited him, and he never suggested it. She told him little about herself, and the promise he had given not to mention her father set limits to his personal questions about other matters, though not to his curiosity. He wondered, for instance, why old Richard Felsby, her father’s former partner, had not helped her financially, for Richard had dissolved partnership and sold out his interest in the firm before the crash, so that he was still rich and could well have afforded some gesture of generosity. But when once George spoke Richard Felsby’s name he knew he had in some way trespassed on forbidden territory. “I don’t see him,” was all she said, “and I don’t want to. I never want to see him.”

She said little, either, about her life at Stoneclough, except to reiterate, whenever he brought up the matter, that she would rather live there than anywhere else, despite the inconvenience of the three-mile walk. He gathered that there was some old woman, a kind of housekeeper, living there also, and that the two of them shared cooking and other domestic jobs; but she gave him few details and he did not care to probe. Most of his time with her was spent along the Stoneclough road, walking evening after evening during that long fine summer; but as the days shortened and the bad weather came, they sometimes met in the library at midday, when she had an hour off and they could talk in one of the book-lined alcoves of the Reference Department. They spoke then in whispers, because of the “Silence” notice on the wall; and there was piquancy in that, because as Chairman of the Municipal Library Subcommittee he had a sort of responsibility for seeing that library rules were enforced.

One lunch hour she greeted him in such a distraught way that he knew immediately something was wrong. Soon she told him, and even in face of her distress his heart leapt with every word of the revelation. By the time she had finished he knew that fate had played into his hands, so he proposed again, with all his quiet triumph hidden behind a veil of sympathy. For George could not avoid a technique of persuasion that made his last thrust in battle—the winning one—always the kindest. And by sheer coincidence, in that odd way in which at important moments of life the eye is apt to be caught by incongruous things, he noticed while he was talking that just above her hair, and glinting in the same shaft of sunshine, lay an imposing edition of Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. He couldn’t help smiling and thinking it a good omen.

The news that had so distressed her was that the bank had foreclosed the mortgage on Stoneclough, so that she would have had to leave the house in any event. George tried to feel that this did not detract from his triumph, but merely contributed to it. He assured her that she would find it more fun living in a small house than in a great barracks of a place like Stoneclough. “I’d like to know what the bank thinks it can do with it… ”

She made no comment, but asked after a pause: “Do you like dogs?”

“Aye, I like ’em all right. Used to have one when I lived with my Uncle Joe—a big black retriever.”

“My dog’s small—and white. His name’s Becky.”

He suddenly realized what she was driving at. “You mean you want to bring your dog to live with us? Why, of course…And I like any dog, for that matter.”

They were married a few weeks later at Browdley Registry Office, with only a few friends of George’s in attendance. She was nineteen, and the fact that he was getting on for twice that age was only one of the reasons why the affair caused a local sensation.

Councillor Whaley, a seventy-year-old confirmed bachelor and one of those political opponents whom George had converted into a staunch personal friend, took him aside after the ceremony to say: “Well, George, she’s smart enough, and ye’ve got her, so God bless ye both…I doubt if it’ll help ye, though, when ye come up for re-election.”

“And d’you think that worries me?” George retorted, with jovial indignation. “Would you have me marry for votes?”

Tom Whaley chuckled. “I’ll ask ye ten years hence if ye’d vote for marriage—that’s the real question.” George then laughed back as he clapped the old man on the shoulder and reflected privately that Tom Whaley mightn’t be alive ten years hence, and how lucky he himself was, by contrast, to have so much time ahead, and to have it all with Livia. For he was still young enough to think of what he wanted to do as a lifework, the more so as the world looked as if it would give him a chance to do it.

George, ever ready to be optimistic, was particularly so on that day of his marriage.

So were millions of others all over the earth—for it was the month of November, 1918.

The honeymoon, at Bournemouth, was a happy one, and by the time it was over George knew a great many things—a few of them disconcerting—about Livia, but one thing about himself that seemed to matter and was simple enough, after all—he loved her. He loved her more, even, than he had thought he would, or could, love any woman. When he woke in the mornings and saw her still sleeping at his side he had a feeling of tenderness that partly disappeared as soon as she wakened, but somehow left a fragrance that lasted through the day, making him tolerant where he might have been unyielding, amused where he might have been antagonized. For she was, he soon discovered, a person with a very definite will of her own. He thought she was in some ways more like an animal than any human being he had ever met; but she was like a real animal, he qualified, not just a human animal. There was intense physicality about her, but it was unaware of itself and never gross; on the other hand, she had a quality of fastidiousness that human beings rarely have, but animals often. He could only modestly wonder how he had ever been so confident of winning her, because now that he had done so she seemed to him so much more desirable that it was almost as if he had to keep on winning, or else, in some incomprehensible way, to risk losing. And when he returned to Browdley that was still the case. He had hoped, after marriage, to concentrate more than ever on his Council work and on study for the university examination—to make up for such splendidly lost time with a vengeance; yet to his slight dismay there came no relief at all from a nagging preoccupation that he could not grapple with, much less analyze. He found it actually harder to concentrate on the Cambridge Modern History, harder to generate that mixture of indignation and practical energy that had just barely begun to move the mountains of opposition to everything he wanted to do as town Councillor. It was as if the fires with which she consumed him were now seeking to consume other fires.

For instance, her sudden change of attitude in regard to Browdley, and her naïve question, within a few weeks of their return: “George, I’ve been thinking—couldn’t you do your sort of work somewhere else?”

“Somewhere else? You mean move into a better part of the town?”

“No, I mean move altogether. Out of Browdley.”

He was too astonished to say much at first. “Well, I don’t know…” And then he smiled. “That’s just what I suggested to you once, and you said you’d rather stay here.”

“I said I’d rather stay at Stoneclough. But I haven’t got Stoneclough now.”

“Well, I’ve still got the Guardian and my Council position. Wouldn’t be so easy for me to give all that up.”

“You think it would be hard to find a newspaper or a council job in some other town?”

“Aye, that’s true too. But what I said is just what I meant. It wouldn’t be easy for me to give up Browdley.”

She was not the sort of woman to say, “Not even to please me?”—and although he did not think it was in her mind, he knew it was rather uncomfortably in his own.

“It’s probably silly of me, George, even to ask you.”

“No, I wouldn’t call it silly—it’s just not practical. Of course I can understand how you feel about the place, but surely it’s easier to put up with now than it used to be when you worked at the library?”

“Oh, it isn’t a question of that. I can put up with anything. I did, didn’t I? It’s just that—somehow—I don’t think Browdley will bring us any luck.”

“Oh, come now—superstitions—”

“I know—I can’t argue it out. It’s just a feeling I have.”

He laughed with relief, for the unreasonable in those days did not seem to him much of an adversary. “All right, maybe you won’t have to have it long, because I’ve a bit of news to tell you…”

He told her then what he had known for several days—that the Parliamentary Member for Browdley was expected to retire on account of age within a few months. When this happened there would be a by-election and George would be a possible candidate; if he won, he would be obliged to live in London during Parliamentary sessions, so Livia would enjoy frequent escapes from Browdley that way.

She was much happier at the thought of this, and soon also for another reason—she was going to have a baby.

The Member for Browdley duly applied for the Chiltern Hundreds; the writ for the by-election was issued; George was selected as his party’s candidate, and the campaign opened in the summer of the following year. George’s opponent was a rich local manufacturer who had made a fortune during the war and declined to entertain the notion that this was in any way less than his deserts. His party’s majority at the coupon election just after the Armistice had been large, but already there were signs of a change in the national mood, especially in the industrial areas, and it was generally agreed that George had a chance if he would put up a fight for it. And there certainly seemed no one likelier or better able to do so.

When George looked back on his life from later years, it was this period—those few weeks and months—that shone conspicuously, because upon Livia, always unpredictable, pregnancy seemed to confer such deep contentment. George then realized the power she had over him, for immediately he felt freed for effort just when effort was most needed. Never did he work harder than during that election campaign; every morning, after a few necessary jobs in the newspaper office, he would leave for a whole day of canvassing, meetings at street corners and factory gates, culminating in some “monster rally” in the evening that would send him home tired but still exhilarated, long after midnight. Usually Livia would then have a meal awaiting him, which he would gulp down avidly while he told her of the manifold triumphs of the day. In her own way she seemed to share his enthusiasm, if only on account of what could happen after his victory, for it was already planned that they would rent a house in some inner London suburb—Chelsea, perhaps—where she could live with her baby while George made a name for himself in Parliament. Who could set limits to such a future? Well, the electorate of Browdley could; and that, of course, sent him out in the morning to work harder than ever, with Livia still in bed and himself strangely refreshed after no more than a few hours of snatched sleep. He had never been so happy, had never felt so physically enriched, or so alert mentally. Things that had seemed a little wrong between him and Livia just after their marriage had worked themselves right—or something had happened, anyway; perhaps it was just that they had needed time to get properly used to each other.

One thing, naturally, had to be postponed for a while—his studies for the university degree. But of course he could pursue them just as easily—nay, more so—in London later on. And it would be an added pride to put B.A. after his name when he could already put M.P.

Gradually during those busy weeks Browdley’s long rows of drab four-roomed houses took on splashes of color from election cards in most of the windows—George’s colors were yellow, his opponent’s blue. The latter’s slogan was “Put Wetherall In and Keep Higher Taxes Out.” George, however, struck a less mercenary note. “A Vote for Boswell Is a Vote for Your Children’s Future,” proclaimed his cards, banners, and posters.

(George would remember that one day.)

But he really meant it. He told the voters of Browdley exactly what he intended to do if they should choose him to represent them; he mixed the dream and the business in a way that was something rather new to the town, and could be both praised and attacked as such. He had plans, not merely promises, for slum clearance, education, medical insurance, and relief of unemployment; and (to redress the balance, as it were) he had visions, not merely opinions, about international trade, India, the League of Nations, currency, and world peace. He was eager, cheerful, spontaneous, sincere, and a little naïve. He battled his opponent trenchantly, yet with rough-spun humor that took away most of the sting; it was another of George’s special techniques, and he had already become rather expert at it. “I don’t like to hear Mr. Wetherall attacked because he made a lot of money during the war,” he would say. “Let’s be fair to the man—he couldn’t help it. (Laughter.) It wasn’t his brains that did it. (Laughter.) He didn’t even have to try to do it. (More laughter.) The money just came rolling in, because we hadn’t got the laws or the taxes to stop it. So don’t blame poor Mr. Wetherall. Blame the laws and the tax system of this country that enabled one man to become half a millionaire while others had to fight in the trenches for a shilling a day. And let’s get things changed so that it can’t happen again. (Cheers.) But of course you mustn’t expect Mr. Wetherall to vote for any such change. After all, why should he? (Laughter.)…” And so on. Political prophets tipped George as the winner, but whether or not, Browdley had certainly never enjoyed a more bracing political contest.

Election day dawned unseasonably windy and wet, which was his first item of bad luck, for the other side had more cars to take voters to and from the polling stations. He left his house for the central committee rooms at an early hour and was kept busy all day with routine matters; meanwhile, as the rain increased, his spirit sank a little. His agent, Jim Saunders, was already giving him revised last-minute opinions that it would be “a damned near thing.”

Polling closed at eight o’clock, and an hour later the count began in the Town Hall. George paced up and down amongst the green-baize-covered trestle tables, keeping his eyes on the mounting piles of ballot papers; his opponent was absent, preferring to spend the anxious hours more convivially in a hotel room across the street. The atmosphere in the Town Hall became tenser as it also grew thicker with tobacco smoke and the smell of wet mackintoshes.

Towards midnight most of the ballot boxes had been brought in from outlying districts and half the count was over, with George leading by a narrow margin. Watching the proceedings, he found it hard to realize that his fate lay in those slips of paper—his own fate and Livia’s. And then, whimsically, he thought of his election slogan—“A Vote for Boswell Is a Vote for Your Children’s Future.” It was a vote for his children’s future, anyhow, he reflected.

By midnight he knew what his fate was, for the last few ballot boxes, drawn from the suburban fringe where mostly professional and retired people lived, had contained a heavy preponderance of votes for Wetherall. The final figures were not even close enough to justify a recount; George had lost the election by a hundred and forty-eight.

As in a trance he received the impact of the news and went through the ritual prescribed for defeated candidates on such occasions. He stepped out on the balcony to make a short speech to his supporters, congratulated and shook hands with the victor, seconded a vote of thanks to the returning officer; it was all over by one o’clock in the morning, and the rain had not stopped.

As he was leaving the Town Hall Jim Saunders handed him a throw-away leaflet printed in the opposition colors that had been given eleventh-hour circulation throughout the town.

George scanned it over and shrugged more indifferently than he felt. “Poor stuff, Jim. And not even true. I’ll bet it’s not libelous, though.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. But there’s a good many voters it may have influenced.”

It was an artfully worded suggestion that George had secured a municipal appointment for his wife—concealing the all-important fact that he had not even met her till after she took the job.

“It’s the sort of thing that swings voters,” Saunders went on. “Shouldn’t wonder if you’d have been in but for this.”

“I doubt it, Jim…” And all the way home George kept telling himself that he doubted it.

Not till he turned the corner of Market Street and saw the familiar printing office (now plastered, and how ironically, with adjurations to “Vote for Boswell”) did he contemplate the really worst penalty of failure, and that was having to tell Livia. He wondered if she would already have heard.

When he entered the house he waited to hear her voice, but only Becky came up to him rather forlornly; and then he saw a note on the table. It told him she had had to call the doctor early that evening and had been sent to the hospital.

An hour later he sat at her bedside, realizing that for a new and far happier reason this was one of the memorable days of his life. His child was born—prematurely, but thrivingly—a boy. And as he looked first at his son, and then at Livia, a great tenderness enveloped him, so that he took her hand and could not find words for anything in his heart or mind.

“I didn’t want you to come earlier,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t let them tell you because I knew you’d be busy…

Is it over yet?”

“Why…don’t you know?” He realized afterwards that he had doubtless been left the job of breaking the bad news gently, but it seemed so trivial then that he answered outright and almost casually: “Aye, it’s all over. I lost. By a hundred and forty-eight.”

“You lost?” He was still so happy that the look of disappointment on her face startled him, especially when she added: “No luck, George. I said so, didn’t I?”

“Luck? Why, isn’t this luck?” And he pointed to the child.

Of course his own personal disappointment returned, though he knew he would not have felt it so keenly but for hers. She had, and always had, that curious capacity to weight or lift his mood with her own, to give him peace or no-peace at will. In his own mind the loss of the election need not have been tragic; after all, he was still young, and there would be other chances—possibly within a short time. But she made it seem tragic by the way she regarded it, and he, as if in defense of Browdley against this attitude, plunged anew into work for the town.

Foremost was his plan to stir some civic spirit among the richer citizens. There were no millionaires, but a few who were well off, and one was Richard Felsby, partner of Livia’s father and grandfather in the days when the firm had been Channing and Felsby. George had never been able to understand what exactly the trouble was between Livia and the old man, perhaps a family feud of some kind, certainly no concern of his own; and since Richard was over eighty, ailing, a bachelor, and the owner of some land on Browdley’s outskirts that would make a fine municipal park if given to the town, George called on him one evening—quite prepared to be kicked out unceremoniously, but unwilling to neglect even a hundred-to-one chance.

Richard Felsby, dressing-gowned, nightcapped, and from a bedroom armchair, astonished him by saying, during their first minute of conversation: “Let’s not waste time, Boswell…When ye married Livia, ye married a problem, and it’s not a bit of use comin’ to me about it.”

“But—” George protested, and then let the old man have his say, since the saying might be of interest.

“And neither of ye need think ye’re going to get a penny o’ my money, because I’m leavin’ it all to Sarah.”

George did not even know who Sarah was, and perhaps his look showed it, for Richard went on: “Sarah looked after Livia and her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather for the best part of sixty years…and where’d ye think she’d be now but for me?…Why, in the workhouse. That’s all Livia cared. I know the woman’s stone-deaf and cranky and no beauty either, but she deserved better than to be left stranded when Livia ran off to marry you.”

“I never knew that,” George gasped.

“Aye, and I don’t suppose ye know a good many other things. But it’s the truth, and ye can tell her so. Sarah gets my money, and if ye’ve come to talk me into anything else it’s not a bit of use.”

George then felt that his simplest disclaimer was to tell the old man frankly what he had come for, and now it was the latter’s turn to be astonished. It had clearly never occurred to him that he owed anything to the town, and George’s suggestion that he did so aroused a host of vaguely associated antagonisms—to mollycoddling and spoon-feeding and high taxes and socialist agitators and what not. But the odd thing was that as the interview proceeded, Richard Felsby found himself rather liking George personally. (He was not the first to fall under that spell, or the last either.) And when George rose to go, he grunted: “It’s all a pack of nonsense, Boswell. This boom that’s on now isn’t going to last, and when it’s over Browdley’ll need jobs, not parks.”

“So you won’t let go any of that land, Mr. Felsby?”

“Not a yard, except at a fair price…But ye can stay and have a drink, if ye like.”

“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”

“Just as well, because the drink ye’d have got here is tea…I’ve often caught chaps that way. To my mind it’s a misuse of the word that it should only apply to alcohol…So ye’re a teetotaler, eh?”

George nodded.

“Teetotal family?”

“Not all of ’em. My Uncle Joe drank plenty.”

“The black sheep?”

“Maybe, but I liked him better than some of the white ones.”

“Ye did?…Sit down, lad, and what about a cup?” George accepted, and then had a chance to verify that Sarah was indeed as had been described. Meanwhile Richard Felsby, who had enjoyed no such congenial human contact since the death of his best friend, Dr. Whiteside, made the most of the occasion and became almost garrulous. He admitted that he wasn’t a big “giver” (George had known this already), but when he did give, he said he liked to suit his own ideas—as when, for instance, he had offered an annual prize to the Browdley Grammar School for the boy who achieved “the best all-around lack of distinction.” “It was the prize I’d have won myself when I was there,” he chuckled asthmatically, “but they wouldn’t even let me offer it.” It appeared, too, that sometimes he amused himself by sending checks for small sums to people momentarily headlined in the news—the farmer who refused to let a fashionable Hunt cross his fields, the postman’s wife with her second set of triplets, and so on. “I reckon ye think I’m a queer sort of chap,” he added, after these confessions.

“Aye,” answered George, unconsciously giving his voice a riper Browdley burr to match the other’s. “Ye’re queer enough. And I suppose ye think I’m queer for wanting Browdley to have a park?”

“Oh, to blazes with the park—are we on that again?…I hear ye’ve got a baby.”

George nodded. “A boy.”

“Let’s hope it takes after you, then. Because I’ll tell ye this, Boswell, the Channings are queerer than you and me combined…Must ye go?”

“Getting late,” said George, with a smile.

“Drop in again some time.”

“Aye…but I won’t promise not to mention that park.”

George did not tell Livia about his visit, because he felt it would not please her, however well he could justify it. And a few weeks later he visited Richard again, partly in case there was any change of mind about the park, but chiefly because he was passing the house and was touched by a sudden vision of the old man’s loneliness in that upstairs room with no one to talk to but a deaf servant. A moment later, having acted on impulse, he was touched again by the evident warmth of Richard’s welcome.

“Sit down, lad, and make yourself at home…See this?” And he waved, of all things, a check he had been busy writing. “I’m givin’ it away for charity…Doesn’t it make your mouth water?”

George laughed, while Richard went on to explain that he was sending it to a man he did not know, but whose name and address had appeared in that morning’s paper—some fellow who had grown a hollyhock taller than his house. “Mebbe ye’ll drop it in the post for me when ye go, Boswell. He’ll get a nice surprise when he opens my letter tomorrow…Well, what are ye starin’ at me for? D’ye think I’m daft? Or don’t ye like hollyhocks taller than houses?”

“I like ’em all right,” answered George, “and houses too. I’ll count it as one of your better benefactions. Why didn’t ye make it a bit more, though? What’s a pound from you?”

Whereat Richard enjoyed the best laugh he had had in years, for despite his reputation for being tight with money, no one had dared to hint it to his face until George, in sheer naïveté, stumbled into doing so. But it made such an instant hit that George was never quite sure afterwards whether he kept it up out of candor or to give the old man more fun.

For he formed quite a habit of dropping in to see Felsby, whose house was not far from the Town Hall. The visits did not have to be long ones, and George enjoyed their brevity as much as the outspokenness of what was said on both sides.

“The trouble with you, George, is that ye think too much of yourself. I always thought ye did, ever since ye got on the Council. I’ve sacked hundreds of better men than you for a tenth of the things ye’ve said to me tonight.”

“Aye,” retorted George. “And ye’d sack me too, if I was an employee of yours. But I’m not. My father was, though, for the best part of a lifetime. Or the worse part, whichever way ye look at it.”

That sort of thing…

(George reflected afterwards that the old man must like it, or he would get offended; but then it occurred to him that he would have got offended already if he had thought that George really meant what he said, but he doubtless supposed he didn’t. Yet George did, in a way, and knowing this found himself up against a familiar dilemma: that to say what you mean without ever offending people is usually to say what you mean without making them believe you mean what you say—and what was the use of that? Well, maybe some use, sometimes. For, as a victim expressed his side of it once: “George tells you what a bastard you are, and you laugh, and then after he’s gone you suddenly say to yourself—‘Of course, George was only joking—it’s a good job he doesn’t really know I am a bit of a bastard!’ ”)

Richard was frank enough also. He once said: “George, I’m sorry for ye, married to a Channing. Her father was no good, and her mother wasn’t much better, and the life she lived up at Stoneclough that last year before he died—well, it was no Sunday School picnic, believe me.”

It was impossible to resent this, in its context, yet George felt impelled to answer defensively: “Oh, Livia’s all right”—before curiosity made him add: “She had a bad time, you mean?”

Richard Felsby said impressively: “There’s only one man who could have told you—and that’s Dr. Whiteside, and he’s dead. He never told me, for that matter—but I knew how he felt, because I remember what he said when he got news of her father’s death—‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘for everybody’s sake.’ …Well, well—maybe that’s more than I should have passed on. But I’ll tell ye this, George—the Channing blood’s had a streak of moonshine in it lately. That’s what made me leave the firm. I found I was getting too sensible for it.”

“You’re not as sensible as you think,” retorted George, allowing the conversation to become bantering again. He guessed it would be good policy not to press his inquiries at this stage, especially as the old man would doubtless return to the subject at a later meeting and tell all he knew. George had had enough experience of wheedling information to know that an air of not too much concern is the best wheedler. And besides, he must keep in mind the other object of his wheedling. So he added, still banteringly: “If ye were sensible ye’d give me that land for a park. Think of the taxes ye’d save.”

At which the old man shook and spluttered with merriment to a degree that quite possibly imposed a strain on his heart.

Suddenly it all came to an end.

Livia found out about the more or less regular visits and flew into the kind of tantrum that George had certainly not anticipated; if he had, he would doubtless not have called on Felsby in the first place. He had been prepared for her coolness over the association, but he was amazed to discover how profoundly the whole thing must matter to her. “Oh George,” she cried as if she had discovered him in some mortal sin, “how could you do it? I hate him—I don’t want to have anything to do with him. You knew that. And to think that secretly—all the time—so that I only got to hear of it by accident—”

Perhaps because he did feel a little guilty in that one respect, he was more than usually ready to defend himself. “Nay, let’s keep a sense of proportion, Livia. No harm’s been done to anyone just because I’ve had a few chats with an old man—even if you do count him an enemy for some reason I’ve never been told about. Besides, I went to him chiefly on business—I wanted him to give the town a park.”

“Oh George, what does a park matter?”

“Just what he said.”

“The main thing is, you must never, never go there again.”

George stared at her, for the first time in his life, with a look of disenchantment.

“I couldn’t promise that, Livia.”

“What?” And she was facing him, the issue suddenly alive between them.

“I’m sorry, Livia. I don’t like to upset you, but I’ve got to think of the town’s interests. If you know what I mean.”

“Oh yes, I know. I didn’t know—but that’s unimportant. It makes no difference.”

(She knew what? What was it she hadn’t known? What was unimportant? What made no difference? He was by now accustomed to the mental gymnastics that her talk often demanded; she spoke in a sort of verbal shorthand, so that one had to grab at the meaning as it flashed by, and even then not be sure of getting it. Basically, he felt it to be a species of natural arrogance; she used the dotted line of her own immediate thoughts and expected others to follow her without that advantage.)

He said again: “I’m sorry.” But in his look there was still the absence of any surrender.

She returned that look for an instant, then quietly went out of the room.

Yet left alone, he had no sense of victory—only a feeling of emptiness that made him wonder if the issue had been worth facing at all.

Would he, despite the stand he had taken, visit Richard Felsby again?

The next morning, after a troubled night of thinking the matter over, he was still unsure, and to the end of his life he did not know what he would have done eventually; for on the evening of that next day Richard Felsby died peacefully in his sleep.

A few weeks later George happened to meet Ferguson, the lawyer who was settling the estate. “Too bad, George,” he commented. “You nearly pulled it off.”

“Pulled what off?”

“You nearly got that park.” Then Ferguson explained in confidence that a few days before he died Felsby had talked about leaving some land as a gift to the town, but on one condition—“and this’ll make you sit up, George—on condition that it’s called The Channing Memorial Park! You’d have had a fine job persuading Browdley to that—some of them have enough to remember the name Channing by, without a park…Perhaps it’s just as well he didn’t have time to give me definite instructions.”

“Aye,” said George, “it’d have put me in a tight corner.” But then he began to laugh. “And that’s just where he wanted me, the old devil…”

Ferguson went on: “As matters stand, his housekeeper gets the lot, and she’s made a will leaving everything to a training college for Methodist ministers…So there goes the last of the Channing and Felsby fortunes, George—and you can add that to your lecture on ‘Browdley Past and Present’!”

The child was called Martin (Livia’s choice) and took after George, in appearance at least, enough to have given the old man a measure of sardonic satisfaction. During the first year of his life Martin grinned far oftener than he cried, almost as if he knew he had been born on the day his father only narrowly missed becoming a Member of Parliament; and when George grinned back, it was as if to say: Don’t worry, I’ll manage it next time. But political affairs are incalculable, and as events developed, it began to seem highly unlikely that any next time would come soon.

This revived Livia’s plea that George should pack up and leave Browdley. He tried to avoid serious argument on the issue, yet it was clear his attitude had not changed, and there grew a hard core of deadlock between them, always liable to jar nerves and send off sparks if any subordinate differences occurred. They did occur, as in all married lives; nevertheless, by and large, Councillor and Mrs. Boswell could have been called a fairly happy couple—except on those few occasions when they could have been called Councillor and Mrs. Boswell. For Livia’s dislike of the town made her scorn the slightest official recognition of her existence. After a few experiments, she declined to attend civic functions so persistently that George ceased to ask her, and in the end she was not even invited. This must have helped rather than hindered him, for Livia was still unpopular in Browdley, especially when the world-wide postwar depression brought sudden distress to the town. It was easy to choose a local name as a scapegoat—easier than to figure what the whole thing was about. And who could figure what the whole thing was about, anyway?

George evidently thought he could, for on a certain day in July, 1920, he wrote the following in one of his Guardian editorials:—

The signing by Germany of the protocol containing the disarmament terms of the Allies marks another landmark on the long road towards world recovery. There are some who profess to be concerned about the future of thousands of workers in the arms industry if production is cut down to a minimum; but to that naïve misgiving every economist and social worker has a ready answer. For the real wealth of the world consists, not merely in things created by hand or brain, but in things so created THAT ARE WORTH CREATING. For this reason we may regard yesterday’s event as a step not only towards PEACE, but because of that, towards PROSPERITY.

George himself needed a step towards prosperity as much as anyone, for his paper was losing both circulation and advertising revenue, and he found himself suddenly on the edge of a precipice which a financially shrewder man would have foreseen. Everything then happened at once, as it usually does: people to whom he owed money (the bank, the newsprint company, the income-tax authorities) demanded payment; those who owed George money, and there were hundreds of them, made excuses for further delay. In this crisis Livia stepped into the breach and proved herself, to George’s utter astonishment, a thoroughly capable business woman. The first thing she did was to produce some sort of order in the printing office, where Will Spivey’s slackness had held sway for years. By making Will’s life a misery she pared expenses to a minimum and increased the margin of profit on whatever small printing orders came in. Then she began a campaign to secure at least part payment of what was owing, while at the same time she made contact with creditors and persuaded most of them to have patience. Altogether it was an excellent job of reorganization, carried out so expeditiously that George made the mistake of supposing that she enjoyed doing it.

“The fact is, I’m not cut out for business,” he admitted, after congratulating her on having saved the Guardian from bankruptcy.

“And do you think I am? Do you think I like asking Browdley people for favors? Do you really think I’m doing this for your sake or my sake or for your old Guardian?”

There was another thing that she did. It so happened that Councillor Whaley carried influence at the bank where the Guardian had an overdraft, and with this in mind Livia readily agreed to something she had long balked at, and that was simply to have Councillor Whaley to tea. She had always said she knew Whaley disliked her and she had no desire to meet him, and George had always urged that Whaley was his friend and that she ought at least to give him the chance to change his mind about her. Her sudden surrender on the matter brought joy to George that was unmarred by the slightest suspicion of an ulterior motive, and when the day came and Tom Whaley arrived (for a “high tea,” according to Browdley fashion), George was sheerly delighted by the result. It was almost ludicrous to see a cynical old chap like Tom falling so obviously under her spell, yet no wonder, for George thought he had never seen her in such a fascinating humor—warm, gay, sympathetic. Tom—it was his weakness as well as George’s—liked to talk, and Livia not only listened, but gave him continual openings, making his chatter seem at times even brilliant (which it never was); and as George looked on, quietly satisfied that all was going so well, he could not help adoring her with such intensity that he wondered what exactly caused the feeling in him. Would it have been the same had there been some fractional mathematical difference in the angle of her nose and forehead? His experience of women before Livia had been limited, but enough to know or think he knew what sex attraction was; yet now, honestly though he tried, he could neither confirm nor deny that what he felt for Livia had anything to do with sex. It puzzled him enormously and quite happily as he sat there, staring at her face across the crumpets and cold ham.

When, having stayed much longer than they had expected, Whaley put on his overcoat to go, he seized a chance to whisper to George at the street door: “George—she’s a winner—whether she wins elections for ye or not!” He was in a mellow, sentimental, patriarchal mood—so utterly had Livia bewitched him.

A moment later George, still beaming from the effect of his friend’s remark, found Livia on her knees on the hearth-rug, warming her hands at the fire. Her face was turned away from him as he approached; he began cheerfully: “Ah that’s been a grand time! You should have heard what Tom thinks about you—he just told me—”

All at once he stopped, because she had turned round, and the look on her face was as startling as her first words, “Oh George, what a bore! Such a silly old man! How can you possibly endure him? That awful, high-pitched voice, and the way he talks, talks, talks—”

George gasped incredulously: “You mean you don’t like him? You don’t like Tom Whaley?”

“What is there to like?”

“But—but—he’s a good fellow—he’s against me on the Council, I know that—but he’s really all right, Tom is—”

“George, he’s dull and he’s pompous and he loves the sound of his own voice. And he will go on explaining the same thing over and over again. I thought I should have screamed while he was telling me the difference between the Local Government Board and the Ministry of Health—”

“He’s one of my best friends, anyhow.”

“Oh, George, I’m sorry…maybe I was in the wrong mood.”

“You didn’t seem to be.”

“Couldn’t you see I was pretending?”

No; he hadn’t seen it. He said, anxious to ease matters: “Well, if you were, I appreciate that much. It was nice of you to give such a good impression.”

Not till long afterwards did he guess why she had done so, but Whaley’s visit undoubtedly led to a second social occasion, far less pleasant, that showed how much further she was prepared to go. It began by her asking George if he would meet some friends of hers, Mr. and Mrs. Wallington by name, for dinner one evening in Mulcaster. It seemed she had picked up a chance acquaintance with Mrs. Wallington in a Mulcaster dress shop, and George, who thought it odd that he should be dragged into it, demurred at first, but on being reminded of how hospitably she had behaved towards Tom Whaley consented on one condition—that he himself should be the host. “Then if I don’t like ’em I don’t have to invite ’em back,” he explained, with sturdy if not too flattering independence.

So in due course Livia took him to a Mulcaster restaurant where the appointment had been arranged. There he was presented, not only to the couple, but to an extra man, and also to the revelation that all of them seemed to know Livia far better than he had anticipated. Although he was usually able to get on well with strangers from the outset, he felt curiously ill-at-ease that evening, and as it progressed he became less and less happy for a variety of reasons, one of which was quite humiliating—he didn’t think he would have enough money to pay the bill, especially as they were all ordering expensive drinks. But apart from that, he found none of his previous pleasure in witnessing Livia’s social success; it was one thing to introduce her to a friend of his own and watch the magic begin to operate, but to see the fait accompli in the shape of already established friendships with strangers was another matter. He did not think it was jealousy that he felt, but rather a sense of annoyance that, after sneering at Whaley, she should show her preference for men like those two. For they were both of the blustery, aggressive type, especially the one who was not the husband and had not been invited. His name was Mangin, and from certain boastful references George gathered that he had lately made a good deal of money in the advertising business. There was a cold swagger about him that met more than its match in Livia’s repartee, but George himself could not come to terms with it, and was made even less comfortable by his wife’s peculiar ability to do so.

As the dinner went on and more drinks fed the bluster, he fell into a glum silence that became equally a torture to maintain or to try to break. He was relieved when Mangin made a move to leave, mentioning a train he must catch; but then came the problem of the bill; why on earth had Livia chosen such a swank establishment, and would such a place be satisfied with his personal check? He was trying rather clumsily to signal the waiter and learn the worst when Mangin shouted: “What the deuce are you bothering about, Boswell? Everything’s taken care of at source—don’t you know me yet? Anyhow, your wife does—that’s the main thing…” Whereupon, with a lordly gesture amidst ensuing laughter, he intercepted the waiter whom George had summoned and ostentatiously tipped him a pound note, then adding to George: “By the way, Boswell, I’d like a word with you if you can spare a moment.”

George could say nothing; to argue without enough in his pocket to pay the bill would have been even more humiliating. In his confusion he somehow found himself leaving the table and being piloted by Mangin into the restaurant lobby.

“So you’re a newspaper man, Boswell?”

George nodded, still inclined to be speechless.

“Know much about advertising?”

“Advertising?…Er…Well, I take in advertising, naturally.”

“Ever written ads?”

“Oh yes, my customers often ask me to help them—”

“I mean big stuff—campaign advertising—things like patent medicines—”

“No, I can’t say I—”

Mangin threw a half-crown into the plate on the cloakroom counter and began putting on his overcoat.

“Well, I’ll tell you what…You don’t seem to have had any experience, but I’ll give you a chance…start at six pounds a week for the first three months and we’ll see what happens…But you’ll have to learn, Boswell, and learn plenty if you want to stay in the game.”

“But—but—” George was slowly recovering his voice. “But I don’t understand—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m offering you a job, that’s all. In my London office.”

“But I don’t want a job. I’ve got a job already—”

“You mean that newspaper—in—what’s the name of the place—in—”

“Aye, in Browdley. I’m owner and editor of the Browdley Guardian.”

“But I thought you wanted to give it up! Wasn’t that the idea…to try somewhere else?”

George suddenly flushed. “There must have been a mistake.”

“Mistake, eh? Looks like it…” Mangin smirked as he signaled the doorman for a taxi. “Better have that out with Livia…I’ve got to rush for my train…G’bye.”

George did not go back to the table immediately; he calmed himself first, then discovered (as he had hoped) that the rest of the party was breaking up. He murmured his good-byes, and could not find words to address Livia during the first few hundred yards of their walk together along the pavement from the restaurant. Eventually she broke the silence herself. “Don’t be so angry, George, just because Mr. Mangin paid for the dinner. You know you only asked the other two—and then all those drinks…they wouldn’t have felt free to have what they wanted if they’d thought you were paying for everything.”

“Why not? How do they know what I earn? I’m not poor just because I can’t afford to buy champagne cocktails.”

“That’s it, George, you can’t afford them and Mr. Mangin can—and besides that, you don’t drink yourself—that’s another thing.”

He said, half to himself: “Seems to me there’s a more important matter than the one we’re discussing.”

She answered eagerly: “I hope so. I don’t know what Mr. Mangin said to you outside. I was afraid you hadn’t given him much of an impression of how clever you are—because you are clever, George—I know you are—in your own way.”

“Thanks,” he retorted. “And perhaps you’ll tell me why in God’s name you should care what impression I make on a man like that?”

“Only because he might find you some work. I thought it was a stroke of luck when I met somebody who knew him—he’s very influential in the newspaper world, so Mrs. Wallington told me. And it would get us out of Browdley—that is, if he did say he could find you something.”

George gritted his teeth and replied: “Aye, he said he could. He offered me six pounds a week in his London office—provided I learned enough.”

“Oh, but George, that’s—that’s wonderful! You don’t make nearly so much out of the Guardian—not lately, anyhow.”

“Livia…” He stopped suddenly in the street and faced her. “Do you really mean you’d have me give up my own paper and all the work I do on the Council—just to have a job under a man like that? And what a job—writing patent-medicine ads…Livia, would you really have me do that?”

He knew what her answer would have been but for the look on his face, which made her temporize: “Maybe it isn’t exactly the life you’d choose. But I don’t choose the life I have, either…And why keep on saying ‘a man like that’? They can’t all be men like you.”

He began walking again. “Livia, let’s not quarrel. You did a silly thing, but I daresay you meant well. You asked this man to find me a job—you made yourself agreeable to him—you were pretending just as you were with Tom Whaley, weren’t you?” His eagerness to think so fanned a warmth between them. “I believe you really thought you were doing the best for me.”

“No…I was thinking about Martin more than you. That was the real reason.”

Then she told him the bare economic facts of his own household (which he had hardly guessed, so preoccupied had he been with the bare economic facts of the whole town)—the fact, for instance, that sometimes lately she hadn’t been able to afford the kind of food and clothing the child most needed, and had had to make do with the second-best. Though this was a condition common all over Browdley, and formed the subject matter of countless speeches he made, he was nevertheless shocked to find it so close to his own personal affairs—not because he thought he ought to have been exempt from what afflicted others, but simply because it had never occurred to him. And once it did, of course, why, of course, something must be done about it. But what could be done? persisted Livia, coolly stemming his indignation. It was no use her asking for more money because she knew, and none better, that the Guardian didn’t make it; she knew also there were no more business economies possible. Nor were there domestic ones; she herself did all the housework, and some of the office work too, now that she knew how careless Will Spivey was. As she very calmly explained: it had become her honest opinion after George’s electoral defeat that it would be a wise thing to leave Browdley, even apart from her own desire to do so.

“But—my Council work, Livia—”

“Where’s it getting you?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve not been defeated in that…yet. I don’t have all my own way—after all, who does?—but I am on the Council, pretty safely on too, judging by my last majority. And the job’s worth doing. I know you’re not interested in it—I don’t ask you to be, but do believe me when I say this—it’s worth doing…Livia, don’t hinder me in it—even if you can’t help me…And as for the extra things you need for Martin, you shall have them. Of course you shall—I had no idea you were doing without…I’d rather go without everything myself—”

“But you can’t, George. You don’t drink or smoke—there’s nothing you could give up…except Browdley. That’s your hobby, or your luxury—whatever you’d rather call it. And I don’t say you’re not entitled to it—you personally, that is—everyone has his own tastes. But what sort of a place is it for a child to grow up in?”

But that only gave him his own private cue for optimism, as she would have known if she had attended more of his meetings. For he answered, beginning quietly but with rising confidence as he proceeded: “Not such a bad place as it used to be…and I’ll make it better. You wait. You don’t know all the plans I have. And they’re not just dreams—they’re practical. I don’t tell you much—because I know you don’t want to hear about it—I wish you did…but never mind that. Mark my words, though. I’ll do things with this town. I’ll get the slums off the map. I’ll build schools…and a new hospital…I’ll…well, laugh at me if you like—I don’t care.”

She did not laugh, but she smiled as she took his arm. “I wouldn’t care either, but for Martin. You’d do anything for Browdley—I’d do anything for him.”

“So would I too—I just don’t see any conflict between them. Don’t you think I’m as devoted to the kid as you are?”

He was; but nevertheless in his heart he looked forward to the time when Martin would be a little older—old enough for the friendly father-and-son relationship to develop, old enough also to start the kind of education on which George set so much store. Whereas for Livia every tomorrow seemed a future far enough ahead and complete in itself; it was almost as if she hoarded the days of babyhood, unwilling to lose the separate richness of each one.

She was wrong, though, in saying there was nothing he could give up. There was, and he gave it up. She never knew, because she had never known anything about it at all. The fact was, after his electoral defeat George had gone back to his earlier ambition, the university degree. The long interval he had let pass meant digging over a good deal of old as well as new ground, but he tackled the job, as he did all his chosen jobs, with enthusiasm. Most of the necessary time he put in late at nights, in the room which he had now begun to call his “study”; and without actually telling Livia a direct lie, he allowed her to think he was busy preparing material for the Guardian. As she was generally asleep when he came up to bed she did not know how long he worked; sometimes it was half the night. He had a curious unwillingness to let her know what he still hankered after, partly because he was not sure he would ever succeed in winning it, but chiefly out of a sort of embarrassment; he was sure she would smile as at a grown man caught playing with a toy, for book learning to her was something you had forced on you during youth and then were mercifully released from ever afterwards. She might also (a more valid attitude) feel that if he had such time to spare it would be better spent in trying to sustain his own precarious livelihood. Anyhow, he did not tell her, and having not done so, it was easy to give the whole thing up without a word to anyone in the world. There were the examination fees he would now avoid, and he could also sell some of the expensive textbooks he had had to purchase. He did this and gave her everything thus saved, spreading it over a period so that she needed no explanation.

But the habit of reading in his study at night continued—in fact, the whole habit of study continued, for it was something bigger than a mere competitive examination that had inspired George. The fringe of scholarship he had touched had left him with an admiration for learned men all the more passionate because he almost never met them either in business or in politics; and there came to him a constant vision, the memory of the dome-headed spectacled examining professor who had been so indulgent to him about the Pathetic Fallacy.

Perhaps Martin would grow up into a learned man—which was another reason for not discussing the matter with Livia.

One thing, however, became both an immediate and a practical ambition—that the boy should have a vastly different childhood from his own. Not that his own had been cruel or vicious; merely that, in recollecting it, he was aware of how far it had been from the ideal. Perhaps equally far from the worst that it might have been, in Browdley, for George’s father had always had regular employment in a job that set him among the aristocracy of cotton-mill labor—a spinner’s wage being at that time more than twice that of the lowest-paid. And though Mill Street became a byword later, it was no worse during George’s childhood than nine tenths of Browdley; for the Boswells, like many other families, had lived in a four-roomed bathroomless house more because there were no others available than because they could not have afforded
better. Anyhow, Number 24, in which George was born, had been clean and decently furnished, and its occupants, though overcrowded, were never without enough plain food and strong soap and good winter fuel; they were “respectable chapel folk,” moreover, which meant that their children were nagged at without the use of technical bad language; and if the young Boswells feared their father too much, and their father feared his Heavenly Father, it was doubtless on general principles rather than for any more definite reason.

Even George’s early education, which was poor enough, had had a few passable things in it; indeed, at the old-fashioned prisonlike elementary school he was taught reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic far more thoroughly than were the youngsters in the luxurious modern school that George persuaded the Council to build years later. But there was a drawback to the thoroughness, for the teacher, a Mr. Rimington, was dull-witted enough to think history and geography “easy” subjects, and therefore somewhat to be despised. All George learned of the former was that somebody was a “good” king and somebody else a “bad” one, plus a few scraps of information such as that Henry the Second never smiled again and that Oliver Cromwell had a wart on his nose; while geography consisted largely of memorizing “what belongs to England,” and of copying maps—an occupation which Mr. Rimington approved of because it took so long and kept the class quiet. He was also dull-witted enough to think that a boy who turned over a page during a reading lesson without waiting for the order to do so was guilty of a serious breach of discipline. George had been punished for this once or twice, after which he hated and feared Mr. Rimington and formed a self-protective habit of concentrating his attention and disengaging his intelligence whenever he crossed the school threshold. Not till years afterwards when, as Chairman of the Browdley Education Committee, he had the task of choosing applicants for teaching posts, did he realize that Mr. Rimington had made himself thus terrifying because when he first became a teacher the rougher products of Browdley homes had terrified him.

And now, as the father of the product of another Browdley home, George turned over in his mind his own childhood memories, not without a certain nostalgia, but with a resolute determination that Martin’s early life should contain happier ones. He remembered the crowded house in Mill Street, his mother’s continual nagging (behind which he had failed to diagnose the harassed affection that was really there), his father’s doomful voice at home and from the pulpit; the canal bank where he sneaked off to play when his father was at work and his mother was ill (the only time of real freedom he enjoyed); the elementary school round the corner and Mr. Rimington’s classroom, with its torn maps and dirty walls, the smell of wet clothes and steaming waterpipes in winter, and of sweat in summer; the slabs of dust-laden sunlight into which he so often stared after finishing tasks adjusted to the speed of the stupidest pupil; terrifying Mr. Rimington himself, and the not-quite-so-terrifying headmaster, old “Daddy” Simmons, whose habit, fascinating to all, was to stick his little finger into his ear and waggle furiously; and the paragraph in the tattered reading book that said: “Harrow is one of the great schools of England. Many famous Englishmen went there when they were boys. Some of them carved their names on the school desks, and these names can still be read. You must not carve your name on your school desk, but you can make up your mind to become a famous Englishman when you grow up…”

George’s own ambitions, even if he should ever become both a Member of Parliament and a Bachelor of Arts, had never permitted themselves to soar as far as being “a famous Englishman.” But for Martin…why not? What obstacles were there? Surely not boyhood in Browdley, since winning scholarships was no harder from there than from anywhere else. Perhaps Martin might win such scholarships—not to Harrow (for George, though he could admire some of their products as individuals, was of the opinion that public schools encourage snobbery), but to Oxford—or Cambridge, at least. That faint preference in favor of Oxford was nothing but a recollection of Gladstone’s Double First.

There came a day when Martin seemed old enough to be taken by his father to the Browdley Town Hall, there to imbibe some vague first impression which George could hardly seek to clarify at such an early age, but which would later, he hoped, inspire the lad to an interest in civics, local government, the history of his country, the parliament of man, and the federation of the world. (After all, there was no limit to the effects of a child’s first impression.) So George held the boy lovingly in his arms in front of the rather bad stained-glass in the main lobby of the Town Hall—stained glass depicting a woman carrying some sheaves of wheat in one hand and what looked like a coffee grinder in the other (“mechanical power,” it was supposed to represent); he hoped Martin would at least notice the bright colors. And in due course the child’s eyes rounded with all the excitement, nay more than the excitement that George had hoped for, but unfortunately those eyes were not on the stained glass at all.

George looked down and saw a large rat scampering across the Town Hall floor.

He was horrified, not only that the child should have seen such a thing, but that such a thing should exist; it argued bad drains or something—he would certainly bring the matter up at the next meeting of the Building Committee.

But Martin was by no means horrified. He knew nothing about rats, but perhaps he thought that what he had seen was some extremely swift and fascinating kind of pussycat (for pussycats were known to him), and with this to wonder about the visit to the Town Hall did indeed enshrine an experience.

Martin loved his father less than his mother and perhaps even than Becky, but George did not mind this, reflecting magnanimously that the balance would be evened up later on. After all, it was a result of the physical contacts of mother and child, the domestic routine, the humble, serio-comic intimacies; and Livia made a perfect mother—unexpectedly so, indeed. It was as if all the nonsense that cropped up so often in her behavior with adults were resolved into complete naturalness between herself and Martin; she never raised her voice to him, or was angry, or even irritated. In an odd way she gave the appearance of being with the boy in his own world, rather than of looking into it from hers; perhaps there was a sense in which she had never grown up herself, or perhaps it was just the animal quality in her that George had noticed before, that extraordinary paradoxical knack of being shameless and fastidious at the same time. When George came upon his wife and child romping together, he sometimes felt that to make them even aware of him was an intrusion, the breaking of a lovely spell, and he would tiptoe away rather than do this; for again he was able to fortify himself by thinking that his own time would come later.

One night, as he sat with a book in his study, the impulse came to write something that might, if anything untimely should happen, be a help to the boy or at least a reminder that a man had once existed who had dreamed things about him and hoped things for him; and in this mood, rare because of its slightly melancholy flavor, George wrote:—

Everything depends on childhood, Martin, and if you ever have children of your own, remember that, just as I, remembering my childhood, intend to make yours good to remember. When I was a boy of seven my parents died and I went to live with an uncle who kept a newspaper and stationery shop in Shawgate, and living in his house gave me, I think, the germ of all my later interest in printed things—perhaps even in politics too, because it so happened that at the time of my arrival there was an election in progress, and Uncle Joe, who was a Liberal (the only thing he had in common with my father), sent me out to distribute hand-bills. All I had to do was to walk about Browdley slipping them under doors and through letter boxes, yet I don’t think the world was or ever could be more wonderful to me than during those few weeks. I kept hearing about some mysterious person called the Candidate, who was opposed in some mysterious way to another person who was called the Other Candidate, and it seemed to me that the great battle of Good and Evil was being fought in the streets of this town, and that I and my uncle were soldiers fighting it. I suppose it was then, before I really knew what things were all about, that I had the first hankering that made me later decide to go on fighting the same sort of battle when I grew up. And if that’s a strange reason for a young man to enter politics, then perhaps it isn’t the real reason, but just the flick of a button in the signal cabin that can send a train to any one of a hundred different places.

But of course all that was years ago—and in another age, because 1914 was really the end of an age. It was not only that things happened differently before then—they happened to people who felt them differently. Take chapel-going, for instance. If you had walked up Mill Street almost any Sunday forty years ago, you would have seen from the notice board outside that William Boswell was to preach there. That man was my father. It would be a cold, raw night, maybe, with mist peeling off the moors, but the folk who wanted to hear him wore hard-wearing stuff; in twos and threes they mustered, till by six o’clock the little gaslit pitch-pine interior was almost full. Punctually on the hour old Jack Slater went to the pedal harmonium (the Methodists of the sect my father belonged to did not believe in pipe organs) and let his fingers wander over the keys according to a style of his own, beginning softly and working up to a great roar, his feet pounding as if he were bicycling uphill to save a life. By this time my father had emerged from the side vestry, Bible in hand, and climbed the steps to the pulpit, where he prayed standing (for the sect did not believe in kneeling or stooping), and announced the opening hymn in the boomingest voice I ever heard. He was a fine-looking man, as you can judge from the photograph in my study; his hands were big and thick-fingered; his hair, black and bushy, crowned a well-shaped head set firmly on broad shoulders. He never drank, smoked, played cards, went to Browdley’s one theater (there were no cinemas in those days), or read a novel or a Sunday newspaper. A life that might have seemed, to an outsider, full of hardships relieved only by boredoms had somehow or other produced in him an air of somber majesty that I could never come to terms with, and I don’t think my mother ever could either. We lived at Number 24, a four-roomed house identical with eleven on one side of it and thirty-two on the other. Parallel with Mill Street stood Jenny Street and Nathaniel Street, composed of houses exactly similar. From the pavement one entered by a single step through the usually unlatched front door; at the back, however, there was an exit through the kitchen into a small paved yard where coal was stored and clothes were hung to dry. I suppose there was no labor-saving device in general use in those days except the Singer sewing machine that, surmounted by a plant pot with or without a plant in it, stood behind the lace curtains in nearly every front window. And there was gaslight downstairs, but not upstairs; and sanitation had but recently progressed in Browdley from the stinking midden to the back-to-back water privy. There were no bathrooms, and baths were taken once a week by heating pans of water over the kitchen fire. I give you all these details because I hope by the time you grow up most of them will be a bit historic—at any rate I hope Mill Street won’t be in existence for you to verify. Mind you, these houses were not slums (as they are today), but typical dwellings of respectable working folk such as my parents were. Respectability even imposed a toll of extra labor, for it was a sort of ritual to wash and scrub the street pavement from the front door to the curb, a task undone by the next passer-by or the next rain shower. When my mother was ill, as she often was during the last years of her life, this necessary tribute to tribal gods was made on her behalf by an obliging neighbor, though I doubt if my mother would have cared much if it hadn’t been. She was a merry little woman with an independent mind uncoupled with any determination to stake out a claim for itself; this made her easy to get on with and rather hopeless to rely on. My father only saw her between six and ten in the evenings (the rest of the time he was either at work or asleep), and during the annual holiday which they took together, always at Blackpool, the strain of trying to seem familiar to a man whose life was so separate from hers made her almost glad when the week was over and she could return to the far more familiar routine of Mill Street. She loved my father well enough, but the emotion of being in love had probably not survived courtship, and by her thirties, with an already numerous family to look after, she had worn her life of household drudgery into an almost comfortable groove. Every morning in the bedroom overlooking the backs of the houses in Nathaniel Street, the alarm clock rang at five-fifteen; without a word my mother would get up, come downstairs in her nightdress, and poke up the kitchen fire that had been banked with small coal overnight. Then she would fill the kettle to make tea, and by the time this was ready my father would be down himself, washing at the kitchen sink and ready to leave as soon as the clock hand approached the half-hour. He was never exactly bad-tempered, but the fact that they were both sleepy made them reluctant to talk; there was, anyhow, nothing much to talk about. A few minutes after he had left the house the whole town resounded with the crescendo of the mill “buzzers,” but by that time my mother was back in the warm bed, content to doze again while the clogged footsteps rang along the pavement outside. To her this pause between my father’s departure for work and the beginning of her own was the pleasantest time of the day—and the only time she was really alone. By eight o’clock she was dressed and downstairs, glancing at the morning paper, making more tea and frying a rasher of bacon for herself. Then came attendance on us children, getting us off to school when we were old enough, and after that a routine of housework and the morning walk along Mill Street to the shop at the corner where nearly everything could be bought, from feeding bottles to fly papers. She would chat there to Mr. and Mrs. Molesworth while they served her; she liked a joke and an exchange of gossip, and often, if the jokes and the gossip were good enough, she would stay talking and laughing until other customers joined in, so that the shop became a sort of neighborhood club for housewives.

Then during afternoons, if the weather were fine, she would put the youngest of us (me, in fact) into a pram and wheel it round a few streets, sometimes as far as the canal bank or the Shawgate shops. Towards four she would be home again, in good time to prepare an evening meal. Then came the second pleasantest interval—the hour in the rocking chair with a cup of tea at her elbow before the children came home from school. While winter dusk crept across the sky, and until the passing of the lamplighter sent a green-yellow glow through the fanlight over the front door, my mother would “save the gas” by poking the fire to a blaze while she rocked and sang. She had a nice voice, small in volume but always true on the pitch, and though most of the tunes she knew were chapel hymns with rather grim words to them, she sang them somehow gaily and with a lilt, breaking off occasionally into a popular song of the moment, something half-remembered from the previous year’s Blackpool holiday, or from summer performances of the Silver Prize Band in Browdley market place.

My earliest recollections, Martin, were of my mother rocking and singing like that. There was a brass rail that ran along the whole length of the mantelshelf, and as I first remember it this rail would shine in the firelight with the shadows darkening all around and my mother’s face growing fainter and fainter as she swung backwards and forwards; till there was only the sound of her singing, the creak of the rocking chair, and the simmer of the kettle on the fire bar…Then, all at once, I would wake up to see the room already gaslit, with my father standing, huge and unsmiling, in the doorway.

I feared my father and loved my mother and that’s about the plain truth of it. On Sundays he locked up all story books, picture books, and even bricks that spelt out words; but while he was at chapel my mother used to unlock them with a key of her own and let me play till just before his return was expected; then she would whisk away the forbidden things with a knowing glance that finally became a sort of joke between us.

That is the home I was born in, Martin—not as happy as it might have been, but not as unhappy either. So I don’t complain of it, but I do want to make yours happier. Which is why I intend soon to begin putting books in your way, because the more freely and vividly you see things while you are young, even if you can’t fully understand them, the more actively they will possess you when you grow up—especially if, in adult life, you have hard battles to fight and bitter disappointments to face. New worlds, Martin, are for the young to explore; later one is glad of a new room, or even of a view from a new window…

He put aside the fragment then, thinking he would add to it on many succeeding nights, but he never did; perhaps the rare mood never recurred.

As the postwar slump deepened and unemployment filled the street corners with lounging, workless men, George encountered new opposition to his Mill Street housing scheme. Many of the cotton mills were closing down completely; some of them went bankrupt as catastrophically as had Channing’s a generation before, but without the criminal taint, though the short-lived boom had been pushed by speculators to limits that were almost criminal.

Among the mills that closed was the one still called Channing’s, though long operated by another firm; now, when George walked down Mill Street, the mill loomed up, symbolically as well as actually, at the dead end of the street. Derelict, like Stoneclough five miles away, it stood for the dead end of what the Channings themselves had stood for. Still physically intact, with machines inside that could spin and weave, nobody would buy it or use it, because nobody wanted what it could do. Yet the illusion that it still had some real value was preserved; it was regularly taxed and insured; the Browdley police kept an eye on it, the fire department was ready to quench the blaze should any lightning or arsonist strike. But neither did, though lightning had once, when George was a boy, struck the Methodist chapel at the other end of the street.

The chapel also stood, a little less forlorn than the mill—derelict, one might say, only six days out of the seven. For Methodism in Browdley, like the cotton trade, was not what it had been. People could not afford to give so much to their chapels, nor were there so many Methodists. George, walking along the street where he was born and which he planned to rebuild for others to be born in, remembered those early days when both mill and chapel had flourished, and when his own father, sharing the week between them in that mystic proportion of six to one, and with his house halfway between, had served a life sentence longer though less stigmatized than that of his boss.

The reason George visited the Mill Street area so often was not a sentimental one. Indeed, it was concerned with drains rather than dreams; for the more graphically he could report to the Council how bad the houses were and what disease traps they had become, the sooner he hoped to get his scheme actually started.

He found a powerful ally in Dr. Swift, Browdley’s medical officer, who had himself issued many warnings. After a long struggle and against the bitter opposition of a few of the town’s old-established doctors, a system of free immunization against diphtheria had been set up, enabling parents to have their children inoculated at a municipal clinic. It was, however, impossible to make this compulsory, and the whole question became impregnated with political and even religious prejudices that George deplored and perhaps at the same time aggravated by his own constant argument that it was not enough to immunize; the causes of epidemics should be tackled, and the chief was bad housing. To which the opposition retorted that George was using the health issue for his own political ends, that Browdley was in no greater danger than other manufacturing towns, and that though the Mill Street area was somewhat less salubrious than the rest, what could be done about it when local tax rates were almost the highest in the country? And since the opposition, fighting on this tax issue, had won seats at recent Council by-elections, George found his slum-clearance project losing rather than gaining ground for the time being.

He often walked with Dr. Swift through the worst of the streets, the medical officer supplying scientific ammunition for George’s continuing struggle on the Council. For George would not give in; there was a point, even though at times it was hard to find, beyond which he would not even waver or compromise. Indeed, his mere mention of Mill Street had begun to send a smile or a sigh across the Council Chamber, so well was the subject now recognized as the bee in George’s bonnet. But he did not mind. “Sooner or later I’ll wear ’em down,” he assured Swift, to which the latter replied grimly: “Better be sooner.”

For it had been a hot summer. Towards the end of September over twenty diphtheria cases appeared in and around Mill Street, mostly among young children, of whom five quickly died.

In such an emergency Dr. Swift was given command almost without restrictions; everything remedial was promptly organized—the quarantining of families, wholesale inoculations, closing of schools, and so on. The Council had adjourned for its four weeks’ annual recess; many Councillors were still on holiday. But George, who had the Guardian to look after and could not afford a holiday, was right on the spot to say “I told you so” to any former opponents he might meet. They were not so much his opponents now. They all agreed, in principle, that something would have to be done about the Mill Street area. And most agreed, in principle, with the Guardian editorial in which George wrote:—

We must learn our lesson from this tragic visitation. Though the epidemic has now (according to the latest assurance of our eminent and indefatigable Medical Officer, Dr. Swift) been checked, we can never again feel secure until preventable disease has been ABOLISHED AT ITS SOURCE. Let those citizens who live in the more fortunate parts of Browdley and whose children have remained unscathed, bear in mind the joint responsibility of us all for what we allow to happen anywhere in our town, and let them do their share, and pay their share, in making Browdley safe for our children’s future.

The only adverse comment George got about this was from a new Catholic priest, Father Harry Wendover, of St. Patrick’s ,who questioned the phrase “what we allow to happen in our town.” Having been introduced to George at a meeting, he immediately buttonholed him with the query: “Isn’t that a bit arrogant, Mr. Boswell? After all, even if you don’t believe in the hand of God, you might at least recognize that there are limits to what the hand of Man can do.”

George noted the newcomer’s tall gaunt frame and deep-socketed eyes, the strong chin and the cultured accent, and decided that here was a man to be both respected and tackled. Rumor had already informed him that Wendover was something of the proud cleric, so George answered, giving as well as taking measure: “Aye, there are limits, I daresay, but in Browdley we’re still a few thousand miles away from ’em. And as for the hand of God, what makes you think I don’t believe in it?”

Wendover smiled—a rather pleasant smile. “To be frank—just gossip. That’s all a priest has to go by when he comes to a new place and wants to find out who’s who.”

“So they gossip about me, do they?” And immediately George was thinking about Livia and what sort of gossip might still be circulated about her.

“Oh, nothing malicious. In fact, you seem to be extremely popular. But they also say that you’re not a God-fearing man like your father, that you don’t often go to church or chapel, and that you’re on good terms with atheists and agnostics.”

It was all spoken with a twinkle that made it inoffensive and not quite serious, but George would not have been offended in any case. He was already too interested in what promised to be an argument.

“Aye,” he answered, “I’m on good terms with anyone who’ll help me make Browdley better. Romans, Church of England, Methodists, atheists, agnostics—they’re all one to me if they’ll do that.”

“So religion has no place in your better Browdley?”

George appreciated a nicely laid trap, especially when he was in no danger of falling into it. He smiled as he had so often smiled across the Council Chamber or a meeting hall. “Nay—I’d rather ask you if my better Browdley has a place in your religion? Because if it hasn’t you’ll not do so well at St. Patrick’s. I’ve got a lot of supporters there.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Boswell?”

“No—just a tip. I’ve no hell-fire in my armory. All I can tell folks is that diphtheria comes from bad drains. But of course if they’re more interested in pearly gates that’s their lookout.”

Wendover’s smile broadened. “If I were old-fashioned I’d probably say that God would punish you for blasphemy. But my conception of God isn’t like that. I doubt that He’ll find it necessary to strike down you or one of your family just to prove a point.”

George grunted. He had an idea that Wendover was enjoying the encounter as much as he was, and already he recognized an agile mind. Agile minds were useful, and it might be that Wendover would take the progressive side in many of the town’s controversial issues. George also realized that priests and parsons had to stand on some ground of their own, not merely on what they could share with every liberal-minded thinker, politician, or social worker. All this weighed against his impulse to continue the argument combatively, so he replied: “I assure you I didn’t intend to be blasphemous, and I hope you’re right about God. I don’t think I know enough to agree or disagree with you. So I’m sticking to what I do know something about, and that’s Man. Seems to me Man could give himself a pretty good time on earth if only he went about it the right way, but he just won’t. You’d almost think he didn’t want a good time, the way he carries on.” But that looked like the beginning of another argument, so he shook hands with a final smile and left the priest wondering.

A few days later Wendover wondered afresh when news spread over the town that Councillor Boswell’s baby had been stricken. But being honest he did not exploit the situation. Nor did he actually believe that the hand of God was in it. He just thought it an extraordinary coincidence, which it was, and wrote George a note that merely expressed sympathy and hoped the child would be well again soon. For he liked George.

During those dark days Livia and George hardly spoke, except when she asked him to do this or that; and he obeyed her then, blindly as a child himself.

They hardly spoke because there was simply nothing to say after the one sharp, inevitable, and rather dreadful argument.

When George came home late after a meeting and found Livia sitting up with Martin, who was ill and had a temperature, he was concerned, but not unduly so; and when he guessed that the thought of diphtheria was in her mind, he told her confidently not to worry, since the boy had been immunized. She just looked at him then and shook her head.

Over the small tossing body and whilst waiting for the doctor, they thrashed the matter out.

The fact was that when the free immunization scheme had gone into operation and he had told her to take Martin to the municipal clinic, she simply had not done so. And she had lied to him about it afterwards.

He kept pacing up and down the bedroom, trying to grasp the situation. “So you didn’t do it? Oh, Livia, why didn’t you? How could you not do what I asked about a thing like that? Did you forget and then tell me a lie to cover it?…Oh Livia…Livia…”

She answered: “I didn’t forget George. I went to the clinic once and saw the crowd lined up outside. I didn’t want to take Martin to a place like that.”

His anger mounted. “Why not? For God’s sake what was wrong about it?”

“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the people there—I mean the other people with their children.”

“Snob!” He shouted the word. “Weren’t they well-dressed enough for you?”

“Most of them were as well-dressed as I could afford to be.”

Yes, he knew that; he had let his anger tempt him into an absurdity as well as a side issue. “Then why—why?” he reiterated. “Why didn’t you have it done?”

“I told you—I didn’t like the place. Some of the children looked dirty, and they had bad colds—”

“And Martin might have caught one! Or a flea perhaps! So to save him from that you let him catch diphtheria—”

She interrupted in a dead-level voice: “I don’t want to quarrel, George. But don’t you remember I asked if it couldn’t be done by a private doctor? And do you remember what you said?”

Yes, he remembered. There had been a wrangle, though a less bitter one, about that also. Couldn’t she realize, he had asked her indignantly, that for months he had been making speeches all over the town in favor of free public immunization? What would it look like if, after all that, he took his own child to a private doctor? Couldn’t she see what a fool and a hypocrite it would make him appear? So Martin must go to the clinic. “Livia, I wouldn’t insist if it meant that the child would be getting anything second-best. But the free immunization’s just as good—just the same, in fact—as anything a private doctor could give. The only difference is in where you take him to get it. Don’t you see we have to set an example to the town in these things? If we don’t use the new facilities ourselves, if we behave as if we thought them not good enough for our own children, how can we expect anyone else to trust them?”

Thus the argument when Martin was six months old. George had thought it ended in his own victory; now, six months later, he realized that the end was neither victory nor defeat, but just postdated disaster.

He cried out, desperately: “I know all that, Livia…And I don’t want to quarrel, either—it’s no good now—it’s too late. But why…whatever you did…why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you take him to a private doctor if you absolutely refused to do what I wanted? Oh, anything—anything rather than this…Or why didn’t you let me do it?…Why didn’t you tell me, anyway? Why did you lie to me?”

He saw her hurt, stung face, and knew she was suffering so profoundly that his accusations made little difference. But she could sting back and make him suffer more, as when she answered with deadly irrelevance: “I did tell you one thing.

I said we ought to leave Browdley.”

“Oh no, that’s not the point—”

“It is and always will be. If we hadn’t stayed here, nothing like this would have happened.”

Even that wasn’t certain, he knew, but he saw the certainty in her eyes, and knew also that she would never believe otherwise, however much he went on arguing.

The arrival of the doctor interrupted them. His visit lasted an hour, and when it ended there was nothing more to argue about, only a dreadful possibility to face.

The local hospital was already overcrowded, so Martin lay in the spare room above the printing office. Livia shared it with him, while George slept on his study couch—so far, that is, as he could sleep at all. Becky, banished from upstairs, curled mournfully under the desk. George had not realized till then the depth of his affection for the child. He was like that with all his affections—they grew, and then lurked, and then sprang to give him pain. He was torn unutterably by remorse at having been so busy those past few months, so busy with the affairs of the town, too busy to look after the physical safety of his own household. He should have made sure that the immunization had taken place, instead of just mentioning the matter to Livia and taking it for granted that she had done it. It was her fault—and yet it was his fault too, for leaving everything of that sort to her. It was the streak of unreasonableness in her cropping up again, and this time tragically—he should have been prepared for it, in all vital matters he should have watched for it. He wished…he wished…and one of the things he did wish now, but dared not wish aloud, was that he had left Browdley. He almost dared not wish it in thought, lest there should pass some spark between his eyes and hers, some spark to set off a conflagration, or—even worse—to indicate a mood which she would take to be surrender. So it had come to that—that he thought of her as an enemy, or of his love for her as an enemy? Which—or both? He puzzled over it, far too modest to think his own emotions unique, but wondering if there were outsiders who would understand them better than he did—novelists, say, or psychoanalysts. Or that fellow Wendover, if ever he got to know him well enough? Though how could a priest…and yet, after all, it was a spiritual matter in some ways. Thus he argued with himself, and as the days passed and Martin did not improve, it occurred to him that the greatest single difference between Livia and himself was that she was too utterly fearless to be reasonable, while he was too reasonable to be utterly fearless. And at a certain level of experience there was simply no compromise, between them.

Just before dawn one morning he dozed off in the chair and dreamed of his own boyhood, a dream he had had recurrently before, though never with such clarity. It was about his Uncle Joe, whom he had gone to live with when he was seven years old, and of whom he had had more fear (on one occasion only) than ever before or since of anything or anyone. What had happened actually, though not always in the dream, was that uncle and nephew had met for the first time at the house in Mill Street, when no one else was there. This was a few months after his father had died, a week after the funeral of his mother, and a few hours after the door had closed on his elder brother Harry, his elder sister Jane, and the furniture removers.

George had been the youngest of a family of six, with a gap so wide between himself and the rest that at the time he was left parentless all the others were grown-up and some of them married. Their bickerings about who should take care of him (each one having a completely plausible alibi) had made them jump at an unexpected offer from their mother’s brother, despite the fact that he and their father had quarreled years before over some point of behavior which (according to the latter) “just shows what a wicked man Joe is.” Nobody ever told George more than that; all Harry would add was an especially sinister: “You’ll find out soon enough, Georgie.” And when the Mill Street household was broken up, Jane and Harry watched the last of the furniture stowed away in the van, then looked at George as if it were somehow disobliging of him to be alive. Finally Jane whispered: “We might as well go now, Harry—George’ll be all right by himself till Uncle Joe comes—he said he’d be along as soon as he closed the shop.”

Which made an excellent excuse to go about their respective affairs and leave a boy of seven alone in an empty house in which both his parents had recently died, there to await (with no lights and dusk approaching) the arrival of a man he had never seen before, and who, from mysterious hints and rumors he had heard, must surely be some kind of monster.

And about nine o’clock this legendary Uncle Joe, having paused longer than he intended at the Liberal Club, came striding along Mill Street to knock at Number 24. George could not, at that moment of panic, decide whether he were more frightened of the darkness or of his uncle; he could only crouch under the stairs until the knock was repeated. Then he decided that the unknown peril was worse and that he would not open the door at all. But in the meantime Uncle Joe had gone round to the back of the house and found a door there unlocked, so that he simply walked in, stumbling and making a great commotion in the dark while he struck matches and called for George.

George saw his face first of all in the light of the quick-spurting flame—not, perhaps, the most reassuring way for anyone bordering on hysteria to encounter a feared stranger. He saw a big reddish face, with bristling mustaches, tufts of hair sticking out of the nose and ears, and eyebrows which, owing to the shadow, seemed to reach across the entire forehead.

The result of all this was that by the time Uncle Joe, groping after a series of wild screams that jumped alarmingly from room to room, finally traced them to the corner of an upstairs cupboard, George had fainted and the old man had used up all his matches.

The only thing he could think of was to carry the boy downstairs in his arms and thence out of the house into the street. They had reached the corner before George came to, where-upon Uncle Joe, panting for breath, gladly set him down on the edge of the curb with a lamppost to lean against. Then, being a man of much kindness but little imagination, he could think of nothing further but to relight his pipe while the boy “got over it,” whatever “it” was.

Presently George looked up from the curb, saw the big man bending over him, and, despite the now less terrifying eye-brows, would have raced away in renewed flight had there been any power left in his legs. But there seemed not to be, so he sat there helpless, resigned to the worst as he heard his captor fumbling around and muttering huskily: “Bugger it! No more matches—wasted ’em all looking for you, young shaver!”

Suddenly then, by a sort of miracle, the heartening message came through—that everything was all right; but only years afterwards was George able to reflect that in that same first kindly breath there had been the two things that had made his father call Uncle Joe a wicked man—namely, a “swear” and the smell of whisky.

All this was what really happened…but in the dream it did not always end like that; sometimes the fear of the stranger’s footsteps in the empty house lasted till the crisis of waking.

And now, years later, while his son lay desperately ill in the room above, George dreamed of this fear again, and was wakened by the doctor’s hand. “Sorry, George…but I think you’d best go up.”

“Is it—is it—bad?”

“Pretty bad…this time.”

George went upstairs, still with the agony of the dream pulsating in his veins; and then, from the bedroom doorway, he saw Livia’s face. There was no fear in it as she glanced not to him, but to the doctor.

The doctor walked over to the bed, stooped for a moment, then looked up and slowly nodded.

One thing was now settled more definitely than ever; George would not leave Browdley, and if she should ever ask him again he would answer from a core of bitterness in his heart. But she did not even mention the matter. She seemed not to care where they lived any more, and if an absence of argument were the only test, then they were at peace during the days that followed. But George knew differently, and he knew that Livia knew also. It was no peace, but an armistice on terms, and one only tolerable so long as both parties fenced off large parts of their lives as individual territory.

They both grieved over Martin, and comforted each other up to the boundary line, but that was fixed, and beyond it lay inflexibility. When, for instance, she said a week or so later: “Tom Whaley telephoned while you were out to say that the Council reconvenes on the seventeenth—” George simply nodded, and went to his study.

She followed him, adding: “He wanted to know if you’d be there.” She waited for him to reply, then said: “I don’t mind you going, George. I don’t mind being left alone in the evenings.”

He answered: “Aye, I shall go.”

“Perhaps you’d better let him know then—”

“Don’t worry—I met him in the street after he telephoned you. I told him I’d be going.”

And there was finality in that.

He went to the meeting and found there an atmosphere not only of warm personal sympathy, but of eagerness to accept him as a prophet; so that he scored, almost without opposition, the biggest personal triumph of his career. The housing scheme he had urged for years went through the first stage of its acceptance that very night; even his bitterest antagonists gave way, while to his friends he became manifestly the leader of a cause no longer lost. There was irony (unknown to any but himself) that at such a moment of easy victory he had never felt grimmer in spirit. When he reached home late that night Livia was in bed, and he would not disturb her, for the news he had did not seem enough excuse; she could read about it if she wished (and there was irony there too) in the pages of the next Guardian. But the excitements of the evening had made him sleepless, so he sat up in his study till daylight, reading and writing and thinking and working out in his mind the terms of the unspoken armistice.

One afternoon he found her with Fred, the messenger boy from the printing works, busily engaged in clearing up the yard behind the office that had always (as far back as anyone could remember) been a dumping ground for old papers, cardboard boxes, tin cans, and so on. It was such a small area, enclosed on two sides by buildings and on the remaining ones by high brick walls, that nobody had ever thought of any other use for it. But now, when she saw his curiosity, she asked if he would mind her turning it into a garden.

“Why, of course not,” he answered, pleased that she should show such an interest. “But I doubt if anything’ll grow there.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

“I’ll give you a hand with it if you like.”

“No, there’s no need. Fred will dig it over, and then I can do all the rest myself.”

“What’ll you plant?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll get you some books about gardening if you like.”

“Oh no, no…I don’t want books.”

And there was just the hint of a barb in that. It was as if she had chosen books as a symbol of his world, just as flowers were to be of hers. The books, too, were increasing all the time; some of them came as review copies addressed to the Guardian by publishers who did not realize how small and unimportant the paper was; many he bought, a few were sent him as chairman of this or that municipal committee. He had no collecting spirit, no special desire to make a show of what he had read. Yet as the books filled up the room, and new shelves had to be rigged till they covered most of the wall space, he could not help a little pride in them to match Livia’s pride (and his own too) in the transformed dumping ground below. And his pride grew definite from the moment that Councillor Whaley, visiting him once while Livia was out, exclaimed: “George, I reckon this must be just about the best library in Browdley—in anyone’s house, I mean. What does your wife think about it?”

“Livia?…Why…why do you ask that?”

“Only because she once worked in a library herself—I thought maybe books were in her line too.”

“No,” George answered. “She likes gardening better.” And he took Tom to the window and pointed down to the rectangle of cleared ground. “She says she’ll plant roses.”

“Why, that’ll be fine.” And then as an afterthought: “Nobody’ll see it, though—except you. Maybe that’s the idea—to give you something to look at.”

George smiled. “I don’t know, Tom. But my idea is that it gives her an interest in life. She needs it—since losing the boy.”

“Naturally. But I’ll tell you what, George, if you don’t mind plain speaking from an old bachelor.” He whispered something in George’s ear about Livia’s youth and having more children. “Aye,” George replied heavily, and changed the subject.

Martin’s death seemed to bring him into immediate friendship with Father Wendover. Neither ever referred to the curious “coincidence” that both must often have recollected; nor did the priest talk much from the standpoint of his profession. He showed, however, considerable interest in George’s family background, and once he said: “You’d have made a fine upstanding atheist, George, if only your father had lived a bit longer.”

“Maybe,” George answered, “but Uncle Joe didn’t continue the training, and the result is I’m no more an atheist today than you are…Not that he was against religion, mind you. He even sent me to Sunday School.”

“Why?”

“To be frank, I think it was because he thought Sunday Schools were a good way of giving kids something to do when they were too dressed up to do anything else.”

“An appalling idea.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He was all right.” George mused for a moment. “It’s odd we should be discussing him, because I dreamed about him the night Martin died…Aye, he was all right. And he liked his Sundays too—in his own way. To my father they were days of gloom and mystery and foreboding, and that was the way he wanted ’em, but to my uncle they were nice comfortable days when you had a late breakfast and took a walk along the canal bank while dinner was cooking and then had a snooze in the afternoon and high tea at five o’clock—and that was the way he wanted ’em.”

“Did he ever go to church?”

“Aye, when he felt like it. It’s true he felt like it less and less as he grew older, but he still counted church as part of a proper Sunday program. He used to say he’d attend regularly if only Aunt Flo were a bit better on her feet, and he’d have liked to put more in the collection plate if only he hadn’t lost so much in cotton investments, and he’d have been proud as punch if I’d had a voice to sing in the choir—but I hadn’t…Altogether what he’d have liked to do was so well-meaning you could hardly call him irreligious, while what he actually did was so little that he interfered with nobody—not even me.”

Wendover, having watched George’s face during all this with a growing conviction that its look of guilelessness was sincere, now slowly smiled. “Is that your portrait of a good man, George?”

“Well, he was good to me,” George answered, simply.

Trade remained sluggish in the town, but the Guardian, mainly because of Livia’s reorganization, began to show a small profit. George was then able to give her more money, but she seemed to care as little about it as about anything else over which he had any control. Yet she did not mope, brood, or look particularly unhappy. Nor did she nag, upbraid, or quarrel. It was merely that she seemed in some peculiar way to have withdrawn into a world of her own, where George was not invited nor could have followed her if he had been.

One evening early in 1921 he came home after a long day out of the town on municipal business, having left in the morning before she was awake. But now, hearing him enter, she came scampering down the stairs, and at the instant of recognition he gasped with the sensation of pain suddenly switched off inside him. Then, as always when he saw her afresh after even a few hours’ absence, recognition dissolved into a curious feeling of never having seen her before, but of experiencing some primitive thrill that the few years of their marriage had neither enhanced nor made stale. Whatever that was to him, it had been from their first moment of meeting and would be till their last; it was something simple that only became complex when he sought to analyze it. Just now he was glad to hold her in a brief hug of welcome and feel that everything was miraculously all right, even if it wasn’t, and nothing needed explaining, even if it did.

He said he was sorry he was late, and she answered brightly: “Oh, that’s all right—the dinner won’t spoil. Lamb stew—can’t you smell it?”

He sniffed hard and joyfully; lamb stew was one of his favorite dishes, and he would relish it all the more from thinking that perhaps she had prepared it to please him.

“Ah,” he gasped.

“And we’ll have it in the kitchen to save time,” she said, evidently reaching an impromptu decision. “Annie—did you hear? We’ll all eat in the kitchen, so hurry up.”

That was like her; the knack of taking short cuts to get what she wanted—the quick plan, or change of plan, generally based on something so elemental that only a child could have avoided the mistake of reading into it more than was there. This eating in the kitchen, for instance, had nothing to do with any feeling on Livia’s part that Annie was an equal (only George could, and did, sometimes think of such a thing); really, it was just that Livia was hungry and, as with all her desires, could not bear to be kept waiting. George was generally amused by this, and often quoted the occasion when, having attended a Council meeting at which he presided, she had left exclaiming: “Oh, George, I’ll never go to one of those affairs again! They drive me silly—all that proposing and seconding and moving the nominations closed and appointing a subcommittee to report to the next meeting…No wonder nothing ever gets done!” But something does get done, had been George’s slightly hurt rejoiner—unspoken, however, because he knew she would then argue that what he called something was not much more than what she called next to nothing…

But now, walking after her into the kitchen, his spirits rose, crowning the physical ease that came over him as he entered the warm small room and sat at the scrubbed table between the gas stove and the meat safe. A curious half-painful happiness clutched at him as he watched her across the table top; she was, he had to admit, as sheerly fascinating to him as ever, with those dark, almost violet-blue eyes that glowed rather than sparkled and gave her whole face a rapt, almost mystic expression; the hair so straw-pale that it could look white against mere gold, the mouth too big for the nose, but the nose so small and perfect that he had sometimes thought that if he were a sculptor he would model it and stick it on a model of someone else’s face—yet he had never found that more matching face, and doubtless never would.

She was talking—most unusually for her—about events of the day, conditions in Europe, and how interesting it must be to visit foreign countries now that the basic comforts of peacetime travel had begun to return.

“Aye,” he agreed. “I’ll bet it’s interesting. I’ve got a book about postwar Europe if you’d like to—”

“Oh, I don’t mean books, George. It isn’t here where you can understand things always—” and she touched her head—“it’s more like this—” and he expected her to touch her heart, but instead she put up her small fist and shook it in his face, laughing meanwhile. “Oh George—you and your books and meetings and speeches.”

He did not mind the mockery he was accustomed to, especially as she seemed so happy over it. She went on chattering till the meal was ended; then, as they left the kitchen for Annie to wash up, he said—and it was the truth: “Livia, that’s the best lamb stew I ever tasted. How about a cup of tea with me in the study before I get down to some work?”

“You’ve got work to do tonight?”

“Aye—just a bit to finish up. The Education Committee meets tomorrow and I’ve got to hammer at them again for that new school.”

She accompanied him to the study and presently Annie brought in tea. He was so happy, sitting there with her, in his own room with the books in it, and with her own garden below the window outside. And suddenly, as if to signalize the height of his content, the vagrant thought came to him that this was the moment, if a man were a smoker, to light up a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette. He laughed to himself at the notion, and then had to tell her what he had been laughing at.

“Well, why don’t you?” she asked. “I’ve got some cigarettes.”

“Nay…I was only joking, Livia.”

“But George, if you want to—”

“I don’t want to—it was just that now would be the time if I ever did want to.”

And then he saw her face cloud over as if something in his words had sent her into a new mood. She went to the window, stared out over the dark garden for a moment, then turned round and said very quietly: “Now’s the time for me too. George, I want to leave you.”

“What?”

The happiness so passing, so brief—drained away from mind and body, so that he felt older by years within seconds. “Livia…what? What’s that?”

“I—I must leave you, George.”

“But Livia—why—what on earth—” He was on his feet and crossing the room towards her.

“No, George—don’t—don’t…Or you can if you like—I don’t mind. It isn’t that I’ve changed in how I feel toward you. And there’s nobody else…but I’m not happy, George, since Martin died.”

“Livia—my little Livia—neither am I—you know that—but after all—” And then he could only add: “I thought you did look happy tonight.”

“That’s because I’d made up my mind.”

“To do what?”

“To leave you, George.”

Then she went into further details. It seemed that years before (and he had never known this) she had been to some school in Geneva and had made friends with local people there; she had lately been in correspondence with them and they had asked her to visit them and stay as long as she liked. So she had accepted.

“But…” And even amidst his unhappiness the germ of optimism began to sprout. “But Livia—that’s another matter altogether! You have friends in Geneva, so you want to spend a holiday with them! Well—why not, for heaven’s sake?” And he began to laugh. “My little Livia—what a dramatic way of putting it—that you’re going to leave me! Of course you are—for as long as you like—I daresay you do need a holiday—I’d come with you if I could spare the time—but as you know, I can’t. I don’t mind you going at all—or rather, I don’t mind so much, because although I’ll miss you I’ll be happy knowing you’re having such a good time.”

“I may not have a good time, George.”

“Of course you will, and when you’ve had enough of it you’ll come back to smoky old Browdley like a new woman. I’ll take care of things here while you’re away—I’ll look after Becky—”

“Oh no, I’ll take Becky with me.”

“You will?…All right, if you want. Anything you want…You’re run-down, Livia—a holiday’s just what you need—I’m sure a doctor would say so. And don’t worry about money—I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and see if there’s a bit extra I can find for you…”

“Thank you, George, but I have enough…And now I know you want to work.”

“I did want to, but I don’t know as I’ll do much after this. When—when are you going to go?”

“Tomorrow. I have all the tickets and things and I’m pretty nearly packed.”

“Oh Livia, Livia…” And for a moment the battle was on again between despair and optimism, the latter winning by a hairline in the end. “All right, Livia—all right.”

“Good night, George. Please do your work. Please.” And she ran out of the room.

A little later, when he went up to bed, she was asleep. He smiled gently and with relief as he saw her thus, for he had already schooled and chilled his optimism, and that she could sleep so soon, as calmly as a child, was reassurance to all his hopes; while into his bones, as he watched her quiet breathing through slightly parted lips, there came an ache of pity for her—as if in sleep she told the plain wordless truth, that it was not in his power to make her happy enough. She was so small, so mysterious, and to him a part of something so incurable that he wondered, watching her in the light that came in from a street lamp, what would have happened had he been a shade less eloquent at that Council meeting three years earlier—if, for instance, the voting had been seventeen to fifteen against the motion instead of for it? Why then, so far as he could see, he would never have met Livia at all. And he would have taken that second examination according to plan and have obtained his university degree. And possibly also he would have won the by-election that would have sent him to Parliament as Member for Browdley. And also he would not have known such happiness, or such unhappiness either…

“My little Livia,” he whispered, stooping to touch her forehead with his lips. He knew she would not wake.

The next morning she left. He traveled also as far as Mulcaster, shepherding her and her luggage and her dog during that first stage of the journey, and fending off all sad thoughts by the resolute pretense that it was just a holiday. He was disappointed when a friend and fellow Councillor entered the same compartment at Browdley station; it was hard to concentrate upon a discussion of local political news, but then, later on, he thought it was probably easier than to have made conversation with Livia. She sat cozily, almost demurely, in a corner by the window, staring with quiet interest upon the familiar scenes. The hour-long journey, with stops at every station, built up in George a certain resignation, so that when the train reached the terminus he was well able to take command of the situation when Councillor Ridyard noticed the luggage. “Why, what’s all this?” Ridyard exclaimed, reading the labels. “Geneva? Who’s going to Geneva?”

“My wife,” said George, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “She’s visiting friends there.”

“Well, well! You don’t say! Just for the moment I thought they’d appointed you to the League of Nations, and I was wondering how on earth we’d manage without you on the Housing Committee…”

At which they all three laughed.

Just before George saw her off on the London train, Ridyard’s joke put him in mind of something to say at a time when it is always hardest to think of anything to say to anybody. “Geneva must be pretty interesting these days, Livia. There’s probably a place for the public at the League of Nations meetings—you might find some of them worth looking in at…but of course they do everything in French, don’t they?”

“Do they?” she answered. “But I know French, anyhow.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“I never knew you did. You never told me.”

“I never told you lots of things.”

“Aye, that’s about it…”

And then the train began to move, and there was no more time for anything but the last shouted good-byes.

Two hours later he was back in Browdley, desperately unhappy, fighting again to believe that it was just a holiday. But after a little while to get used to it he established a fairly permanent victory over his misgivings; for she wrote several letters, quite normal ones, reporting what sort of time she was having, where she went, and whom she met. And he, in return, reported upon his doings in Browdley—his continuing struggle to maneuver the housing scheme towards its first stage of accomplishment. When she had been away a couple of months she wrote that she had found a job with a tourist agency, conducting travel parties about Switzerland and Austria, and this, though it seemed to make her near return less likely, reinforced his belief that she was benefiting by the change. After all, it was quite natural not to stay too long as a guest in a friend’s house, and if a temporary job offered itself, was it not sensible to take it? What really cheered him was the knowledge that those tourist-guide jobs were temporary—the season began about May and did not last beyond October. So that when October should come …

But before October came, Lord Winslow came, on that first of September, 1921, to lay the foundation stone of the first unit of the Mill Street Housing Scheme.

Part Four

BETWEEN 1921 AND 1938 much happened in the world; America had the biggest boom and then the biggest slump in history; England went on the gold standard and then off again; Germany rose from defeat to power and then from power to arrogance; flying became a commonplace and radio the fifth estate; people changed from being bored with the last war to being scared of the next—with one short interval of cynical, clinical absorption.

And those were the years during which, in Browdley, the Mill Street Housing Scheme was progressing unit by unit.

One afternoon in the first week of October, 1938, the Mayor of Browdley presided at official ceremonies to mark the scheme’s completion. It had taken a long time, with many intervals of delay and inaction, but at last it was finished, and clusters of cheerful little red-brick semi-detached cottages covered the entire area of what had once been slums. George Boswell himself was also cheerful; in his early fifties he wore both his years and his mayoralty well; except for gray hair he had not changed much, it was remarked, since the day so long before when the foundation stone had been laid upon the first unit.

“Remember that day, George?” someone buttonholed him afterwards. “You had Lord Thingumbob here, and my wife slipped on the way home and busted her ankle—that’s how it sticks in my mind.”

This ancient mishap seemed to amuse the husband more than it did the Mayor, whose face momentarily clouded over as he answered: “Aye, I remember that day.”

“And so you should, after the fight you’ve had. Seventeen years, George, and without a Council majority till lately, so that you couldn’t vote ’em down, you just had to wear ’em out…Well, it’s all over now, and a big job well done.”

“Aye, but there’s plenty more to do.”

The cloud then lifted, and the Mayor was seen to be enjoying the triumph he deserved. True, there was no noble lord on hand this time, but there was to have been a personage of equal if not superior importance, none other than a Cabinet Minister—and everyone knew that his absence was not George’s fault, but Hitler’s. George did not like Hitler—for other reasons than that; but now that the Pact of Munich had been signed he could not help seeing a certain symbolism in what had happened—the removal of the threat of war by a last-minute miracle so that the final ceremonies of the Mill Street Housing Scheme could take place as planned. And a further touch: the very same workmen who had erected the flags and platform had been taken right off the job of building an air-raid shelter under the Town Hall. George mentioned this in his speech, and again in a Guardian editorial that concluded:—

We people of Browdley—quiet folks who ask for nothing more than to do our work in peace and live our lives in decency—we do not profess to understand the complicated geographic, ethnographic, and historical problem of the Sudetenland which has come so close to plunging a whole continent into the infinite disaster of war. We cannot be sure even now that the settlement just reached will be administered fairly to all parties, or whether, in certain phases of the negotiations, the threat of the sword did not prevail over the scales of justice. What we do know, by and large, is that at the eleventh hour a decision has been made that every honest citizen of every country will endorse in principle—because it is AGAINST WAR. Let every man of Browdley whose death sentence has thus been commuted, let every woman of Browdley, who will not now face sorrow and bereavement, let every child of Browdley who will grow up to inherit a happier world—let them face anew THE TASKS OF PEACE AND RECONSTRUCTION.

After the ceremonies George walked home across the town and had tea alone in his study—the same study, though enlarged by a bay window built over the garden, as well as by inclusion of a book-lined alcove that had formerly been part of the lobby. For George’s library was now more certainly than ever the largest private one in Browdley, the years having just about doubled its contents.

Everything else was much the same, including Annie, and the printing office, and Will Spivey. When George handed in his Munich editorial, the old fellow, a little crustier but otherwise unchanged by the years, read it through, grunted, and said at length: “Do you want this as well as the one about the new sewage scheme?”

“No,” answered George. “Instead of.”

“What’ll I do with the sewage one then?”

“Keep it till next week.”

But by the next morning George’s slight misgiving about Munich had thriven, and he took the opportunity to cut out that final sentence. Instead he wrote:—

…For the rest, we must wait and see whether Hitler’s word is to be trusted. If his desire for “peace in our time” is as sincere as our own, we should expect to see some corresponding reduction in German armaments, and until we have evidence of this we can only continue, however reluctantly, the process of bringing our own armaments up to a minimum safety level. THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL DO THIS WE DO NOT DOUBT.

George’s optimism had merely swerved in another direction.

Like most Englishmen, he was shocked rather than surprised when war came. Nineteen thirty-eight had been the year of hypnosis, the sleepwalk into tragedy, but the first half of 1939 brought a brand of disillusionment that made the actual outbreak of hostilities almost an anticlimax. After that there was so much to be done, and so little time for self-scrutiny that George was spared the full chagrin of awakening; like all mayors of towns, he found his office had become practically a branch of the national government, with his own tasks and personal responsibilities greatly increased. He shouldered them with gusto from before dawn till often past midnight while England slowly dissolved into a new era—slowly, it seemed, because it had been natural to expect change and catastrophe overnight. When no bombs fell on London, and when all continued to be quiet along the Western Front, a curious hangover of illusion recurred; it was a “phony” war, said some; perhaps it was not even a war at all. One morning at his editorial desk, aware of this unreality and not knowing how else to handle it, George indulged in a little spree of optimism. After all, he reflected, the good citizens of Browdley deserved a pick-me-up; they had done wonders in response to all his war-emergency appeals, had enlisted splendidly for air-raid protection and civilian defense, and were resolutely creating a strong Home Front while across the Channel hundreds of their sons were already facing the enemy, but so far, thank heaven, not being killed by him. It was astonishing, compared with the First World War, how few casualties there were along that Western Front. And thinking things out, George composed the following:—

We have now been at war for almost six months, and though it would be premature to offer ourselves any congratulations, nevertheless we may justifiably wonder whether the Germans are able to do so either. True, their tanks and mechanized armies have scored victories over the farm carts and cavalry of Poland, but at the cost of overrunning that country they have brought against them a factor which, with memories of a quarter of a century ago, must chill the blood of even the most ardent Nazi—namely, THE FULL FIGHTING STRENGTH OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE. For today that strength is assembled, not in a line of half-flooded trenches hastily improvised, but along the mightiest system of steel and concrete fortifications ever constructed by man—THE MAGINOT LINE. No wonder that the Nazi Juggernaut has satisfied itself with triumphs elsewhere. No wonder that (as some people are whispering, almost as if there were a mystery about it)—“nothing is happening” on the Western Front. If nothing is happening, then surely that is the measure of our victory, and of the enemy’s defeat. For that is precisely what the Maginot Line was built for—in order THAT NOTHING SHOULD HAPPEN.

George thought this rather good, for it rationalized something that had begun to puzzle even himself slightly—that so-called phony war. But of course the Maginot Line was the clue. A high military officer had shown him some photographs of it—after which the whole business became no puzzle at all.

A pity the general public couldn’t clear their minds in the same way, but naturally the photographs were secret; and it was to substitute for them, in a sense, that George had felt impelled to write his editorial.

Perhaps as a result of this, he wrote fewer editorials after the war ceased to be phony. For one thing, he was overworked, and if he ever found himself with an hour to spare he preferred to drop in at St. Patrick’s to see Father Wendover, who had long been his best friend. As George had somehow suspected from the first, Wendover was not only agile-minded but considerably sympathetic to George’s work in the town. He had always held what were considered “advanced” ideas for a priest, with the result that he more often had to defend himself for being one than for having them; and that, he claimed, was as good for him as for his opponents.

Such controversies had flourished in peacetime, and George had often joined in them; during the war, however, and especially after the Norwegian fiasco and the French collapse, nothing seemed to matter but the bare facts of life and death, disaster and survival, enemy and friend. And George found Wendover congenial because, beneath the surface of the proud ecclesiastic, there lay a deep humility which, in a curious way, matched his own. Thus it was to Wendover that George took his thoughts during the difficult days of 1940, and there was one day, just after Dunkirk, when he brought over some notes of a speech he was due to make to a local patriotic organization. He wanted to know what Wendover thought about it

And the latter, while he was listening, smiled slightly. Here was George Boswell, Mayor of Browdley—this decent, hardworking, well-meaning, quite talented fellow—a good citizen and a stouthearted friend—a man whose powers of leadership were considerable and might have been greater had he not been so personally likable, and had he not liked to be so likable—here was George Boswell, with the Germans poised along the European coast line from Narvik to Bordeaux, thinking it really mattered what he said to a few hundred people gathered together in Browdley Co-operative Hall. But then, as an honest man, Wendover had to admit that a similar comment might have been made on his own sermons at such a time…for were George’s speeches of any less practical importance? So he listened patiently and said, at the end: “Not bad, George—not bad at all. Cheerful, anyhow.”

“You mean it’s too cheerful?”

“Well, you always were an optimist, weren’t you?” Then he smiled, but it was rather a grim, troubled smile. “You know, George, I don’t want to discourage you, but things do look pretty bad. We’ve lost our army and all its equipment, and we’ve about one plane for every ten the Germans have, and the Channel’s only a ditch nowadays…”

George’s eyes widened with a sort of bewilderment, “Aye, I’ve thought of all that myself. I’ve even wondered—some-times—if they’ve got a chance.”

“You mean to invade us?”

“Aye.”

“They might have. Recognizing the fact shouldn’t alter our resolve to fight to the last man. On the contrary, it’s the basis of it.”

George swallowed hard, then said, after a pause of gloomy thoughtfulness: “So it boils down to this—we might even lose the bloody war?”

“I think we’d be fools to assume that it’s impossible. But of course I don’t say we shall. I’m only speaking the thoughts that came into my mind while I was listening to you—perhaps because you have been wrong before when you’ve made such gallant prophecies.”

George suddenly stuffed the notes of his speech into his pocket. “Then by God I’ll be wrong again!” he almost shouted. “After all, as you say, I’ve got no reputation to lose. Aye, and I’ll not do it by halves either! I’ll tell folks that Hitler’s on the verge of his first great defeat, and that whatever else the Germans succeed in, they’ll never lick England!”

So George did this, and it was among his most quotable prophetic utterances. It was certainly the only one he had ever conquered a qualm about, and one of the very few that proved completely correct.

But as the summer months passed and the air assaults that had been expected a year before began now upon London and the large provincial cities, it became clear that this was not like the First World War, when every rostrum and pulpit had resounded to the call of a somewhat romantic patriotism. George could remember the mayor of that day orating in Browdley market square about the injustices of poor little Belgium, and thereafter luring recruits from the audience as a revivalist preacher extracts penitents. Thank goodness we don’t have that to do, thought George more than once as he began his work on those fateful autumn days; and besides, it wasn’t poor little Belgium any more, but poor little England—yet was there any Englishman who wouldn’t somehow resent that phrase? Why, even poor little Browdley didn’t seem to suit. Indeed, as George went about his wartime business in the town, visiting factories and homes and organizations, it seemed to him it had never been less “poor,” in any sense of the word. And it wasn’t so little either. One day, in company with other local mayors, he was taken up in an R.A.F. plane (his first flight), and when he stared down from three thousand feet upon the roofs of the town, he couldn’t, help exclaiming: “Why, it looks like a city!” To which an Air Force officer replied: “Let’s hope it doesn’t, or it’ll be put on the blitz list.” For Browdley had so far escaped, though bombs had fallen in the neighborhood at several places.

And there were other curious things about the war—for instance, that even with all the new food-rationing restrictions, many Browdley families were being better fed than in peacetime, because they now had full employment and money to spend. And the children in the schools, so the Medical Officer reported, were actually healthier than ever before in the history of the town.

It was nervous tension that weighed most heavily during that first terrible year of the real war—the loss of sleep through air-raid warnings even if the raiders did not come or merely passed over; the extra hours of work without holidays, the ten-hour shifts plus overtime of men and women desperately striving to repair the losses at Dunkirk; the irritations of tired folk waiting in long lines for buses to and from their factories; the continual wear and tear on older persons and those of weaker fiber. But on others the tensions, hardships, occasional dangers, and ever-present awareness of possible danger, seemed to have a toughening effect; many men who had worked all day found they were no worse off attending Home Guard drills in the evenings or patrolling the streets as air-raid wardens than they would have been in the pubs and cinemas of their peacetime choice. And in this George discovered (to his surprise, for he had never taken deliberate exercise and had rarely given his physical condition a thought) that he belonged to the tougher breed. He was fortunate. There was even pleasure to him, after a hard day of mainly sedentary work, in transferring mind and body to physical tasks of air-raid defense, in the long walks up and down familiar pavements, in chats with passers-by, in hours afforded for private thinking, in the chance of comradeship with men he would otherwise have missed getting to know. Not that he ever romanticized about it; he was ready to admit that any fun he derived from what, in a sane world, would be a waste of time was due to the fact that so far there had been no actual raids; if there were, he did not expect to enjoy them any more than the next man. But for all that, there were good moments, supreme moments, and if there were bad ones ahead, he would take them too, as and when they came, sharing them with his fellow citizens as straightforwardly as he shared with them so many cups of hot, strong, sugary tea.

A few things gave him emotions in which pleasure, if it could be called that, came from an ironic appreciation of events. For instance, that the old Channing Mill in Mill Street had at last found a use; its unwanted machinery was junked for scrap metal, while its large ground floor, leveled off, served as a headquarters and mess room for the air-raid wardens.

And also that Richard Felsby’s land, which the old man had decided too late to give the town for a municipal park, had been compulsorily requisitioned for the drills and maneuverings of the Home Guard.

But no use could be found for Stoneclough. It remained a derelict in even greater solitude now that there were no holidays to tempt Browdley folks on hikes and picnics.

George was an exceedingly busy man. Not only was his printing business getting all the work it could handle, but his position as Mayor counted for more and more as the national and local governments of the country became closely integrated. For the first time in his life he had the feeling that he really represented the town, not merely his own party on the Town Council; and it was a satisfactory feeling, especially as his tasks were far too numerous to permit him to luxuriate in it. He was not a luxuriator, anyhow. And when he came home after a fourteen-hour spell of work, it was rarely with time left over to indulge a mood. He did not even read in his study most nights, but made himself a cup of tea and went immediately to bed and to sleep.

The ordeal of the great cities continued. Night after night the wail of sirens and thudding of gunfire wakened Browdley, and sometimes a wide glow on one of the horizons gave a clue as to which of the greater near-by cities were being attacked. One night there came an emergency call for help from Mulcaster, and George accompanied several truckloads of Browdley men in a top-speed drive to the stricken area. Till then all his fire fighting and similar work had been a rehearsal; but that night, from soon after midnight till long past dawn, he knew what the real thing was, and of course, like all real things, it was different. Crawling into smoking ruins while bombs were still falling in the neighborhood, giving first aid to the injured before a doctor could arrive, he directed his squad of co-workers under conditions which, despite all the training they had had, were in a dreadful and profound sense novel.

A youngish doctor asked him when the raid was over: “Been in this sort of thing before?”

George shook his head.

“I’d have thought you had, from the way you handled those stretchers.”

“Oh, I’ve done that before.”

“The last war?”

“Aye.”

“How would you compare it—this sort of thing—and that?”

George answered irritably: “I wouldn’t. And nor would you if you could.”

The men returned to Browdley with scorched and blackened faces, minor injuries, and a grim weariness of soul which, after sleep, changed to bitterness, determination, cheerfulness, even ribaldry—so strange is the alchemy of experience on men of differing make-up.

On George, after that first irritable outburst (which he later regretted as being needlessly melodramatic and quite out of character), the principal effect was a decision to do something which, at any previous time, would have been an acknowledgement of defeat, but which now, the way he could look at it, seemed more like victory over himself. He gave up the Guardian. He did not even try to sell it; he abandoned it. For years it had never more than just paid its way, and sometimes not even that; but the real issue, in George’s mind, was not financial at all. He suddenly realized that the paper had been costing too much in human effort, including his own, that could better be devoted elsewhere.

“It’s one thing with another,” he explained to Wendover. “Will Spivey’s getting old—it’s all he can do to manage the job printing—I’ll have to keep that going, of course—it’s my living. And then there’ve been newsprint difficulties, and you can’t get paper boys any more, and I’ve just lost another man to the Army…And besides all that, I haven’t the time myself nowadays. If we should get a big raid on Browdley one of these nights, we’d all have our hands full. I know what I’m talking about, after what I saw in Mulcaster. Because I’d be responsible for things here, in a sort of way. There’s a lot more work in being Mayor than there used to be.”

“And I haven’t heard any complaints about how you’re doing it, George.”

“I’ll do it better, though, when the paper’s off my hands.”

“You’re sure you won’t regret not being an editor any more?”

“Editor?” George grinned. “What did I edit? Births, marriages, funerals, meetings, whist drives, church bazaars. The Advertiser’ll do that just as well—and one paper’s enough in a town of this size. Most folks always did prefer the Advertiser, anyway.”

“But you used to write your own stuff in the Guardian sometimes.”

“Aye, and there you come to another reason why I’m giving it up. D’you remember when I came to talk to you about that speech I made just after Dunkirk?”

“You mean the one in which you prophesied that Hitler would never lick us? Yes, I remember. And I’m beginning to think you were right.”

“For once. But as you said, I’d been pretty wrong before. I’m glad you said that because it made me think about it, and I never realized how wrong I actually had been till the other day I got out the back files of the Guardian and reread some of my old editorials. By God, they were wrong. After Locarno, for instance, I wrote about France and Germany finally burying the hatchet, and after Munich I said that even though the settlement wasn’t perfect, at any rate it might keep the peace of Europe for a generation…and only a few months ago I was blabbing that the Germans couldn’t break through in the west because of the Maginot Line…Mind you, I was always perfectly sincere at the time, but that only makes it worse. Seems to me, Harry, I’m just not cut out to deal with world affairs.”

“You’ve been as right as a good many of the politicians.”

“Aye, and that’s no compliment. Maybe it was a good thing I never got to Westminster—I’d have been just another fool with a bigger platform to spout from…And another thing occurred to me—I was thinking about it last night on warden’s duty—and it’s this—that the nearer I stay to Browdley the more use I am and the fewer mistakes I make. Look round the place—I have done some good things—not many, not enough—but they’re here, such as they are, and I don’t have to try to forget ’em same as I do the stuff I used to put in the paper…Look at the Mill Street Housing Scheme, and the new Council School, and the Municipal Hospital, and the electric power station the Government took over. Aye, and the sewage farm, if you like—that’s mine too—remember what a fight I had over it? Those things are real, Harry—they exist—they’re something attempted, something done. They’re what I’ve been right about, whereas Czechoslovakia’s something I’ve been wrong about. So give me Browdley.”

“You’ve got Browdley, George.”

“Aye, and it’s got me. Till the war’s over, anyhow.”

“And afterwards, perhaps.”

“Don’t be too sure. There’s young chaps coming along as’ll make me a back number someday, but they’re in uniform now, most of ’em…‘Vote for Boswell and Your Children’s

Future’—that was my old election slogan. I hope nobody else remembers it. I’d rather be remembered for the lavatories I put in the market square. Because they’re good lavatories, as lavatories go. Whereas the children’s future that I talked so much about…”

Wendover smiled. “I get your point, George. But don’t oversimplify it. And don’t throw all your books on world affairs in the fire.”

“Oh no, I won’t do that. In fact when I’ve got the time I’ll study more of ’em. I want to find out why we’ve all been let in for what we have. And I want to find out why folks ten times better educated than me have made the same mistakes.”

“Maybe because education hasn’t much to do with it, George.” Wendover added: “And another thing—don’t be too humble about yourself.”

George thought a moment, then came out with one of those, devastatingly sincere things that endeared him to his opponents even oftener than to his friends. “Oh, don’t you worry—I’m not as humble as I sound. That’s what Livia once said.”

He did not often mention her now, and when he did the name slipped out casually, by accident, giving him neither embarrassment nor a pang. So much time can do.

But the remark gave Wendover the cue to ask: “By the way, heard anything of her lately?”

“No, I suppose she’s still out there.”

And then, after a silence, the subject was changed.

Even in Browdley by now the affair was almost forgotten, and George could assess with some impartiality the extent to which it had damaged his career. Probably it had lost him his chance at the general election of 1923, though his subsequent failure at two other Parliamentary elections might well have happened in any case. Undoubtedly the divorce had alienated some of his early supporters, especially when (due to the legal technique of such things in those days) it had been made to seem that he himself was the guilty party. Many of his friends knew this to be untrue, but a few did not, and it was always a matter liable to be brought up by an unscrupulous opponent, like the old accusation that he had put his wife on the municipal payroll. But time had had its main effect, not so much in dulling memories, but in changing the moral viewpoints even of those who imagined theirs to be least changeable, so that the whole idea of divorce, which had been a shocking topic in the twenties, was now, in the forties, rather a stale one. George knew that a great many young people in the town neither knew nor would have been much interested in the details that had so scandalized their parents.

Those details included Livia’s remarriage, at the earliest legal date, to the Honorable Jeffrey Winslow, who had given up a diplomatic career to take some job in Malaya. Except that Lord Winslow died in 1925 and left a large fortune, some of which must have gone to the younger son, George knew nothing more. The Winslow name did not get into the general news, and George did not read the kind of papers in which, if anywhere, it would still appear. But when Singapore fell, early in 1942, he could not suppress a recurrent preoccupation, hardly to be called anxiety; it made him ask the direct question if ever he met anyone likely to know the answer and unlikely to know of his own personal relationship. “I think they must have got away,” he was told once, on fairly high authority. It satisfied him to believe that the fairly high authority had not said this merely because it was the easiest thing to say.

Those years, 1941 and 1942, contained long intervals of time during which it might almost have been said that nothing was happening in Browdley while so much was happening in the rest of the world. But that, of course, was an illusion; everything was happening, but in a continuous melting flow of social and economic change; the war, as it went on, had become more like an atmosphere to be breathed with every breath than a series of events to be separately experienced. Even air raids and the threat of them dropped to a minimum, while apathy, tiredness, and simple human wear-and-tear offered problems far harder to tackle. But there were cheerful days among the dark ones, days when the Mayor of Browdley looked round his little world and saw that it was—well, not good, but better than it might have been. And worse, naturally, than it should have been. Sometimes his almost incurable optimism remounted, reaching the same flash point at which it always exploded into indignation against those old Victorian mill masters with no thought in their minds but profit, and the jerry-builders who had aided and abetted them in nothing less than the creation of Browdley itself. Yet out of that shameless grab for fortunes now mostly lost had come a place where men could have stalwart dreams. George realized this when—a little doubtfully, for he thought it might be regarded as almost frivolous in wartime—he arranged for an exhibition of postwar rehousing plans in the Town Hall—architects’ sketches (optimism on paper) of what could be done with Browdley if only the war were won and the tragedy of peacetime unemployment were not repeated. And by God, he thought, it wouldn’t be repeated—not if he had anything to do with it; and at that he wandered off in mind into a stimulating postwar crusade.

One day he was visiting a large hospital near Mulcaster on official business; as chairman of a regional welfare association it fell to him to organize co-operation between the hospital authorities and various local citizen groups. He was good at this kind of organizing, and he was good because he was human; with a proper disregard of red tape he combined a flair for sidetracking well-meaning cranks and busybodies that was the admiration of all who saw it in operation. Indeed, by this stage of the war he had won for himself a local importance that had become almost as regional as many of the associations and committees on which he served. More and more frequently, within a radius that took in Mulcaster and other large cities, his name would be mentioned with a touch of legendary allusiveness; somebody or other somewhere, puzzled momentarily about something, would say to someone else: “I’ll, tell you what, let’s see if we can get hold of old George…” And if then the question came: “Who’s he?”—the answer would be: “Just the Mayor of Browdley, but pretty good at this sort of thing”—the implication being that George’s official position gave only a small hint of the kind of service he could render. And if a further question were asked: “Where’s Browdley?”—the answer to that might well be the devastating truth: “Oh, one of those awful little manufacturing towns—the kind that were nearly bankrupt before the war and are now booming like blazes.”

After a meeting of the hospital board George was taken over the premises, and here too he was good; he knew how to say cheery words to soldiers without either mawkishness or patronage. And if any of the men were from Browdley or district he would make a point of drawing them into neighborly gossip about local affairs. It was noticeable then that his accent became somewhat more “Browdley” than usual, as if how as well as what he spoke made instinctive communion with those whose roots were his own.

On this occasion his tour of the wards was to be followed by tea in the head surgeon’s room; and on the way there, waiting with his nurse escort for an elevator, he happened to glance at a list of names attached to a notice board near by. One of them was “Winslow.” It gave him a slow and delayed shock that did not affect the naturalness of his question; she answered that the list was of patients occupying private rooms along an adjacent corridor—all of them serious cases and most of them war casualties. He did not question her further, but a few moments later, meeting the head surgeon and others of the hospital staff, he found himself too preoccupied to join in general conversation; the name was already echoing disconcertingly in his mind—Winslow…Winslow…Not such a common name, yet not so uncommon either. Surely it would be too much of a coincidence—and yet those coincidences did happen. At least it was worth inquiry.

So he asked, forgetting to care whether any of those present knew anything of his own personal affairs: “I noticed a name on my way here…a patient in one of the private rooms…Winslow…”

“Winslow?”

“Aye, Winslow.”

Someone said: “Oh yes…rather badly smashed up, poor chap. You know him?”

“Er—no…But I…I know of him—that is, if he belongs to the same family. Is he—er—related to Lord Winslow?”

The head surgeon thought he might be. Somebody else said he was. The head surgeon then said: “You can see him if you want. He’s not too bad.”

“Oh no, no—I wasn’t thinking of that.”

But afterwards, while he was trying to talk about something else altogether, George wondered if he had been thinking of that. For the idea, once in his head, engaged those sympathies of his that were always eager for a quixotic gesture. Years before, he had come near to hating the man who had taken Livia from him—hating him because as well as in spite of the generosity with which he, George, had treated them both. But now there was no hate or near-hate left, but only a wry curiosity, plus the warmth George felt for any man broken by the war. Would it not be worth while to clinch this attitude by a few words of well-wishing? Could it possibly do any harm? Might it not, if it had any effect at all, do good?

When he was about to leave he said that perhaps he would visit that fellow Winslow after all.

“Certainly…Briggs here will take you over.” The head surgeon singled out a young colleague who responded with respectful alacrity. “Don’t stay too long, though.”

“Oh no, only a few minutes. Not even that if you think it might—”

The surgeon smiled. “It won’t. You’re too modest, Boswell.” But he added quietly to Briggs: “Better go in first, though, and see how he is.”

As George accompanied the young man across lawns and courtyards to the block in which Winslow’s room was situated, they discussed the weather, the big raid on Mulcaster (history by now), the widening circle of war all over the world, and the difficulties of obtaining whisky and cigarettes that had lately become so acute that George had begun to feel almost ashamed of his own total exemption from such common hardships. But they provided a theme for conversation, and only when Briggs left him in the corridor did his thoughts recur to the nearer urgency, and then with a certain qualm. Was he doing a wise or a foolish thing, or merely an unnecessary one? While he was still wondering, Briggs emerged, his face youth- fully flushed as he stammered: “I’m afraid, sir, he—I mean, if you could perhaps come round again some other time—”

“Why, of course…Not convenient, is that it?”

“That’s it.” But the assent to such a vague explanation was so eager that George went on: “Is he asleep? Or isn’t he feeling good?”

“No…he’s no worse…and he’s not asleep…”

“Then what?”

“Well, sir, to be frank, he—he said he—er—he’d rather not—er—”

“Didn’t want to see me, eh? Well, that’s all right. Don’t bother about it.”

“It’s a mood they get into sometimes. They feel so low they just don’t feel like having visitors at all.”

George said he perfectly understood, and then, to cover an embarrassment that was more the young doctor’s than his own, added: “I’m glad it isn’t because he’s worse.”

“No…he’s getting on as well as can be expected.”

They walked away together, again discussing topics of general interest. At the hospital gate George said: “You did give him my name, I suppose?”

“Oh yes. I also said you were the Mayor of Browdley, but—but—”

“But it made no difference, eh? Well, why should it?”

George laughed, and then they both went on laughing as they shook hands.

But by the time he reached Browdley he could not see much of a joke in the situation, nor did he feel his usual zest for tackling the pile of clerical work on his desk. So he walked across the town to St. Patrick’s clergy house. Wendover was in, and George, on impulse, told him all about his visit to the hospital and his discovery of Winslow there. This led to a longer talk about Livia than George had had for years with anyone, and also to a franker expression of Wendover’s personal attitudes than George had yet encountered, despite his many years of close friendship with the priest.

“You see, George, I never felt it my duty to discuss your affairs—especially as you never told me much about them.”

“Aye, I never felt like it—which is no reflection on you, of course. And I wouldn’t say you’ve missed much. I’ll bet you find it hard listening to stuff about other people’s private lives.”

“Even if I did, it would still be part of my job. Another part is to offer advice.”

“And that’s even harder, I should think.”

“Well, you know, a priest has one advantage—so many things are decided for him by authority. Take divorce, for instance. The view of my Church is very simple—we think it’s wrong, and therefore we’re against it.”

“Aye, I know. And that makes me guilty of compounding a felony because I made it as easy as I could for the two of them? Isn’t that how you’d look at it—and at me?”

Wendover gazed at George very steadily for a moment before saying: “Do you really want my opinion of you?”

“Mightn’t be a bad moment to get it out of you.”

“All right. I have it ready. Nothing new, either—I’ve had it for years. I think you’re much more like a Christian than many people who come to my Church.”

“Quite a compliment.”

“Less than you think.”

It certainly failed to please George as most compliments did; indeed, for some reason it made him feel uncomfortable. He said, almost truculently, after a pause: “I’d do the same again if I had to. You can’t hold a woman if she’d rather be with someone else. And anyway, twenty-odd years is a long time to go on bearing a grudge. That’s what puzzles me—why should he bear a grudge?…Well, maybe I can guess. I can remember a few things Livia once told him.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“Do you mean against you?”

George nodded.

“Why should you think that possible?”

And then, for the first time, after an almost quarter-century interval, George disclosed to another human being the events of that memorable day, September the first, 1921—the day of the foundation-stone laying at which Lord Winslow had officiated, and after which the two had had their long conversation in George’s study.

When he had finished Wendover made no reply at first, though he did not seem particularly surprised. And George, with his usual revulsion of feeling in favor of someone he had lately been criticizing, hastened to continue: “Mind you, don’t get too bad an impression. If I’ve given you that, then—”

“No, George—and I don’t rely on impressions. You’ve only told me that she lied, and that she may have been unfaithful while she was still legally your wife—”

“Aye, it sounds bad enough. But the funny thing is, she had her good points.”

“It would be very funny indeed if she hadn’t.”

George caught the note in the other’s voice. “I know—you probably think I don’t blame her enough. But after all, she was my choice—and when she was only nineteen, don’t forget. Might have been my own fault for not making her happy too. Maybe she’s been really happy with this other chap. I’ve nothing against either of ’em. And if he’s ill or crippled, if there were anything I could do—though I don’t suppose there is…Well, I took the first step today and got snubbed for it, and that’s about the whole story. So with all this off my chest, I’ll now go home and try to work.”

Wendover accompanied him to the street door. “Snubs are unimportant, George.”

“Of course—and I’ve got a hide like an elephant for ’em. I’d call it my secret weapon, only it’s no secret.”

“It never was. Most of the saints had it.”

George grinned. “Oh, get along with you. Don’t you go calling me names!”

“All right—I won’t. I can’t teach you much, but perhaps there is one thing—a piece of advice that Christians need sometimes. While you’re trying so hard to be fair to everybody, remember to include yourself. That’s all.”

“I suppose the truth is, I get a bigger kick out of being fair to the other fellow. So there’s no credit in it.”

“Was I offering you any?”

George’s grin turned to a laugh. “Good night, Harry. Thanks for listening to me. That’s the help I really needed, because there’s nothing I can do if Winslow feels the way he does. Nothing at all…Good night.”

“Good night, George.”

George walked slowly across the dark town. From St. Patrick’s to Market Street was about a mile; it took him past the library and the Town Hall and the main shopping length of Shawgate. The night was moonless and cloudy—almost pitch-dark, therefore, in the blackout; but to George this made for no more than a little groping, and in the groping there was a sudden awareness of his whole life, shaped by and shaping those familiar streets and walls. It was as if, at the moment that things half-forgotten were coming back to trouble and confuse, the town rallied invisibly to his aid, assuring him that what he had done so far had not been in vain, and that what he had yet to do could be limitless within the same limits. That these were circumscribed, even narrow by some standards, was evident; but there was gain to match that loss—the gain of warm personal contacts, the “How do, Tom” and “Good night, Mr. Mayor” that he would not by now have exchanged for empire. And tonight, as he received and answered the greetings that his known footsteps drew from passers-by, he felt upon his heart the touch of benediction. These were his people, from whom he had sprung, and whom he would serve to the end, because he believed in them and in the destiny of their kind to make this world, if it can ever be, a happier place.

Comforted, he reached his house, entered the study, and turned over the papers on his desk, driving himself to concentration. He still felt disturbed by the day’s curious incident, but somehow not as hurt as he had been or might have been. Presently he carried papers over to his armchair, and settled himself in comfort. They were the minutes of the last Council meeting and required his approval. The dry official phraseology merely emphasized the part of his life that had gone on for so many years; and would continue to do so—whether or not, whether or not. Like the rhythm of train wheels that go uphill and down dale, through cities and across country …whether or not. But that again, the blessed rhythm and routine of work he knew so well, led deeper into springs of comfort already found along the dark pavements; and soon a measure of tranquility was on him. He read every item of the minutes carefully, corrected a few, initialed others, then soon after midnight went to bed and slept dreamlessly till dawn, when the early morning buses wakened him as they started up in the garage just beyond the garden—Livia’s garden, as he still thought of it. Then he got up, went back to his desk, and dug deeper into the pile of work there; and at eight, when Annie brought in the morning mail and some tea, he was still working.

Among the envelopes was one that bore the Mulcaster postmark. Like so many that reached him it was addressed merely to “The Mayor, Browdley,” but the handwriting looked like a child’s. Inside he found a note scribbled in pencil with the heading “Hospital,” and so briefly worded that he hardly grasped what it was all about till he had read it over twice. Just—“I don’t know what there is about mayors that got my goat this afternoon, but next time, if you want to see me, drop in.” And signed with the initial “W.”

The note chilled George with its contrast of childish script and adult irony. Presently he surmised that the look of childishness might have come from writing with the left hand—doubtless an effort, yet not too great for the extra words that hurt and were probably meant to.

Nevertheless, he caught the nine-five to Mulcaster.

At the hospital the nurse on duty told him he could see the patient “now” if he wanted. He asked, because of her peculiar emphasis on the word: “What made him change his mind?”

“Well, I think it was because of what Dr. Briggs and I both said.” She blushed as she explained further: “We said you were awfully nice and that everybody liked you.”

George’s smile was a little ghastly, as if he had heard what might be his own epitaph. He answered: “Thanks for the testimonial…All right, I’ll see him. That’s what I’ve come for. Does he have many visitors?”

“None, so far. He’s only been here a fortnight.”

All this as they walked along the corridor. She opened the door and George followed her. The room was cheerfully bleak, and contained bed, side table, two small chairs, and a table in front of the window surmounted by a large bowl of roses. The shape of a human being was recognizable on the bed, but the face was so swathed in bandages that nothing could be seen of it, while the legs, similarly swathed, were held in an up-slanting position by an assembly of slings and frames. George was appalled, but the nurse began cheerfully: “Well…here’s Mr. Boswell again.”

George waited for her to go out, but she stayed, fussing around with the pillow and drawing a chair to the bedside, so he said the only possible thing, which was “Good morning.”

From the bed came a curious muffled voice returning the greeting.

“You’ll have to stoop a little to him, then you’ll hear better…His words get all tied up with the bandages.”

The voice grunted, and George placed his chair closer.

“There’s only one rule,” she added, finally moving to the door. “You mustn’t smoke.”

“I don’t smoke,” George answered.

When the door had closed on her George heard what might have been a sigh from the bed and then the question, abruptly: “Has she gone?”

“Aye,” said George.

“She’s a good nurse, though.”

“I can believe it.” And then after a pause: “I got your note this morning. It’s a bit quick to have taken you at your word, but I thought—”

“Oh, not at all. And don’t be impressed by all these bandages and contraptions. I’m not as much of a wreck as I look.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re getting on all right.”

“Yes, they seem to be patching me up. Would you mind giving me a tablet out of that bottle on the side table?”

George did so. He saw that the left hand was comparatively usable, though the skin was pink and shriveled.

“Thanks…they’re only throat lozenges.”

“I hope talking doesn’t bother you. I won’t stay long. I just wanted to bring you my good wishes.”

“Thanks…I can listen, anyway.”

But George for once found himself without chatter. He said, stammering somewhat: “There isn’t much else I have to say—except that I’m sorry we meet for the first time under these somewhat awkward circumstances. I used to know your father—slightly. I met him—once—several years before his death—”

“What?” The exclamation was so sharp that it discounted the enforced motionlessness of the body. And a rush of words continued: “What do you mean? His death! Have you heard anything? Who told you that? Have they been trying to keep it from me?”

George realized there was a misunderstanding somewhere, though he could not yet tell what. For a moment the wild thought seized him that this Winslow might not be of the same Winslow family at all. He said: “I’m sorry if I’m making a mistake. I was referring to Lord Winslow—the one who used to be Secretary of Housing—”

A strange muffled sound came from the bed, uninterpretable except as one of relief, though the words that followed were still tense with excitement: “You certainly have got it all balled up, Mr. Mayor…That was my grandfather.”

George described the rest of the interview to Wendover the same evening. “Aye, it was my mistake all right, but even when I realized it I didn’t realize everything else immediately, because he kept on asking me about his father—did I know anything, had there been any news, and so on—and of course I could only repeat what I’d heard from the man in London—that they’d both got out of Singapore in time. But then he told me they hadn’t been in Singapore at all, but in Hong Kong, where his father had a job.

“I didn’t stay long after that. I could see I’d put him in a nervous mood, and I felt it was my fault, in a way, for not verifying things beforehand. And I was a bit excited myself, because it was hard to realize that he must be Livia’s boy—and not more than twenty-two, if that…Charles, he told me his name was…I could have talked better to his father, if it had been him, but with the boy I felt tongue-tied…because as he went on talking it became clear to me that he hadn’t the faintest idea who I was—or rather who I had been in his mother’s life.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“No, Harry, I didn’t.”

“He must have thought it odd that you should take all that trouble to visit him.”

“Aye, and he said so, before I left. He got quite cordial—in a nervous sort of way. He tried to apologize for having refused to see me the day before—he blamed what he called the superstition that provincial mayors are pompous old bores—‘I wonder why people think so,’ he said, and although it was a backhanded compliment, I knew he was meaning it all right. So I answered: ‘Probably because many of ’em are’—and we had a good laugh. Or rather, he couldn’t laugh, but I knew it was the same as if he was laughing…I promised to visit him again. He made a point of asking me to, if ever I was in that part of the world.”

“Don’t you intend to tell him?”

“Not just yet. I don’t see that it can matter much—to him. Or if it did, it wouldn’t help. You see he needs help. His nerves are all to pieces and he’s pretty low-spirited about things in general—I gathered that. Maybe I can cheer him up…and if he finds me a nuisance—then it’ll be easier for him to tell me so if he thinks I’m only the Mayor of Browdley.”

Wendover smiled. “You’d make a good Jesuit, George. You can find more reasons for doing what you want to do…”

George visited the Mulcaster hospital every week or so from then on. Not all the visits were on account of Winslow; some would have had to be made on official business in any case. But he found himself looking forward to them all, and not grudging the length of the journey, which meant less sleep, for it was in the nature of his own work that hardly any of it could be postponed, shortened, or abandoned. And gradually, as the youth continued to improve, there came to George the intense pleasure of noting definite improvements each time—the slow removal of bandages; the first time the cradles and slings were discarded; the first step from the bed to a wheel chair; and most of all, the lifting of the mind from despondency. All this took months, and the visits, though regular, could not last long. The Mayor of Browdley was curiously shy during the early ones—almost desperately afraid of intruding where he might not be really as welcome as it appeared—reluctant, it would seem, to believe that the invitations to come again were genuine. It was unlike George, who was so used to being liked, to have such diffidence; and yet there was in him all the uncertainty of a man in whom the touch of bravado masks only a deep humility and an awareness of personal inadequacy.

They talked of many things, from hospital gossip to world affairs, with no plan or aim in the talking; and this, perhaps, was as good a way to get to know each other as if either had deliberately tried. George was often tempted to lead the subject to Livia, but always forbore; he had an odd feeling of conscience about it—that his own concealment of identity could only be justified so long as he did not take such advantages. Sometimes, however, information slipped out without any probing. Charles liked to talk about the family home in Berkshire, the big centuries-old house that belonged now to his uncle, the inheritor of the title—“and thank heaven it does—my father never wanted it, and neither do I, though it’s a lovely old place to visit.” He spoke affectionately of both parents, but seemed to have spent comparatively little time with them since he was very young. “But that’s the way it is when your people are overseas. They pack you off to school in England and you hardly see them for years at a stretch, and then when you do they’re almost strangers. It was better for a while after 1934, when Dad gave up his job and they went to live in Ireland, near Galway. It was a sort of farm, and I used to stay there during the school holidays. Mother made a good farmer—she had a knack for anything to do with crops or animals. She could squeeze warbles on a cow, and that’s a thing you can’t do without being sick unless you really love farming.”

George didn’t inquire what squeezing warbles was.

“And yet she could be the great lady too—doing the society stuff if ever she felt like it. I’ve often thought she’d have made a damn fine actress…And when she made up her mind about something, nothing on earth or under heaven would stop her…My God, the wires she pulled to get out to Hong Kong after the war started.”

“I thought you said he’d given up the job.”

“He had, but he didn’t much like farming, and after a year or so he went abroad again—for an oil company. Mother didn’t like it, but she followed him, and I didn’t see either of them again till ’thirty-nine, when they came home on six months’ leave. They were still in London in September, and Father offered his services to the Government, but they told him he couldn’t do better than go back to his job with the oil company. So he did—alone at first, because of the war and because Mother was mad with him for wanting to go back at all—but of course she soon followed as before. She always followed him everywhere, though I guess they neither of them expected to end up in a Jap prison camp.”

“End up?”

“Well no, I didn’t mean that. Oh God, I hope not.”

“You don’t really know what happened?”

“Not a thing—except that they were in Hong Kong when the Japs took over. That’s definite. All the rest is rumor.”

George caught the sudden tremor in his voice, and made haste to change the subject.

Once—and for the first time since the initial interview and misunderstanding—they mentioned the former Lord Winslow. “I don’t really remember him,” Charles said. “I think he disapproved of Dad’s marriage, or something of the sort. But from all accounts he was a very distinguished piece of Stilton in his way.”

George was not quite sure what this meant; besides, he was thinking of the phrase “something of the sort” and wondering how much, or little, it concealed. “A great authority on housing,” he remarked safely.

“So are you, aren’t you?”

George smiled. “I was one of six kids brought up in four rooms. Not a bad way to become a practical authority.”

“I should think it was also a pretty good education for your father.”

“Well, no—because he wasn’t interested in earthly houses so much as in heavenly mansions.” George chuckled.

“A good thing his son didn’t take after him, then. I hear you’ve done rather well for that town of yours.”

“Not so badly. I reckon Browdley’s five per cent better than it might have been if I’d never been born.”

“That’s modest of you.”

“Nay, I’d call it swelled head. Takes a lot for one man by himself to make five per cent of difference to anything.”

“Same in flying. The idea of the lone hero soaring into the blue on a mission of his own is a bit outmoded.”

“Aye, it’s all teamwork nowadays.” George added hastily: “Not that I’m much of an expert on military affairs.”

“Is anybody? What about all the so-called experts who’ve been wrong? About the Maginot Line, for instance?”

George sighed. “I was wrong about that too, without being an expert.”

“I suppose you were fooled by the last war—superiority of defense over attack, and so on?”

“To some extent. I couldn’t help remembering the Somme.”

“You were there?”

“Er…yes.”

“What were you in—the poor bloody infantry?”

“No.”

“Artillery? Sappers?”

“No…I…er…I wasn’t in the armed forces at all.”

“War correspondent? You’re still in the newspaper business, aren’t you?”

“I was—in a small way—until recently.”

Charles laughed. “I won’t be fobbed off with a mystery! What were you in the last war, for God’s sake?”

George then answered the question that he had not been asked for a long time, and never went out of his way to encounter, but which, when it was put directly, he always answered with equal directness. “I was a conscientious objector,” he said.

There was a little silence for a moment—not an awkward one, but a necessary measuring point in the progress of an intimacy. And this was the moment that made George sure he was liked and not merely tolerated by the youth whose less injured hand moved slowly across the arm of the wheel chair towards him.

“Conchy in the last war, eh?” The hand reached out. “Shake, then. Because that’s what I might be in the next—if they have a next.”

George took the wrinkled burned-red hand, though he thought it an ironic occasion to have first done so. Presently Charles went on: “What happened? You had a bad time?”

“Well,” answered George, a little dazed at the extent to which they were talking as if they had known each other all their lives. “I was on the Somme, as I said, and that was a pretty bad time. My brother—one of my brothers—and I—were in the same Ambulance Unit. He was killed.”

“Driving an ambulance?”

“No. We were both stretcher-bearers.”

“Not exactly the safest job on earth.”

“No.”

“But you came through all right?”

“I was gassed—not very badly, but it led to pneumonia and a medical discharge. Probably saved my life in the long run.”

Charles said, with a touch of pathos: “What did it feel like—after that? When you were out of hospital, I mean, but still not well enough to do things normally? How did you get used to things again?”

“I didn’t, because the things I’d been used to before the war were things I didn’t intend to get used to again—ever…But of course in your case it’s different.”

“I don’t know that it is, particularly…But tell me about how you got started again. In business, wasn’t it? A newspaper?”

“Aye, but it sounds too important when you put it that way. Just a bankrupt small-town weekly. Nobody’s bargain, they practically threw it at me, but I thought it would help me in local politics.”

“And it did?”

George nodded. “I was lucky. One of those handy by-elections cropped up, and there I was—the youngest town Councillor Browdley had ever had.”

“How old were you then?”

“Let me see…it was April ’seventeen when they let me out of hospital, and the election was in the September following. I’d be thirty-one.”

“You didn’t lose any time.” Charles thought for a moment, then added: “Wasn’t it against you to have been a conscientious objector?”

“Quite a bit. The other side used it for all they were worth, but Browdley’s got a mind of its own in local matters—even in wartime.” George chuckled. “I was for lowering the fares on municipal buses before eight in the morning. That got all the factory workers.”

Charles smiled. “You weren’t a pacifist in the election, then?”

“I was if anybody asked me, but I used most of my eloquence on the bus fares.”

“The war must have been on your mind, though.”

“Aye, it was—just as it still is.”

After another pause Charles said thoughtfully: “So you think it’s wrong to take human life under any circumstances?”

“I did then.”

“You mean you don’t think so any more?”

“That’s about it. I’m not so sure of a lot of things as I was in those days. I don’t hate war any less, but the problem doesn’t look so simple for an individual to make up his mind about. Seems to me there are times when life’s less important than a few other things, and those are the times when taking it—and giving it—are the only things we can do. It’s the price we have to pay if we can’t get what we want any cheaper.”

“And what is it that we want?”

“I don’t know what you want, but if I had a boy I’d want a better world for him than either your generation or mine has had.”

“A world fit for heroes to live in, eh?”

“Nay, I’d rather call it a world fit for ordinary folks to be heroic in…And I can’t see it coming unless we win this war. I don’t see it necessarily coming even if we do win it…But there’s a chance if we do.”

“Quite a change in your attitude from last time.”

“Aye—but that doesn’t mean I regret what I did then. Seems to me I was right for a reason I couldn’t have foreseen. Doesn’t what’s happening now prove it? What good did that first war do—all the misery and butchery I saw on the Somme? What was it for? To save freedom? There was less in the world afterwards. To crush Germany? Germany was strong again within a generation. To fix Europe once and for all? Europe got unfixed again worse than ever…”

“I’ll tell you one thing it did, Mr. Boswell—it gave some of you chaps who survived it twenty years of a damned good time. It gave you twenty years of movies and dog racing and charabanc outings and stock-market gambles and holidays on the Continent and comfortable living—twenty years of the kind of fun we may not have, even if we do survive.”

George answered: “I didn’t have twenty years of fun. I had twenty years of trying to improve a little town called Browdley—trying to put up a few schools and pull down a few slums—trying to make some headway against the greed and selfishness of those old Victorian shysters who ran the place for half a century like a slave barracks…”

“And what does that prove? Merely that we all get saddled with old debts. You had the Victorian mess to deal with—I’ve got yours.”

“Mine?”

“Who else’s? You surely don’t claim that you used those twenty years successfully? The last war mightn’t have been so worthless unless you’d made it so…” Charles added, smiling: “Not that I mean anything personal, of course. You risked your life, same as I have, and then you came home and did what seemed to you worth doing. But it wasn’t worth doing—because the main thing wasn’t right. And the main thing was the peace. Why weren’t you a conscientious objector to that?”

George answered gravely: “Aye, you’ve a right to ask. I’m quite ready to take blame for plenty that I did—and plenty that I didn’t do. I can see now, like a lot of folks, that I was living in a fool’s paradise—if by any stretch of imagination you can call Browdley any sort of paradise. Maybe if I’d had a better education—”

“Depends on what you call a better education.”

“I daresay I’d call yours one. What was it—Eton and Oxford?”

“No. Charterhouse and Cambridge…and also Berlin.”

“What? You were educated in Berlin?”

“Not in Berlin—over Berlin.” And then the boy laughed rather wildly. “Sorry. I’ve been waiting to work that off on somebody, but you were the first to give me a cue.”

George smiled. “I see what you mean.”

“You ought to. After all, you were at the University of the Somme yourself.”

“Aye, but don’t let’s be overdramatic. War doesn’t teach anybody much—except to hate it. If you hate it beyond a certain point you go out of your mind, so if you don’t want to do that you have to forget it somehow or other, and I suppose that’s mostly what I and millions of others did.” George paused a moment before taking a further plunge in intimacy: “And that’s what you’ll do too, my lad, unless you’re the exception that proves the rule. Maybe you are. But if you aren’t…well, there’s a maternity ward next door for you to think of. Aren’t you afraid that someday all those kids will blame you as you’re blaming me—not personally, but as a generation?”

“A damned hard question, and the answer is yes, I am afraid. I’m scared stiff…and I’m not hopeful. But what the hell can I do? Lads of my age, as you call them, have the war to win first, before we can bother with anything else. Give us a chance to do one thing at a time, for Christ’s sake.”

“Give us a chance, then, too—even if it’s only a chance to help you. Some of us still have one foot out of the grave.”

The door opened and the nurse entered. She had heard the raised voices and the laughter sound as she walked along the corridor, and now she was in time to catch George’s last sentence. It must have seemed to her a strange conjunction, justifying the acerbity with which she approached the wheel chair, whipped out a thermometer, and said to George: “You mustn’t make him laugh, Mr. Boswell—it would be very bad for the new skin. And you really have talked to him enough, I think…if you don’t mind…”

It was true; it was the longest time George had yet stayed. “I understand,” he said, smiling to both of them.

Charles then asked the nurse if she would fetch him some more of the lozenges.

She went out exclaiming: “My goodness, Lieutenant, have you used them up already?”

“Seems like it, Nurse.” Then, when the door closed, he turned quietly to George. “Just a moment—before you go. I wanted to say this, but we got talking about so many other things…I’ve had the tip they mean to transfer me somewhere else—for facial surgery and what not. Probably before you come again…so if they do, and I send you my new address, would you—would you have the time—to—to write to me—occasionally?”

George laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Aye,” he answered. “I will that.” The long argument had given him such mental stimulation that now emotion came to him with an impact; after those four words he was speechless, stricken at the sudden thought of an end to the visits.

The nurse came hurrying back with a fresh bottle of lozenges, then spied one still half-full on the table beside the bed. “Well, I do declare—you didn’t finish the others after all! He’s so absent-minded, Mr. Boswell…Aren’t you, Lieutenant?”

George stammered his good-byes, and wondered as he left the hospital what was the matter with him to have used up so much time in talking politics. Of course it was the mere zest of a debate that had led him on, exhilarating him as it always did—recalling the remark once made by a teetotal friend that drink would have been wasted on George, since a good hard-hitting argument produced on him the same effects, even to the hangover the next day, when he wondered what he had said in the heat of the moment that might have given offense, or that he didn’t exactly mean.

But now his emotions were of a different kind. Sadness grew in him all the way back to Browdley, coupled with and finally outweighed by a breathless satisfaction that the boy had asked him to write. Of course he would write.

Winslow was transferred during the following week to a hospital in the South of England, where specialists were reputed to work miracles with skin and cartilage; but it was not of this that he wrote in his first letter to George. He wrote:—

DEAR MR. BOSWELL—Just a line to let you know my new address. I expect to be here several months, as the work they do here takes time—and patience too, I expect, by all concerned. The men call it the beauty shop. But the main thing I have to tell you is about my mother. I’ve had news that she is among those to be repatriated from a Jap prison camp. The Foreign Office sent me word a few hours ago, and though they couldn’t give me any information as to how she is, or about my father at all, it certainly is great news that she is actually out of enemy hands and on the first stage of her way home. They don’t expect her to arrive for at least six or eight weeks, as the ship is slow and has to take a roundabout route. By that time I hope to be well enough myself to meet her—though the doctors here only smile when I say it. I’m a bit stubborn, though, when I set my mind on anything, which is a quality I inherit from her. Incidentally, I’d like you to meet her, because I’m sure she’ll want to thank you personally for your great kindness to me while I was at Mulcaster…

When George took this over to Wendover the latter read it through and turned on his friend a somewhat quizzical expression. “Well, George,” he commented at length, “it settles one thing.”

“Aye, I’ve got to tell him.”

Wendover nodded. “And quickly too. You don’t want him writing to her about you.”

“I don’t see how he could.”

“There might be some port of call where he could send air mail.”

“That’s so. Anyhow, I agree with you. Spill the beans and get it over. Might even have been better to tell him in the first place.”

“One of the penalties of being too subtle, George. I could never quite make out what your aim was—or still is, for that matter.”

“My aim?”

“Yes—in regard to the boy.”

George answered: “I haven’t got an aim—except that I’d like to help him because I like him. I never realized how much I like him till now that I can’t see him. And I don’t think it’s because he’s Livia’s boy—it’s because I like him. He’s a fine young chap—and a brain too…But I suppose it’ll be an impossible situation when Livia gets back.”

“It might be. You’ll have to take that chance. But take it now—by telling him.”

“Aye, I will. I’ll write tonight.”

George wrote a short letter containing the simple fact, and received in reply by return the following:—

DEAR MR. BOSWELL—What a hell of a surprise! I’ll admit you could have knocked me down with a feather, as they say. I’m a bit puzzled why you didn’t tell me earlier, but perhaps it doesn’t matter. Of course I’d known that my mother was previously married, but I was never told any of the details. Frankly, the whole thing makes no difference to me, but of course it may to her when she gets here. I don’t want to worry her, because from what I hear and can guess, she must have had a pretty bad time…

George wrote back, and they both kept up the correspondence without ever referring to the personal matter again; nor did the youth even mention his mother, or the progress of her homeward journey across the world. George could not but feel that a barrier—temporarily, at any rate—had come between them, and there returned to him his earlier shyness, diffidence, and reluctance to believe that Charles really wanted to continue the friendship. Then one day he read that the ship containing some hundreds of women and children repatriated from Japanese prison camps had put into an English harbor. It was his turn to write, but he put it off, thinking that even out of turn he could expect a letter from the boy about his mother—telling of her arrival, condition, and attitude. When such a letter did not come he eventually wrote briefly and rather meaninglessly about nothing in particular, but to that letter he received no answer, and when, after writing again, there was still no answer, he could reach only one conclusion.

“I’m not surprised,” he told Wendover. “He probably thought it as good a way as any other to close an episode.”

“That’s a rather tragic interpretation, George.”

“I don’t think so. I wanted to help him, nothing more—and now Livia’s back, perhaps he doesn’t need help. Or at any rate, perhaps I’m no longer one who can help him.”

“I hope it isn’t going to worry you.”

“No.” George’s answer was decisive. “Give me something to do and I’ll worry over it. But when I can do nothing…”

But George did worry, nevertheless, if that was an adequate word for the quiet intrusion of thoughts about the boy into every momentarily unoccupied fragment of his time and mind. Those fragments, however, were few on account of increasing pressure of official work. There was, for instance, Browdley’s annual budget which, as Chairman of the Finance Committee, he must prepare for annual presentation. More urgent still was a general tightening up of air-raid precautions and civilian defense, for which London had issued specific instructions, believing that northern England’s long period of relative freedom from enemy air attacks might be coming to an end. There were also meetings and conferences on other matters—with the Medical Officer about a chicken-pox outbreak, with local union officials and plant-management committees, with regional groups in charge of War Loan drives, charitable funds, and so on. Least arduous of all—indeed, a kind of optional luxury in which George frankly indulged himself amidst all the urgent necessities—was an interview with an idealist town planner whose vision of a new Browdley included wide boulevards, American-style apartment houses, and glass-walled factories.

George almost forgot his personal affairs as he turned over the nicely water-colored drawings and marveled at large green blobs representing trees that could not possibly grow to such a size in less than twenty years. But there was an even more fundamental anachronism. “Do you realize,” he said, a trifle impishly, “that your plan would mean pulling down practically the whole town?”

“That was rather the idea,” came the quiet reply.

George laughed. “I see. And it might be a good one except that if you once did pull the place down I can’t really imagine why anyone should want to rebuild it at all. It’s really only here because it’s here, so to say. A century ago they needed coal for the cotton mills, so they had to build the cotton mills near the coal—but now they don’t need the coal so much, in normal times, or the cotton mills either. I doubt if they’d put up half of these towns if they had the chance to begin all over again.”

“I know what you mean, sir. Growth and then decay. It happens with towns as with human beings.”

“With countries, too, and empires.”

“And down to the smallest villages. There’s a place near here called Stoneclough—”

George started at the sound of the mispronounced word. “Cluff—they call it. You’ve been there?”

“Yes, I just happened along—by accident. Very interesting. Seems to be completely uninhabited, including the big house at the top of the hill.”

“Aye—there’s nobody at Stoneclough any more.”

“I took some photographs—thought of working it up into an article—the Forsaken Village, or some such title. But I doubt if it would be of enough general interest till after the war.”

“And maybe not then,” George answered, moodily. But he liked all such contacts with enthusiasts in their own special fields. As a contrast, it fell to him the same week to visit the Parliamentary Member for Browdley, none other than that same Wetherall (now Sir Samuel) who had defeated him in the 1919 by-election, again in the general election of 1923, and had represented the town in the House of Commons ever since. An old man now; and like most former enemies, he had made his peace with George. The political truce since the war began had brought them even closer, so that George was genuinely sorry to hear that Wetherall was ill. They spent an afternoon together in the manufacturer’s house just outside Browdley, talking over old times and old squabbles. Wetherall was still rich, still worried about taxes, still unaware that anything had happened to make the world vitally different since he was a boy. His solution for the problems of the postwar cotton trade was that all Indians should wear their shirts a few inches longer, and he couldn’t understand how the Japs could possibly have taken Singapore after the place had cost the British taxpayer so much money to fortify. Capping it all, he persisted in believing that George had changed during the years into someone much more like himself; it gave him satisfaction to say (as if to justify his own liking for the Mayor)—“Ah, you’re not such a firebrand as you used to be. You’ve seen a bit of reason these last few years.”

George, reflecting what he had seen—the blitz raid on Mulcaster, for instance—hardly thought he would call it reason. But why argue with an old fellow who looked as if only his illusions could nourish him precariously for a few more years at most?

Wetherall went on: “Just as well I’ve kept you out of Parliament till you’ve grown sensible, George. You’ll not do so bad when your time comes.”

“Why…what…what, makes you say that?”

“George, you old twister, don’t pretend it never entered your mind before! Listen—and this is in confidence—I probably won’t stand at the next election. God knows when that’ll be—after the war or after I kick the bucket, whichever comes first. But I’m telling you this so you’ll be ready.”

George was suddenly aware of the peculiar truth that it hadn’t been on his mind, not for quite a time, and that it revisited him now as an almost strange idea, with all kinds of new angles and aspects to be considered. He said, sincerely enough: “I’m sorry you’re thinking of giving up, Sam. Over twenty years for the same constituency must be pretty near the record…”

“Yes, and it’s meant a lot of hard work, one way and another, but I don’t grudge anything I’ve done for the town, any more than you do, George. After all, it’s Browdley that made me what I am.”

George thought that was very possible.

“So when they sent me to Parliament I made up my mind I’d do the best I could for them.”

George thought that was very possible also, since during the entire period of his membership of the House, Wetherall had made only two speeches. One was about the local sewage scheme, which George had persuaded him to be for; the other was against the revision of the Anglican Prayer Book, which nothing could persuade him to be anything but against.

George said cheerfully: “Well, Sam—don’t give up yet. And I wish you’d try to fix things with the Ministry about our Children’s Home. We ought to get an extra grant for that, what with all the kids from the bombed areas we’ve taken in…”

Sometimes the cheerfulness sagged a little and George saw the future in a hard bleak flash of momentary disillusionment; but even then he was prone to diagnose his mood as due to overwork, and therefore not to be taken too seriously. The cure was usually a good night’s sleep or a chat with Wendover. The priest’s help was all the more tonic because of the fixity of their disagreements, and also because (as George once laughingly confessed) he was far too modest to suppose that he could exercise any influence in reverse; but Wendover, with equal banter, wouldn’t even concede that this was modesty. “It’s your instinct for self-preservation, George. We authoritarians keep you going. How would you know your opinions were free unless you had ours to attack?…But I’ll suggest this—that before the century ends, it may not be freedom that the world values, so much as order. Order out of chaos. A new world, George, with an old discipline.”

“Aye, but suppose that road leads to Moscow, not to Rome—what would you chaps do then?”

“I should follow my Church, of course. But why assume that the two roads are ultimately so far apart? One thing I do know—that if the Church so decided, it would be very easy for a Catholic to change his mind about Communism, just as Moscow could doubtless make terms with Rome for as good a reason as Constantine ever had…And what a tremendous bond that is in a chaotic world—two major disciplined forces that know their own power to enforce a decision!”

“You’ve forgotten the Standard Oil Company. That makes three.”

“Let’s say, then, forces that can command not only obedience, but willing sacrifice.”

“Which lets in Hitler. He could command all that at first. But in the end he was defeated by free men.”

“Only when they themselves learned to organize, obey, and sacrifice. And as soon as they forget that lesson there’ll be other Hitlers.”

“Aye, and as soon as we forget we’re free we’ll have Hitlers in our own ranks.”

“There’s danger in whatever we do, George…But don’t misunderstand me…I’m not pleading a cause.”

“Well, I am—and millions are fighting for it too! Today’s my future—like theirs—and what happens by the end of the century doesn’t give us much comfort—”

“Nor me either. It’s merely that I’m content to let wiser men shape events that can’t yet be properly foreseen. Whereas you have to settle the whole destiny of mankind here and now to satisfy an itching conscience. Quite a handicap!”

“I’d do better if I didn’t think for myself, is that what you mean? Maybe I would—depends on who did the thinking for me. But I want to choose who…see? And that’s democracy—even for a little fellow.”

“You’re not a little fellow, George. You’re a very shrewd dictator who made up his mind years ago to have his own way in Browdley—and you have had it, against a big majority who’ve been either against your ideas or indifferent to them—and the methods by which you’ve succeeded have been slyness, smartness, blarney, importunity, intrigue, compromise, a certain amount of downright trickery, and a vast amount of personal charm! But you prefer to call it democracy!”

By the time they reached that kind of point in argument George was usually in a good humor and his normal cheerfulness renewed.

He never realized the majestic and in some ways rather terrifying alchemy of English life so much as when he attended official conferences in London. He had been attending them for years, until now they were something rather like routine, but he always remembered his first one—when, as a young man just elected to the Browdley Council, he had been sent as its delegate to a consultation with high officials of one of the Whitehall ministries. Because the government in power was of the opposite political party to his own he had expected to be frostily received and was full of carefully rehearsed truculence that evaporated at the first calm, polite, and curiously impersonal meeting with people whom he had thought of as his enemies. But it had left him baffled afterwards. “Talk about raising the standard of revolution!” he had reported, when he got back to Browdley. “It was hard enough to make anyone raise a couple of eyebrows!” Was it possible that London did not know what a potentially dangerous man he was? Or did not care? Or both knew and cared, yet was imbued with some classic spirit that would only return cool civility for warm antagonism? After he had attended half a dozen more such conferences, George’s bafflement lessened, not because he had entirely solved the problem, but because he had come to terms with it; it was as peculiar, yet could seem as normal, as the normally peculiar smell of the London tubes.

By now, of course, he was not baffled at all. Whenever he visited the ministries on business he met important men who knew him, who called him George, who took him to lunch and kidded him good-humoredly about his being teetotal.

The war years had only continued, with some intensification, the natural process of all the years; and when, as sometimes happened, George spent half a day at the House of Commons, he found himself surrounded by a platoon of ex-firebrands who held official positions. “Too bad you aren’t here, George,” he had often been told. “You’d have been at least an undersecretary by now.”

“But then I wouldn’t have been Mayor of Browdley,” answered George, seeking to console himself from force of habit, yet no longer really needing to. He liked London; but to be a stranger to it, even a familiar stranger, kept him alive to that same majestic and rather terrifying alchemy of English life, as slow and sure and relentless almost as the grinding of the mills of God.

That it had helped to save England after Dunkirk and during the blitz autumn of 1940, George thought very probable.

For then its virtue had shown like good bones under the flesh—especially its abiding combination of firmness and benignity, so that the same machine of government could jail a baronet for a rationing offense and organize the distribution to small children of Mickey Mouse gas masks. Nothing was too small, and no one too great, to be beyond the range of that cool-headed but never cold-hearted survey. And George, administering Browdley, had tried to generate something of that dual mood in microcosm.

And yet…whenever he went to London he felt the strength of Browdley in him, rebelling against certain things.

One morning, walking briskly along Whitehall after a meeting with officials, George ran into a man named Sprigge whom he had first met years before on the Terrace of the House of Commons. George was pleased to be remembered, and willingly accepted the other’s invitation to have lunch at a near-by club. They talked about the war and politics; Sprigge said that since their previous meeting he had lived a good deal in China and the Malay States, getting out just in time after Pearl Harbor. It was natural then for George to ask, with an air of casualness, if he had ever come across the Winslows.

“You mean Jeff Winslow, brother of Lord Winslow?”

“Aye, that’s him.”

“Knew him well, my dear chap. Often dined at his house. Good parties he used to give—not so starchy as the really official ones, because, as he used to say, he wasn’t really official. You see, he was attached to the Sultan of Somewhere-or-other, and that made a difference. The lady next to you at dinner might be an Italian spy or an Egyptian princess or a Japanese snake-charmer—used to be fun finding out…Was he a friend of yours—Winslow?”

George answered: “Not—er—exactly, but I knew his father slightly—and I’ve also met his son.”

“And as a result of that you’re sort of interested in the middleman, eh?”

“That’s it,” George agreed. And then, to steer the conversation very gently: “I remember his father expected so much of his career.”

“Well, he was a brilliant fellow—no doubt about that.” Sprigge paused, then added: “Wasted, though, the way things turned out.”

“Wasted?”

“Perhaps that’s too strong a word. But he’d have done well in the regular Diplomatic if he’d stayed in it…and also if…well, anyhow, perhaps it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t. Not altogether his fault.”

George said nothing.

“Of course I’m only repeating things I’ve heard—but there was said to have been some scandal about his wife—an earlier divorce or something. And then other matters…later…well, one shouldn’t gossip.”

“Did you meet the boy?”

Sprigge shook his head. “He was at school in England. I suppose he’s of age now to be in the fighting somewhere.”

“Aye,” said George thoughtfully. He would have liked Sprigge to go on chattering, but just then a fellow club member said “hello” in passing and Sprigge insisted on making an introduction—Henry Millbay, the name was, which to George seemed familiar though he could not exactly place it. Millbay shook hands, declined a drink, and regarded George with a certain friendly shrewdness while, to restart the conversation, Sprigge went on: “We were just talking about Jeff Winslow—the one who was in Malaya…Boswell knows the family…Ever meet him out there, Millbay?”

Millbay shook his head, and the subject was dropped.

Half an hour later, after talk that would have been more agreeable had he not been thinking of other things all the time, George remembered an appointment and took his leave; but in the club lobby, as he was retrieving his hat and coat, Millbay overtook him. “I’m a busy man too,” he commented, with just the slightest derogatory implication that Sprigge was less so. “Wonder if we’re going in the same direction?”

They found they were not; nevertheless Millbay kept George chatting for several minutes on the pavement outside. Presently he said: “I didn’t want to talk much in front of Sprigge, who’s the biggest male gossip in London, but he said you knew the Winslows—Jeff Winslow…”

“I didn’t actually know him,” George answered.

Millbay’s glance quickened. “Oh, you mean you knew her?”

George experienced again, and for the first time in years, that old sensation of a fist grasping his insides. “Aye, but a long while ago.”

“Rather remarkable woman.”

“Aye.”

“She’s just home from a Jap prison camp in Hong Kong. I saw her the other day.” Something in George’s face made Millbay add: “Part of my job, you know, to interview repatriates. The idea is to get information about the enemy. They all knew plenty, but it was mostly horrors…Of course her story was particularly interesting to me because I’d known her and her husband before the war…Remarkable woman.”

“Aye.”

“Even if I hadn’t known that already I’d have thought so after interviewing some of the other women. They said she looked after English and American children in the prison camp. Seems to have been so bloody fearless that even the Japs let her have her own way as often as not. Anyhow, she got the kids extra food and medicines when nobody else could.”

“What about her husband?”

“She didn’t know. Nobody knows. After the first few months the Japs took to separating the men from the women and shipped the men to another camp—some said in Japan itself. Incidentally, she needn’t have been interned in the first place—there was a chance for some of the women to get away, but she insisted on staying with Jeff. At the Foreign Office we’re still pressing inquiries about him, but so far without luck, and it’s hard to be optimistic.”

George then asked, so softly that he had to repeat the question: “Do you know anything about the boy?”

“He was in the R.A.F. and got smashed in one of the Berlin raids. I think he’s discharged now, and up at Cambridge. The mother’s staying at the family place in the country.” Millbay paused as if to give George time to realize where the conversation stood again, but George, though realizing it, said nothing. Presently Millbay smiled and added: “I’ve told you a lot—now you tell me something. What do you think of her?”

“Of…her?”

“Yes. Of Livia Winslow.”

The utterance of the name made George stammer: “I—I thought she was what you called her—remarkable.”

“Did you know her at all well?”

“Aye, pretty well…but years ago, as I said.”

“Then maybe you can answer one specific question: was she—er—when you knew her—politically—er—reliable?”

“Politically reliable? What’s that?”

“Rather vague, I admit…but perhaps elastic enough to describe something a diplomat’s wife should be. After all, Jeff had to handle fairly important matters—important, I mean, to British policy.”

“And you’re asking me if she always agreed with that policy? How on earth do I know? But I can tell you this much—I don’t always agree with it, and if that’s become a crime lately, by all means put me down on your black list.”

George had reacted normally to a familiar stimulus, and Millbay reacted normally to that type of reaction, with which he was equally familiar. He smiled. “We’re not as stupid as all that, Boswell, even at the Foreign Office. And our black list is largely a gray list—or should I use the phrase ‘neutral tints’?” He paused a moment, then asked quietly: “Did you know her when she was in Ireland?”

“No.” George caught the alertness of Millbay’s glance and countered it with a more humorous alertness of his own. Suddenly he laughed. “Look here…what are you driving at? Are you a detective or something?”

Millbay also laughed. “I might be the ‘something.’ To tell you the truth, I’m just a government official who once wrote a few novels.” George then knew where he had seen Millbay’s name, and also why he had not clearly remembered it; he was not much of a novel reader. Millbay continued: “Perhaps that’s why I’m handed all these wartime psychological problems. They’re quite interesting, though, as a rule…Take this woman we’ve been talking about—from all accounts she’s top-notch for sheer physical and mental courage against appalling odds. Yet all that—and every novelist knows it—doesn’t guarantee that she couldn’t be a complete bitch in other ways. Did you, incidentally, ever discuss Hitler with her?”

“Good God, no—the time I knew her was years before Hitler was even heard of. You’re not suspecting her of being a Nazi spy, are you?”

Millbay laughed again. “Stolen treaties tucked away in the corsage, eh?…Hardly…So you don’t think she’d have made a good spy?”

George answered: “From my judgment she’d make the worst spy in the world.”

“What makes you say that?”

George answered: “Of course it’s long ago that I knew her, but people don’t change their whole nature. What I mean is—if they’re…well, outspoken…not always too tactful…”

Millbay touched George’s arm with a half-affectionate gesture. “Thank you for confirming my own private opinion. I never did believe there was anything really wrong with her in that way—especially on the basis of the incident that gave rise to most of the talk…You heard about it, perhaps?”

“I don’t think so. What was it?”

“Some big dinner party in Batavia, with a crowd of officials, attachés, Army people, and so on. I was told about it by several who were there. Before the war of course—1932 or 1933. Conversation turned on Hitler, and most of what was said was unflattering—especially from the viewpoint of the career diplomat. Suddenly Livia said—‘Isn’t it odd that people who profess to follow a religion founded by a carpenter are so ready to sneer at someone for having once been a house painter?’ Quite a sensation! Of course she was tabbed as pro-Hitler after that, but I really don’t think she had to be. I think she could have meant exactly what she said…Because it is odd, when you reckon it up. With all the perfectly sound reasons the democracies have for hating that man, they choose to sneer at him because he once followed a trade. How do house painters feel about it, I wonder? If I knew any, I’d ask ’em.”

“I do know some, so I will ask ’em.”

“And then tell me? Well, anyhow, you can imagine that sort of remark didn’t do her husband any good professionally.”

“Aye, I can see that.”

They were still at the curbside, but a government car had driven up and the chauffeur was waiting. Millbay said hastily: “Sorry there hasn’t been more time to talk. Always interesting to compare notes about people one knows…Incidentally, if you’re free tonight, why don’t you dine with me? Then we’d have more time.”

George was free and accepted, though not without a misgiving that grew and crystallized during the afternoon into a determination to pursue a certain course of action if Millbay should make it necessary. Before they were halfway through the meal, at a service flat in Smith Square, Millbay had made it necessary. They had discussed general topics at first, but then Millbay had continued: “You know, Boswell, I’m still a bit curious about Livia Winslow. She always rather fascinated me, in a sort of way, and to meet someone else who knew her…well, I suppose it’s the novelist in me cropping up again, even though it’s years since I last published anything. And I certainly don’t intend to publish anything you tell me, so don’t worry.”

“Anything I tell you?”

“Yes—if you feel like it. I wish you would.”

“About what?”

“About Livia…that is, of course, unless you’d rather not discuss her.”

George then said what he had made up his mind to say if this situation should arise. He said: “I don’t mind discussing her, but I’d better tell you something in advance. I was once married to her.”

“Good God! You don’t say?”

Till then George had felt slightly uncomfortable, but now, relaxed by his own candor, he could almost enjoy the other’s unbounded astonishment. He grinned across the table. “I dunno why I felt I had to tell you, but now I have done, I hope you’ll go ahead and give me any more news you have about her.”

“So you’re just as interested as I am?”

“Probably. That’s rather natural, isn’t it?”

“You haven’t kept in touch with her at all?”

“No—not since…” He left the sentence unfinished.

“And that was—when?”

“September first, 1921.”

“Well remembered, eh?”

George nodded.

Millbay gave him a slow, shrewd glance, then continued: “Jeffrey happens to be a friend of mine…Would you like me to talk about his marriage?”

“Aye—if you feel like it.”

“And you won’t mind if I’m frank?”

“We’d both be wasting our time if you weren’t, wouldn’t we?”

“Glad you think so. And in exchange will you give me your own frank opinion…afterwards?”

George smiled. “Nay, I’ll not promise that. Let’s hear your story first.”

I first met Jeffrey Winslow (Millbay said) in connection with the Kemalpan affair. I don’t suppose you heard much about that. It didn’t get publicized. Things like it are always apt to happen, and to happen with the same declension of eventfulness—that is to say, they begin excitingly—bloodshed in the jungle, perhaps—and end a year or so later with quiet voices pronouncing judgment across some departmental desk top in Whitehall. Mine was one of the quiet voices; I had all the papers relating to the affair before me, and I’d given several days to the most careful study of them. After all, you don’t squash a man’s career without good reasons, especially if he belongs to a family like the Winslows. I was as tactful as I could be. I rather liked the look of the fellow from the outset; he was neither truculent nor obsequious, and heaven knows he could have been either. He just sat at the other side of the desk—a little nervous, as was natural; he answered questions briefly and clearly, and there was a pleasant ring in his voice that I would have taken for sincerity had not the circumstances of the moment put doubts in my mind.

Of course the Kemalpan affair needs some explanation—that is, if you don’t already know about it. (George said he didn’t.) Oh well, I can put it in a few sentences. Kemalpan is a technically independent Sultanate that the British Government has a treaty with; Jeffrey Winslow was adviser to the Sultan on matters connected with imperial relations—somewhat of a nebulous job, but semi-diplomatic, with tentacles reaching into commercial and military spheres. Decidedly no plum—but not badly paid, and easy enough, as a rule, if you didn’t mind burying yourself in a place like Kemalpan. That, I should add, is the name of the capital city as well as of the state; the capital is inland, in the midst of jungle and rubber plantations; Winslow preferred to live with his wife at a settlement on the coast fifty miles away—healthier there, or so he reckoned. There’s a telegraph line between the coast and the capital, and a sort of rough trail that you can drive over in a Ford—but no good roads, no railway, and in those days no airline. These details are important in view of what happened. Also I should add that a small colony of British and Dutch rubber planters lived on their estates near the inland capital, and were on good terms with the Sultan, whose subjects they employed. The Sultan didn’t mind low wages for the tappers so long as he got a cut of the plantation profits—which he did, more or less, in the form of thoroughly legalized taxation. Quite a nice setup as long as it lasted, and it lasted throughout the twenties, when rubber rose to four shillings a pound; but later the fall to sixpence led to labor troubles, and by the mid-twenties these had reached danger point. All this is necessary to give the background to what happened in October ’34, when an insurrection in the capital threatened to depose the Sultan in favor of some native “leader” whom the planters called a Communist—it’s a conditioned reflex, you know. But it was true that the plantations couldn’t pay higher wages without going bankrupt, and equally true that the mob was in a mood to overthrow things if the Millennium didn’t appear overnight. The Sultan, who was a sly old debauchee with no real interest in life but graft and women, rapidly slipped into panic; meanwhile the planters with their wives and families moved in from outlying districts to seek protection in the royal palace—protection being a few hundred of the Sultan’s private army, poor in quality and doubtful in allegiance.

The crisis developed within a matter of hours, while the Winslows were at their home on the coast; Winslow wired the news to London, which was part of his job, and was told to await instructions. A day later those instructions were sent. He was told to assure the Sultan that the British Government would back him to the full in suppressing the revolt, and that therefore the capital must be held at all costs until such assistance was forthcoming…

Now this was the point. Those instructions were sent, and we had evidence later that they reached the coast settlement where Winslow lived; but he swore he never got them. Thus he didn’t give the Sultan any assurance of British help and the Sultan promptly gave in to the rebels. There followed a nasty little affray at the palace in which three white men and two white women were butchered. Well, that was the Kemalpan affair…nothing very remarkable, but thoroughly reprehensible from every official standpoint, and a year later we were still holding inquiries about it in Whitehall, still collecting more evidence that the instructions to Winslow had actually been transmitted and must have been received by him, though he still swore that they hadn’t.

A further point cropped up: the telegraph line from the coast to the inland capital had been cut, so that if Winslow had received his orders he could only have properly obeyed them by making the fifty-mile trip in person over the rough trail; and this, with most of the intervening country in the hands of the rebels, might not have been so safe. In fact, it might have been decidedly unsafe—which was why he couldn’t have relied on anyone else to do the job. So you see where all this is leading…and where it had already led on that foggy Friday in November ’35, when I first talked to the fellow in my office. Was his denial of having received instructions just the only thing he could think of as an excuse for having been scared? If that were the true interpretation, it added up to something rather serious.

You know, it’s a queer thing when you have to talk to a gentleman in the social sense who has somehow broken the code of a gentleman in the ethical sense. You can never quite come to grips with the situation. You fence and evade and know that he knows all the time what you’re really thinking. I never, for instance, came anywhere near hinting to Winslow that he might be both a liar and a coward, yet he must have known that that was the inevitable implication behind all the questioning. And presently it all boiled down to that simple question: Had he or had he not received those instructions? He stuck to it that he hadn’t, and he sounded convincing, but long experience has left me with the opinion that lies are, if anything, easier to tell convincingly than the truth. Besides, evidence that the instructions had reached him was almost watertight, so I had to accept it. But of course I did not say so. I said, quietly and politely: “Well, Winslow, we seem to have reached a deadlock. Maybe there’ll be some further evidence…if so, perhaps you’ll be good enough to come here again.”

He answered then, with a certain austere dignity which I liked (whether he were a liar and a coward or not): “Of course I will, but it’s nine months now since I was advised to come home on leave, and since then I’ve been kept waiting for the inquiry to finish. It’s rather a strain, in some ways. Besides, I should very much like to go back to my job.”

It was then my duty to tell him that there was little chance of his ever resuming that kind of job under government service. He took it very well. He said he was sorry—which I knew did not mean any kind of confession, but merely that the outcome was a blow to him. I said I was sorry too—and by that I did not mean that as a liar and a coward he deserved any special leniency, but merely that it grieved me, as a member of the so-called ruling class, to see another member acquitting himself out of style. You see what snobs we all are…Anyhow, I shook hands with him and wished him well and didn’t expect to see him again.

But I just couldn’t get the fellow out of my mind. He’d interested me—not only because the departure from tradition is always more interesting than the tradition itself, of which one gets a little bored when one is, as I am, a somewhat cynical conformist. I should be believed, no doubt, if I said that after talking to Winslow I paced up and down my office floor wondering if, in his place, I should have behaved any better. Yet actually I didn’t wonder at all, because I knew. I have fought in wars, and there have been several occasions on which I risked my life, not because I was brave, nor because I hated the enemy, but because risking my life was the thing to do in those particular circumstances, and all my training had been to make me act both accordingly and automatically. That’s one of the reasons why Winslow interested me—because his training had been, if anything, more traditional than mine. Who’s Who and Debrett were sufficient authorities for that. He’d been to a good public school and to Oxford, had then passed into the Diplomatic and been an attaché at the embassy in Vienna. Quite brilliant at Oxford, by the way, and with his family connections he must have been exactly the type for whom one would forecast a distinguished future. All of which added to the mystery—for why, if one came to think of it, should such a fellow ever fetch up at Kemalpan? That was decidedly not the thing to have done…and since it was unlikely that anybody would take Kemalpan from choice, what had forced him into it? Well, there were people I knew who could throw out a few hints. Our friend Sprigge is the expert there. Scandals, women, mésalliances, bad checks—he can usually tell you. In Winslow’s case it was a divorce—which in those prim days didn’t help anyone…and I needn’t say more about that to you.

I also discovered that Winslow had written a book of essays on moral philosophy that had attracted some attention in its field, and might have led to a useful subsidiary reputation had not his main career gone off at such a tangent. I was interested enough to get hold of the book. I found it a bit above my head, but I thought it showed signs of a first-class mind, and first-class minds are such rare things in our time and land that it becomes a crime, in my opinion, to frustrate, sidetrack, or otherwise stultify them. And his, at least, had been sidetracked at Kemalpan, for—apart from the career—there had been no succeeding books.

During the following months a trickle of further evidence came in, but none of it helpful to his case. A Chinese clerk reported that he had personally delivered the coded message from the telegraph station to Winslow’s bungalow, where he had handed it to a responsible servant; the servant said Winslow was out at the time, so he had placed it on his desk along with other messages and letters…The case also began to look blacker from another angle, for at the time the message was received it was known at the coast settlement that the lives of white refugees in the Sultan’s palace were endangered, so that if Winslow had been concerned with his own personal safety he must also have weighed it against the safety of others. About twenty, to be precise—including women and children. And to complete the indictment, it seemed reasonably probable that if he had managed to get the message through to the Sultan, the latter would have put up a defense instead of a surrender, and the five lives might have been saved. Altogether there was very little excuse for Winslow, and when, just about the time this later evidence came in, I got a letter from him in Ireland I was in a rather unsympathetic mood for considering it, especially as the first few sentences showed me he was asking the impossible. Briefly, he wanted a job. Not, of course, the same job in Kemalpan, or even that kind of job in that kind of place; yet, he argued, could not a decade of experience in the East, plus the knowledge of several obscure languages and dialects, be put to some use somehow and somewhere? What he hinted at was a job in some government office, where he could continue in the public service, however humbly.

I wrote back and told him how little chance he had. And a week later Mrs. Winslow herself came to see me.

It was another interesting meeting. I had heard of this Mrs. Winslow once before, in connection with her oft-quoted and misquoted remark about Hitler at the Batavia dinner party; I hadn’t disliked her for that (because it seemed to me she had probably been misunderstood), but it had given me an impression that she was a dangerous partner for a man of affairs. And now, when I saw her across my desk, I was immediately struck by a certain controlled intention in her whole look and attitude. She faced me as if she knew what she wanted and meant to get her own way at all costs. After a mere good-morning she plunged right in—couldn’t I possibly find her husband some desk job in Whitehall? Apparently my letter had been the final blow to his hopes, and she was afraid of a breakdown if he didn’t find some work where he felt he could be useful. And though she herself preferred to live in Ireland, she would not say no to London if Jeffrey had to be there. She talked of living in London as a sort of sacrifice she would make for her husband if the Government in return would do its part.

I told her flatly it was impossible, and when she stressed the personal angle I delicately hinted that government posts were not handed out to prevent breakdowns. The Kemalpan incident, I said, was of a kind that they must both recognize had called at least a halt to Jeffrey’s career. At that she began to protest and argue, but of course I wouldn’t go over all the details with her. “Even assuming some tragic mistake, one can do nothing about it now. Men’s careers have been ruined before by mistakes—it would be nothing new.”

“You look at it very coldly,” she said.

“I look at it very logically,” I answered. “The whole incident, affair, or whatever you call it, is closed now and can’t be reopened unless some totally new item of evidence should crop up. And that’s so unlikely that we can almost say it won’t happen.”

She then said quietly: “It can happen. That’s what I came here for—to tell you something. It was I who intercepted the cable. I decoded it, found out what it meant, then decided that Jeffrey shouldn’t ever see it. Of course he doesn’t know I did that, or that I’m admitting it now to you.”

She waited for me to show surprise, and perhaps I did, but it was not surprise at what she said so much as surprise that she should expect me to believe it. Naturally I didn’t. But it would have been equally unwise to dismiss the matter without further probing.

“What made you do such a thing?” I asked guardedly.

“I just had to,” she answered. “The telegraph line was cut, so I knew he’d want to take the message himself, and as the country was in the hands of the rebels I didn’t think he’d have much chance of getting through. And he might have got killed.”

“He might,” I agreed. “And five others did.”

She said nothing.

“Probably as a result of the message not being delivered.”

“I wouldn’t say probably. Possibly.”

“You knew the planters and their families were in danger when you intercepted the message?”

“Yes.”

“And you deliberately let them take their chance in order to ensure your husband’s personal safety?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think that rather indefensible?”

“I’m not defending it. I’m just saying it’s what I did. My husband was dearer to me than a crowd of people I didn’t know.”

“How many people would you be willing to sacrifice for such a reason?”

She didn’t answer.

I went on, with more sarcasm: “Or shall I put it this way—at what point would the lives of strangers, by sheer weight of numbers, tilt the balance against the life of the man you love?”

She answered: “Never.”

“So you’d sacrifice millions, if one can conceive of such a situation?”

She nodded.

She really was at this point beginning to surprise me. It’s rare that people, especially women, are willing to let a logical point be pressed home. I said, rather severely: “I’m glad to think you are probably unique in looking at things that way.”

“Oh, but I’m not,” she answered. “In wartime wouldn’t you press a button, if you could, to destroy a million of the enemy rather than lose a single life on your own side? Then why is my attitude so extraordinary?”

What was extraordinary, of course, was her argument, and it was one that didn’t seem to me profitable to continue. I was still disinclined to believe her confession, but I was clear in my mind as to the implications of the alternatives. Either she was lying to save her husband’s reputation—in which case one could possibly like her for it; or she had actually told the truth—in which case she was ruthless, unprincipled, and wholly the kind of wife whom a man in a responsible position should not have.

But in any case nothing could be done. Even if her confession were accepted at its face value it would not help Jeffrey to get his job back. The most it could do would be to win him a measure of half-incredulous sympathy.

I explained all this to her, and it seemed to me that she picked up the cue, as it were, and from then on made a bid for the sympathy. Jeffrey, she repeated, was on the verge of a breakdown. All he asked was some job, however small and ill-paid, just to give him the feeling—perhaps even the illusion—that he had not been dishonorably discharged. It had even come to the point, she said, that their marriage might founder if he could not get such a job; he was finding it hard to settle down in Ireland, and the book he was trying to write was not going well. This was the first I had heard about another book and I asked her for details. She said it was a book about the Far East—one he had long projected—something rather scholarly and definitive. She had been urging him to use up his time that way ever since he came home, and surely conditions in Ireland were ideal for authorship—a quiet place in the country, nothing else to do, and ample money to live on. “Really,” she added, “he’s quite well off—there’s no reason why he should worry about a career, or about writing books either, so far as that goes. The whole Kemalpan business wouldn’t matter if only he didn’t think it mattered.”

“Perhaps, though, the relatives of the people who were killed there might still think it mattered.”

“Oh, them. I wasn’t thinking about them.”

And she wasn’t. She was just thinking of herself and Jeffrey. That seemed to close the argument quite finally. I got up and made it clear that there was nothing more I could say or do.

During the next few weeks I found myself wondering even more compellingly about the Winslows. First, he had interested me, then she; but now my interest in each of them separately was more than redoubled in them both. What went on between such a pair? What sort of thing was their life together? If she had been lying on his behalf, it was possible that the appalling selfishness of her argument might not have been sincere. Or had she been telling the truth, as to both fact and attitude? To summarize it another way: if she were a liar, one liked her better and her husband less; but if she were not a liar, one disliked her intensely and felt sympathy for her husband. And I still could not properly make up my mind. I have rarely been so puzzled about anything. Then suddenly more evidence filtered through—I needn’t go into details, but it was a kind that weighed down one of the scales pretty conclusively. She had told the truth. She had intercepted the message. Which meant that Jeffrey himself was neither a liar nor a coward, but at worst a victim. The revelation swung me into a mood in which I recollected our meeting and how much, from first appearance, I had liked him. I remembered his quietness, his austere dignity, the simple unassumingness which, I knew, concealed a mind whose quality had been demonstrated. So on impulse I wrote him a friendly letter, saying nothing much except that I hoped he was getting on all right and that if he ever visited London he might find time to have lunch with me. To my surprise he answered by return and took the invitation with far more seriousness than I should have thought. He would have been so glad, he said, to come to London and see me (I hadn’t suggested that, by any means), but he was not very well and couldn’t get away…would I, however, visit him in Ireland—stay a week or two—there was good shooting, fishing, climbing, if that sort of thing appealed to me? He would be very happy, and please make it soon, because the late summer (and it was then August) was perhaps the best time of the year at Carrigole.

It happened that I had not had a holiday that year, and though the idea of visiting the Winslows seemed quite fantastic at first, I soon found myself thinking of reasons why I might take Jeffrey at his word. After all, I liked him; it might even be that if he were feeling low-spirited I could help him by talk and companionship. But I will not disguise that my overmastering motive was sheer curiosity. I wanted to find out what sort of people they both were, in their own home and with their own domestic problems. And at least it could do no harm to call on them if I happened to be holiday-making thereabouts.

So I looked up Carrigole on the map and found it was a dozen miles from Galway—a small place, not very accessible, in a district of lakes and mountains. And that’s why I asked you, Boswell, if you ever knew the Winslows in Ireland, because I should have liked your opinion of Carrigole.

It began to rain when I first came within sight of it. I had hired a car for the last stage of the trip and all the way I felt oddly excited about getting there. Actually I had never been in Ireland before, and crossing the country from Dublin it had occurred to me that even the trains were antique—and not contemptibly, as on so many out-dated railways all over the world, but honorably, with dignity, like good sound Victorian mahogany furniture. And when, at Galway, my train reached its destination, there was again the contrast with other railheads I had seen; for here was no mere petering out into obscurity, but a grand finale in stone—the massive quayside station, far too large and almost as quiet as a cathedral, shaking a granite fist into the sea.

But my first glimpse of Carrigole was equally memorable—or perhaps the mood I was in gave me extra percipience—a kind of mystic awareness I am naturally distrustful of, but can’t deny exists, at certain rare times and places. I knew Ireland was supposed to be like that, and therefore I was perversely surprised to find it so. Through the rainswept windows of the car I saw blue smoke drifting over the roofs of whitewashed cottages, and beyond them a mountain rising into clouds that totally covered the summit. I gathered, from the map on my knee, that this must be Slieve Baragh, not much higher than a hill, yet as I saw it then for the first time it seemed in another world of measurement. Presently the car slowed down for the village, and here the swollen clouds dipped lower, bringing no raindrops but emptying silently; Slieve Baragh was now hidden behind a curtain that suggested Himalayan heights—and yet, I remembered again, it was not much of a mountain—a mere two thousand feet. I couldn’t help making other mental notes of the near and the practical—the uneven walls and mud-brown pavements, the butcher who called himself a “flesher” and the chemist’s shop magnificently styled a “Medical Hall.” I wound down the side window to catch the whiff of peat on the wet breeze as the car bumped over a bridge across a river—only a minor river, like the minor mountain, but turbulent now as it filled almost directly from the sky.

A mile or so past the village the Winslows’ house stood behind a drenched garden, and Jeffrey was waiting at the gate in the rain. He looked pale and worn, and there was intense nervousness in the way he greeted me.

I ought to describe the house; it was substantially built, thick-walled and small-windowed, in a style conditioned by roaring Atlantic gales for half the year, and political troubles for half a century. These indeed had left the house, with its most conspicuous attribute—a large, burnt-out wing, blackened and roofless, which provided a ready topic of conversation. “They tried to burn the whole place down in ’twenty-two,” Jeffrey explained. “Livy got it cheap because it hadn’t been lived in since then and needed so much repairing, but part of it’s beyond repair—it would be too large for us, anyway. We have a couple of servants and the boy when he’s home from school—that only makes five…”

By then we were in the square hall, from which the main rooms of the house opened on all sides, and it was there that Livia met me. Perhaps because of the dark afternoon it seemed to me that she appeared from nowhere, a sudden distillation of shadows. I was not surprised when she greeted me as a stranger, allowing Jeffrey to make the unnecessary introduction. I played up accordingly and thought it equally unnecessary when, a few minutes later in the bedroom I had been shown to, she closed the door behind her and said with a sort of conspiratory quietness: “Jeffrey still doesn’t know I came to see you in London.”

I nodded and said I would have surmised that he didn’t.

“And of course he doesn’t know anything else either.”

I knew what she meant, and I nodded to that also.

“I hope you won’t ever repeat what I told you in confidence,” she went on.

I said temporizingly and in the bland way which I have cultivated as part of my official equipment: “My dear Mrs. Winslow, I wasn’t aware that you were telling me anything in confidence, but as a matter of fact I don’t usually gossip.” I added, to change the subject: “It’s so kind of you to have me here, and I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Not at all,” she answered, with cold politeness. “You’re on your way to Limerick, aren’t you?”

That was as broad a hint as I needed, and clear proof of what I had already guessed—that she didn’t want me to stay, and that Jeffrey had invited me either without her knowledge or against her wishes. I had guessed this subconsciously enough to have wired my time of arrival too late for any cancellation of the invitation—and, as it happened, too late even for Jeffrey to meet me at Galway.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m on my way to Limerick.”

I had a bath, changed into drier tweeds, and went down to dinner. I met the boy then, Charles I think his name was—a youth of thirteen, at Charterhouse—tall, good-looking, shy, likable. Intelligent, too, as I discovered after a few casual remarks. He was piling turf on the old-fashioned fire as I entered, for it was chilly enough to have one, and that set us talking of turf and electricity, old and new, the Shannon hydroelectric scheme and the ancient Irish tongue that nobody spoke except illiterate peasants and modern schoolteachers. Livia then said: “We’re all half-mad with our opposites,” which seemed to end rather than clinch any discussion. She had a curious way of saying things that were never quite clear, yet never so meaningless as to be easy to ignore. Jeffrey noticed my interest in the boy and soon found a chance to tell me, like any other proud father, that Charlie was keen on music and by no means a bad piano player. We went on chatting desultorily throughout the meal; then the boy made a polite excuse and left us three adults together. I somehow had an impression that he got on better with his father than with Livia, accepting the shy approach more readily than the frontal assault; and it has amused me since to reflect that Livia ranged against the polite taboos of the English public-school system would be a unique example of an irresistible force meeting an immovable body.

After he had gone there was a change of atmosphere that became almost baleful; it had been tense before, but now it was menacing, a curious hostility between Jeffrey and Livia that was due, I could not help feeling, to my own presence. A sort of invisible cat crouching on the table top to spring at any of our throats at an unknown signal—if the metaphor isn’t too farfetched. In an attempt to ease the conversation into some harmless groove I said, unimportantly: “It’s probably not a good day to sight-see, but I did at least get a good whiff of Ireland as I drove over.”

Livia answered, as if she must dispute with me at all costs: “It is a good day to sight-see. Ireland’s a sad country, so you see it best when it looks sad, but the sadness is alive—it comes out of the earth—it isn’t like the dead sadness of London, especially the West End.”

“Oh come now,” I said facetiously. “The Café Royal at midnight hasn’t got much dead sadness.”

“Jeff and I love it here,” she went on, defensively, as if I had ever denied it. “That is, he could if he wanted to,” she added, as if Jeffrey had ever denied it.

“But what do you do all the time?” I asked, still facetiously.

“Livy looks after the farm,” Jeffrey answered. “She likes that sort of work, though it’s not very good land—far too stony, and the gales come in full of salt spray that sours the soil…I’ll take you round tomorrow.”

“Mr. Millbay won’t have time,” Livia said pointedly. “He’s got to leave for Limerick tomorrow.” She added: “Jeffrey’s busy too. He has to write his book.”

“If he can,” Jeffrey commented, with a note of ruefulness.

“He doesn’t concentrate enough,” she countered. They were both talking at each other, it seemed, with me as a needed yet somehow exacerbating audience.

The question of the book raised Jeffrey a notch higher in whatever emotion was being generated between them. “Livy,” he said, “appears to think that writing is just a simple matter of one page after another.”

“Well, isn’t it?” Livia asked, appealing to me.

I tried to lower the tension by asking Jeffrey how far the book had progressed.

Livia answered for him: “About a hundred pages, and it ought to be easy for him to finish because it’s all about Far Eastern affairs that he’s an expert on.”

Jeffrey said, still in the same mood of self-scarifying irony: “Livia thinks that with a record like mine people will be eager to accept me as an authority.”

I gathered that this had been argued between them before, since Livia retorted: “What does his record have to do with what he writes?…That’s what I always ask him.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Yes, that’s what she always asks me, and I think the answer is rather obvious. Wouldn’t you say so, Millbay?”

I didn’t want to get into such an argument, so I said nothing.

Livia went on, as if even my silence irritated her: “And what of his record, anyway? Who bothers about it except a few people in the Government?”

Jeffrey answered heavily: “I think Charlie would bother about it if he knew—and perhaps he does know, or can guess.”

“Charlie has no right to be ashamed of his father,” Livia retorted, and then she added, astoundingly: “My father spent twelve years in jail and I wasn’t ashamed of him.”

I hadn’t known about that, and mentally made up my mind to look into the matter when I got back to London. And of course I afterwards found who her father had been. But in the meantime I felt I had to be honest and side with Jeffrey about the book. He was undoubtedly right, and his Far Eastern opus, however good, might well fall under the curse of Kemalpan—the more so since, if it were very good indeed, it might even attract publicity to what would otherwise have been ignored or forgotten. I didn’t bring up that point, but my general support of Jeffrey’s attitude led to what I had feared—and that was the whole Kemalpan issue spouting up like a volcano. Jeffrey muttered gloomily that he wondered if it were worth while even to finish the book at all, what he really wanted was a job, something he could work at to prove himself more than a failure and an idler. A job, a job …to get away from the everlasting western gales and the stony soured soil and the clouds dripping over the mountain and nothing to do…nothing to do…

I could feel the tension mounting now like a physical wave through the shadows, and again to ease it I said: “You know, Jeffrey, there are jobs, if you really want one. It wouldn’t have to be in government service. Your Far Eastern experience would be a bargain for a good commercial firm, and it’s true, as you know, that a man can serve his country in, say, British-American Tobacco quite as valuably as in an embassy.”

I saw his eyes light up at that. “Do you think they’d even consider me?”

But then a strange and disconcerting thing happened. Livia got up from her chair and leaned across the table towards us with a gleam in her eyes that was of a very different kind. It gave her face a rather frightening radiance, emphasizing the curious profile of nose and forehead as she stared down at us like, I thought, the figurehead of a ship about to dive into a storm. “He’s not going!” she screamed, in a wild angry whisper. “He must stay here. This is the place for him…always…”

After that there was little I could say. The scene subsided, leaving us to stammer a few commonplaces about this and that; Livia seemed to realize she had said too much, or had somehow been caught off-guard.

We adjourned to the drawing room and sat up, the three of us, till it became clear that Jeffrey wanted to talk to me alone if there were any chance. Towards midnight I began yawning, to bring the thing to an issue, and Livia said it was time we all went to bed; whereupon Jeffrey announced that he and I would stay up and chat for a while. He said that with an air of challenge, and there was nothing much she could do about it except leave us together. Such a small victory, and yet, from his whole attitude, I gathered it was both a narrow and a crucial one.

When we were alone he asked me again about the possibility of a commercial job—had I meant what I said—did I really think there was a chance of it? Certainly, I answered, if that was what he really wanted, and I offered there and then to put in a good word for him. But the imminence of something practical and decisive seemed to reverse his mood and deflate his eagerness, so that I told him to think it over carefully; maybe he didn’t want to go as much as he thought he did. He answered, far too carefully: “I’d go like a shot but for Livy.”

Then he lapsed into a mumble of pitiful things about her—almost as if he had learned most of them by heart and were repeating them as much for his own benefit as for mine. She would be dead against his going abroad again; she had spent ten years in Malaya and that was understandably as much as she wanted; she loved Ireland and the farm; she worked so hard, was so good to him, they really got on all right together despite occasional bickerings…and so on.

And of course, knowing what I did, it antagonized me to the point of saying: “So you really mean you’ll stay here for the rest of your life just to please her?”

He answered: “Perhaps I ought to stay here. After all, she’s been very decent about the whole thing. The Kemalpan business, I mean. She’s never reproached me about it.”

That did the trick. Accustomed as I am to the severest verbal self-discipline I simply couldn’t keep back my answer. “By God,” I explained, “she damn well oughtn’t to, since she was the whole cause of it herself!”

Then I told him what I hadn’t promised Livia not to tell him, though I should have broken that promise anyway.

Of course he was appalled. He wouldn’t believe it at first, even when I said I had documents, depositions, and so on, that I could send or show him later. “Besides,” I said, “she confessed to it even before there was proof.” That appalled him also, and I had to tell him about her visit to my office. When he still seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the situation, I said: “You mean you don’t think she’s capable of it?”

He answered heavily: “She’s capable of anything.” And then he went on with a touch of anger: “Why did you tell me? Do you want me to think badly of her? After all, though what she did was quite dreadful, it only shows how much she loves me…in her way.”

“Certainly, if you think so,” I answered. “She shows she loves you by ruining your career—to say nothing of sacrificing the lives of five strangers. I didn’t intend to say all this when I came here, and I admit I acted on impulse in doing so, but now I’m rather glad I did.” I thought it was a good moment then to say good-night and tell him I’d be leaving in the morning early. “Perhaps there’s somewhere in the village I can hire a car to take me on to Limerick…” He said there was, and pulled himself together enough to telephone about it. Then he took me up to my room. At the door we shook hands and I repeated my offer to try to find him a commercial job if he wanted one. I also said that in any case I hoped he’d give me a ring if ever he were in London.

I slept badly and got up soon after dawn. The mists were over the mountain and a gale from the sea was already tearing them to shreds. I did not think Carrigole was a place I should like to stay in for long, much less to live in altogether. There was something elemental and primitive about it that would get on my nerves unless I could become elemental and primitive myself.

The car had already arrived and stood in the lane beyond the garden, but as I was crossing the latter from the house I saw Livia hurrying towards me from a side gate. She was dressed in a sort of waterproof smock, tied loosely at the waist; her head was almost hidden behind a low-brimmed sou’wester, and she wore also knee-high boots caked with mud. I don’t know why I remember such things, except that I was aware of a curious half-hypnotized tension that made me stir my mind over details to keep it from somehow freezing at her approach.

I was prepared for a scene, but there was none. “So you’re going now?” she greeted me.

I said I had thought it better to leave early, so as to reach Limerick by midday.

“Why yes, of course. Much better. I’m always up like this. There’s so much to be done on a farm.”

I said I was sure she was kept very busy.

“Of course Jeff’s still asleep,” she went on. “Nine’s early enough for him to start writing, don’t you think?” And then, with a bright smile; “What time would you begin writing if you were a writer?”

I answered, smiling back: “Any time I damn well felt like it—and I speak with authority because I am a writer.”

She didn’t seem to take offense—and yet I knew, from something in her eyes, that Jeffrey had told her I had told him everything, and that she hated me for it. And I had a feeling that to be hated by Livia Winslow was no mild experience.

She accompanied me to the car. “Jeff is really happy here,” she said, as if I were again denying the fact. “And no wonder, is it?” And then she added, in a phrase I remember because I wasn’t quite sure what it meant: “When I first saw this place I thought I had found where I was born in another world…”

So I finished my Irish holiday and returned to London with such thoughts about the Winslows as you can imagine. Some months later Jeffrey rang me up at my office, the tone of his voice conveying a certain urgency, but also, I thought, a very welcome quality of decision. He sounded like a man who had finally yet in a sense firmly reached the end of his tether. We lunched at my club, and afterwards he asked if my offer to aid him in finding a job still held.

Not only it did, I told him, but it so happened that a few days before I had mentioned his name to a friend in one of the big oil companies, and the reaction had been distinctly favorable. “Only I didn’t know whether you’d changed your mind, so I hardly cared to approach you about it.”

“I’ll take the job whatever it is,” he said. “Where do I go and when can I start?”

“Look here,” I answered, “I don’t own the company. You’ll have to fix all that yourself—but if you like I can telephone my friend this afternoon and let him know you’re in town. I should imagine, from the way he talked, that it would be something fairly immediate, and he did also tell me where it was—Hong Kong…How does that suit? You speak Cantonese?”

He said he did.

“They’ll probably jump at you then.”

He seemed so relieved that I told him how glad I was to see him in such a different mood from the last time we had talked.

“Yes,” he said. “You can call it that if you like—a different mood.”

I asked him what had happened to make the change, and then he told me something so extraordinary that if I hadn’t known enough about Livia beforehand I should have disbelieved it, or him, or both of them, and even now I’m not a hundred per cent certain. It seemed that after my one-night visit they had had many arguments about his taking another job abroad, Livia becoming more and more obstinate in her insistence that he should stay at Carrigole. It was almost as if she had some obsession about the place—and perhaps, for that matter, she had. Most of her ideas were obsessions, anyhow, just as most of her affections were passions—she did nothing by halves. In such an atmosphere as had developed between them Jeffrey found it impossible to write his book and presently did not even wish to; what he craved was a job, and that too was for him an obsession. Their disagreements had culminated, he said, in an angry scene in which she accused him of pretending to want the job when what he really wanted was to leave her; this he denied emphatically, but in the very act of doing so caught himself wondering if it were half true. And then she staged an astonishing climax. She told him she would never leave him, that she loved him too much, that wherever he went she would follow, and that rather than lose him she would kill anyone who stood in the way of their life together. He took that for melodrama till she added, with a terrifying sort of casualness: “I did that once, you know.”

He thought she meant the five victims at Kemalpan, and though he knew she could be held accountable for their deaths, he thought it was going too far to say that she had actually killed them. But then she always did go too far, and he always tried to drag her back by being severely and irritatingly logical; it was almost a routine. So he said: “Oh come now, don’t put it that way. They might have lost their lives in any event.”

“They?” she echoed. And then it turned out that she hadn’t been thinking of Kemalpan at all. “Then who?” he asked, puzzled but also wryly amused.

“Don’t you remember Anne Westerholme?” she answered.

He told me that when she spoke that name he first had to make an effort to recollect it, but that when he did so he felt himself growing pale and cold with an emotion he would have called fear, except that he had known fear before, and this was nothing like it.

He also told me about Anne Westerholme, and the story took him back almost ten years, to the time when he was adviser to another Sultanate and lived with Livia at a place called Tanjong Palai. It was not such a good job as the one he obtained later, but the district was healthier and they had a pleasant bungalow in the hills, with the usual neighborhood society of tea and rubber planters. One of these, a friend of Jeffrey’s, was bringing out a young governess from England to look after his three small boys, but as they developed scarlet fever while she was en route he had arranged with the Winslows that the girl should stay with them until the end of quarantine. So Anne Westerholme arrived one afternoon at the Winslows’ bungalow, and the next morning she was dead. She had been bitten by a five-foot krait, the most venomous of Malayan snakes, and as it could be surmised that she had opened her bedroom window without fixing the screen there was no hitch in the presumption of accidental death. Thousands die from snakebite every year in that part of the world; it was tragic, but hardly remarkable.

But now, a decade later, Livia had more to say about this, and what she said was quite dreadful. She said that very early in the morning she had entered the girl’s room and seen her asleep with the krait curled up at the foot of the bed. It would have been easy then to kill the snake (she had killed scores) but she simply did not do so. She went back to the kitchen, calmly gave the Chinese houseboy his daily orders, played some Mozart records on the phonograph, and waited for the call that summoned her, along with the servants, too late.

Jeffrey said that when she told him this, sitting over the turf fire at Carrigole late one night, he was so horrified that it did not occur to him at first that he had only her word for the story; but that later, when he did realize that, his feelings of horror hardly diminished. He made her go to bed, he said, and himself spent the night in his downstairs workroom, arranging the manuscript of the book he knew he would never finish—not at Carrigole, anyhow. And in the morning he took the train for Dublin en route for Holyhead and London.

We sat over coffee in the club smoke room discussing the matter throughout most of the afternoon.

“But do you really think she was speaking the truth?” I asked.

“I think she could have been,” he answered, with no kind of reluctance. “But I also think she could have made up the story.”

“But what motive could she possibly have had? A girl fresh from England—how could Livia have had any concern with whether she lived or died?”

“Jealousy,” Jeffrey answered. “She saw in this girl some menace to her own life with me—or so she said when she made the confession.”

“But that’s equally absurd!” I persisted. “How long had you known the girl? A few hours, I suppose…Had you had any chance to…but of course it’s preposterous…and what sort of a girl was she? I suppose you hardly remember—even the name didn’t stay in your mind—”

Jeffrey nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I’d almost forgotten that, but I do remember her—she had reddish hair and a rather calm face.”

“Not pretty, though?”

“No, but calm…calm.”

“And Livia was with you the whole of the time—”

“Oh yes. The three of us just talked during dinner, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s still absurd,” I repeated. “Even for Livia it’s absurd. How could she possibly imagine there was anything for her to be jealous of?”

He nodded again, but then suddenly moved restlessly in the club armchair. “You know,” he said at length, “I’ll be perfectly frank with you, since you deserve that much for all you’ve done for me lately…It’s true of course that there was nothing between me and that girl. Yet…there almost might have been…eventually. I knew that, in a queer sort of way, while we were just chatting during dinner. Nothing special or exciting or significant or provocative—and yet—and I was aware of it—that girl’s calmness came over to me…and Livy intercepted it, just as later on she intercepted the cable.” He got up, clenching and unclenching his hands. “That’s the really frightening thing about it,” he exclaimed, when he had let me order a second brandy. “Livy knew. She always knew. She doesn’t miss a thing…”

The Mayor of Browdley sat for a long time in silence after Millbay had finished. He was—and he was aware of it—a little out of his depth. This world of rubber planters and Sultans and five-foot kraits was so foreign to him, or seemed so when he tried to get it into extempore focus; how different from that other world of cotton mills and council meetings? And yet, after all, it was the same world, governed by the same passions, the same greeds, the same basic gulf between those who take and those who give. True, there were no snakes in Browdley, but there was diphtheria that could kill (and had killed, hadn’t it?) just as effectively; and there had once been a murder in a street not far from Mill Street, a particularly lurid murder that had made headlines in all the Sunday papers. From Browdley to Kemalpan and Tanjong Palai was only a matter of miles, but from Livia’s mind to his own…how far was that?

Millbay interrupted his musings. “Well, Boswell, you stipulated for my story first. Now what about yours?”

George answered at length: “Aye … but I haven’t one. Nothing to match what you’ve told me, anyhow. I can’t say I’m glad to have heard it, but it’s been good of you to give me so much time.”

“No need to be grateful. I’d rather know how it all strikes you.”

“That’s just it,” George answered. “It does strike me. It strikes me all of a heap.”

“You mean you don’t altogether believe it?”

“I don’t disbelieve it, because I’ve been struck all of a heap before by some of the things Livia did.”

“Oh, you have?”

“Aye…When she left me I was a bit like that for years. But I got over it…”

And that was all. Millbay, though disappointed, was tactful enough not to press him. “Seems to me,” he said later, “that those who want to plan the future with everything neatly laid out in squares and rectangles are going to find the Livias of this world sticking out like a sore thumb.”

“Maybe,” replied George. “But maybe also if the world was planned a bit better there wouldn’t be so many Livias.”

“You evidently accept that as a desirable state.”

“Nay,” said George quickly. “I’ll not say too much against her. We had some good times. And this jealousy you’ve talked about—I never noticed it particularly…”

Millbay smiled. “May I be very personal?”

“Anything you want.”

“It’s perhaps such ancient history that you won’t feel hurt if I suggest it…that perhaps she wasn’t as jealous in your case because she didn’t…love you…as much.”

“Aye, that might have been it.”

It was getting late and George took his leave soon after that. He thanked Millbay again, walked from Smith Square to his hotel in a street behind the Strand, and rather to his surprise slept well and did not dream. The next day was a Saturday and he was busy at a conference. The conference was about nothing more or less momentous than the co-ordination of local authorities in the grouping of road-transport services throughout the northern industrial areas; and George, again to his surprise, found it quite possible to intervene in the discussion and secure for Browdley favorable treatment in the proposed setup. The conference then adjourned till Monday, and with a day to spare George could not think of anything better to do than visit Cambridge. He had never been there before, and thought it would be a good opportunity to compare it with Oxford, which he had visited once, in a mood of envy and adoration, thirty years earlier. So he took the train at Liverpool Street and eventually arrived, after a journey in which wartime and Sunday discomforts were incredibly combined, at a railway station whose form and situation roused in him the most drastic instincts of the rebuilder. He then took a bus into the town, got off at the post office, had a late and rather bad lunch at a restaurant, and entered the nearest of the colleges.

Here at last he felt an authentic thrill that years had scarcely dimmed; for George still worshiped education and could still think nostalgically of never-tasted joys. To be young, to live in one of these old colleges, to have years for nothing but study, and then to emerge into the world’s fray already armored with academic letters after one’s name—this was the kind of past George would like to have had for himself, and the kind of future he would have wanted for his own boy, if his own boy had lived. The multiple disillusionments of the interwar years had not dulled this dream, because it had been a dream only—for George, in Browdley, had never heard about fully trained university men having to cadge jobs as vacuum-cleaner salesmen. So he could pass through the college archway and stare across the quadrangle at sixteenth-century Gothic buildings with the feeling that here, at any rate, was something almost perfect in a far from perfect world.

Civilian sight-seers being rare in wartime, the college porter, scenting a tip, came out of his office to ask George if he would like to be shown over. George said yes, with some enthusiasm, and for the next hour was piloted through various courts, and into a quiet garden containing a famous mulberry tree; he was also shown the rooms in which there had lived, during the most impressionable years of their lives, such varied personages as John Milton and Jan Smuts. George was entranced with all this, and by the time the tour was completed had absorbed much assorted information about the habits of undergraduates in pre-war days. It did not entirely conform to what he had imagined, or even thought desirable. But perhaps after the war things would be a little different in some respects. He soon found that everything the porter was afraid of, he himself most warmly hoped for; and presently he summed the man up as an incurable snob, of a kind almost never met in Browdley. However, all that did not matter in wartime, since the man, from his own statements, was an air-raid warden and doubtless doing his duty like everyone else. George gave him five shillings, which he thought was enough; and the man took it as if he thought it just about enough.

“By the way,” George added, as an afterthought, “have you a list of all of the men in the University—not just this college only?”

He had, and George inspected it. It did not take him more than a moment to find that Winslow was at St. Jude’s. The porter then told him where St. Jude’s was and he walked there across the town.

He did not know whether he really intended to visit Winslow or not, but as he was strolling towards the college entrance he saw a man leaning on two sticks walk out towards the curb and there hesitate, as if uncertain whether to risk crossing. George caught his glance from a distance and immediately changed direction to help him; whereupon the man turned away, evidently deciding not to cross after all. But the whole maneuver puzzled George, so that he approached nevertheless and asked if he could be of any service. The man was a tall young fellow in a rather ill-fitting tweed jacket and gray-flannel trousers, with a hat turned down over his forehead in such a way that, with the further obstruction of dark glasses, the face was hardly to be seen. Yet immediately—from some curious instinct rather than from any arguable recognition—George knew who it was. He had never seen him dressed before, or even standing up before, yet there was not a shadow of doubt as he exclaimed: “Why, Charles…” and took the other’s arm.

The youth stared at him for a moment before forcing a smile. “I—I didn’t expect you’d recognize me.”

“Don’t say you didn’t want me to!”

“I won’t say it if you’d rather not.” The voice and the tone were ironic. “What are you doing in these parts, anyhow?”

George explained and added heartily: “No need to ask what you’re doing.”

“Isn’t there? At present I’m going to have my hair cut by a barber who most obligingly does it for me privately every third Sunday afternoon. I can’t face that sort of thing when there’s the usual audience.”

George nodded with understanding. “Then I mustn’t keep you. But perhaps afterwards…How about having a meal with me?”

Charles declined with a brusqueness that softened into an only slightly irritated explanation that he hardly ever left the college after dusk. “For one thing there’s the damned blackout.” And then, either shyly or grudgingly (George could not be sure which): “I’m in Room D One in the First Court. Come up tonight after dinner if you like. About eight.”

George had been intending to return to London by the seven-thirty train, but he canceled the arrangement quickly enough to accept without an appearance of hesitation. A later train, however inconvenient, would do all right. He said: “Thanks, I will. And now, since you were wanting to cross the street…”

He helped the boy as far as the opposite curb, then left him after a few conversational commonplaces. George’s sense of timing was never, indeed, so infallible as when he found himself up against that rare phenomenon—someone who didn’t seem particularly glad to see him.

He spent an hour or two in further sight-seeing, then made his way to St. Jude’s after another bad meal. The night was cloudy, and the staircase leading to D One proved hard to find, even by inquiry. To George’s astonishment, after he had knocked, the door was opened by a rather pretty girl in nurse’s uniform who admitted him to a large pleasant room in which Charles, with one arm bared to the shoulder, had evidently been undergoing some sort of treatment which George’s arrival had interrupted. George apologized for being early (though actually he was punctual), but Charles assured him the job was finished and introduced the girl, who joined in unimportant conversation while she packed her equipment. She seemed very charming, friendly, and efficient, and George, whose mind always flew to Browdley on the slightest provocation, wished he had her in the town’s health department. He had also noticed the state of the arm, and Charles, aware of this, felt constrained to cover a certain embarrassment by making light of it. “Still have to be patched up, but I’m sure a lot of fellows would envy me the method.” The girl laughed and made businesslike arrangements for her next visit. She demurred at first as George picked up her bag, but when he insisted she let him carry it down the stairs. Outside the door he said: “It isn’t just that I’m being polite. I’d really like to know how that boy is, and I thought you’d be the one to give me the true facts.”

She replied calmly as they walked across the court and through the gateway into the street: “He’s not well at all—but that’s a usual experience after the sort of crash he had. They seem to improve, and then they get worse again. It’s partly because they expect to recover too soon and too completely—and it doesn’t happen.”

“But it will eventually—in his case?”

“He has a good chance. Physically he’s doing fine. He fractured both ankles, and one of his hands and arms had bad burns—that’s the one I’m working on—the muscle’s damaged. And his face, too—that was burned, but they did a wonderful job with plastic surgery—I’ve seen a photograph of him as he used to be and it’s really remarkable. Of course the shock is really the hardest thing to get over.”

“But he will?”

“I hope so, though he’s pretty bad at times. He has sudden nerve storms—you can’t imagine what they’re like until you’ve seen him…But he should improve gradually.”

“It all sounds serious enough,” George said.

“It is—though I’ve seen many worse. And he has heaps of courage. You know he got a D.F.C.?”

“No?…When was that?”

She mentioned a time earlier than that of George’s visit to the Mulcaster hospital.

He said: “He never told me.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“But isn’t he proud of it?”

She smiled. “He’s just shy about those things, that’s all. Do you know him well?”

“Not very. But I—I like him a great deal.”

“So do I.”

They had reached the pavement where she said she would wait for a bus. George would have liked to go on talking, but the bus came up almost immediately. “And where are you off to now?” he asked, curious as always about the lives and work of others.

“Back to the hospital here. They keep me busy.”

“I’llbet they do,” he answered admiringly. The bus moved away and he walked back to the college room encouraged by a feeling of community with all who worked with such quiet, cheerful skill—the real aristocracy on earth, he reflected, if there ever were such a thing.

Charles had put on his coat and was making sure the curtains were drawn over the windows. George apologized again for having arrived perhaps inopportunely.

“Not at all…Sit down. You’ve had dinner, of course. How about some coffee? I make it here, on my own.”

George agreed and watched Charles as he busied himself with the small but intricate task. It was as if he wanted to show how he could do things—as if embarrassment, aware of itself, could find relief in a kind of exhibitionism. He made excellent coffee, anyhow, and over several cups they fell to discussing the business that had brought George to London, which George explained in as much detail as was interesting to himself until it occurred to him that Charles might not be similarly enthralled. But the boy urged him to continue. “Go ahead. It’s shop talk, but I always enjoy that from anyone who knows what he’s talking about.”

George acknowledged the compliment with a pleased “Aye,” and then, to keep it modest, added: “So long as it’s anything to do with Browdley…Now tell me your gossip.”

“Nothing to tell except a lot of dull stories about hospitals.”

“They moved you about a lot?”

“Yes. Everybody who thought he could do anything had a go at me. Not that I’m complaining. They did rather well, I reckon. And the French johnny who fixed up my nose really improved on the original. I had to spend six weeks in his private nursing home in Leeds.”

“Leeds? As near to Browdley as all that? Why didn’t you let me know? I’d have visited you.”

Charles looked embarrassed. “Well, you stopped writing, so I thought you’d got a bit bored with that sort of thing. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I stopped writing?”

And then, of course, the matter was explored; it appeared that George’s last two letters had never reached Charles; it was all as trivial as that. (They did arrive, eventually, after a series of fantastic reforwardings.) George exclaimed, laughing because his relief was so much greater than he could have believed: “And I thought it was you who didn’t want to write!”

Just then the air-raid siren went off, effectively changing the subject. “There’s a shelter in the next court,” Charles said, “if you’d like to go there.”

“What do you generally do?”

“It’s only happened two or three times before, but I’ve always stayed here. I don’t think it’s a very good shelter anyway.”

George said staying where they were was all right with him, so they went on talking. Now that the contretemps of the letters had been cleared up, the mood came on them both for subsidiary confessions; Charles, for instance, admitted that when he had caught sight of George outside the college that afternoon he had deliberately looked the other way. “It was partly because I thought perhaps you really didn’t want to see me—not now that you know I know who you are. There’s also a bit of a phobia I have about my new face. It gives me the most conflicting impulses—for instance, in your case, because you never saw my old face, I didn’t mind so much, yet because I also didn’t think you’d recognize me I was glad to think you wouldn’t realize I was avoiding you…Or is all that too complicated?”

“Aye—and so are most human impulses, if you get down to analyzing ’em.”

“I’m glad you think so. I’ve had a good deal of time to analyze myself lately—perhaps too much—and on the whole I prefer flying…I suppose you know I’ll never be able to do that again?”

George had all along thought so, but deemed it best to appear surprised. Charles went on: “The doctors simply hooted when I mentioned it. Asked me whether I wasn’t satisfied with the way they’d fixed me up for a life of strictly civilian usefulness.”

“And aren’t you?”

“I guess I’ve got to be. I’m damned lucky compared with thousands. The fact is, though, I really wanted to fly again…As long as I could be useful that way I was satisfied. But now that I have to wonder how I can be useful, I’m not satisfied.”

“What’s wrong with just being here?”

“Probably quite a lot. And that’s what makes the big difference. There never was much wrong with the R.A.F., and even if there had been it was none of my business. My job was to fly.”

“And now your job’s to get ready for some other job that’ll be just as useful in its way by then.”

“I’d like to believe that. I’d like to think the things I’m being lectured about have the slightest connection with anything that matters. The Statute of Mortmain, for example—or the Amphictyonic Council.”

“The Amphictyonic Council certainly has—because it was a sort of League of Nations, wasn’t it?”

Charles gasped. “Good God! Now how the hell did you know that?”

“Because I once studied history for a university examination same as you’re doing now.”

“You did? You mean you…” The first gunfire could be heard in the far distance; it seemed to cause a break in the youth’s astonishment, giving him the chance to reflect, perhaps, that it was not very polite to be so astonished. He stammered: “It’s just that I didn’t realize you were—well, what I mean is…”

George let him flounder with a certain grim joy. “Aye, I get what you mean,” he said at length. “You thought education wasn’t much in my line, I daresay. But you’re wrong there. I had great ambitions when I was a lad, and to get a university degree was one of ’em. But it didn’t come off—and perhaps it doesn’t matter so much when I look back on it now. I’ve done other things.”

“That’s what my father used to say. His ambition was always to be an ambassador in one of the important capitals, but things didn’t work out that way. In fact they worked out damned badly…You know he’s probably dead?”

George said gently: “Not probably. I don’t think anyone knows enough to say that.”

“I wish they did. I wish it was a certainty. I can’t bear to think of him being—”

George caught the note of hysteria and checked it by putting out his cup for more coffee. “Come now…I know it could be bad, but maybe it’s not as bad as that…Isn’t it possible to get word from him? Doesn’t anybody have an idea where he is?”

The whole room began to shake as if a train were rumbling deeply underground. A flake of plaster fell from the ceiling with almost dainty nonchalance. Charles answered: “My mother thinks he’s in Japan. I don’t know what evidence she has—if any. She’s—she’s a little strange—in some ways. She’s been writing to all kinds of people in the Government—making rather extraordinary suggestions for rescuing him. Quite extraordinary. I’m terribly sorry for her.” His voice trembled.

The underground train noise began again. George took his refilled cup of coffee. “Thanks,” he said. And then: “I’m sorry too, lad.”

Charles lit a cigarette. “Air-raid warden in Browdley, aren’t you?”

George nodded.

“Ever had a raid?”

“Not so far, thank goodness. But I know what they’re like. I was at Mulcaster in one of the worst.”

“I was in a few too.”

“So I understand.”

“Oh, I don’t mean those. I mean as one of the underdogs. A few hours after my mother landed there was a bad one on the docks there…She wasn’t scared. I was, though.” He smiled. “Not that I wouldn’t rather be here than in a shelter. It’s a bit of a bother for me to get down steps, and I hate strangers staring at my funny face.”

“It’s not funny to me.”

“That’s because you never saw it before. The really funny thing is that you should ever have seen it at all…Just coincidence, wasn’t it, that you noticed my name on the list at that hospital?”

“Aye—but when you come to think of it, there’s a lot of coincidence in the world.”

“That’s so…Boy meets Girl—always the perfect coincidence. My father meeting my mother…You meeting my mother. Where was it? In Browdley?”

George nodded.

“My father met her first in Vienna.”

“Aye.”

“You knew that?”

George nodded. After a pause he asked: “By the way…did you…did you tell her you’d met me?”

“Yes.”

“Did she mind?”

“She seemed a bit surprised, that’s all.” An explosion came, nearer than any before. Charles began to laugh.

George said: “Steady, lad.”

“Oh, I’m all right. I was just laughing at something she said about you when I happened to mention you were Mayor of Browdley. She said you were like a lion when you talked at public meetings, and behind that you were rather like a friendly old dog that nobody need be afraid of, but behind everything, else you had the secret strength of the dove.”

“The what?”

Charles repeated the phrase, after which they both laughed together. “Well, it’s the first time I ever heard of it,” George said. “And I still don’t know whether she meant that doves are strong or that I’m weak…Maybe she didn’t know herself when she said it.”

“Maybe. My father once said she said things not because they meant anything but to find out if they did mean anything.”

George made no comment.

“And sometimes her mind seems full of words waiting for other words to set them off like firecrackers.” The distant underground rumbling died away and all was silence. “Sounds as if it might be over…Where d’you think it was? Just tip and run on some little place—they do that, don’t they?” With difficulty the boy got up and walked to the window. “George—do you mind if I call you George?—George, I wish I could be of some use—some real use—in this blasted country…If only I could fly again—but that’s out, and so far I can’t seem to settle to what’s in. I guess millions of us are going to feel like that after the war.” He moved restlessly. “How about a stroll? I can, if I’m careful.”

“Not till the All Clear sounds. Take it easy.”

“All right, all right. I’ll bet you make a good warden. When are you going back to that town of yours?”

“Tomorrow night, I hope.”

“So soon?”

“I’ll have finished my work in London and I’ve got plenty waiting for me at home.”

“They can’t do without you?”

“They could, but they mightn’t want to.”

“I’ll bet you’re a good mayor, too. I’ll bet everything in that town runs like clockwork.”

“Oh, not so bad. I’d match it against any other place in England for being efficiently managed, if that’s what you mean.” George smiled to himself as he thought of the matter, then saw the other’s quizzical, slightly sardonic glance, and wondered if he were being baited. “Look here,” he continued, in some embarrassment. “I’m showing off too much…Aye, and I’d have been down that shelter too, but for showing off. Maybe that’s what kept us both here like a couple of fools.” Charles shook his head, so George added: “Or maybe not in your case.”

“No, George. Oh God, no. If you must have a reason, it’s simply that I don’t give a damn what happens. To me personally, that is. I’m scared, and yet I don’t care. When you’ve seen a lot of your friends killed you can’t think you’ve survived by any special virtue of your own. Then why the hell have you survived? And the next step in argument is why the hell should you go on surviving?”

George said quietly: “I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”

“It’s better than having you think it was bravery—or even bravado…Well, let’s discuss something pleasanter. That town of yours, if you like.”

“Provided it doesn’t bore you.”

“Not at all. I wouldn’t even mind seeing the place sometime.”

“Why don’t you then—sometime?”

It was half an hour before the All Clear sounded, and George was just in time to catch his train.

Of course they began to correspond again, and within a short time it happened that George was called to London for another official conference. This time it did not spread over a week end, and he was far too conscientious to pretend it did; but by routing his return journey, with much extra discomfort, through Cambridge, he was able to spend a whole afternoon with Charles. He was delighted to note an improvement in the boy’s physical condition; he could use his legs more easily, and since he had been recommended to do so for exercise, the two spent part of the time strolling slowly about the Backs, which at that time of the year were at their loveliest.

Less reassuring to George was Charles’s state of mind, which still seemed listless and rather cynical, especially at the outset. He still questioned the value of anything he was doing at Cambridge, and George was too tactful to reply that even if it had no value at all, it was as good a way of passing a difficult time as any other. “But you like it here, don’t you?” George asked, “Or would you rather be at home?”

“I haven’t a home,” Charles answered, so sharply that George did not probe the point. But then the boy smiled. “I’m sorry—you must think I’m very hard to please. Of course Cambridge is all right, and I’ve really nothing to complain of. Everybody’s perfectly charming to me. The dons don’t mind whether I work or not—the whole atmosphere is timeless. It’s a bit frightening at first. And that air of detachment people have here. One of the St. Jude’s dons—a little wizened fellow who’s the greatest living authority on something or other—began talking to me quite casually the other day about the Channing case—took it for granted that I didn’t mind everyone knowing that my grandfather served a long sentence in jail. And of course I don’t mind—why should I? After all, my father didn’t exactly distinguish himself either—ever heard of Kemalpan? Well, I won’t go into that…and damn it all, I don’t care—why should I care?”

“Aye, why should you?” George interrupted. “You haven’t done so badly yourself—so far.”

“So far and no further, though—that’s what it looks like.”

George looked straight into the boy’s eyes. “You were talking about one of the dons here.”

“Oh yes—the one who reminded me that my grandfather was a crook. But he must have studied the trail pretty closely from the way he talked. He said John Channing was quite a pioneer in his way, and that his scheme for reorganizing the cotton industry was very similar to the one sponsored by the Bank of England twenty years later. ‘Unfortunate that your grandfather was tempted to borrow money by printing too many stock certificates. He should have become Governor of the Bank, then he could have printed the money’.” Charles imitated the high-pitched voice of the don. “So utterly detached—it made things rather easy between us afterwards. And then there’s another fellow—a very famous scientist—who remarked pleasantly to a small crowd of us at a tea party—‘The Germans really do have the most God-awful luck—you almost feel sorry for them’—but nobody turned a hair or thought anything of it, because everyone knows he’s working day and night on some poison gas to kill the whole German nation if they start that game themselves.”

George answered: “You put your finger on a point, though, when you said ‘a very famous scientist.’ Anyone not so famous could get into trouble if he talked like that at the Marble Arch to a crowd.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He might be booted out of the Park by a few bus drivers. Probably nothing more…Because the English, after all, are a race of eccentrics. They don’t think it’s odd that people should be odd. And they always bear in mind the possibility that the lunatic view might, after all, be right. That’s what makes them tolerant of their enemies.”

George nodded. “Which is rather wise, because often it’s only from amongst your enemies that you can pick your friends.”

“Has that been your experience, George?”

“Aye—as a minority member on a town council where I’ve had more of my own way, I reckon, than most of the chaps on the other side with all their voting majority. But it’s taken time—and patience.”

“But what happens to the battle, George, if you win over all your enemies to help you fight it?”

“Why, I’ll tell you what happens—the battle’s over, and that’s what everybody’s after, isn’t it?”

“No, not exactly. What everybody wants is victory.”

“And everybody can’t get it. But you can make a lot of folks think they’ve got it. Remember Philip Snowden back in 1929—no, you’d be too young—anyhow, we all cheered like mad because he made France pay an extra million pounds of war debt! Think of it—one whole extra million pounds! The Fighting Yorkshireman! Wouldn’t have been easy to forecast how we’d all feel about the Fighting Frenchman a bit later!”

“Does it prove we shouldn’t have cheered?”

“Maybe not. Perhaps it proves that though it’s hard to get the victory you want, it’s even harder to want the victory you got ten years back.”

“Which is the devil of a way to look at things in the middle of a war.”

“Aye, I can see it might be.”

Charles walked on for a little way, then said thoughtfully: “You know, George, you have a rather Machiavellian mind.”

George laughed. “Twisty, you mean, eh? That’s what my opponents say. But I’ll give you one good tip in politics—keep straight from year to year, and you can twist as much as you find convenient from day to day. And as for the really big fellows—the great men of the world—if they keep straight from century to century, they can do their twisting on a yearly basis. Does that make any sense?”

Charles laughed. “What doesn’t make sense to me is that you didn’t try for Parliament. Or did you—ever?”

“Aye, a few times.”

“And no luck? How was that?”

George answered after a pause: “Hard to say. Perhaps just what you said—no luck.”

But the recollection was now without a pang, or at any rate the pang was smothered in much greater pleasure; for George had made a discovery—that he could talk to Charles as he had never been able to talk to anyone—even Wendover, with whom there had always been the prickly territory of dogma. But the boy, less schooled in dialectic than the priest, nevertheless had a clear, intricate mind—almost too intricate, almost ice-clear; and George argued with him joyfully every foot of the way from St. Jude’s to Queens and then back again, on that lovely May afternoon. All the time a curious happiness was growing in him—something he did not diagnose at first, but when he did, it came in the guise of a guess—that this must be what it felt like to have a grown-up son. During the last half-mile they increased pace, because Charles was in a hurry to get to his rooms. “That’s what your arguments do, George—make me forget the time…And I don’t want to keep Julie waiting.”

“Julie?”

“The…er…the nurse you met. Miss Petersham.”

George didn’t think it could matter much if she did wait for a few minutes, but he said merely: “And a very nice girl, too.”

“You thought so?”

“Aye.” George smiled and added: “We had quite a conversation on the way to her bus. She told me one thing you didn’t let out.”

To George’s immense astonishment Charles flushed deeply and began to stammer: “You mean—about—our—engagement?”

George swallowed hard. “Well, no—as a matter of fact, it was your Distinguished Flying Cross.”

“Oh, that…”

George could see that Charles regretted having given himself away. He held the youth’s arm as they began to climb the staircase. He said: “I’m sorry if they were both things you didn’t want me to know, but now I do know I’d like to offer my congratulations…and double ones.”

“Thanks…Of course there’s no secret about a D.F.C…The other thing is more or less—has to be—because—well, it depends on what sort of a recovery I make. I wouldn’t have her tie herself to an old crock. Or even a young one.”

He had left his room unlocked, and the girl was already there when they entered it. She greeted them both and immediately set about preparing the equipment for massage treatment.

Charles said abruptly: “He knows all about us, Julie.” She looked up, startled—to Charles, then to George, then to Charles again. “Did you tell him?”

“No…it sort of slipped out. But I don’t really mind.” Then Charles laughed and George shook hands with the girl and said how pleased he was. “I was praising you to him even before I knew,” he said. It was a happy moment. “And now I’d better leave if I’m going to catch my train…I’ll see you both again before long, I’m sure.”

He shook hands again, but the girl followed him to the door. “My turn to see you to the bus this time.”

“All right.”

Crossing the court towards the college entrance she said: “I’m glad you know. Charles thinks such a lot of you.”

“He does?”

Something in his voice made her laugh and ask: “Why, are you surprised?”

And George, who was so used to being liked yet could never somehow get over the surprise of having it happen to him again, replied truthfully: “In a way, I am, because it’s hard for a lad of his age to get along with an old chap like me. Yet we do get along.”

“I know. And you’re not old.”

“Older, then.”

“You can be a great help to him anyhow.”

“You too, lass. And far more than I can.”

“Well…he needs all the help we can both give him.”

“He’s getting better, though?”

“Oh yes—physically. It’s in other ways we can help him most.”

“I understand. There’s something he hasn’t got—yet. It’s a sort of reason to be alive. He doesn’t know why he wasn’t killed like so many others—he’s said that to me more than once. Does he talk like that to you?”

“Sometimes,” she answered.

They walked a little way in silence; then, as they reached the curb, she said: “Mr. Boswell, I’m going to be very frank and ask you something—as a friend of his …”

“Yes?”

“Will you…would you help him…even against his mother?”

A bus to the station came along. “The next one will do,” George muttered. And then, as they stepped back from the commotion of passengers getting on and off, he went on muttering: “Help him—against his mother—eh? Why, what’s wrong about his mother?”

She answered: “I only saw her once, when she came to visit him, and of course to her I was only a nurse. And I was only a nurse—then. But I could see that she wasn’t good for Charles. She got on his nerves. She wants to possess him—her whole attitude was like that—and I don’t think she’s the right person, and even if she were, I don’t think he’s the sort of person who ought to be possessed—by anyone. He should be free.” She continued after a pause: “Maybe you’re wondering about my motives in all this. Well, so far as I’m concerned he is free. I love him, that’s true, but I only agreed to the engagement because I thought it would help him—which it did, and still does. But when he’s better he may feel differently. I shan’t try to hold him. He’s too young, anyhow, to decide about a wife…I want him to be free. I don’t want him to be possessed.”

“And you think…his mother…?”

“That’s what she wants. I know it. I think he knows it too, but he can’t easily resist, for the time being—that is, till he’s recovered. She’s so strong.”

“Strong?”

“Yes, but there are two kinds of strong people. There’s the kind that make you feel strong yourself, and there’s the other kind that make you feel weak…She’s that kind. And he’s so sorry for her—naturally, on account of what’s happened. Everybody is—she’s a tragic figure…Which makes another reason. He’s had enough tragedy.”

George could sense the girl’s emotion from the way she suddenly stopped at the word “tragedy” and laughed, as if that were the only thing left to do. She said, after the laugh:

“Well, I’ve told you now. I don’t know what you can do, but you’re a friend of Charles and I took advantage of it. Don’t do anything at all if you’d rather not. I really haven’t any right to ask.”

Another bus was approaching along King’s Parade. George answered: “Nay, Julie, we’ve all a right to ask anything when it’s a matter of helping somebody.”

She smiled. “That’s a nice way to look at it…You’d better catch this bus or you’ll be late.”

He nodded. And then at the last minute: “I wonder…do you know who I am?”

She replied, in a rather puzzled voice: “Why yes—you’re the Mayor of Browdley, isn’t that it?”

“Aye,” he answered, with a slow smile. “And I’ll bet you’d never heard of Browdley till Charles told you. That’s how important it makes me.” He gripped her arm. “See you again soon, lass.” And then from the bus platform: “I’ll do what I can. I dunno how, but I will.”

Inside the bus and all the way to Browdley, by various slow-train connections that took all evening and half the night, George still did not know how he would keep his promise, though his determination to do so surged into the familiar dimensions of a crusade.

George might have a Machiavellian mind, as Charles had said, or he might have made a Jesuit, as Wendover had once said; but there were times when he knew that nothing is more effective than the direct approach. So after pondering long on the problem of how to help Charles, he decided that the first step must be to meet Livia himself and judge what help was needed; and to meet Livia the simplest method seemed to write and ask for a meeting.

She returned a characteristic brief note that he could visit her any time he wanted while she was at Castle Winslow.

It was a week before George could arrange to be away from Browdley long enough to make the trip, and once again there was the complicated uncomfortable journey by a series of trains. He was not surprised when no one met him at Castle Winslow station, and as it was fine weather and there were no cabs he walked the three miles from the station to the lodge gates, wearing down by sheer physical fatigue a mounting excitement over the fact that at last, after over twenty years, he was about to see Livia again. It was curious how something had lingered to produce that excitement still. He remembered the months immediately after he had known definitely that she would not return to him—how she had been on his mind night and day, so that he had scarcely been able to work; he remembered how he would wonder whether to avoid the Stoneclough road with all its memories, or to exorcise them deliberately by the self-torture of walking there; and how for weeks he would try the one method and then, in despair, the other. But for years now there had been nothing particular to remember or to try to forget.

At the lodge an old man hoeing potatoes in a patch of garden pointed further along the road when George spoke the name Mrs. Winslow. “She’s at the Dower House—that’s about a mile. Turn left at the signpost and then it’s the first place on the right behind the trees. There’s a lot of kids there—you can’t miss it.”

George walked on, puzzled at the reference to “a lot of kids,” and more so when he came, near enough to hear their shrill cries and screams. At length he glimpsed a rather large rambling house, well set back from the road behind tall poplars. In the space between the road and the building children of all ages from three or four to ten or eleven were romping as in a school playground.

George walked in and the children took no notice of him, but a buxom middle-aged woman who looked like a farmer’s wife changed her direction across the yard as he approached. He gave his name and repeated who it was he wanted to see.

“I don’t know whether she will,” answered the woman, doubtfully. “She won’t see anybody as a rule. You’re not from a newspaper, are you?”

George assured her he wasn’t.

He waited till a moment later the woman beckoned him from a doorway. As she led him through the cool interior she explained the presence of the children. They had been bombed out of their homes in some of the big industrial cities, and this was one of the rehabilitation centers set up by the Government for the recovery of special cases—“like shell shock,” some of them, she said. George knew all about it, for there was a similar center not far from Browdley, which he had visited. “And does Mrs. Winslow help in looking after them?” he asked, eager for some clue to what he might expect.

“Yes, she helps. She’s all right with the children.”

Presently the woman opened a door leading to a kind of veranda in which a few children were lying asleep or strangely awake in open cots. That strangeness was another thing George had seen before—the tense stare, the twitching muscles; these were the worst cases. And beyond them, arranging pots of geraniums along a ledge, was Livia. She wore a large shabby straw hat and a bright-colored dress.

At the instant of recognition he gasped with the sensation of something suddenly switched off inside him, but it was not pain any more; and as always when he had seen her afresh after an absence recognition dissolved into a curious feeling of never having seen her before, but of experiencing some primitive thrill that time had neither enhanced nor made stale; but it was no longer a thrill entirely of pleasure.

“Livia…” he said.

She looked up. “Hello, George.” She gave him an odd sort of smile. She had not changed much in appearance—at least, not as much as he had expected. She went on: “I didn’t think you’d be coming today when you didn’t get here earlier.”

“I walked from the station.”

“Oh, didn’t Howard send the car? I asked him to.”

“Howard?”

“My brother-in-law. He probably didn’t do it deliberately. I mean he did do it deliberately. I mean, he deliberately didn’t send the car. Just because I asked him. He doesn’t like me. None of them do—except these.” As her eyes ranged over the cots something came into her face that made George reflect how beautiful she still was, provided one had ever thought her beautiful at all.

“Well, it didn’t matter. I enjoyed the walk.”

“Come into the garden.”

He followed her. She had been taking cuttings from geraniums, planting them in pots for the veranda, and without a word of apology or excuse she now resumed the task, and with such concentration that George did not feel she was giving him more than a part of her attention. At any rate, there was to be no such dramatic or over-dramatic encounter as he had half expected, and for this at least he was thankful.

He stammered: “I hope you’re well, Livia—after—after all the—the trouble—you’ve had.”

“Oh, I’m all right. Poor Jeff, though. He’s in Japan, only nobody knows where. If only the Government would send me out I’d find him—surely it’s possible by submarine? They could put me ashore on a dark night—like Casement in Ireland. Don’t they do that sometimes? Do you know anyone at the Admiralty you could ask? I told Jeff I would…People thought I was against his work—and so I was—because I could see all this coming. In Hong Kong, I mean. The place stank of what was coming…And then he had to go back into it all like a fool. I’d never have left him no matter where he went, but they took him away. They took him away, George. I wish I was with him still, even in a prison camp. Where you are doesn’t really matter. The earth is all the same.” She began to pick up a handful of soil and sprinkle it into a pot. “I always liked planting things. Then you can let history slip through your fingers—like peasants do. That’s why I want Charlie to give up Cambridge and live on a farm.”

“To give up Cambridge?”

“Yes—what’s the good of it? We argued about it but he didn’t understand. Nobody ever does. They argue and argue but they don’t feel. It’s a little farm off the coast of Galway. I’d like him to settle down there and rest from thinking, arguing, books …all that…dead things that have caused all the upset…”

George watched her with curious intensity. She went on: “You don’t know what the world is all about, George. You never did. All your meetings and speeches—must have been thousands of them…what did they do? Or what did they stop?”

George did not reply. The heedless fever of her voice had not only been hard to keep pace with as a listener, but it had given him an inward tension that left him without power or will to reply. Presently she exclaimed: “Well? Don’t say you agree with me—that would be too amazing!”

He still couldn’t answer.

“Never mind,” she smiled, after another pause. “Tell me about Browdley.”

“Browdley’s all right,” he managed to say, in hardly more than a whisper.

“Not been bombed to bits yet?”

“Thank God, no.”

“Annie still with you?”

“Aye.”

“And Will Spivey?”

“Aye.”

“And there’s still the little garden I made?”

“It’s still there.” He added: “And Stoneclough too.”

She suddenly began to cry, but without any sound. The tears fell into the soil as she went on filling up the pot. “Oh George, what a long time ago. I hope you’ve been happy.”

“You have, haven’t you?”

She nodded.

“I’m glad.”

“Yes…it was a thing to try for, wasn’t it? Love, I mean—not happiness.” She stopped crying as abruptly as she had begun. “Poor Jeff…I wish I knew someone at the Admiralty—Howard knows them all but he won’t help. He doesn’t like me—Howard, I mean—Lord Winslow, that is. He thinks I ruined Jeff’s career. And now he thinks I want to ruin Charlie’s. Ruin…ruin…how can anyone make more than there is? I loved my father and then I loved my husband and now I love my son…anything wrong in all that? Or in these children…these have been ruined too, but not by love. I’ll tell you what I do about them—are you interested?”

George murmured assent and she began to chatter with eager animation. “They’re in need of almost everything when they come here—they have to be clothed, as a rule, as well as fed—I got some of the older ones to help in cooking and serving their own meals, also repairing their own clothes—that is, if they can—and of course we grow most of our own fruits and vegetables, so there’s always plenty of work in the garden. But the worst cases can’t do anything at all for a time—they just scream and cry and there’s nothing helps but when I talk to them, and I do that. I talk nonsense mostly. When bad things are on their minds that’s all they want to hear. Nothing serious. Not even politics.” She smiled. “Charlie told me you were Mayor of Browdley now?”

George said that was so.

“You should have come here wearing your Mayor’s chain. To make the children laugh. Always a good thing to make them laugh.”

George smiled back. “Aye, I might have.”

“You would, I know. You’re very kind. It’s just that you don’t think of things, isn’t it? Or rather you think of too many other things…”

After that she continued to work on the geraniums for a long interval—so long that George began to wonder whether she had forgotten he was there.

But presently, with the air of a duchess at a reception, she turned to him brimming over with graciousness. “It was so nice of you to come. And you’ll come again, won’t you?”

“Do you—do you really want me to—Livia?”

“Of course. Any time. That is, before we go to Ireland…”

“You’re…going to take Charles …to Ireland?”

“Yes, for the vacation. And if I can I shall persuade him not to go back next term—he only likes Cambridge because he’s got himself entangled with a girl there.”

“What?”

“Of course he doesn’t know I know, but it was plain as soon as I saw them together. Poor boy…rather pathetic to watch him pretending she was just a hospital nurse that came to give him massage treatment. Of course I don’t blame him. In his state he’d be an easy victim.”

“You mean…you…you think she’s…that sort of a girl?”

“I don’t care what sort she is, I’m going to put a stop to it.”

“Why?”

“Because I have other plans for my own son. It’s about time we got to know each other—what with all the separations of school, and then the war…and the peace isn’t going to be much better, for most people. Or are you optimistic about it? You probably are—you always were about most things…I won’t shake hands—mine are too dirty. But do come again—before we go…Good-bye…”

“Good-bye, Livia.”

“And you will come again?”

“Aye.” He walked to the door, then hesitated and said: “My advice would be to let that boy live his own life.”

“And marry the first girl he meets? That would be optimism.”

He wasn’t sure whether she meant that such a marriage would be optimism, or whether it would be optimistic of him to suppose that she would ever let Charles do such a thing; and whichever she meant, he wasn’t sure whether she were serious or merely ironic. Anyhow, he knew there was little use in continuing the argument, the more so as she had again resumed the potting of the plants. He said from the door, watching her: “I wish you were as good with grownups as you are with kids, Livia. You’re doing a fine job with these. Their parents’ll bless you for it.”

“Their parents are dead, George. Dead—dead.” Her eyes looked up, but her hands worked on. “Fancy you not knowing that.”

George also felt he ought to have known it—though after all, why? But Livia had always been like that, possessed of some curious power to impose guilt, or at least embarrassment; and so he stood there in the doorway, staring at her till he knew there was nothing else to say. Then he walked off.

The woman who looked like a farmer’s wife accosted him as he was leaving the house. “They telephoned from the Hall, sir,” she said, with new respect in her voice. “His Lordship wished to apologize about the car—it had a puncture on the way to the station. But he’s sent another car to take you back, and he also asked if you’d call and see him on the way.”

“Where would I find him?”

“The chauffeur will take you, sir.”

The Rolls-Royce swung into the last curve of the mile-long drive and pulled up outside the portico of Winslow Hall. It was an imposing structure, in Palladian style; and George’s reflection at any normal time would have been concerned with its possible use as state or municipal property; but this was not a normal time, and to be frank, he did not give Winslow Hall a thought as he entered it. He was thinking of Livia.

Even the library, when he was shown in, did not stir in him more than a glance of casual admiration, though this was the kind of room he had all his life dreamed of—immense, monastic, and book-lined.

“Nice of you to drop in, Boswell,” began Lord Winslow, getting up from an armchair.

The two men shook hands. The present Lord Winslow was a revised edition of the former one, but with all qualities a shade nearer the ordinary—thus a little plumper, rather less erudite, more of a dilettante, worldlier, colder beneath the surface.

George declined a drink, but began to take in his surroundings—the ornately carved mantelpiece, a smell of old leather bindings, the huge mullioned window through which a view of rolling parkland was superb.

“First time you’ve been in this part of the country perhaps?” And Winslow began to chatter about local beauty spots, while the butler brought sherry. “Good of you to take such an interest in Charles. He sends me glowing accounts of you.”

“It’s a pleasure to help the boy.”

“That’s how we all feel…” And then a rather awkward pause. “Cigar?”

“No thanks—I don’t smoke.”

Lord Winslow got up and closed a door that had swung open after the butler had not properly closed it. Coming back across the room he said: “So you’ve seen Livia?”

“Aye, I’ve just come from seeing her.”

“She’s a little off her head, as I daresay you must have noticed.”

George, despite his own liking for downright statements, was somewhat shocked by the coolness of the remark.

Winslow went on: “I suppose it’s what she went through in Hong Kong.”

“It might have been.”

“Though to tell you the truth, she was rather—er—unpredictable, even before that. …Of course it’s a problem to know quite what to do. Especially in regard to Charles.”

“Aye, that’s what matters.”

“I’m glad you think so. She’s dead set on taking him to live with her in Ireland, but in my opinion that would be a mistake, even if it were feasible, which it probably isn’t. I doubt if the Government would issue permits.”

“Permits?”

“You see it’s Southern Ireland. Neutral country. They wouldn’t be quite sure what she was up to in a place like that…I heard this in confidence from a chap in the Passport Office. They have everybody tabbed, you know.”

“But I don’t see—”

“Oh, nothing significant—nothing at all, I’m quite certain. She probably mixed with some of the wrong people somewhere—she’s really rather eccentric in her choice of friends. Personally I don’t think it ever meant a thing, though it certainly can’t have helped Jeff…any more than it would help Charles.” Suddenly Winslow rang the bell, and when the butler appeared turned to George with the remark: “I hope you’ll stay to dinner.” George was surprised by this on top of other surprises, and had hardly begun to stammer his regrets when Winslow interpreted them to the butler as an acceptance.

“It’s kind of you,” George said when the man had gone, “but I was thinking of my train. It leaves at six-fifteen.”

“Oh, there’s another one after that.”

“Are you sure? Because I looked it up and—”

“Positive…I’m so glad you’ll stay. I’d like to talk things over with you…I’m sure we both have the boy’s best interests at heart.”

So George found himself dining at Winslow Hall—just himself and Lord Winslow in the enormous paneled room that could have seated fifty with ease. The sunset slanted through the windows as they began the meal, but later, when the butler approached to draw the blackout curtains, Winslow left his seat and beckoned George to share with him a last look at the view. “You see how it is,” he said quietly. “I have no children. All that—and this—may belong to Charles eventually.” They went back to their places at the table. Winslow went on: “Oh yes, I know what you’re going to say—one can’t keep up these great estates any more—all this sort of thing’s done for, outmoded, a feudal anachronism, and so on. That’s the fashionable attitude, I’m aware. But fashionable things are usually wrong—or half wrong. All kinds of Englishmen are busy nowadays explaining to other countries how England has changed, is changing, and will change after the war. No doubt it goes down very well—especially with Americans. But between you and me England may not change as much as some people expect. And the kind of people who talk most about change don’t seem to have changed much themselves—at least not to my somewhat jaundiced scrutiny.”

“Aye,” answered George. “You might be right about that. And there’s certainly one thing about England that won’t change—and hasn’t changed.”

“What’s that?”

“Ninety-five per cent of us are working folks and have been for a thousand years.”

A slight flush came into Winslow’s face. He poured himself an extra brandy. “True, of course—as well as a useful demagogue statistic…It only remains now for you to assure me that it’s the rich what gets the pleasure, it’s the poor what gets the—”

“Nay, I don’t say that. There hasn’t been much pleasure for your brother or your nephew these past few years—rich or not. And there isn’t going to be much for them—or for any of us, maybe—in the years ahead…That’s why I’d like you to think twice about what you want Charles to do when he grows up.” And George, now in a proper stride, became talkative for the first time since his arrival. “I’m very fond of the boy. He’s taught me a bit since I knew him and maybe I’ve taught him a bit too. Don’t saddle him with all this stuff.

When I was a lad the rich had all of what were called advantages, but there’s been a difference lately. It isn’t that there’s going to be a bloody revolution to take all this away, but are these things going to go on being such advantages? That’s what folks are beginning to wonder, and once they start wondering, the bottom’s out of the market. Take the Right School and the Right Accent, for instance. You’ve got the right ones, I’ve got the wrong ones, but suppose someday we all wake up and find the whole thing doesn’t matter?”

“Of course. I’d be all for it. But what if some of your extremist fellows merely reverse the positions and call your accent right and mine wrong—what then?”

George gave a faint grin. “Aye, that would be a pity. But I daresay some of the chaps on your side are pretty good mimics. Our side always produced a few.”

Winslow’s flush deepened. “Maybe it will come to that. Lip-service to Demos could hardly be more literal.”

George had to think that one out. Then he answered: “I don’t know what you mean by Demos. I don’t care for words like that. I don’t like to hear people called ‘the masses’ or ‘the proletariat’ or even ‘the average man.’ Take my own town of Browdley. There’s not an average man in the place—they’re all individuals—different, separate, with their own personal problems same as we all have. And we don’t know any Demos either. We’ve never seen the animal.”

Winslow smiled coolly. “I think we’re straying rather far from the point—if there ever was a point…You obviously think there’s no future in inheriting a title, a place like this, a seat in the House of Lords—and all the responsibilities as well as privileges it entails?”

George answered: “I never like to say what there’s a future in. Sounds too much like a tip on the stock market…It’s what’s in the future that matters more. I can’t forecast that, nor can anybody. But I’ve often thought it’s as if we’re all in a train going somewhere. Some people don’t like traveling, and just grumble about having to. And others think that trains go backwards or that you can push a train by leaning on a door handle. And quite a lot of folks seem to think that miracles can happen to a train. But it really doesn’t matter what you think unless it’s based on what you can see out of the window. The train’s going to get you somewhere, wherever that is—and the one place it certainly won’t be is the place you started from.”

“Sounds very wise, Boswell. But whenever I hear a man enunciating a philosophy, I always ask him how has he handled his own life by its aid? Has he been a success or a failure? Has he been right when other men have been wrong? Has he made many mistakes?…Or is all that too personal?”

“Aye, it’s personal, but I don’t mind answering it. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, and I’ve often been wrong. And I’ve been a failure if you measure by what I once had ambitions about.”

Winslow helped himself to more brandy. “Very honest of you to admit it…and if I might be personal again and suggest a reason—not perhaps the only reason, but a reason…might it not be the same one as in the case of my unfortunate brother?”

George was silent and Winslow went on, after waiting for some answer: “To put it bluntly…Livia.”

George pushed his chair back from the table. “I think we’ve discussed her enough,” he said gruffly. “Perhaps I ought to be thinking of my train.”

“Yes, of course.” Winslow rang the bell again and told the butler: “Mr. Boswell will be catching the nine-forty. Will you telephone the station master?”

“Very good, Your Lordship.”

“Why do you have to worry the stationmaster about me?” George asked. “I can find a seat, or if I can’t, it doesn’t matter.”

Winslow smiled. “My dear chap, if I didn’t telephone, you wouldn’t even find a train. The nine-forty’s fast from Bristol to London unless I have it stopped for you.”

“You mean you can stop an express at that little local station just to pick up one passenger? And in wartime?”

“Certainly—but it isn’t done by favor. It’s a legal right dating back to the time the railway was built a hundred years ago. My great-great-grandfather wouldn’t sell land to the company except on that condition—in perpetuity. Damned thoughtful of him, I must say.”

Soon afterwards Lord Winslow shook hands most cordially with George, and the latter was driven to Castle Winslow station in the Rolls-Royce. The station was normally closed at that time of night, but the stationmaster had opened it for the occasion and personally escorted him along the deserted platform.

“First-class, sir?”

“No, third,” George answered grimly.

After that they conversed till the train came in. The station-master agreed that England was changing, but he also thought he never remembered farmers so prosperous or farmland selling at so high a price.

“How about taxes?” George asked. “I suppose the big estates are pretty hard hit?”

“Oh, they’re all right if they did what Lord Winslow did. He made himself into a company years ago. He’s a smart chap.”

“Aye…Knows how to keep up with the old and play around with the new, is that it?”

But the stationmaster was cautious. “He’s smart,” he repeated. “Travels third like yourself, as often as not…Because the firsts are just as crowded and he don’t see why he should pay extra for nothing. You can’t blame him, can you?”

George agreed that you could not.

But on the way to London the stopping of the express became a symbol—and a very handy one—of the kind of thing he found himself rather passionately against. And it was equally handy as a symbol of the kind of thing he felt Charles would be unlucky to inherit.

The university term was nearly over, and soon Charles would have to decide where to go for the vacation. His mother, he told George, wanted him to spend it with her in Ireland (she had been pulling wires, as only she knew how, to get the necessary permits); but Uncle Howard had asked him to Winslow Hall; and Julie, of course, though she would never suggest it, naturally hoped he would stay in Cambridge, like many other undergraduates in wartime. As for Charles himself, he didn’t exactly know what he wanted to do. He was so damned sorry for his mother and anxious to give her a good time—especially after the nice letter she had written him about George’s visit. So had Uncle Howard. In fact Charles showed George the two letters, and George, reading between the lines, deduced in both writers a desire to enlist him as an ally against the other. He did not, however, worry the boy with this interpretation, but kept it filed, as it were, in that department of his mind where the shrewder things took place.

Of course what Charles would really like best, he admitted, was to stay where he could see Julie, at least for part of the vacation. The only objection was that this, he felt sure, would either bring his mother to Cambridge forthwith (in which case he couldn’t see Julie at all), or else she would guess there was some girl in the case, and make a scene about it.

“What makes you think she’d do that?” George asked.

“Oh, just a few odd hints in letters and so on. And once in an air-raid shelter just after she landed. Some girl was a bit scared, and as I was too, we talked together till the raid was over. Mother of course couldn’t understand it.”

“That you talked—or that you were scared?”

“Both…Anyhow I can’t stand scenes, and I know if she were to learn about Julie she’d make another one.”

“But you can’t keep it a secret indefinitely.”

“I’ll let her know when I know for certain I’m going to get all right. Because, as I told you, I wouldn’t marry at all other-wise.”

“You’ll get all right.”

“That’s what everybody says, but of course saying so is part of the treatment. You can’t really believe them—least of all doctors—in a matter like that.”

“Well, what do you think? Don’t you believe you’re going to get all right?”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes not. So many things change my mind about it. Trivial—ridiculous things…Sometimes I stop in front of a lamppost as if the future of the world depended on which side I walk round. Of course you may say it does depend on that. I mean, if you believe in predestination, every little thing must be charted out in advance, so that if it were possible for even a caterpillar to walk just once on the wrong side of a lamppost, then the whole cosmic blueprint goes to pot. On the other hand, you can say that my hesitation in front of the lamppost was itself predestined, so that—”

“That’s enough,” George interrupted. “You’re much too clever for me. And if that’s what you get from studying philosophy at a university—”

“No, George. That’s what I got from piloting a bomber over Germany. You have to think of something then. Something fearful and logical, like predestination, or else mystic and mathematical, like the square root of minus one.” The boy’s eyes were streaked now with flashes of wildness. “Anyway, how did we get on to all this?”

“I was saying you’re going to get better—and meaning it too. That is, if you tackle the future the right way.”

“I know. And avoid scenes. Scenes don’t help. And when I feel better enough to tell my mother about Julie there’ll be a scene. And then I’ll feel worse again…Sort of a vicious circle, isn’t it?”

George nodded. “All the same, though, I wouldn’t wait too long.”

“You mean, before I tell her?”

“Nay, don’t bother your head about that. I mean, before you marry the girl.”

A strained smile came over Charles’s face. “Where’s the hurry?” he asked, with sudden excitement. “What makes you give me that advice?”

George answered: “Because it seems to me there’s another vicious circle knocking around. You say you won’t marry till you know for certain you’re going to get all right, but perhaps marriage is one of the things that would help to make you certain.”

Charles laughed. “I see! Dr. Boswell’s advice to those about to get married—Do! Advice based on his own experience of long, happy, and fruitful wedlock!” After a wilder outburst of hilarity, the laughter drained suddenly from the boy’s face and a scared look took its place. He clutched frantically at George’s arm. “Oh God, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean that…I never thought…I forgot for the moment…George…Oh George, please forgive me…” His voice and body began to shake convulsively.

It was the first time George had seen the kind of thing Julie had told him about, and it shocked him immeasurably. He put his arms round the boy and fought the enemy with a silent, secret strength of his own. There was not much to say. He kept saying: “Steady, lad…it’s all right…all right…”

“George, I didn’t mean…I swear I didn’t mean anything personal—”

“Aye, I know you didn’t. And what if you did, for that matter? To blazes with everything except you getting well again…Quiet down a bit more, lad, and then let’s take a walk…”

All this took place during another of George’s visits to one of those fairly frequent conferences that had often been a nuisance in the past, but which now he looked forward to with an excitement entirely unshared by his colleagues. Nobody had at times been more severe than he in castigating the week-end hiatus in official circles, but now on a Saturday morning in some Whitehall government office he found himself almost gleeful over slow-moving procedure, actually hoping in his heart for an adjournment till Monday.

This had happened, once more, so he was enjoying the intervening day with a clear conscience. And another item of good fortune was that Charles could now walk short distances, with only one stick, and relish the exercise. Perhaps it was this that made him seem more boyish, even school boyish on occasions; and for the first time George ceased to be startled when he reflected that Charles was only in his twenty-second year.

But other startling ideas filled the gap, and one of them was unique because it came to George in—of all places—a public house.

Charles had mentioned this pub as being a rather pleasant place within easy walking distance in the country, and after an evening meal George let him lead the way there. The scene of a few hours earlier seemed to have drawn them closer together, though in a way that neither could have expressed or would have wished to talk about; but George, at least, was aware of it and satisfied. It gave an edge to his enjoyment of the full moon over the fields, and the scents of crops and flowers that lay heavy on the warm air. Familiar as he was with the grimmer landscape of the north, he thought he had never known anything so richly serene as those rural outskirts of the university town—a quality enhanced, somehow, by the counterpoint of events overhead. For while they walked the hum and throbbing never ceased, sometimes increasing to a roar as planes in formation flew directly above. The R.A.F. was evidently out in force, heading for the Continent, and George guessed and was a little apprehensive of Charles’s mood as he heard and was perhaps reminded.

For that reason George tried to keep the conversation on trivialities. During the walk they overtook several other pedestrians, which George commented must make a red-letter event in Charles’s post-hospital experience, even though the slower movers were only old bent men plodding along at a mile an hour. Charles dryly rejoined that there was a good deal of rheumatism locally, which was a peculiar thing in an otherwise healthy district.

“Maybe not so peculiar,” George countered, getting onto one of his favorite topics. “Give people decent houses, in town or country, and don’t think that roses round the door make up for bad drains and damp walls.”

Charles laughed. “Not bad, George. You might win a Parliamentary election yet. Castle Winslow would give you a chance, anyway. It’s a family constituency—with the Winslow influence you’d probably romp home. Unfortunately the old boy who represents it now may hang on for another twenty years.”

George laughed also, and in the same mood. “Pity. But in the meantime there might be a chance for you—in Browdley. Then I could demonstrate a bit of my influence.”

They both went on with the joke till the passage of planes in even greater numbers changed the subject back to an earlier one. “I once tried to write a poem,” Charles said, “about the contrast between those old chaps and the boys upstairs. I thought of it actually while I was flying back from Germany after a raid. You have to think of something then, when your nerves are all on edge. I can’t remember more than one of the verses—I think it went—

Each with a goal his own—

Beginner’s or Ender’s luck—

Four hundred miles to Cologne,

Two to the Dog and Duck….

It’s less than two from where we are now, but some of those veterans wouldn’t miss their nightly pint if it were twice that…By the way, though, you don’t drink?”

“No, but I’ll swill lemonade while you have all the beer you want.”

“All I can get, you mean. Don’t be so bloody optimistic.” Presently they reached the pub and pushed into the already crowded bar, where Charles received a few cordial but quiet greetings from people whom he had presumably met there before. A few air crews from the near-by station were taking their drinks, and others were having a dart game, but perhaps half the crowd were civilians, mostly old farm laborers with tanned and wrinkled faces. The changing world met here with the less changing earth, tilled throughout the ages by men who had worked heedless amidst clashes of knights in armor, and were now just as heedless up to the very edge of runways and bomb craters. Heedless? But the word failed to express the rueful sagacity, the merry ignorance, that flourished nightly in the bar parlor of the Dog and Duck. Like all genuine English country pubs, it was always a cheerful but rarely a boisterous and never a Bacchanalian place—it was a microcosm of that England in which so many things are not done, including the act of wondering too truculently why they are not. George, even with his small personal knowledge of pubs, recognized at once the same spirit that usually obtained at Council meetings and Whitehall conferences, and thus he felt immediately at home. And in that heart-warming mood, while he leaned over his glass of lemonade and Charles over his tankard, George’s startling idea came to him for the second time, but really startlingly now because, in a fantastic way, he half meant it. “Why don’t you stand for Browdley at the next election?”

Charles looked puzzled. “You mean—for Parliament?”

“Aye. It’s an idea.”

“No, it’s a joke, George, and not a very good one.”

“Of course there won’t be an election till after the war—so far as one can foresee. But there might be worse things that a chap like you could do when the time comes.”

Charles smiled and drank deep. “And better things, I hope.”

“Listen…When I visited you in that hospital at Mulcaster you said something I hope you remember. You said you blamed my generation for not making a proper peace after the last war. And I asked you then if you weren’t afraid that the kids now in their prams won’t grow up to blame your generation for the same thing…Well, lad, they will—unless you do something about it.”

“Maybe—but not in politics.”

“How else?”

“I don’t know, George—don’t ask me. I can’t fly any more, or I might drop a few bombs somewhere. But I do know I couldn’t face the political racket. Nobody would ever vote for me, anyway—I’m not the type that goes around kissing babies and promising everything to everybody. I’d say the wrong thing, and probably think it too—because, to be frank, I’ve never seen an election without feeling that the whole machinery of it is a bit ridiculous—”

“And it is. But it’s the machinery we’ve got, and we’d better use it while we’ve got it.”

“Oh certainly—but leave it to the right man. You’re probably the right man for Browdley—you were born there, and you know the people. I wouldn’t understand them—factory workers and miners—not because I’m a snob, but because I’ve never lived in that sort of a place.”

“They’d understand you, that’s the main thing. They’d understand you because they’re doing a job same as you’ve done a job, and some of them are risking lives and health at it same as you’ve risked yours. You wouldn’t be talking to them except as equals. Besides, it might be years off yet—there’s plenty of time.”

“You really are a most persistent fellow, George. Anyone would think it was something I’d agreed to.”

George laughed. “Aye, we’ll not worry about it. Twenty-one’s full young.” And then he laughed again as he added: “Though William Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-four. You won’t beat that.”

But a dark look came into Charles’s face. “There’s one final reason, George, even if there weren’t any other. You’ve heard me spout my opinions, and you’re taking it for granted I’d think it worth while to convert others to them. But I’m not sure that I would, even if I could. Don’t think me cynical—it’s merely that I’m not sentimental. As I’ve found the world, so far, it’s a pretty lousy place, especially when you get a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes. Most people don’t—and perhaps they’re better off. That’s why I wouldn’t make a good vote-catcher. He has to be such a bloody optimist—like you. Even if he warns of doom he has to promise that if only you’ll elect him he’ll prevent it. Frankly, I don’t kid myself to that extent and I don’t think I’d find it easy to kid Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

“Aye, things are bad enough, I’ll admit that.” George drank the rest of his lemonade in slow gulps. “But as for what goes on behind the scenes, that’s just what gives me hope. Go behind the scenes of everyday life and see the courage and decency most folks have—see the raw material we’ve got to work on, if only those who have the brains for the job can keep faith in it.”

“I know what you’re driving at, George. Just a simple little job of rebuilding the world.”

“Ah now, that is cynical. Of course it’s not simple—was it simple to invent a plane? It’s appallingly difficult and complicated—and that’s where chaps like you come in. It’ll need all your brains and education, but it’ll also need something I’ve got—and that’s a bit of faith in Tom, Dick, and Harry.” George then added softly, administering the gentle shock with which he had wheedled so much of his own way in his time: “Since you once said you’d like to, why don’t you come to Browdley when term ends and have a look at the place?”

“You mean—visit Browdley?”

“Aye, why not? Or were you only joking when you said you’d like to?”

“No, I wasn’t joking—matter of fact I wouldn’t mind coming, only—” He hesitated and then added: “I hate disappointing so many other people.”

“But you can’t please ’em all, no matter what you do. Why not please yourself for a change? And of course you needn’t stay longer than you want…”

George felt very happy as he sat in the London train that night. Thinking back upon the long conversation at the Dog and Duck he could not exactly remember when the idea of taking Charles to Browdley had first occurred to him, but he knew that as soon as it had, there had come to him the feeling of instant rightness. It was like trying a new key in a strange lock and knowing, even before the turn, that somehow it would work. And it had all happened, as so many things happened in George’s life, because he got talking and couldn’t stop. He hadn’t, of course, been really serious about Charles embarking on a political career. It was much too soon to be serious about any kind of career for a youth who was still so far from mental and physical health. But that led straight to the point; for part of the cure lay in being serious about something. And suddenly George saw beyond the merely personal relationship between them; he saw the boy’s problem as that of every boy returned from battle with body, mind, and spirit scarred by experience; and he knew that the problem must be tackled better than the last time, when millions who had faced the realities of war were too embittered, or too apathetic, or (like George himself) too easy-optimistic to face those of peace. But Charles was not optimistic enough; and that, for George, made the task of rehabilitation even more congenial. So if he could interest him in Browdley, why not? And if, in due course, interest should deepen into faith…faith in the things George had faith in …?

George’s heart was already warm to the prospect, but his head cautioned him against that same overoptimism while optimism gave him answer that the boy himself would check that. He’s got a better mind than I have, George reflected humbly; he’ll be good for me, too; he’ll not stand any of my nonsense…And then optimism soared ridiculously as George daydreamed them both as co-workers for Browdley—Mayor and Member—what a team! His eyes filled as he thought of it…highly unlikely, of course, but not quite impossible…and what more need a dream be?

Before taking the train he had mentioned to Julie his plan to have Charles at Browdley. He had only a few moments with the girl because she was going on night duty; they had met by appointment in the market square where she had to change buses. She had told him then, since her arriving bus brought up the subject, that she lived in a suburb of the town and that her father was a schoolmaster there. George rode with her on another bus to the big hospital not far from the railway station, and perhaps because they found a seat on the top deck he was reminded of other bus rides, so many of them, years before, with Livia. And the reminder, of course, emphasized the difference of everything else, for no one in the world, he was sure, could be less like Livia than Julie was…

She was delighted with his idea. “Oh, I’m so glad, Mr. Boswell. It’ll be a real holiday for him.”

“Not much of a holiday resort, Browdley, but I’ll do my best to give him a good time.”

“He’ll be with you, that’s the main thing, because I’ve noticed how good for him you are.”

“You’ll be better, though, one of these days.”

“I hope so.” And then she added: “By the way, I know who you are now. He told me.”

“He did. That’s fine. Now we none of us have any secrets from one another.”

And suddenly again the same impulse he had had with Charles made him add: “Why don’t you marry him soon?”

She seemed startled by a word rather than by the question. “Soon?…You mean—before he—before he gets better?”

“Aye, why not? Don’t you want to?”

“I’d love to, but…in a way it would be taking an advantage. So many men in hospitals fall in love with their nurses—think they’ve fallen in love, anyhow. It often makes part of the cure, so the nurses don’t mind. But a sensible nurse doesn’t take it too seriously, even if she falls in love herself. That’s why I don’t consider our engagement as binding—not on Charles, anyway. When he gets better he may prefer someone else.”

“And if he prefers someone else he may not get better. If I were you I’d take that seriously.”

“You mean…”

“Aye, but think it over first. You’re pretty right and reasonable about most things, I’d say.”

That was all they had time for, but he was left with a comfortable reassurance that to be right and reasonable was not always to be prim and cold; and this, for him personally, was like a pat on the back from the Almighty.

So he enjoyed his thoughts during the journey back to Browdley.

A couple of weeks later, as he left a Council meeting, the Town Hall porter handed him a wire that read: HAVE JUST

TAKEN YOUR ADVICE. HONEYMOON AT SCARBOROUGH. THEN MAY WE BOTH ACCEPT YOUR INVITATION TO THE MAYOR’S NEST? JULIE AND CHARLES,

George stood for a few seconds in the Town Hall lobby, holding the wire under the dim lamp; then his face broke suddenly into a wide slow smile that made Tom Roberts grin back with cheerful impudence. “Backed a winner, Mr. Mayor?” he quipped—the joke of that being the Mayor’s well-known antipathy to betting of all kinds.

“Nay, Tom…two winners!” George answered, surprisingly, as he strode down the Town Hall steps into Shawgate.

On his way to Browdley station to meet them, he could not help reflecting what an extraordinary thing it really was that he should be welcoming Livia’s son to his home.

He had spent the evening with Wendover, being far too excited to settle to any solitary work; and towards midnight, for a change and because of the bright moon, he chose the slightly longer route through the wasteland on the fringe of the town, where factories met fields and—less metaphorically—lovers met each other. And he thought of that evening, so many years before, yet so well remembered, when he had passed that way in the other direction, having taken old Lord Winslow to his train after the unforgettable interview. And now it was that man’s grandson and a young wife whom he was meeting—as happily as if he himself were young again and happy about most things.

In fact he was momentarily so excited that when the train drew in and they had all exchanged the first greetings, he was glad that a heavy suitcase provided something immediate and practical to attend to—there being neither cabs nor luggage delivery till next morning. Meanwhile Charles was smiling and assuring George that he didn’t in the least object to a walk on such a night, if it wasn’t too far. “Not far at all,” George answered, chiefly for something to say to the stationmaster as they passed the exit. “Except when I’m hurrying for the nine-five to Mulcaster—eh, Ted?”

They crossed the cobbled station yard and turned into the huddle of streets. A few other walkers passed or overtook them, even so late—men on their way to night-working factories, policemen, air wardens. George pointed out the stationer’s shop in Shawgate that had formerly been his Uncle Joe’s, and which still, after two changes of ownership, displayed the same mixture of leather-bound ledgers, morocco editions of the standard poets, Bibles, cookery books, and the works of Miss Florence Barclay. But as a concession to the day and age, and with that ironic innocence of which the English are so capable because they are unaware of it, a single modern edition occupied pride of place in the very center of the window—Mein Kampf in an unexpurgated translation. George did not point this out, because he saw in it nothing remarkable; but he did draw attention to the Mayor’s office in the Town Hall with its rather florid stained-glass windows that an earlier generation had considered stylish. He kept up a running gossip, also, about Browdley people whom Charles and Julie would probably meet in due course. “The Vicar—he’ll amuse you. He’s writing a book about Roman numerals—has a theory about them—been busy on it for years—he’s eighty-eight, I think…There’s a younger chap of seventy-odd—Catholic priest—Wendover, by name—my best friend—you’ll like him…That’s the new municipal swimming bath—just finished before the war began. Like a fool I said I’d make the first dive when it was opened—used to be quite a swimmer when I was a lad—but I hadn’t done any for years and I made a belly-flop that splashed all the other Councillors and their wives…it was the laugh of the place the day after…Here’s the real business center—the banks. Woolworth’s, Lipton’s. And down that street is where I managed to enter the world—the house isn’t there any more, and that’s another thing I managed.”

Julie said: “You’d make a good guide, Mr. Boswell. Too bad there aren’t any Cook’s tours to places like this.”

“Aye, it is too bad. Some of the London folks ought to come here once in a lifetime. They’d learn more than they would on the French Riviera—and about their own country at that…And don’t you go on calling me Mr. Boswell. Nobody here does.”

Presently Charles remarked: “And you’ve never had a raid?”

“So far, not a solitary bomb. They say you shouldn’t even whisper such a thing—but I’m not superstitious. All I sometimes wish is that I could clear everybody out of the town and organize my own raid. There’s still a few thousand folks living in houses that oughtn’t to exist, and it’ll take me ten years to finish ’em off—the houses, I mean—even when peace comes.”

George was silent again, and for a rather odd reason; at the very utterance of the phrase “when peace comes” he had been swept by a sudden illusion that peace had come, and that Browdley under the moonlit sky was the most peaceful spot, just then, on earth.

“Now you’ll have to let me make you some coffee,” he said, as they turned the corner from Shawgate into Market Street. “Because here we are—this is the old Guardian office—my printing works—this is where I live. You’ve seen most of the sights already—it’s only a small town.”

“And. an honest one too,” Charles commented, as George opened the front door by merely turning the handle. “You live alone?”

“There’s Annie comes in every day to clean up a bit. She’s an old woman now, but she’ll be glad to see you because—” He was on the point of saying “because she knows who you are but he changed it at the last moment to “because she’s got three nephews in the R.A.F.” Which was true.

While George was ushering them inside, somebody passed along the pavement and called out the usual welcome. “’Owdo, George. Back again?”

“Howdo, John. Aye, I’m back.”

It was the fourth or fifth exchange of similar greetings on their way from the station. Charles laughed and commented that George certainly seemed to be well known. George laughed also and said Aye, he wasn’t exactly a stranger in those parts. The triteness of the remarks masked the tension they both felt as they entered the little house. George led the way along the hall and into his study, where he switched on a light after verifying that the curtains were drawn. Usually, on bringing anyone there for the first time, he watched for some sign of amazement at the shelves of books, but now he actually forgot to do so and was recalled from far different thoughts when Charles exclaimed: “Quite a library.”

George then made his familiar boast that it was the best private collection in Browdley. But he added: “Not that I’d say the competition’s been very keen.” And then he heard himself launching into what now seemed just a ruefully amusing anecdote. “You know what your mother did once when I was away? Took off a lot of the paper covers and burned ’em…Thought she was making the place tidy for me…My, I lost my temper—and that’s a thing I don’t often do…Well, how about some coffee? Come in the kitchen—it’s easier…”

George talked about the war and the postwar world; the news in the newspapers was very encouraging, and he found it hard as ever not to be optimistic, though after a lifetime of experience he could keep his optimism under wry control. He still had ambitions, dreams, plans, and hopes; and if a small portion of them came to anything, well, that was as much as a reasonable man could expect, but it was also as little as a patient man would accept. “It’s no good your people asking for the moon,” a testy political opponent had said at the last Council meeting; to which he had replied: “Nay, Tom—it’s the sun they’re asking for—the moon’s what I’ve promised ’em when the war’s over. And if you fellers have any sense ye’ll settle for that as a fair compromise.”

So now, by an easy transition, his talk with Charles led back to Browdley again—its industries, homes, and people. “You’ll know what I mean tomorrow when you look over the place. The war seems to have solved our chief local problems—bad trade and unemployment—though it’s only a fake solution, we’ll have our troubles again later. But for the time being we’re better off, in some ways, than we used to be—everybody’s got money, the Council has a budget surplus, and as for jobs—why we’re even short of men to fill ’em.”

“I suppose there’s a good deal of female employment then?”

George began to laugh. “You mean, do the women work? Of course they do…And I’m laughing same as when I read in some of those shiny-paper fashion magazines what a marvelous thing’s happening in England because of the war—the women are actually not idling any more! But the women of Browdley never have idled. They’ve worked in their homes and in factories and in both together ever since the town began. Even when the men had nothing to do, the women had plenty. So don’t you go praising ’em in your speeches for the novelty of getting their hands soiled!”

“You’re still dreaming, George. I shan’t make any speeches.”

“Aye, I forgot…I was just the same when I was your age—I could talk, but I couldn’t make a speech. And even when I could I hated it at first…But you’re not such a fool as to do anything you hate.”

“Who’s speaking now, George—the lion, the dog, or the dove?”

The remark put them in a mood in which Julie told them to go back to the study and talk while she washed up in the kitchen; she insisted on this with such emphasis that George wondered if she were deliberately contriving a chance for him to talk to Charles alone. He was not sorry to have that chance, anyway. The boy entered the study first and was drawing the curtains aside before George could press the switch. The sudden flood of moonlight crisscrossed the rows of books; it lay on his desk, on the litter of papers and Council reports; full of gleams and shadows, it caught the glass in front of photographs on the mantelpiece.

“Just wondered what sort of view you had, George.”

“Not much, I’m afraid. That’s the wall of the bus garage.”

“But the garden…Come over here!”

George crossed the room, and as he approached the window, which was partly open, the scent of summer flowers came to him as he never remembered it before—geraniums, roses, carnations, stocks, mignonette.

“Aye, it’s nice this time of the year. I’m not much of a gardener myself, but Annie likes it and does a bit now and again…Livia’s garden, we still call it—used to be a piece of waste ground till she took it in hand.”

At the word, uttered like a spell between them, Charles stirred uneasily. “Livia,” he muttered. “My father used to call her Livy…The lost books of Livy, he used to say, what wouldn’t I give to look into them!” He breathed deeply into the scented air. “So she planted the garden and burned your book covers? Anything else?”

George did not speak.

Charles went on: “My father used to say she made you into a nerve of her own body and let you do the aching instead of her…unless you were ill or a child, and then she took all the aches to herself and rocked you to sleep.” He sat on the arm of a chair, fidgeting nervously with his cigarette case. “But that wouldn’t suit me. I’m not a child, and I don’t expect always to be ill.”

“You won’t be. You’ll get better.”

“I want to work, too.”

“You will.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

“Watch the light if you’re not going to pull the curtains.”

“Good old warden. The moon’s so bright you could turn on all the street lamps.” He suddenly pointed to a photograph on the mantelpiece. “That her?”

“Aye.”

“And the baby?”

“He died.”

“She was young then.”

“Aye. Nearly a quarter of a century ago.”

“You make it sound a long time.”

“It has been a long time.”

“I feel so damned sorry for her, George. My uncle never liked her. Nobody seems to like her much, for that matter—not how she is now. And the chances are my father won’t come back. She thinks he will, but to me it doesn’t seem probable.”

George exclaimed: “By God, though, if she thinks he will, he may. In fact he’d almost better!”

Charles stared for a moment, then slowly smiled. “Yes, I know. She gets her own way as a rule. That’s why, when she learns about Julie and me—”

“You haven’t told her yet?”

“Not yet. Do you think I should?”

George thought a moment, then said: “Aye, might as well get it over.”

“I will then. I’ll write her tomorrow. Your advice has been pretty good so far.”

“You mean you’re happy?”

Charles nodded profoundly.

“That’s good. I can see Julie is too. And don’t feel you ought to be looking after your mother. It’s she who feels she ought to be looking after you…but you’re against that, and so am I.”

“I know. And she doesn’t really need me, she only needs me to need her.”

“That’s not a bad way of putting it.”

“Because she’s got a sort of secret strength to face things—and less fear than anyone I ever met—man or woman. I often used to think when I was sweating it out over Berlin—God, I wish I had guts of iron like hers…It was crazy, sometimes, the things she’d do. We were at a restaurant in Munich once and a crowd of army officers sat down at the next table. They were pretty drunk and high-tempered, started abusing a waiter for something or other. Eventually one of them struck the man, and my mother, who was closer than I was, leaned over and bopped the officer over the head with a Chianti bottle. Suddenly—quietly—without a word—just like that.” Charles swung his arm. “Pure slapstick comedy but for the time and place.”

“What happened?”

“Blood and Chianti all over everything. A riot. Amidst which I managed to get her out by a back door. The restaurant owner was as keen to save his premises as I was to avoid an international incident.”

George laughed. “It wasn’t always so serious. Once she and I were arguing at dinner about something or other quite trivial when she picked up a piece of apple pie and threw it at me. And it happened that you could see in from the street and somebody had seen in—and also it was the middle of an election campaign. They called me Apple-Pie George after that for a time.” George laughed louder at the recollection. “I used to think it harmed my chances—maybe it did. But I’m glad to know about all this. I’d forgive her a lot for that.”

“Didn’t you forgive her anyway?”

“Aye, I always found it pretty easy.”

“My father used to say it was easy to forgive her if she was wrong, but if she turned out to be right then you might as well never forgive yourself.”

George said after a long pause: “I don’t want to send you away, but if you’re feeling sleepy…I’ve booked a room for you both at the Greyhound.”

“The Greyhound?”

“Just along the street. More comfortable than here.”

Charles crossed the room and George put his arm round the boy’s shoulder as the two walked back to the kitchen. “Don’t you worry, lad. If I can help her I shall. It won’t all be your job. You can count on me for that.”

“Seems to me I count on you for a lot of things, George.”

George took them over to the Greyhound, said goodnight, and began the short stroll back to his house. But he felt so wakeful he made a detour past the Town Hall, his mind being still full of thoughts, strange thoughts, such as that Charles had actually been under his roof, and that Browdley in moonlight was really a beautiful place. Not only the Town Hall, but the main office of the Browdley Building Society, Joe Hardman’s fish shop, even Ridgeway’s garage on whose doors, as a halcyon reminder, there could still be seen the painting of a very gay peacetime charabanc for hire…all so beautiful…which was absurd, of course; yet even as he admitted it, beauty and a little sadness remained in what he felt. He could not hope for sleep in such a mood; but he could work, there was always that. As he entered his house the hall was bright as bars of silver; he could even read the headline of the Advertiser, and a typical one, even after five years of war—“Shall Browdley Have Sunday Cinemas?” So that was how his old journalistic rival still looked at the world, he mused, with extra irony because the Sunday cinema question had been debated in Browdley ever since he had campaigned as a young man for his first Council election…and now they were at it again!…No wonder Lord Winslow could remark that England didn’t change! But it did change, for all that, beneath the surface of dead issues regularly flogged to life. George slipped the paper into his pocket as he walked into the open study doorway.

Suddenly he knew he was not alone. Someone was standing in front of the window, staring out—as Charles had done earlier—into the garden. The figure turned, offered a profile against the moonlight, was unmistakable…

“Livia!”

At the instant of recognition he felt his hands clench with shock for which he must brace mind and heart as well; and he did so, almost as instantly.

“Where is he? He’s been here, George. I know that. I want to see him.”

He answered in a level voice: “They’re not here now, Livia.”

“They? Who’re they?”

He answered because it was the way he himself thought of them: “Charles and Julie.”

He caught his breath, having spoken the phrase; he would have expected a scene, but for knowing that with Livia one could never expect the expected. All she did was to cross the room and sit on the arm of his armchair, while he drew curtains and switched on the light. He saw then that she looked tired and rather pale, but not uncomposed. Because he wanted to give her time to grasp the situation, he did not speak, but went back to the curtains and pretended to be fixing them with especial care.

“Julie,” she said at last, still quietly. “So that’s her name, Charlie and Julie. How sweet! Where are they?”

“Why did you come here, Livia?” he countered. “What made you think it would help?”

“I don’t want it to help. I mean to stop this nonsense. And I know they are here, now you’ve told me she’s with him, because I went to Cambridge first and talked to his servant at the college…I know, it’s no use you denying it. Of course I know. And I know your part in it all. I always know.”

“Aye, there’s not much misses you—or ever did. But there’s something extra to tell you this time.” He added, in a kindly voice, with no note of triumph in it: “I told you, Livia, my advice would be to let the boy live his own life. That’s what he’s going to do, and I’ll admit I’m all for it. So whatever you’ve come to stop you’re too late.”

“I’m too late?” She stared at him with glazed eyes. “Oh no, no. You’re the one who’s late. You have been all along. And he’s where you put him because of that. You and your kind of people. You talk about letting him live his own life—why didn’t you, then, when he had one to live—not just half a one? That’s all he has now because of the mess you’ve made of everything. You said once my father’s victims were all over the town—but yours are all over the world—people like you who went on making speeches…speeches…you were making them before he was born—just as you still are—”

“Livia, you surely haven’t come here just for an argument—”

“I told you what I came here for. I want Charlie. I want him. What’s left of him, that is, after your kind have said all their prayers and made all their speeches—”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at, Livia. If you mean that my generation’s largely responsible for the war, then I’ll agree with you. Charles and I once discussed the same point—”

“Oh, you did, did you? Just a nice friendly discussion. And he forgave you, I suppose. Man to man and all that. With his shattered nerves and smashed legs and burned eyes he forgave you—because he too may need to be forgiven someday.”

“Aye, if he just sits back and lets things happen. I told him that. There was a children’s ward next to where he was in the hospital, and I asked if he wasn’t afraid that those kids when they grew up—or his own kids for that matter—”

Her eyes sharpened.

“His? He’ll never have any. Maybe he can’t. It’s like that sometimes. I hope so, because that would be the best way to end it. My father, me, him, full stop…”

“Livia, that’s a terrible thing to say.”

“More terrible to mean.”

“I hope you’ll never let him know you do mean it.”

“I shan’t have to. It’ll come to him when we’re in Ireland.”

“Ireland? I doubt he’ll want to go there now so much.”

“He doesn’t know what he wants. He thinks he wants this girl, but that’s absurd. I can make him want what he really wants.”

“Livia…remember I said you were too late.” George paused, then added: “They’re married.”

“What?”

“Three days ago in London. He was going to wire you about it tomorrow. Perhaps he ought to have done so before, but you can hardly blame him.”

George then saw something which, despite all Millbay had said, he had tried to believe did not exist. It was a look of implacability so vivid, so pure in a sense, that he recoiled from it less in revulsion than in elemental awareness of what it signified. For he was all against it, as a stream of yielding water is against the rock it will wear down in a million years or so. And suddenly, without bitterness, he saw Livia as a symbol of all that must so be worn down, no matter how hard or long the struggle, no matter how often the victories of greed and despair and intolerance seem to make nonsense of it.

With his own gentler implacability he stared at hers till the transfiguration disappeared.

She said at length: “So…you think…you’ve done the trick?”

“It’s no trick, Livia.”

“Last-minute victory, then? Narrow majority? And a hearty vote of thanks to Mister Mayor…?” But she was her masked self again, so that the stress on the prefix was only ironic. She went on: “Perhaps you still don’t know what I’m driving at? You never did—and you’re afraid Charlie might if he got the chance. You’re afraid he might see things my way. So’s Howard. He wants him to have lands and a title and riches—”

“Aye, I know, and I agree with you there. They’d be just a burden to him, and that’s why—”

“That’s why you’d rather give him your kind of burden. Speeches—promises—the same old never-again stuff. But you shan’t, George—I can stop that, even now. And as for the little schemer he’s been duped by, does she think her influence is going to count?”

“Nay, Livia, not hers. Nor mine, nor his uncle’s, nor yours. Let him get on his feet, build up his own ideas, see things with his own eyes when he has the strength to see clearly—that’s all I’m aiming for. He’ll influence me as much as I will him—I’m not so sure of my own opinions that I’d try to ram them down somebody’s throat. I’ll take his—if he can convince me. Or we can keep our own. It doesn’t matter. I know you look at things differently—”

“So does the man from Mars, maybe.”

That stumped him; he blinked bewilderedly till she continued: “If he could see the world today he’d think it was in charge of raving lunatics and the asylums were for sane people who’d gone there for safety. So if anybody thinks I’m a little out of my mind—Howard does, I know—”

“Livia, I don’t. But I do think—for the time being—you’re not able to help the boy as he most needs helping…Later, perhaps…”

“Too late—and already you talk of later…” She suddenly got up and began walking towards the door. “I can see this is wasting more time. I’d better start on my way back. The five-ten, isn’t it? I remember. Can I have a cup of tea first?”

“Why…of course, I’m only sorry you…” But then he stopped; he didn’t know what he was only sorry about, except that she had come.

She said, from the hall as she crossed it to the kitchen: “No pressing invitation to stay a few days, then?”

“Nay, Livia, and you know why. I’m anxious that Charlie shouldn’t have any shocks.” He had called the boy Charlie because she had and it seemed almost something shared and sharable at last between them, something that warmed his voice as he added: “Give him a chance, Livia. Leave him alone a bit. God knows that’s a hard thing to say, but I mean it.”

She said after a pause: “Do you hate me, George?”

He shook his head. “I never did and I never could. I’m not much use at hating folks, to be frank. But I can fight ’em when I have to…and I’d have to now, if you made me.”

“And you think you’d win?”

“I’m not so sure, but I’m not sure I’d lose, either. That’s why I say give him a chance. Give us all a chance this time.”

In the kitchen she prepared tea herself, not letting him do so, as if she were certain nothing had been changed (and practically nothing had). She began to cry a little while she moved about. George watched her unhappily, puzzled not so much by her behavior as by his own, for he found himself less moved by her tears than by her simple act of tightening a tap that had been leaking into the sink for days. Nobody could do things so deftly, quickly, tidily, uncontrovertibly. She had probably got her own way with Japs pretty much as she did with taps, George reflected whimsically; and then again he was touched by her next remark, clairvoyant in that old familiar blinding way of hers: “You think I’m acting, don’t you, George? And you think that means I’m not sincere?…You don’t understand that sometimes I mean things so much I have to act?…You don’t understand that, because you never mean things so much…Oh George, you don’t know how terrible it is to be alive in this world!”

“Perhaps I do, Livia, perhaps I don’t feel it the way you do, but I know it, and I also know this—there’s not only terror—there’s hope—and love—”

“But they’re the most terrible of all—”

“Nay, nay, not how I see things.”

“But do you see anything? Anything to match love and hate? I love my son and I hate that girl—I’d kill her if I got the chance…”

“You would?”

“That shocks you, doesn’t it?”

“Nay…it doesn’t exactly do that. But it makes me think.”

“And you think it’s awful…yet all the other killing that’s going on—killing without hate—oh, that you can take for granted. Duty. Honor. Jeffrey did too—and with better brains than yours…What do you see, George? In the future, I mean? What chance is there? This humanity you do everything for—what do you see in it?”

George saw the grayness round the edges of the curtains; he looked at his watch, then crossed to the window and let in the summer dawn. Already it was staring the moon out of the sky. It seemed to him that the world, like Livia, was snarled with memories and desires, beauty and blackness and lies and truth and hope and despair; you might as well leave it alone unless you had a driving love for the thankless job of tackling it. But if you had that love, then you could go ahead. George saw the roofs across the street as they took form and substance, and knew that the love in his own heart was more than he could speak or even make a speech about—and least of all to Livia; but the thought of it, and the continual vision of it, had governed all he had ever done that seemed either weak or strong.

“Aye,” he said as he turned back to her. “I’ve often wondered that myself, but it doesn’t make any difference.” He came over and touched her shoulder with a kindliness induced by his own thoughts rather than by any more personal emotion. “Drink up, Livia—we’ll have to hurry if you want to catch the five-ten. And no more arguments, because we’ll not change each other, I reckon, from now till doomsday…”

Random Harvest

James Hilton

Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

“According to a British Official Report, bombs fell at Random.”

—GERMAN OFFICIAL REPORT

PART ONE

ON THE MORNING OF the eleventh of November, 1937, precisely at eleven o’clock, some well-meaning busybody consulted his watch and loudly announced the hour, with the result that all of us in the dining car felt constrained to put aside drinks and newspapers and spend the two minutes’ silence in rather embarrassed stares at one another or out of the window. Not that anyone had intended disrespect—merely that in a fast-moving train we knew no rules for correct behavior and would therefore rather not have behaved at all. Anyhow, it was during those tense uneasy seconds that I first took notice of the man opposite. Dark-haired, slim, and austerely good-looking, he was perhaps in his early or middle forties; he wore an air of prosperous distinction that fitted well with his neat but quiet standardized clothes. I could not guess whether he had originally moved in from a third or a first-class compartment. Half a million Englishmen are like that. Their inconspicuous correctness makes almost a display of concealment.

As he looked out of the window I saw something happen to his eyes—a change from a glance to a gaze and then from a gaze to a glare, a sudden sharpening of focus, as when a person thinks he recognizes someone fleetingly in a crowd. Meanwhile a lurch of the train spilt coffee on the table between us, providing an excuse for apologies as soon as the two minutes were over; I got in with mine first, but by the time he turned to reply the focus was lost, his look of recognition unsure. Only the embarrassment remained, and to ease it I made some comment on the moorland scenery, which was indeed somberly beautiful that morning, for overnight snow lay on the summits, and there was one of them, twin-domed, that seemed to keep pace with the train, moving over the intervening valley like a ghostly dromedary. “That’s Mickle,” I said, pointing to it.

Surprisingly he answered: “Do you know if there’s a lake—quite a small lake—between the peaks?”

Two men at the table across the aisle then intervened with the instant garrulousness of those who overhear a question put to someone else. They were also, I think, moved by a common desire to talk down an emotional crisis, for the entire dining car seemed suddenly full of chatter. One said there was such a lake, if you called it a lake, but it was really more of a swamp; and the other said there wasn’t any kind of lake at all, though after heavy rain it might be “a bit soggy” up there, and then the first man agreed that maybe that was so, and presently it turned out that though they were both Derbyshire men, neither had actually climbed Mickle since boyhood.

We listened politely to all this and thanked them, glad to let the matter drop. Nothing more was said till they left the train at Leicester; then I leaned across the table and said: “It doesn’t pay to argue with local inhabitants, otherwise I’d have answered your question myself—because I was on top of Mickle yesterday.”

A gleam reappeared in his eyes. “You were?”

“Yes, I’m one of those eccentric people who climb mountains for fun all the year round.”

“So you saw the lake?”

“There wasn’t a lake or a swamp or a sign of either.”

“Ah. …” And the gleam faded.

“You sound disappointed?”

“Well no—hardly that. Maybe I was thinking of somewhere else. I’m afraid I’ve a bad memory.”

“For mountains?”

“For names too, Mickle, did you say it was?” He spoke the word as if he were trying the sound of it.

“That’s the local name. It isn’t important enough to be on maps.”

He nodded and then, rather deliberately, held up a newspaper throughout a couple of English counties. The sight of soldiers marching along a Bedfordshire lane gave us our next exchange of remarks—something about Hitler, the European situation, chances of war, and so on. It led to my asking if he had served in the last war.

“Yes.”

“Then there must be things you wish you had forgotten?”

“But I have—even them—to some extent.” He added as if to deflect the subject from himself: “I imagine you were too young?”

“Too young for the last, but not for the next, the way things are going.”

“Nobody will be either too young or too old for the next.”

Meanwhile men’s voices were uprising further along the car in talk of Ypres and Gallipoli; I called his attention and commented that thousands of other Englishmen were doubtless at that moment reminiscing about their war experiences. “If you’ve already forgotten yours, you’re probably lucky.”

“I didn’t say I’d forgotten everything.”

He then told me a story which I shall summarize as follows: During the desperate months of trench warfare in France an English staff officer reasoned that if some spy whom the Germans had learned to trust were to give them false details about a big attack, it might have a better chance of success. The first step was to establish the good faith of such a spy, and this seemed only possible by allowing him, over a considerable period, to supply true information. Accordingly, during several weeks before the planned offensive, small raiding parties crawled across no man’s land at night while German machine gunners, having been duly tipped off as to time and place, slaughtered them with much precision. One of these doomed detachments was in charge of a youth who, after enlisting at the beginning of the war, had just begun his first spell in the front line. Quixotically eager to lead his men to storybook victory, he soon found that his less-inspiring task was to accompany a few wounded and dying survivors into a shell hole so close to the enemy trenches that he could pick up snatches of German conversation. Knowing the language fairly well, he connected something he heard with something he had previously overheard in his commanding officer’s dugout; so that presently he was able to deduce the whole intrigue of plot and counterplot. It came to him as an additional shock as he lay there, half drowned in mud, delirious with the pain of a smashed leg, and sick with watching the far greater miseries of his companions. Before dawn a shell screamed over and burst a few yards away, killing the others and wounding him in the head so that he saw, heard, and could think no more.

“What happened to him afterwards?”

“Oh, he recovered pretty well—except for partial loss of memory. … He’s still alive. Of course, when you come to think about it logically, the whole thing was as justifiable as any other piece of wartime strategy. The primary aim is to frustrate the enemy’s knavish tricks. Anything that does so is the thing to do, even if it seems a bit knavish itself.”

“You say that defensively, as if you had to keep on convincing yourself about it.”

“I wonder if you’re right.”

“I wonder if you’re the survivor who’s still alive?”

He hesitated a moment, then answered with an oblique smile: “I don’t suppose you’d believe me even if I said no.” I let it go at that, and after a pause he went on: “It’s curious to reflect that one’s death was planned by both sides—it gives an extra flavor to the life one managed to sneak away with, as well as a certain irony to the mood which one wears a decoration.”

“So I should imagine.”

I waited for him to make some further comment but he broke a long silence only to summon the waiter and order a whiskey and soda. “You’ll have one with me?”

“No thanks.”

“You don’t drink?”

“Not very often in the morning.”

“Neither do I, as a rule. Matter of fact, I don’t drink much at all.”

I felt that these trivial exchanges were to cover an inner stress of mind he was trying to master. “Coming back to what you were saying,” I coaxed, eventually, but he interrupted: “No, let’s not come back to it—no use raking over these things. Besides, everybody’s so bored with the last war and so scared of the next that it’s almost become a social gaffe to bring up the matter at all.”

“Except on one day of the year—which happens to be today. Then the taboos are lifted.”

“Thanks to the rather theatrical device of the two minutes’ silence?”

“Yes, and ‘thanks’ is right. Surely we English need some release from the tyranny of the stiff upper lip.”

He smiled into his drink as the waiter set it before him. “So you think it does no harm—once a year?”

“On the contrary, I think it makes a very healthy purge of our normal—which is to say, our abnormal—national inhibitions.”

Another smile. “Maybe—if you like psychoanalyst’s jargon.”

“Evidently you don’t.”

“Sorry. If you’re one of them, I apologize.”

“No, I’m just interested in the subject, that’s all.”

“Ever studied it—seriously?”

I said I had, which was true, for I had written several papers on it for the Philosophical Society. He nodded, then read again for a few score miles. The train was traveling fast, and when next he looked up it was as if be realized that anything he still had to say must be hurried; we were already streaking past the long rows of suburban back gardens. He suddenly resumed, with a touch of his earlier eagerness: “All right then—listen to this—and don’t laugh … it may be up your street … Sometimes I have a feeling of being—if it isn’t too absurd to say such a thing—of being half somebody else. Some casual little thing—a tune or a scent or a name in a newspaper or a look of something or somebody will remind me, just for a second—and yet I haven’t time to get any grip of what it does remind me of—it’s a sort of wisp of memory that can’t be trapped before it fades away. … For instance, when I saw that mountain this morning I felt I’d been there—I almost knew I’d been there. … I could see that lake between the summits—why, I’d bathed in it—there was a slab of rock jutting out like a diving board—and the day I was there I fell asleep in the shade and woke up in the sun … but I suppose I’ve got to believe the whole thing never happened, just because you say there isn’t a lake there at all … Does all this strike you as the most utter nonsense?”

“By no means. It’s not an uncommon experience.”

“Oh, it isn’t?” He looked slightly dismayed, perhaps robbed of some comfort in finding himself not unique.

“Dunne says it’s due to a half-remembered dream. You should read his book An Experiment with Time. He says—this, of course, is condensing his theory very crudely—that dreams do foretell the future, only by the time they come true, we’ve forgotten them—all except your elusive wisp of memory.”

“So I once dreamed about that mountain?”

“Perhaps. It’s an interesting theory even if it can’t be proved. Anyhow, the feeling you have is quite a normal one.”

“I don’t feel that it is altogether normal, the way I have it.”

“You mean it’s beginning to worry you?”

“Perhaps sometimes—in a way—yes.” He added with a nervous smile: “But that’s no reason why I should worry you. I can only plead this one-day-a-year excuse—the purging of the inhibitions, didn’t you call it? Let’s talk about something else—cricket—the Test Match. … Wonder what will happen to England … ?”

“Somehow today that doesn’t sound like cricket talk.”

“I know. After the silence there are overtones … but all I really wanted to prove was that I’m not a complete lunatic.”

“Most people have a spot of lunacy in them somewhere. It’s excusable.”

“Provided they don’t inflict it on strangers.”

“Why not, if you feel you want to?”

“I don’t want to—not consciously.”

“Unconsciously then. Which makes it worst of all. Not that in your case it sounds very serious.”

“You don’t think so? You don’t think these—er—peculiarities of memory—are—er—anything to worry about?”

“Since you ask me, may I be perfectly frank?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know what your work is, but isn’t it possible you’ve been overdoing things lately—not enough rest—relaxation?”

“I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me that. My doctor does—every time I see him.”

“Then why not take his advice?”

“This is why.” He pulled a small notebook from his vest pocket. “I happen to be in what is vaguely called public life—which means I’m on a sort of treadmill I can’t get off until it stops—and it won’t stop.” He turned over the pages. “Just to show you—a sample day of my existence. … Here, you can read it—it’s typed.” He added, as I took the book: “My secretary—very neat. She wouldn’t let me forget anything.”

“But she can’t spell ‘archaeological.’ ”

“Why does she have to?” He snatched the book back for scrutiny and I had the feeling he was glad of the excuse to do so and keep it. “Calderbury Archaeological and Historical Society? … Oh, they’re my constituents—I have to show them round the House—guidebook stuff—an awful bore … that’s this afternoon. This evening I have an Embassy reception; then tomorrow there’s a board meeting, a lunch party, and in the evening I’m guest speaker at a dinner in Cambridge.”

“Doesn’t look as if there’s anything you could cut except possibly tomorrow’s lunch.”

“I expect I’ll do that, anyway—even though it’s at my own house. There’ll be a crowd of novelists and actors and titled people who’d think me surly because I wouldn’t talk to them half as freely as I’m talking to you now.”

I could believe it. So far he had made no move towards an exchange of names between us, and I guessed that, on his side, the anonymity had been not only an encouragement to talk, but a temptation to reveal himself almost to the point of self-exhibition. And there had been a certain impish exhilaration in the way he had allowed me to glance at his engagement book for just those few seconds, as if teasing me with clues to an identity he had neither wish nor intention to disclose. Men in whom reticence is a part of good form have fantastic ways of occasional escape, and I should have been the last to embarrass an interesting fellow traveler had he not added, as the train began braking into St. Pancras: “Well, it’s been a pleasant chat. Some day—who knows?—we might run into each other again.”

Spoken as if he sincerely half meant it, the remark merely emphasized the other half sense in which he did not mean it at all; and this, because I already liked him, irked me to the reply: “If it’s the Swithin’s Dinner tomorrow night we may as well introduce ourselves now as then, because I’ll be there too. My name’s Harrison. I’m on the Reception Committee.”

“Oh, really?”

“And I don’t know what your plans are, but after the show I’d be delighted if you’d come up to my rooms and have some coffee.”

“Thanks,” he muttered with sudden glumness, gathering up his newspapers and brief case. Then I suppose he realized it would be pointless, as well as discourteous, to refuse the name which I should inevitably discover so soon. He saved it for a last unsmiling afterthought as he jumped to the platform. “My name’s Rainier … Charles Rainier.”

Rainier nodded rather coldly when I met him again the following day. In his evening clothes and with an impressive array of decorations he looked what he was—a guest of honor about to perform his duties with the touch of apathy that so effectively disguises the British technique of authority. Not necessarily an aristocratic technique. I had already looked him up in reference books and found that he was the son of a longish line of manufacturers—no blue blood, no title (I wondered how he had evaded that), a public school of the second rank, Parliamentary membership for a safe Conservative county. I had also mentioned his name to a few people I knew; the general impression was that he was rich and influential, and that I was lucky to have made such a chance encounter. He did not, however, belong to the small group of well-known personalities recognizable by the man-in-the-street either in the flesh or in Low cartoons. On the contrary he seemed neither to seek nor to attract the popular sort of publicity, nor yet to repel it so markedly as to get in reverse; it was as if he deliberately aimed at being nondescript. A journalist told me he would be difficult to build up as a newspaper hero because his personality was “centripetal” instead of “centrifugal”; I was not quite certain what this meant, but Who’s Who was less subtle in confiding that hit recreations were mountaineering and music.

On the whole I secured a fair amount of information without much real enlightenment; I hoped for more from a second meeting and traveled to Cambridge in a mood of considerable anticipation. It was the custom of the secretary and committee of the Swithin’s Society to receive guests informally before dining in the College Hall; so we gathered first in the Combination Room, where we made introductions, drank sherry, and exchanged small talk. It is really hard to know what to say to distinguished people when you first meet them—that is, it is hard to think of talk small enough to be free from presumption. Rainier, for instance, had lately been in the financial news in connection with a proposed merger of cement companies, a difficult achievement for which negotiations were still proceeding; but it was impossible to say “How is your merger getting on?” as one might say “How are your chrysanthemums?” to a man whom you knew to be an enthusiastic gardener. Presently, to my relief, some other guests arrived whom I had to attend to, and it was perhaps a quarter of an hour before I saw him edging to me through the crowd. “Sorry,” he began, “but I’ve got to let you down—awful toothache—where’s the nearest dentist?” I hustled him out as inconspicuously as possible and at the door of the taxi received his promise to return to the dinner if he felt equal to it. Then I went back and explained to the company what had happened. Somehow it did not sound very convincing, and none of us really expected to see him again. But we did. An hour later he took the vacant place we had left at the High Table and was just in time to reply to the toast with one of the best after-dinner speeches I had ever heard. Maybe the escape from physical pain plus the Cambridge atmosphere, with its mingling of time-honored formality and youthful high spirits, suited a mood in which he began with badinage about toothache and ended with a few graceful compliments to the College and University. Among other things I remember him recalling that during his undergraduate days he had had an ambition to live at Cambridge all his life, as a don of some sort (laughter), but exactly what sort he hadn’t stayed long enough to decide (laughter), because fate had called him instead to be some sort of businessman politician, but even what sort of that he hadn’t yet entirely made up his mind (more laughter). … “So because of this fundamental indecision, I still hope that some day I shall throw off the cares of too many enterprises and seek the tranquillity of a room overlooking a quadrangle and an oak that can be sported against the world.” (Prolonged laughter in which the speaker joined.) After he had finished, we all cheered uproariously and then, relaxing, drank and argued and made a night of it in the best Swithin’s tradition; when eventually the affair broke up, it was Rainier himself who asked if my invitation to coffee still held good.

“Why, of course—only I thought maybe after the dentist you’d feel—”

“My dear boy, don’t ever try to imagine what my feelings are.”

But he smiled in saying it, and I gathered he had forgiven not so much me as himself for having taken part in our train conversation. A few friends adjourned to my rooms near by, where we sat around and continued discussions informally. Again he charmed us by his talk, but even more by his easy manners and willingness to laugh and listen; long after most of the good-nights he still lingered chatting, listening, and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I didn’t know then that he slept badly and liked to stay up late, that he enjoyed young company and jokes and midnight argument, that he had no snobbisms, and that public speaking left him either very dull and listless or very excitable and talkative, according to the audience. Towards three in the morning, when we found ourselves sole survivors, I suggested more coffee, and at that he sank into an armchair with a sigh of content and put his feet against the mantelpiece as if the place belonged to him—which, in a sense, it did, as to any Swithin’s man since the reign of Elizabeth the Foundress. “I’ve been in these rooms before—often. Fellow with the disarming name of Pal had them in my time—‘native of Asia or Africa not of European parentage,’ as the University regulations so tactfully specify. High-caste Hindoo. Mathematician—genius in his own line—wonder what he’s doing now?—probably distilling salt out of sea water or lying down in front of trains or some other blind-alley behavior. Used to say he felt algebra emotionally—told me once he couldn’t read through the Binomial Theorem without tears coming into his eyes—the whole concept, he said, was so shatteringly beautiful. … Wish I could have got into his world, somehow or other. And there are other worlds, too—wish sometimes I could get into any of them—out of my own.”

“What’s so wrong about your own?”

He laughed defensively. “Now there you’ve got me. … Maybe, as you hinted yesterday, just a matter of overwork. But it’s true enough that talking to all you young fellows tonight made me feel terribly ancient and envious.”

“Not envious, surely? It’s we who are envious of you—because you’ve made a success of life. We’re a pretty disillusioned crowd when we stop laughing—we know there won’t be decent jobs for more than a minority of us unless a war comes to give all of us the kind of job we don’t want.”

He mused over his coffee for a moment and then continued: “Yes, that’s true—and that’s probably why I feel how different everything is here instead of how much the same—because my Cambridge days were different. The war was just over then, and our side had won, and we all of us thought that winning a great war ought to mean something, either towards making our lives a sort of well-deserved happy-ever-after—a long golden afternoon of declining effort and increasing reward—or else to give us chances to rebuild the world this way or that. It all depended whether one were tired or eager after the strain. Most of us were both—tired of the war and everything connected with it, eager to push ahead into something new. We soon stopped hating the Germans, and just as soon we began to laugh at the idea of anyone caring enough about the horrid past to ask us that famous question on the recruiting posters—‘What did you do in the Great War?’ But even the most cynical of us couldn’t see ahead to a time when the only logical answer to that question would be another one—‘Which Great War?’

“There was a room over a fish shop in Petty Cury where some of us met once a week to talk our heads off—we called ourselves the Heretics, but I can’t remember anything said at those meetings half so well as I can remember the smell of fish coming up from the shop below. And J. M. Keynes was lecturing in the Art School, politely suggesting that Germany mightn’t be able to pay off so many millions in reparations, or was it billions?—in those days one just thought of a number and stuck as many naughts as one fancied after it. And there were Holland Rose on Napoleon and Pigou on Diminishing Returns, and Bury still explaining the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and one evening Pal and I—sounds sentimental, doesn’t it, Pal and I?—lined up in a queue that stretched halfway round Trinity Great Court to hear a lecture by a fellow named Eddington about some new German fellow named Einstein who had a theory about light bending in the middle—that brought the house down, of course—roars of laughter—just as you heard tonight only more so—good clean undergraduate fun at its best. And behind us on the wall the portrait of Catholic Mary scowled down on this modern audience that scoffed at science no less than at religion. Heretics indeed—and laughing heretics! But my pal Pal didn’t laugh—he was transfixed with a sort of ecstasy about the whole thing.

“I did a good deal of reading on the river, and also at the Orchard at Grantchester—you remember Rupert Brooke’s poem? Brooke would be fifty today, if he’d lived—think of that. … Still stands the clock at ten to three, but Rupert Brooke is late for tea—confined to his bed with rheumatism or something—that’s what poets get for not dying young. The woman at the Orchard who served the teas remembered Brooke—she was a grand old chatterbox and once I got to know her she’d talk endlessly about undergraduates and professors past and present—many a yarn, I daresay, that I’ve forgotten since and that nobody else remembered even then. … Trivial talk—just as trivial as the way I’m talking to you now. Nineteen-twenty, that was—Cambridge full of demobilized old-young men still wearing dyed officers’ overcoats—British warms sent up to Perth and returned chocolate-brown—full of men still apt to go suddenly berserk in the middle of a rag and turn it into a riot, or start whimpering during a thunderstorm—aftereffects of shell shock, you know. Plenty of us had had that—including myself.”

“As a result of the head injury you mentioned yesterday?”

“I suppose so.”

“You had a pretty bad time?”

“No, I was one of the lucky ones—comparatively, that is. But when you’re blown up, even if you’re not physically smashed to bits …” He broke off awkwardly. “I’m sorry. It isn’t Armistice Day any more. These confessions are out of place.”

“Not at all. I’m interested. It’s so hard for my generation to imagine what it was like.”

“Don’t worry—you’ll learn soon enough.”

“How long was it before you we rescued?”

“Haven’t the faintest idea. I suppose I was unconscious.”

“But you must have recovered consciousness later?”

“Presumably. I don’t remember when or where or any of the details. But I’ve some reason to believe I was taken prisoner.”

“Reason to believe? That’s a guarded way of putting it.”

“I know—but it happens to be just about all I can say. You see, I literally don’t remember. From that moment of being knocked out my memory’s a complete blank till years later when I found myself lying on a park seat in Liverpool.”

“Years later?”

“Getting on for three years, but of course I didn’t know that at first. And it was a wet day, as luck would have it.” He smiled. “You don’t find my story very plausible?”

“I might if you’d tell me the whole of it—without gaps.”

“But there are gaps—that’s just the trouble.”

“What were you doing in Liverpool?”

“Once again, I haven’t the faintest idea. I didn’t even know it was Liverpool at first. The main thing was to know who I was—where and when were easy enough to find out later.”

“Do you mean you’d been going by some other name until then?”

“Maybe. I suppose so. That’s another of the things I don’t know. It’s as if … well, I’ve sometimes worked it out this way—there were different rooms in my mind, and as soon as the light came on in one it had to go out in the other.”

“Well, what did you do when you realized who you were?”

“What anybody else would do. I went home. I felt in my pockets and found I had a small sum in cash, so I bought a new outfit of clothes, took a bath at a hotel, and then went to the railway station. It was as simple as that, because along with knowing my own name it had come to me without apparent effort that I lived at Stourton, that my father owned the Rainier Steelworks and all the other concerns, that we had a butler named Sheldon, and any other details I cared to recall. In fact I knew all about myself in a perfectly normal way up to the moment of that shell burst near Arras in 1917.”

“Your father must have got a very pleasant shock.”

“He was too ill to be allowed it, but the family got one all right. Of course, since I’d been reported missing in the casualty lists, they’d long since given me up for dead.”

“It’s a very remarkable story.”

“Remarkable’s a well-chosen word. It doesn’t give you away.”

I thought for a moment; then I said: “But the Army authorities must have had some record of your coming back to England?”

“None—not under the name of Rainier.”

“But wasn’t there a disc or something you had to wear all the time on active service?”

“There was, but if you’d ever experienced levitation by high explosive you wouldn’t put much faith in a bit of metal tied round your neck. It’s quite possible there was nothing the Germans could identify me by when they took me prisoner.”

“What makes you think you were ever in Germany at all?”

“Surely if I’d been dragged in by my own men they’d have known who I was?”

“H’m, yes, I suppose so.”

He went on, after a pause: “I don’t blame you at all if you don’t believe a word of all this. And it’s just as well you’re the first person I’ve confided in for years—just as well for my reputation as a sober citizen.” He laughed with self-protective cynicism. “It’s been a conspiracy of events to make me talk like this—Armistice Day—our meeting on the train—and then something the dentist said tonight when I came out of his nitrous oxide.”

“The dentist? What’s he got to do with it?”

“He was making polite conversation while I spat blood. One of the things he said was, ‘So you were a prisoner in Germany?’ I asked him what gave him that idea, and he answered, ‘Because I notice you have a tooth filled with a substitute metal German dentists were having to use during the latter part of the war’—apparently he’d come across other instances of it.”

We were silent for a moment. I could hear the first stir of early morning traffic beginning along King’s Parade. Rainier heard it too, and as at a signal rose to go. “A strange business, the war. The English told the Germans exactly where I was, so that the Germans could kill me … then the Germans did half kill me, patched me up, and saw that my teeth were properly cared for … after which the English gave me a medal for having displayed what they called ‘conspicuous gallantry in the field.’ ” He fingered it on his lapel, adding: “I wear it at shows like this, along with the Most Noble Order of Something-or-Other which the Greeks gave me for arranging a loan on their currant crop in 1928.” He began putting on his overcoat, heedless of my assurance that there was no hurry and that I often sat up till dawn myself. “Please don’t bother to see me out—I’ll take a bath at my hotel and be in time for the first train.”

On his way across the room he paused at my shelves of books and asked what tripos I was taking.

“Economics. I took the first part of the History last year.”

“Really? I did the same when I was here. But where does the psychoanalysis come in?”

“Oh, that’s only a side line.”

“I see. Made any plans for when you go down?”

“I’d like to be a journalist.”

He nodded, shaking hands at the door. “Well I’ve got a few contacts in Fleet Street. Write to me when you’re ready for a job—I might be able to do something for you.”

Early the following year I took a Ph.D. and began looking around for the post which, it seemed to me then, ought to drop snugly into the lap of any bright young man who had written a two-hundred-page thesis on “The Influence of Voltaire on the English Laissez-Faire Economists.” Cambridge had deemed this worthy of a doctorate; nobody in Fleet Street, however, held it worth a regular job. I had a very small private income and could therefore afford to cadge snippets of highbrow reviewing from some of the more illustrious and penurious weeklies, reckoning myself well-paid if the books themselves were expensive and could be sold for more cash to Mr. Reeves of the Strand; but the newspaper world at that time was full of journalists out of work through amalgamations, and the chance of getting on the staffs of any of the big dailies was not encouraging. Of course I remembered Rainier’s offer, but apart from my reluctance to bother him, he was abroad—in South America on some financial business. But by the time he returned I had been disappointed often enough to feel I should take him at his word. He replied instantly to my note, asking me to lunch the next day.

Thus I made my first trip to Kenmore. “Near the World’s End pub,” Rainier used to say, and it was the fashion among certain guests to pretend it was at some actual world’s end if not beyond it—the world in this super-sophisticated sense being that part of London within normal taxi range. I went by bus, which puts you down at the corner of the road with only a hundred yards or so to walk. I had no idea how notable, not to say notorious, those Kenmore lunches were; indeed, since the invitation had come so promptly, I had beguiled myself with visions of an intimate foursome composed of host and hostess with perhaps a press magnate summoned especially to meet me. I did not know then that Mrs. Rainier gave lunches for ten or twelve people two or three times a week, enticing every temporary or permanent celebrity to meet other temporary or permanent celebrities at her house, and that these affairs were at frequently joked about as they were infrequently declined. She functioned, in fact, as a kind of liaison officer between Society and Bohemia, with a Maecenas glance at moneyless but personable young men; and though there is no kind of social service I would less willingly undertake myself, there are few that I respect more when competently performed by someone else.

Searching my memory for impressions of that first arrival, I find I cannot put Mrs. Rainier into the picture at all. She was there, she must have been; but she was so busy making introductions that she could not have given me more than a few words, and those completely unimportant. I came a little late and found myself ushered into a drawing room full of initiates, all talking with great gusto, and all—so it seemed to me (quite baselessly, of course)—resentful of intrusion by a stranger who had neither written a banned novel nor flown somewhere and back in an incredibly short time. I say this because one of the guests had written such a novel, and another had made such a flight, and it was my fate to be seated between them while they talked either to their outside neighbors or across me to each other. There was an empty place at the head of the table, and presently I gathered from general conversation that Rainier often arrived late and sometimes not at all, so that he was never on any account waited for. I had already written off the whole affair as a rather profitless bore when the guests rose, murmured hasty good-byes, and dashed out to waiting cars and taxis. (Mrs. Rainier’s lunches were always like that—one-fifteen sharp to two-fifteen sharp and not too much to drink, so that you did not kill your afternoon.) Just as I was following the crowd, a touch on my arm accompanied the whisper: “Stay a moment if you aren’t in a hurry.”

Mrs. Rainier led me a few paces back along the hall after the others had gone. “I didn’t quite catch your name—”

“Harrison.”

“Oh, yes. … You’re a friend of Charles’s—it’s too bad he couldn’t get here—he’s so busy nowadays.”

I murmured something vague, polite, and intended to be reassuring.

“It’s a pity people who can fly halfway round the world, haven’t any manners,” she went on, and I answered: “Well, I suppose there are quite a number of people who have manners and couldn’t fly halfway round the world.”

“But having manners is so much more important,” she countered. “Tell me … what … er … I mean, are you a … let me see … Harrison …”

I smiled—suddenly and rather incomprehensibly at ease with her. “You’re trying to recall a Harrison who’s written something, married somebody, or been somewhere,” I said. “But it’s a waste of time—I’m not that Harrison, even if he exists. I’m just—if I call myself anything—a journalist.”

“Oh … then you must come again when we have really literary parties,” she replied, with an eagerness I thought charming though probably insincere. I promised I would, with equal eagerness, and every intention of avoiding her really literary parties like the plague. Then I shook hands, left the house, and on the bus back to Fleet Street suddenly realized that it had been a very good lunch from one point of view. I had never tasted better eggs Mornay.

The next afternoon Rainier telephoned, profuse in apologies for his absence from the lunch, and though the matter could hardly have been important to him, I thought I detected a note of sincerity. “I gather you didn’t have a very good time,” he said, and before I could reply went on: “I’m not keen on the mob, either, but Helen’s a born hostess—almost as good as an American—she can take in twenty new names all in a row and never make a mistake.”

“She didn’t take in mine. In fact it was pretty clear she didn’t know me from Adam.”

“My fault, I expect. Must have forgotten to tell her.”

“So a perfect stranger could walk into your house and get a free lunch?”

“They’re doing that all the time—though most of ’em have invitations. … Look here, if you’re not busy just now, why not come over to the House for tea?”

I said I would, and took the bus again to Chelsea. But at Kenmore the maid told me that Rainier hadn’t been in since morning and never by any chance took tea at home; and just then, while we were arguing on the doorstep (I insisting I had been invited less than twenty minutes ago), Mrs. Rainier came up behind me and began to laugh. “He meant the House of Commons,” she said, passing into the hall. “You’d better let my car take you there.”

Extraordinary how stupid one can be when one would prefer to impress by being knowledgeable. I knew quite well that the House of Commons, along with the Stock Exchange and Christ Church, Oxford, was called “the House,” yet somehow, when Rainier had used the phrase over the telephone, I could only think of Kenmore. Most of the way to Westminster in the almost aggressively unostentatious Daimler (so impersonal you could believe it part of an undertaker’s fleet), I cursed my mistake as a poor recommendation for any kind of job. I had feared Rainier might be waiting for me, and was relieved when, after sending in my name, I had to kill time for half an hour before a policeman led me through devious passages to the Terrace, where Rainier greeted me warmly. But his appearance was slightly disconcerting; there was a twitch about his mouth and eyes as he spoke, and a general impression of intense nervous energy in desperate need of relaxation. During tea he talked about his South American trip, assuming far too modestly that I had read nothing about it in the papers. Presently the division bell rang and only as we hurried across the Smoke Room did he broach the matter I had really come about. “I inquired from a good many people after I got your letter, Harrison, but there doesn’t seem to be a thing doing in Fleet Street just now.”

“That was my own experience too.”

“So I wondered if you’d care for a secretary’s job until something else turns up?”

I hadn’t really thought about such a thing, and maybe hesitation revealed my disappointment.

He said, patting my arm: “Well, think it over, anyway. I’ve had a girl up to now, but she’s due to get married in a few weeks—time enough to show you the ropes … that is, of course, if you feel you’d like the job at all. …”

So I became Rainier’s secretary, and Miss Hobbs showed me the ropes. It had been flattery to call her a girl. She was thin, red-faced, middle-aged, and so worshipful of Rainier that no husband could hope to get more than a remnant of any emotion she was capable of; indeed, I felt that the chance of marriage was tempting her more because she feared it might be her last than because she was certain she wanted it. She hinted this much during our first meeting. “I almost feel I’m deserting him,” she said, and the stress on “him” was revealing. Presently, showing me how she filed his correspondence, she added: “I’m so relieved he isn’t going to have another lady secretary. I’d be afraid of some awful kind of person coming here and—perhaps—influencing him.”

I said I didn’t imagine Rainier was the type to be influenced by that kind of woman.

“Oh, but you never know what kind of a woman will influence a man.”

We went on inspecting the filing system. “The main thing is to see he doesn’t forget his appointments. He doesn’t do much of his correspondence here—he has another secretary at his City office. So it won’t matter a great deal if you don’t know shorthand and typewriting.”

I said I did know shorthand and typewriting.

“Well, so much the better, of course. You’ll find him wonderful to work with—at least always have, though of course we’re more like old friends than employer and secretary. I call him Charles, you know, when we’re alone together. And he always calls me Elsie, whether we’re alone or not. We’ve been together now for nearly fifteen years, so it’s really quite natural, don’t you think?”

During the next few hours she gave me her own version of the entire Rainier ménage. “Of course the marriage never has been all it should be—I daresay you can imagine that. Mrs. Rainier isn’t the right kind of wife for a man like Charles. He’s so tired of all those parties she gives, especially the house-parties at Stourton—that’s their big place in the country, you know … they have no children—that’s another thing, because he’d love children, and I don’t know why they don’t have them, maybe there’s a reason. When you’ve worked with him for a time you’ll feel how restless he is—I do blame her for that—she doesn’t give him a proper home—Kenmore’s just a hotel with different guests every day. I do believe there’s only one room he feds really comfortable in, and that’s this one—with his poor little secretary slaving away while he smokes—and he shouldn’t smoke either, so he’s been told. … D’you know, he often locks himself in when he wants to work, because the rest of the house is so full of Goyas and Epsteins and whatnot that people wander in and out of all the rooms as if it were a museum. Of course there really are priceless things in it—why not?—he gives her the money to spend, and I suppose she has taste—that is if you like a home that’s like a museum. I sometimes wonder if Charles does.”

After a pause during which I made no comment she turned to the writing desk. “Charles gets hundreds of letters from complete strangers—about one thing and another, you know. If they’re abusive we take no notice—in fact, whatever they are, he doesn’t bother much about them, but I’ll let you into a secret—something he doesn’t suspect and never will unless you tell him, and I’m sure you won’t—I always write a little note of thanks to anyone who sends a nice letter … of course I write as if he’d dictated it … I really think a good secretary should do little things like that on her own, don’t you?”

I said nothing.

“Really, if he were to ask me to stay, I believe I would, marriage or no marriage—I mean, it would be so hard to refuse him anything—but then, he’s too fine and generous to ask—as soon as he knew about it he urged me not to delay my happiness on his account—just as if his own marriage had brought him happiness. … Not that Charles would be an easy man to make happy, even if he had got the right woman. But he isn’t happy now—that I do know—there’s always a look in his eyes as if he were searching for something and couldn’t find it.”

For two or three days Miss Hobbs continued to show me the ropes; Rainier was away in Lancashire. During this time Mrs. Rainier gave several lunch parties to which I was not invited, though I was in the house at the time and was even privileged to give assistance to a foreign plenipotentiary who spoke little English and had strayed into the study in search of a humbler apartment. I could better understand after that why Rainier sometimes locked the door.

Then he returned, having wired me to meet his train at Euston. As soon as we had found a taxi and were driving out of the station he asked me how I’d been getting on, and added without waiting for an answer: “I don’t suppose you’ll find it hard to be as good as your predecessor.”

I said I should certainly hope to be.

“Then you’ve already found out a few of the things I’ve been putting up with?”

“Yes, but not why you have put up with them, for so many years.”

“Pure sentiment, plus the fact that I’ve always had a submerged sympathy with crazy people, and Elsie’s crazy enough. She used to work at Stourton in my father’s time, then she worked for my brother, and when he naturally wanted to get rid of her there was no one fool enough to take her but me. I made her my social secretary—because in those days I had no social life and it didn’t matter. But after I married there were social things for her to do and she did them with a peculiar and fascinating idiocy. D’you know I’ve found out she writes long letters to people I’ve never heard of and signs my name to them? … And by the way, did she tell you I’m not happy with my wife?”

“Well—er—”

“Don’t believe it. My wife and I are the best of friends. I suppose she also hinted it was a marriage of convenience?”

I felt this was incriminating Miss Hobbs too much and was beginning a noncommittal answer when he interrupted: “Well, that happens to be true. I married her because it seemed to me she’d be just the person to turn a tired businessman into a thumping success. She was and she did. … Can you think of a better reason?”

“There’s generally considered to be one better reason.”

He switched the subject suddenly, pointing out of the window to a news placard that proclaimed, in letters a foot high: “Collapse of England.” At that moment I felt that one thing Miss Hobbs had said about him was true—that look in his eyes as if he were searching for something and couldn’t find it. He began to talk rapidly and nervously, apropos of the placard: “Odd to think of some foreigner translating without knowing it’s only about cricket … it was something you said about that on a train that first made me want to know you better—but really, in a sense, it doesn’t refer to cricket at all, but to how God-damned sure we are of ourselves—you can’t imagine the same phrase in the streets of Paris or Berlin—it would begin panic or riots or something. … Just think of it—‘Débâcle de France’ or ‘Unter-gang Deutschlands.’ … Impossible … but here it means nothing because we don’t believe it could ever happen—and that’s not wishful thinking—it’s neither wishing nor thinking, but a kind of inbreathed illusion. … Reminds me of that last plenary session of the London Conference when it was quite clear there was to be no effective disarmament by anybody and we were all hard at work covering up the failure of civilization’s last hope with a mess of smeary platitudes … Lord, how tired I was, listening to strings of words that meant nothing in any language and even less when you had to wait for an interpreter to turn ’em into two others … and all the time the dusty sunlight fell in slabs over the pink bald heads—godheads from the power entrusted to them and gargoyles from the way I hated ’em … and during all that morning, full of the trapped sunlight and the distant drone of traffic past the Cenotaph, there was only one clean eager thing that happened—young Drexel whispering to me during a tepid outburst of applause: ‘See the old boy in the third row—fifth from the end—Armenia or Irak or some place … but did you ever see anybody more like Harry Tate?’ … And by Jove, he was like Harry Tate, and Drexel and I lived on it for the rest of the session—lived on it and on our own pathetic fancy that foreigners were strange and at best amusing creatures, rather like music-hall comedians or one’s French master at school—tolerable if they happen to be musicians or dancers or ice-cream sellers—but definitely to be snubbed if they venture on the really serious business of governing the world. … Look—there’s another!” It was a later placard, proclaiming in letters equally large, “England Now without Hope.” Rainier laughed. “Maybe some fussy archaeologist of the twenty-fifth century—a relative of Macaulay’s sketching New Zealander—will dig tins up from a rubbish heap and say it establishes definite proof that we’d all been well warned in advance! … Has my wife got a party tonight?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of a crowd?”

“Mostly sporting and dramatic, I think.”

“Then I’ll dine and sleep at the Club. Borotra’s the only dramatic sportsman I care about, and he probably won’t come.”

He put his head out of the cab window, giving the change of address, and also telling the man to drive more slowly. I could see he was nervously excited, and I was beginning to know by now that when he was in such a mood he talked a good deal in an attempt to race his thoughts—an attempt which usually failed, leaving a litter of unfinished sentences, mixed metaphors, and unpolished epigrams, with here and there some phrase worthy of one of his speeches, but flung off so carelessly that if the hearer did not catch it at the time Rainier himself could never recall it afterwards. I have tried to give an impression of this kind of talk, but even the most faithful reportage would miss a curious excitement of voice and gesture, the orchestration of some inner emotion turbulent under the surface. Nor, one felt, would such emotion wear out in fatigue, but rather increase to some extinguishing climax as an electric globe burns brighter before the final snapping of the filament. It was of this I felt suddenly afraid, and he noticed the anxious look I gave him.

“Sorry to be a chatterer like this, Harrison, but it’s after a bout of public speech-making—I always feel I have to use up the words left over, or perhaps the words I couldn’t use. … I suppose you’d call me a rather good speaker?”

I said I certainly should.

“And you’d guess that it comes easily to me?”

“It always sounds like it.”

He laughed. “That’s what practice can do. I loathe speaking in public—I’m always secretly afraid I’m going to break down or stammer or something. Stammering especially … of course I never do. … By the way, you remember that mountain in Derbyshire I thought I recognized?”

“Yes.”

“The same sort of thing happened in Lancashire, only it wasn’t quite so romantic. Just a house in a row. I was helping Nixon in the Browdley by-election—we held meetings at street corners, then Nixon dragged me round doing the shake-hands and baby-kissing stuff—that’s the way his father got into the Gladstone Parliaments, so Nixon still does it. I admit I’m pretty cynical about elections—the very look of the voting results, with two rows of figures adding neatly up to a third one, gives me the same itch as a company balance sheet, exact to the last penny … whose penny? Was there ever a penny? … My own majority in Lythamshire, for instance—precisely twelve—but who were the twelve? Twelve good men and true, maybe, or twelve drunken illiterates … ? Don’t you sometimes feel how false it all is, and how falsely reassuring—this nineteenth-century gloss of statistical accuracy, as if the flood tide of history could run in rivulets tidy enough for garden irrigation, safe enough for a million taps in suburban bathrooms … but when the storm does come, who’ll give a damn if the rows of little figures still add up—who’ll care if the sums are all wrong provided one man knows a right answer?”

“You were talking about a house.”

“Oh yes. … Just an ordinary four-room workingman’s house—tens of thousands like it. A cold day, and as we stood waiting at the door I could see a great yellow glow of firelight behind the lace curtains of the parlor window. Nothing extraordinary in that, either, and yet… it’s hard to describe the feelings I had, as if that house were waiting for me—a welcome—out of the wintry dusk and into the warm firelight … a welcome home.”

His eyes were full of eagerness, and I said, trying to hasten his story before we reached the end of the journey: “Did the feeling disappear when a stranger answered the door?”

“I’m coming to that. … There were three of us, Nixon, myself, and Ransome, the local party secretary, nice little man. We knocked and knocked and nobody came. Then I saw Ransome fumbling in his pocket. ‘Can’t think where she is,’ he said, ‘but I expect she’ll be back in a jiffy.’ I realized then that it was his house, and that we were being invited in. He found a key, unlocked the door, and we entered. No lobby or hall—straight into the warmth and firelight. There was a kettle steaming on the hob, cups and saucers set out, plates of bread and butter. Everything spotlessly neat, furniture that shone, a clock ticking loudly somewhere. It was all so beautiful, this warm small room. The man kept talking about his wife—how proud she’d been at the thought of having two such men as Nixon and myself to tea in her home—such an honor—she’d never forget it—and how embarrassed she’d be when she came back and found us already there. ‘I’ll bet she’s gone round the corner for a Dundee cake,’ he laughed. But as time passed he began to be a bit embarrassed himself, and presently suggested having tea ourselves without waiting for his wife. So we did—I sat in a rocking chair by the fireside, and the flames were still leaping up so brightly we didn’t need any other light, even though it was quite dark outside by the time we left.”

“So you never saw his wife at all?”

“No, she didn’t come back in time. … But that room—the feeling I had in it—of comfort, of being wanted there … It’s just another thing of the same kind. That part of my life—well, you remember what I told you at Cambridge.”

“Why do you worry about it so much?”

“I wouldn’t if it would leave me alone. But it keeps on teasing me—with clues. So what can I do?”

“I still say—more rest and less work.”

He patted my arm. “It’s good to know I can talk to you whenever I’m in this mood. Watson to my Sherlock, eh? Or perhaps that’s not much of a compliment?”

“Not to yourself, anyhow. Watson was at least an honest idiot.”

He smiled. “That must be the Higher Criticism. Of course you were born too late to feel as I did—Sherlock’s in Baker Street, all’s right with the world.”

“Since we now realize that most things are wrong with the world—”

“I know—that was part of the illusion. I remember Sheldon taking me on a trip to London when I was six or seven years old … the first place I asked to see was Baker Street, and being a sympathetic fellow he didn’t tell me that the stories were just stories. We walked gravely along the pavement one afternoon early in the century—a small boy and his father’s butler—looking up at the tall houses with respectful hero worship. Distant thrones might totter, anarchists might throw bombs, a few lesser breeds might behave provokingly in odd corners of the world, but when all was said and done, there was nothing to fear while the stately Holmes of England, doped and dressing-gowned for action, readied his wits for the final count with Moriarty! And who the deuce was this Moriarty? Why, just a big-shot crook whom the honest idiot romanticized in order to build up his hero’s reputation! Nothing but a middle-aged stoop-shouldered Raffles! And that, mind you, was the worst our fathers’ world could imagine when it talked about Underground Forces and Powers of Evil! … Ah well, happy days. You’d better keep the cab to go home in. Good night!”

I hadn’t taken Rainier’s problem very seriously till then. For one thing, loss of memory is normal. We all forget things, and are equally likely to be reminded of them long after we think they have been forgotten for good. Often, too, the reminder is faint enough to be no more than a clue which we fail to follow up because the matter does not seem important. The unusual part of Rainier’s experience was that he did think it important, so that from something merely puzzling it was already on the way to becoming an obsession.

Some part of his story could doubtless be verified, and I already felt enough curiosity to make the attempt. I said nothing to him, but the next time the chance occurred I led Miss Hobbs to talk in a general way about her employer’s early life and career. She was more than willing—except for a continual tendency to drift into later and somewhat disparaging gossip about Mrs. Rainier. “Wasn’t he in the war?” I began, putting the leading question that anyone might have asked.

“Oh yes. He got a medal—didn’t you know that? And the strange thing was—they thought he was dead. So it was given post—post—”

“Posthumously.”

“Yes, that’s it. But you couldn’t blame them, because after the attack he was reported missing and nothing was heard about him till—oh, it was years later when he suddenly arrived home without any warning. And then it turned out he’d lost his memory.”

“Seems to me the sort of story for headlines.”

“You mean in the papers? Oh no, it was kept out—the family didn’t want any publicity.”

“That wouldn’t have been enough reason for most of the journalists I know.”

“Ah, but Sheldon arranged it.”

“Sheldon?”

“He’s the butler at Stourton. You haven’t been to Stourton yet, have you?”

“No.”

“It’s really a marvelous place.”

“Sheldon sounds a marvelous butler if he knows how to stop journalists from getting a good story and editors from printing it.”

“Well, he is rather marvelous, and I don’t suppose there’s much he doesn’t know—not about the family, anyhow. He really rules Stourton—lives there all the year round, even during the winter when the family never go out of town. I really owe him a good deal—I was only just a local girl in those days, I used to do bookkeeping and secretarial work at the house, and that brought me into contact with Sheldon constantly.” She added, rather coyly: “You know—perhaps you don’t know—how difficult it can be for a girl employed in a big house if the butler isn’t all he should be.”

I said I could imagine it.

“Sheldon was always a gentleman. Never a word—or a gesture—that anyone could object to.”

I said nothing.

“And later, when Mr. Charles took over Stourton, Sheldon personally asked him if he could do anything for me, otherwise I don’t suppose I’d be here.”

“I see. … But coming back to the time when Mr. Rainier—our Mr. Rainier, I mean—suddenly returned to Stourton. Were you working there then?”

“Not just then. It was Christmas and as old Mr. Rainier was ill they canceled the usual parties and gave me a holiday. It was parties that always kept me busy—writing out invitations and place cards and things.”

“What was Mr. Rainier like when he returned?”

“I didn’t see him till a good while afterwards, but I do know there was a lot of trouble about it, one way and another—Sheldon would never tell us half that went on.”

So there the trail ended; she didn’t know much of what had actually happened; and since then a great many years had passed, old Mr. Rainier was dead, and probably the same fate had overtaken most of the personnel from whom any elucidating inquiries might have been made at the time. Perhaps there were traces somewhere, a dossier preserved in forgotten files, memoranda hidden away in official archives; but there seemed small chance of unearthing them, or even of finding if they existed at all.

“Quite a mystery,” I commented. “Didn’t Mr. Rainier himself ever try to solve it?”

“You mean, did he try to remember things?”

“Well, more than that—didn’t he ever consult anybody—specialists, psychoanalysts, or anyone?”

“You don’t know him, or you wouldn’t ask that. The last thing he’d ever do is to go to anybody and tell them things about himself. The only person he ever did talk to was someone he’d known at Cambridge, some professor—Freeman, I think his name was.”

“You mean Dr. Freeman—the Dr. Freeman?”

“Maybe he was a doctor.”

“A tall white-haired man with a stoop?”

“Yes, that was him—he used to visit Charles a good deal before the marriage. You know him?”

“Slightly. Why not since the marriage?”

“He didn’t like parties, and I don’t think he liked Mrs. Rainier for beginning all that sort of life for Charles. She’s very ambitious, you know. People say she’ll make him Prime Minister before she’s finished.”

I laughed—having heard similar remarks myself, followed at a rule by some ribald comment on her party-giving technique. Miss Hobbs added: “Not that she isn’t a good hostess—that I say.”

Since the point was raised, it seemed to me that Mrs. Rainier was too good, and that for this reason she might miss the secret English bull’s-eye that can only be hit by guns sighted to a 97 or 98 per cent degree of accuracy. Anything more than that, even if achievable, is dangerous in England, because English people mistrust perfection, regarding it in manners as the stigma of foreigners, just as they suspect it in teeth to be the product of dentistry. All this, of course, I did not discuss with Miss Hobbs.

I saw Freeman a few days later. He had been a rather impressive figure at Cambridge, in my time as well as Rainier’s, but had recently retired to live at Richmond with an unmarried sister. It was probably a lonely life, and he seemed glad to hear my voice on the telephone and to accept an invitation to dinner. I had known him fairly well, since he had long been president of the Philosophical Society and I in my last year its vice president, and though he had written several standard works on psychology he was not psychologist enough to suspect an ulterior motive behind my apparent eagerness to look him up and talk over old times.

We met at Boulestin’s that same evening.

After waiting patiently till the inevitable question as to what I was doing with myself nowadays, I said that I had become Rainier’s secretary.

“Ah, Rainier—yes,” he muttered, as if raking over memories. And he added, with a thin cackle: “Well, history won’t repeat itself.”

“How do you mean?”

“He married one of them.”

“You mean Mrs. Rainier? You mean she was his secretary before Miss Hobbs?”

“Oh, the Hobbs woman was with him all the time—a family heirloom. Must be forty now, if she’s a day. What did she do at last—retire?”

“She’s leaving to get married.”

“Heavens—I never thought her turn would come. Who’s the lucky man? … But I can answer that myself—Rainier is, to get rid of her.”

“You know her then?”

“Hardly at all, I’m glad to say. But she used to write me the most ridiculous notes whenever Rainier made an appointment to see me. They were supposed to be from him, but I found out quite casually afterwards that she forged his name to ’em. … Absurd notes—it interested me, as a psychologist, that she should have thought them appropriate.”

“But to come back to Mrs. Rainier—”

“Oh, she worked in his City office, I think. A different dynasty. These great magnates have platoons of secretaries.”

“Queer Miss Hobbs never mentioned it. I should have thought it was something she’d have liked to drive home.”

“On a point of psychology I think you’re wrong. She’d prefer to conceal the fact though they were both, so to say, equal at the starting post, the other woman won.”

“Maybe. I gather you know Rainier rather well?”

“I used to. You see, I began with the initial advantage of meeting him anonymously.”

“I’m not quite clear what you mean.”

He expanded over a further glass of brandy. “Rainier’s a peculiar fellow. He has a curious fear of his own identity. He lets you get to know him best when he doesn’t think you know who he is. … It’s an interesting kink, psychologically. I first met him through Werneth, who was his tutor at St. Swithin’s. Apparently he told Werneth about—er—well, perhaps I ought not to discuss it, but it was something interesting to me—as a psychologist—but not particularly to Werneth, who was a mere historian.” Again the cackle. “Anyhow, Werneth could only get his permission to pass it on to me by promising not to divulge his name, and on hearing what it was all about I was so interested that we actually arranged a meeting—again anonymously—I wasn’t supposed to know who he was. … But I’ll let you into a secret—Werneth had told me, privately, beforehand—unscrupulous fellow, Werneth. And then one morning several months later I couldn’t find my bicycle outside the college gate after a lecture, but in its place was a similar model with the name ‘Charles Rainier’ on it. I made his mistake an excuse to call on him—and I must say—after the opening embarrassment—we very soon became friends.” He added: “And now, of course, I know what you’re going to ask me, but being less unscrupulous than Werneth I can’t tell you.”

“I don’t think you need, because I already know about Rainier’s—er—peculiarity. I suppose it was that.”

“Suppose you tell me first of all what that is.”

“The blank patch in his life that he can’t remember.”

“A rather inexact description.”

“No doubt, and that’s why I’d very much like to hear your own.”

He smiled. “It was an unusual case—but I’ve heard of several similar ones. They’re recorded, you know, in technical journals. Rainier had—if one might so put it—certain threads of recollection about the blank period, though they were so faint as to be almost nonexistent at first. After he left Cambridge we didn’t meet again for ten years—by that time the threads had become a little less faint. It was my aim, when I came to know Rainier again after the ten-year interval, to sort out those threads, to disentangle them—to expand them, as it were, into a complete corpus of memory.”

“I understand. But you didn’t succeed.”

“Are you asking me that or telling me?”

“Both, in a way.”

He said, smiling: “My expectation all along had been that his full memory would eventually return—a little bit here, a little bit there—till finally, like a key turning in a lock, or like the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the whole thing would slip into position. But I gather that it hasn’t yet happened?”

“The bits are still being assembled, but nowhere near to completion.”

“Tell me, Harrison, if I may ask the question—why are you taking such a keen interest in this matter? Hardly within the scope of secretarial duties. … Or is it?”

“I like him and I hate to see him bothered by it as he still is. That’s the only reason.”

“A good one.”

“Now you tell me something—have you any theories about the blank patch?”

“Theories? I can only guess it was a pretty bad time. He was injured, if I remember rightly, just above the left parietal bone of the …” He went off into a medical survey that conveyed nothing to me. “It was an injury that would require operative treatment—perhaps a series of operations. That’s why it’s perhaps a pity that he still bothers, as you say he does. Even if complete recollection were to return to him now, it would probably be only of pain, unhappiness, boredom.”

“On the other hand, even such memories might be better than an increasing obsession about the loss of them?”

“Possibly.”

We were silent for a time after that. Presently I said: “You know he was taken prisoner by the Germans?”

“Oh yes. But German or English—all hospitals are unhappy places, especially for a man who can’t tell anyone who he is. I imagine the Germans treated him namelessly or by error under someone else’s name, and eventually returned him to England under the same condition. Then there would be other hospitals in England, full of experiences nobody would wish to remember. There were a great many shell-shock and loss-of-memory cases that took years—some of them are still taking years, God help them. The whole thing happened so long ago I don’t see how we can ever expect to know all the details. Tell me your theory, if you have one.”

“That’s the trouble, I haven’t.”

“The real trouble, of course, is Mrs. Rainier.”

Curious, the way people sooner or later led the talk to her. Freeman, reticent at first about a former friend, saw no reason now to conceal his opinion of a former friend’s wife. “She’s an unusual sort of woman, Harrison.”

“Well, he’s not so usual, either.”

“They get on well together? Is that your impression?”

I answered guardedly: “I think she makes a good politician’s wife.”

“And I suppose, by the same token, you think he makes a good politician?”

“He has some of the attributes. Clever speaker and a good way with people.”

“When he’s in the mood. He isn’t always. … Did you ever hear about the Bridgelow Antiquarian Dinner?”

I shook my head.

“It was—oh, several years ago. He was supposed to be helping the candidate, and during the campaign we asked him to our annual beano—strictly non-party—just a semi-learned society, with the accent on the semi. I was president at the time, and Rainier was next to me at the table. Halfway through his speech, which began pretty well, there was a bit of a disturbance caused by old General Wych-Furlough fumbling in late and apologizing—his car had broken down or something. He talked rather loudly, like most deaf people, and of course it was annoying to a speaker, but the whole incident was over in a minute, most people would have passed it off. Rainier, however, seemed to freeze up suddenly, couldn’t conceal the way he felt about it, finished his speech almost immediately and left the table rather sooner than he decently could. I went out with him for a moment, told him frankly I thought his behavior had been rather childish—surely age and infirmity entitled people to some latitude—it wasn’t as if there’d been any intentional discourtesy. He said then, in a rather panicky way: ‘It wasn’t that—it was something in the fellow himself—something chemical, maybe, in the way we react to each other.’ I thought his explanation even more peculiar than his behavior.”

I checked myself from commenting, and Freeman, noticing it said: “Go on—what was it you were going to ask?”

“I was just wondering—is it possible he had one of those submerged memories—of having met the General before?”

“I thought of that later on, but it didn’t seem likely they could ever have met. He didn’t even know the General’s name. And if they had met before, I still can’t think of any reason for antagonism—the old boy was just a fussy, simple-minded, stupid fellow with a distinguished military career and a repertoire of exceptionally dull stories about hunting.”

“Was Mrs. Rainier at the dinner?”

“No, she wouldn’t come to anything I was president of—that’s very certain.” He added, as if glad to get back to the subject: “A strange woman. I’m not sure I altogether trust her—and that isn’t because I don’t particularly like her. It’s something deeper. She always seems to me to be hiding something. I suppose it’s part of my job to have these psychic feelings about people. … You know about her famous parties?”

“Who doesn’t? I’ve sampled them.”

“Mind you, let’s be fair. She’s not a snob in the ordinary sense—I mean about birth or money. Of course it would be too ridiculous if she were—since she began with neither herself. But what exactly is it that she goes for? Brains? Celebrity? Notoriety? I went to Kenmore once, and I must admit she plays the game loathsomely well. But all this relentless celebrity-hunting and party-giving doesn’t make a home—and I’m damned if I know what it does make.”

“Some people say it’s made Rainier’s career.”

“I’ve heard that too—from people who don’t like him. The people who don’t like her will tell you her methods have actually held him back. Still, I don’t deny she’s a good mate for a man of affairs. The real point is whether Rainier’s life ought to be cluttered up with business and politics at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply that I’ve always considered him—abstractly—one of the rare spirits of our time, so that success of the kind he has attained and may yet attain becomes a detestable self-betrayal.”

“So you think the marriage was a mistake?”

“Not at all, if he felt he had to have that sort of life.”

“What other sort of life could he have had?”

“Out of my province to say. I’m talking about the quality of the man, not his opportunities. I suppose it wasn’t his fault his father left him a small industrial empire to look after—steelworks and newspapers and interlocking holding companies and whatnot—all more or less bankrupt, though people didn’t know it at the time. Even the seat in Parliament was a sort of family inheritance he had to take over.”

“Like Miss Hobbs?”

“Yes like her—just as idiotic but not so loyal. He only scraped in by twelve votes last time. … But since you mention the Hobbs woman, let me assure you she’s a modernistic jewel compared with the old butler they keep at Stourton … Sheldon, I think his name is.”

“You don’t like him either?”

Freeman shrugged. “It isn’t that I mind his eccentric impertinences—Scottish servants are like that and one takes it from them—even Queen Victoria had to. What makes me really uncomfortable is the same feeling I have about Mrs. Rainier—that he’s hiding something.”

“Maybe they’re hiding something together?”

His smile was of another kind and did not answer mine. “You haven’t been to Stourton yet, have you? It’s an amazing hiding place for anything they’ve got to hide.”

Miss Hobbs left during the week that followed and I settled down to the task of becoming her successor. It was not quite as simple as she had led me to believe. Rainier’s interests were manifold; besides holding directorships of important companies he was a member of many societies and organizations—all this, of course, on top of his political work. I had plenty to do, and he expected it done quickly and efficiently. We had little chance to talk on other than business matters, and for the time he seemed to have dropped completely the preoccupation that had begun to interest me. One thing happened that I had not after Freeman’s remarks anticipated: Mrs. Rainier invited me to another of her lunch parties. This time it was really literary, as she had promised (Maurice Baring, Charles Morgan, Louis Bromfield, Henry Bernstein, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, H. G. Wells, and a pale young man whose name I have forgotten who wrote highbrow detective novels whose names I have also forgotten), and despite initial misgivings I found the whole affair quite pleasant. Once more there was the empty chair for Rainier, if he should turn up, but he failed to, and nobody seemed surprised. Again also Mrs. Rainier asked me to stay a moment after the others had gone, but now the request was less remarkable, since I had work in the same house. “Can you spare time to look at my garden?” she said, leading me to the back of the hall where the French windows were open.

We sauntered across the lawn to a door in the high surrounding wall; unlocking it, she watched my face as I showed surprise, for within was a second garden, not much bigger than a large room, but so enclosed by trees and carpeted with flowers that one could hardly have believed it to exist in the middle of a London borough. “It’s a secret,” she confided. “I only show it to close friends—or to those who I hope are going to be.”

I murmured something polite that might equally have referred to her last remark or to the garden itself.

“You, see,” she went on, “I never cared for Miss Hobbs. I don’t think Charles did, either, but he was too kind to get rid of her. If she told you things against me, and I’m sure she did, just suspend judgment till you know me better.”

I went on saying polite things.

“You and Charles first met on a train, didn’t you?” She stooped to a vase. “One of those chance meetings—I’ve had them myself—when you tell all your secrets to a perfect stranger because you’re certain you’ll never meet him again. … Something like that?”

I said guardedly: “I don’t know about secrets, but we certainly found it easy to talk.”

“And you like your work here?”

“Very much.”

“I’m glad. It will be wonderful if you can really help Charles—apart from just office work. He needs the right sort of companionship sometimes—he has difficult moods, you know. Or perhaps you don’t know—yet. Anyhow, the thing to do is not to take him too seriously when he has them.” I waited for her to continue, knowing that she too was waiting for me; even if I were willing to suspend judgment I was also, like Freeman, unwilling to trust her completely. She suddenly smiled. “Well, now you know my secret. Keep it for me.” And she added, leading me back through the doorway: “This, I mean. It used to be the place where the gardener threw all the rubbish. I planned it myself—I do most of the work here still. Charles never looks in—hasn’t time. Hasn’t time for my lunches either—not that I mind that so much, but I do wish—sometimes—I’d find him sitting here—quietly—alone—like men you sometimes see outside their cottages in the country—at peace. He never is, you know.”

I felt she would like to tell me something if I already knew enough to make it advisable, but she wasn’t certain I did know, to she hesitated. I asked her why she thought he Was never at peace.

“For one thing, he’s so terribly overworked.”

“Yes, I know, but apart from that?”

“Oh, well, it’s hard for anyone to feel at peace these days. Don’t you think so?”

“What about the men you sometimes see outside their cottages in the country?”

She smiled, suddenly on the defensive, sure now that I didn’t know as much as she had half suspected, and for that reason anxious not to give me any further opening. “They’re probably not really at peace at all—just too old and tired to worry about things any more.” As we entered the house the social manner closed about her like the fall of a curtain. “Now that we’re becoming friends you must come to Stourton for week ends as soon as we open it up. There’s a real secret garden there—I mean one that everybody knows about.”

I hadn’t expected Stourton to be quite so overwhelming. We drove there a few weeks later in four Daimlers—“like a high-speed funeral,” said Rainier, who was in a macabre mood altogether; three of them packed with luggage and servants from Kenmore, the first one containing ourselves and an elegant young man named Woburn, who was coming to catalogue the Stourton library. Most guests would arrive the following day—perhaps twenty-odd: politicians, peers, actors, novelists, crack tennis players, celebrities of all kinds. It was a warm morning and as we drove through Reading and Newbury the sun broke through the haze and kindled the full splendor of an English summer, with its ever-changing greens under a dappled sky.

Presently we turned off the main road and curved for a mile between high hedges; then suddenly, in a distant fold of the downs, a vision in cream-colored stone broke through heavy parkland trees. Woburn, who had not seen it before, joined me in a little gasp of admiration. “You were intended to do that,” said Rainier. “In fact the architect and roadbuilder conspired about it two hundred years ago. My brother Julian, who fancied himself as a phrase maker, once called it ‘a stucco prima donna making a stage entrance.’ Now, you see, it goes out of sight.” Intervening upland obscured the house for another mile or so until, at a new turn of the road, it reappeared so much more intimately that one could only give it a nod of respectful recognition. “But here we are again, and for the rest of the way we simply have to give it all the stars in Baedeker.” We swooped into the final half-mile stretch that ended in a wide Palladian portico. “A house like this is like some kinds of women—too expensive even to cast off. Of course what you really pay for isn’t the thing itself, but the illusion—the sense of ownership, the intangible Great I Am. Nowadays a bankrupt illusion—the farms don’t pay, the hills that belong to me are just as free for anyone else to roam over, the whole idea of possessing this place is just a legal fiction entitling me to pay bills. I think it would sooner possess me, if I’d let it. … Hello, Sheldon.”

Sheldon was waiting on the top step to welcome us. Neither plump nor cadaverous, obsequious nor pompous, he shook the hand that Rainier offered him, bowed to Mrs. Rainier, and gave Woburn and myself a faintly appraising scrutiny until Rainier made the introductions. Then he said: “Well, Mr. Harrison, if this is your first visit to Stourton it probably won’t be your last. Mr. Rainier keeps his secretaries a long time.” The remark struck me as rather offhandedly familiar as well as a somewhat gauche reminder of Mrs. Rainier’s former position, but there was a general laugh, from which I gathered that Sheldon enjoyed privileges of this kind, perhaps on account of age. He was certainly a well-preserved antiquity, with an air of serene yet somehow guarded responsibility; in different clothes he might have looked a cabinet minister, in contradistinction to those cabinet ministers who, even in their own clothes, look like butlers.

By the time I had been shown to my room in the East Wing (Stourton, like every grand house of its period, had to have wings) the sun was almost down over the rim of the hills and the slow magic of a summer twilight was beginning to unfold; through my window the vista of formal gardens and distant skyline was entrancingly beautiful. I was admiring it as Rainier entered with Woburn, whom he had been showing round the library. “I hope you don’t object to views,” he said. “I know it’s the latest artistic fad to consider them rather vulgar. I put in these large windows myself, against all the advice of architects who said this sort of house shouldn’t have them. Otherwise, except for a few extra bathrooms, I haven’t touched the place.”

Behind the two of them stood Sheldon, announcing that our baths were ready; Rainier turned then and led us across the corridor into an extraordinary room of Moorish design embellished with fluted columns and Arabic gargoyles and a high domed ceiling. He watched our faces and seemed to derive a certain satisfaction. “My father built this,” he explained, “as what he called an extra billiard room. He made the bulk of his fortune, during the Edwardian era, when the social hallmark was to have a billiard room, and during the last year of the war, when money was coming in so fast he didn’t know what to do with it, he conceived the idea of an extra billiard room as a symbol of utter superfluity. … At least, that’s the only theory I can imagine. I don’t think a single game of billiards was ever played in it, and I turned it into a bathhouse without any feeling of impiety.” We passed through the room, which was furnished with divans and sun-ray lamps, into a further apartment containing a row of small but quite modern cubicle bathrooms, three of which Sheldon was already preparing for our use. “There were only four bathrooms in the entire house before I made these,” Rainier continued. “One was in the servants’ quarters and Sheldon had actually paid for it out of his own pocket. That gives you some idea of the times, even as late as 1919.” He added, after a pause and another glance at our faces: “And of my father too—I know that’s what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t really niggardliness. He gave a great deal during his lifetime to the more orthodox charities. What he mostly suffered from were a few strikingly wrong notions. One of them was doubtless that servants didn’t need bathrooms. Another was that he was really an English gentleman. And another was that the remaining saga of mankind would be largely a matter of tidying up the jungle and making the whole earth a well-administered English colony under a Liberal government. I think when the war ended he assumed that’s what was going to be done to Germany.”

“Maybe it should have been,” said Woburn quietly. He had done little but smile until then, and I noticed Rainier give him a look of sharpened interest. Then we went into our respective cubicles, but the walls were only neck-high and conversation rose easily with the steam. I could hear Rainier and Woburn veering on to a political argument, while in my own cubicle Sheldon, arranging towels, saw me notice the slightly brown color of the water as it filled the tub. “Won’t harm you,” he remarked. “We tell some of our guests it’s due to mineral springs that are good for rheumatism, but as you’re one of the family I’ll let you into a family secret—it’s just the rust in the pipes.”

He was going out chuckling when I retorted, quite without secondary meaning: “I hope all the family secrets are as innocent.”

The chuckle ended sharply as he turned on me a look that evidently reassured him, for his mouth slanted into a slow smile as he resumed his exit. “I trust you will find them so, Mr. Harrison.”

Meanwhile Rainier had come back to the subject of Stourton, and I heard him saying to Woburn: “My father bought it after it had bankrupted the Westondales, and the Westondales inherited it from ancestors who had built it out of profits from the African slave trade. This made my father’s purchase almost appropriate, since my great-great-grandfather made his pile out of the first steam-driven cotton mills in Lancashire. You may imagine Stourton, therefore, peopled with the ghosts of Negroes and little children.”

A short while later we dressed and dined in the vast room that would have seated fifty with ease, instead of our four selves. Mrs. Rainier, I noticed, was particularly gracious to Woburn, whom she probably felt to be shy in surroundings of such unaccustomed grandeur. There was talk of how he would set about the library-cataloguing job; most of the books, it appeared, had been taken over from the Westondales along with the house. “My father was not a great reader, but he had a curious knack of reading the right things. One day he read that some pine forests in Hampshire were supposed to be healthy to live amongst, so he promptly bought several hundred acres of them—on which part of Bournemouth now stands. Quite an interesting man, my father. He played the cornet, and he also cried over all Dickens’s deathbed scenes—Little Nell and Paul Dombey, especially. He liked to have them read to him, for preference, and his favorite reader was an old governess of mine named Miss Ponsonby, who hated him and used to come out of one of those tearful séances muttering “The old humbug!’ But he wasn’t altogether a humbug—at least no more than most of us are. I’m not quite certain what he was. … Somebody ought to write a really good biography of him some day. He did have one written just before he died, but it was a commissioned job and made him into a not very convincing plaster saint—and, of course, it would be easy to write the other sort, showing him as a sinister capitalistic villain. … But in between, somewhere, is probably the truth—if anyone thought it worth while to make the search.”

“Why shouldn’t Mr. Woburn try?” asked Mrs. Rainier.

“Not a bad idea, if he wants to. But let him finish the cataloguing first. Ever write anything, Woburn?”

“A few stories, Mr. Rainier. You read one of them—probably you’ve forgotten it—”

“Ah yes, of course. The one about the unfortunate Russian?”

Woburn nodded, and the somewhat mysterious reference was not explained. After coffee Mrs. Rainier said she was tired and would go to bed; Rainier mentioned letters he had to write; so there seemed nothing left for Woburn and me but to pass the evening together, somehow or other.

Sheldon suggested the library, ushering us into the fine somber room with a touch of evident pride, and obligingly switching on a radio in time for the news summary of a Hitler speech delivered in Berlin earlier that day. We listened awhile, then Woburn snapped off the machine with a gesture—the meager residuum of protest to which modern man has been reduced. “I hope there isn’t a war this year,” he remarked, as one hoping the weather would stay fine. “You see, as soon as I finish this job I have another with the Kurtzmayers—they have a big collection at Nice and I daresay I shall spend all the autumn there—unless,” he added with a half-smile, “Mr. Hitler’s plans interfere with mine.” I smiled back with a touch of the uncomfortableness that afflicts me when some facetious travel-film commentator refers to “Mr. and Mrs. Hippopotamus” and waits for the laugh. I was thinking of this, and also wondering how a youngster like Woburn (at least ten years my junior) had managed to establish this cataloguing racket amongst the rich and eminent, when he disarmingly told me all about it. “It was the Rainiers who gave me an introduction to the Kurtzmayers—they’ve been rather good at putting things in my way.”

I asked him how long he had known the Rainiers.

“Only a few months. And you?”

“About two years. I met him first—quite by accident—in a train.”

“I met him first in a public library.”

“By accident?”

“No, I had a job there and he came to see me. Mrs. Rainier sent him.”

“Mrs. Rainier?”

“Yes, I met her before him. It was her idea I should do the Stourton job—that’s why she sent him to see me.”

“I should have thought she’d have asked you to see him.”

“So should I, but it seems he had a queer idea he wanted to see me first without either of us knowing who the other was, so that if he didn’t like me the whole thing could be dropped.”

“I see.”

“Haven’t you ever noticed that for all his glib speech and ease of manner he’s really shy of meeting new people—in a rather odd way?”

I said perhaps I had, and asked him how his own meeting had happened.

“He didn’t have far to come—the library was only just across the river in Lambeth. Of course I took him for just an ordinary visitor. He first of all asked at the counter if we had any illustrated books on English villages. It’s the sort of vague request you fairly often get from people, so I picked a few books off the shelves and left him at a table with them. Presently he handed them back with a few words of thanks, and out of politeness I then asked if he’d found what he’d been looking for. He said, well no, not exactly—he’d just thought the pictures and photographs in some illustrated book might happen to include one of a place he’d once seen but had forgotten the name of. They hadn’t though, and it didn’t matter.”

“You must have thought it curious.”

“Yes, but the really curious thing was that I’d just written a short story based on a similar idea. He seemed quite interested when I told him this and we talked on for a while—then finally he stared round rather vaguely and said, ‘I’m supposed to see a man who works here called Woburn.’ I said I was Woburn and he pretended to be surprised and pleased, but somehow I felt he had known all the time, though his pleasure seemed genuine. He then said his wife had talked about me and thought I might do some cataloguing, and of course he had to say then who he was. I told him I’d be very glad, and he said that was fine, he’d let me know; then he shook hands hurriedly and left.”

“Did he let you know?”

“Not immediately. After a few weeks I wrote to him, because I really wanted the job if I could get it—I was only earning three pounds a week. Of course I’d found out all about him in the interval—about his Fleet Street interests—that’s really why I sent him that short story I’d written, because I thought maybe he’d pass it on to one of his editors.” Woburn smiled. “He returned it a few days later, without comment, but said I could begin the cataloguing any time I liked.”

“Tell me about the story.”

“Oh, it was nothing much—just a rather feeble yarn about a Russian soldier returning from the front after the Revolution.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing exciting. He just roamed about the country trying to find where he lived.”

“Had he—had he lost his memory?”

“No, he was just a simple fellow—couldn’t read and write—all he could give was the name of the village and a description of it that might equally have applied to ten thousand other Russian villages. The government officials wouldn’t bother with him, because he couldn’t fill out the proper forms, so he just had to go on wandering vaguely about trying to find the place.”

“And did he—eventually?”

“He was run over by a train and carried to a neighboring village where he died without knowing that it actually was the one he’d been looking for … of course you might have guessed that.”

“Having read Gogol and Chekhov, I think I might.”

“I know, it was just an imitation. I haven’t any real originality—only a technique. I suppose Rainier realized that. So I’d better stick to the catalogues.”

It seemed to me a courageous, but also a rather desolate thing for a young writer to admit.

“Why not try the biography, if they give you the chance?”

“I might, but I doubt if it would work out You can’t be sure they’d really want anyone to be impartial. That’s why it’s an affectation of Rainier’s to run down his ancestors. A sort of inverted snobbery put on to impress people because the direct kind isn’t fashionable any more. … Mind you, I like him immensely.”

“And her?”

“Oh, she’s marvelous, isn’t she? The way she can remember dozens of names when she introduces people. …” I remembered Rainier had once commented on that too. But Woburn added: “Rather a mistake, though, in English life—never to make a mistake. Like knowing too much—such as the names of all the states in America. Stamps one as a bit of an outsider.”

“You seem to have sized things up pretty well.”

“Probably because I am an outsider.”

“So am I. So are most of the people who come here. So are half the names in Debrett. Come to think about it, that’s one healthy symptom of English so-called society—its inside is full of outsiders.”

“I suppose the Rainiers are outsiders—in a sense.”

“Well, they haven’t a title, but that makes no difference. Owning Stourton’s almost a title in itself.”

“Yes, it’s a wonderful place. There’s an odd atmosphere here, though, don’t you think?”

“Do you think so?”

“You don’t know everything, you don’t know everything—that’s what the place seems to say.”

“Maybe those ghosts of Negroes and little children?”

“They haven’t got any children, have they?”

“No.”

“Did they ever have?”

“I don’t know. One somehow doesn’t get to know things like that.”

“Do you think they’re happy?”

Before I could attempt an answer we both turned sharply to see Sheldon carrying in a tray with siphon, glasses, and whiskey decanter. “I thought perhaps you two gentlemen might like to help yourselves, either now or later.” Without offering to serve us he placed the tray on a table and walked out of the room, pausing at the door to deliver a quizzical goodnight.

We returned the salutation and then, as soon as the door closed, looked at each other rather uneasily. “I didn’t hear him come in,” said Woburn, after a pause. “He didn’t knock.”

“Good servants don’t—except at bedroom doors.”

“Oh? I don’t know things like that. My mother never had a servant.”

“Now who’s being an inverted snob? My mother had one servant, whom we called the skivvy. That sets us both pretty equal so far as Stourton’s concerned.”

“You probably went to a good school, though.”

I mentioned the name of my school and agreed that it was generally considered fairly good. “As good as Netherton, which is where Rainier went. Anyhow, from a social angle, the main thing is the accent—which you and I both seem to have. Nobody’s going to ask us where we picked it up.”

“I don’t mind if they do. I was at a board school up to the age of twelve—then I won a scholarship to a suburban grammar school. I took a London degree last year, working in the evenings. I never try to conceal the truth.”

“Conceal it? I should think you’d boast about it.”

“I suppose that’s really what I am doing. Will you have a drink?”

“Yes, please.”

He began to mix them and presently, while working off a certain embarrassment, added: “How does that fellow Sheldon strike you?”

I said I thought he was the kind of person one could avoid a decision about by calling him a character. “Maybe the keeper of the family skeleton,” I added.

“No—because if there were one, Rainier would take a perverse delight in dragging it out of the cupboard for everyone to stare at.”

We laughed and agreed that that might well be so. It was past eleven before we yawned our way upstairs. When I reached my room I found it full of cool air and moonlight; in the vagrant play of moving curtain shadows I did not at first see Rainier sitting by the window in an armchair. He spoke as I approached: “Don’t let me scare you—I’m only admiring your view. It’s exactly the same as mine, so that isn’t much of an excuse. … How did you and Woburn get along?”

“Quite well. I like him. An intelligent young fellow.”

“Spoken with all the superiority of thirty to twenty?”

“No, I don’t think so. I do like him, anyhow.”

“He’s my wife’s protégé. She wants to see him get on in the world—made me root him out of a municipal library to do this card-indexing job. … Yes, he might go far, as they say, if there’s anywhere far to go these days.”

“That’s the trouble, and he probably realizes it as much as we do.”

“Well, we can’t change the world for him, but it’s nice to have him around—company for Helen, if nothing else. I like him too, for that matter. I like most boys of his age—and of your age. Wish I had an army of ’em.”

“What would you do with an army of them?”

“Something better, I hope, than have them catalogue books or write biographies of my ancestors.” He read my thoughts enough to continue: “I daresay you’re rather surprised at my lack of enthusiasm for the family tree. That may be because I didn’t have a very satisfactory home life. When I was a small boy my father was just something distant and booming and Olympian—a bit of a bully in the house, or at least a bit of a Bultitude (if you remember your Vice-Versa)—all of which made it fortunate for the family that he wasn’t much in the home at all. My mother died when I was ten.”

“But you liked her?”

“I loved her very dearly. She was a delicate, soft-voiced, kind-hearted, sunny-minded, but rather helpless woman—but then most women would have been helpless against my father. He loved her, I’ve no doubt, in his own possessive way. Perhaps a less loving and more thoughtful husband would have sent her to a warmer climate during the winters, but my father wasn’t thoughtful—at best his thoughtlessness became comradely, as when he insisted on taking her for brisk walks over the hills on January days. It was a cherished saying of his that fresh air would blow the cobwebs out of your lungs. It also blew the life out of my mother’s lungs, for it was after one of those terrible walks, during which she gasped and panted while my father shouted Whitmanesque encouragement, that she called in Sanderstead, our local doctor, who diagnosed t.b. My father was appalled from that moment and spent a small fortune on all kinds of cures, but it was too late—she died within the year, and my father, I have since felt, promptly did something about her in his mind that corresponded to winding up or writing off or some other operation that happens even in the best financial circles.”

He suddenly stood up and moved to the open window, staring out as if facing something that challenged him. “Those are the hills where he made her walk. You can see the line of them against the sky.” Then he turned abruptly and said he was sure I was tired and would want to go to bed.

I assured him I wasn’t sleepy at all.

“But you came in yawning.”

“Maybe, but I’m wide-awake now. The breeze is so fresh … You must have hated your father.”

He answered slowly: “Yes, I suppose I did. Freud would say so, anyhow. But of course when I was a boy and even up to my undergraduate days people only admitted the politer emotions.”

“The war changed all that.”

“Yes, indeed, and so many other things too.”

He was silent for a moment; then I went on: “You once told me about a certain day, sometime after the war ended, when you found yourself on a park seat in Liverpool.”

“When did I tell you that?” He controlled a momentary alarm, then added with a smile: “Ah yes, I remember—in your rooms at St. Swithin’s. I’m always garrulous after public speeches. … Well, if I told you, you know. That’s how it was. And don’t ask me about anything before the park seat because I can’t answer.”

“But how about after the park seat?”

He seemed relieved. “After? Oh, I can stand any amount of cross-examination there—I’m on safe ground from about noon on December 27, 1919.”

“I wish you’d begin your story there, then, and bring it up to date.”

“But there is no story—except my life story.”

“That’s what I’d like to hear.”

“How I Made Good? From Park Seat to Parliament?”.

“If you like to call it that.”

He laughed. “It’s mostly a lot of sordid business details and family squabbles. You don’t know the family, either.”

“All the same, I wish you’d tell me. The effort of setting it all out might even help you towards the other memory—if you’re still anxious for it.”

I could see the response to that in his eyes as he entered the light again.

“So you really think memory’s like an athlete—keep it in training—take it for cross-country runs? H’m, might be something in the idea. When do we start?”

“Now, if you’re not too sleepy. I’m not … Go back to that park seat in Liverpool.”

“But I told you about that once.”

“Tell me again. And then go on.”

So he began, and as it makes a fairly long story, it goes better in the third person.

PART TWO

HE FOUND HIMSELF LYING on that park seat. He had opened his eyes to see clouds and drenched trees, and to feel the drops splashing on his face. After a while his position began to seem more and more odd, so he raised himself to a sitting angle, and was immediately aware of sodden clothes, stiff limbs, a terrific headache, and a man stooping over him. His first thought was that he must have been drunk the night before, but he soon rejected it, partly because he could not remember the night before at all, partly because he somehow did not think he was the sort of young man to have had that sort of night, but chiefly because of a growing interest in what the man stooping over him was saying. It was a kind of muttered chorus—“That’s right, mister—take it easy. Didn’t ’ardly touch yer—it was the wet roadway, you sort o’ slipped. Cheer up, mister, no bones broke—you’ll be all right—wouldn’t leave you ’ere, I wouldn’t, if I didn’t know you’d be all right. …”

Presently, suggested by the muttered chorus and supported by the fact that his clothes were not only sopping wet but also muddied and torn, another hypothesis occurred to him—that he had been run down by a car whose driver had brought him into the park and was now leaving him there.

But where? His brain refused an answer, and when pressed offered a jumble of memories connected only with war—shell fire for headaches, a smashed leg for stiffness, no man’s land for all the mud and rain in the world.

He stood up, feeling dizzy, swayed and almost fell. The man had gone, was now nowhere to be seen. Then he noticed he had been lying down on sheets of newspaper. He stooped to peel one off the seat, hoping it might afford some clue, but the top of the page that would have contained a name and date was an unreadable mush, and the rest was rapidly softening under the heavy rain. He peered at it, nevertheless, searching for some helpful word or phrase before the final disintegration. Most of the letterpress seemed to be news about floods and flood damage—rescues from swollen rivers, people stranded in upper floors, rowboats in streets, and so on.

Then suddenly his eyes caught a paragraph headed “Rainier Still in Germany”—one of those mock-cheerful items that tired sub-editors put in to fill an odd corner—something about soaked holiday crowds taking comfort from the thought that somebody somewhere was faring even worse.

Now it is curious how one’s own name, or the name of one’s home, or a word like “cancer,” will sometimes leap out of a page as if it were printed in red ink. It was like that for the young man as he staggered through the deserted park towards a gate he could see in the distance. Rainier Still in Germany—Rainier Still in Germany. It was a challenge, something he had to answer; and the answer came. “Impossible—I’m here, reading a newspaper, and the newspaper’s in English—therefore this can’t be Germany.”

Presently he passed through the park gate into a busy thoroughfare. A tram came along, mud-splashed to its upper windows and sluicing swathes of water from the rails to the gutters. It was difficult to see through the spray of mud and rain, but on the side of the tram as it passed by he could just read the inscription—“Liverpool City Corporation.”

He walked along by the high railings till the park came to an end and shops began. Meanwhile he had been feeling in his pockets, finding money—coins and several treasury notes, amounting in all to over four pounds. Reaching a news agent’s shop he went inside and asked for a paper.

“Post or Courier, sir?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

A paper was handed over. “Looks like you’ve had a fall, sir? Terribly slippery after all this rain. … Like me to give you a bit of a brush?”

“Er … thanks.”

“Why, you’re wet through—if I was you I’d get home and to bed as quick as I could. Like me to get you a cab?”

“No, that wouldn’t help. I don’t live here. But if there’s a tailor near abouts—”

“Two doors ahead, sir. He’ll fix you up. Say I sent you.”

“Thanks.”

He walked out, glancing at the paper as he did so. He saw that the date was December 27, 1919.

So now he knew three important things: Who, Where, and When.

Two hours later Charles Rainier was in a train to London. He had had a hot bath and a meal; his clothes did not fit well, but were dry; and after a lightning headache-cure across a chemist’s counter he felt somewhat drowsily relieved.

Beside him were several more newspapers and magazines. As it was the end of December, some contained résumés of the events of 1919; and these at first he had found very astonishing. Biggest of all surprises was to find that the war had been over for more man a year and had ended in complete victory for the Allies; this was surprising because his last recollected idea on the subject had been that the Allies were just as likely to lose.

But that dated back to a certain night in 1917 when he lay in a shell hole near Arras, half delirious with the pain of a smashed leg, watching shell after shell dig other holes round about him, until finally one came that seemed to connect by a long dark throbbing corridor with his headache that morning.

Charles arrived in London towards dusk, in time to catch the last train that would get him to Stourton that night. The train was late in reaching Fiveoaks, which is the station for Stourton, and three miles away from it, as anyone knows who has ever received a letter on Stourton notepaper. From Fiveoaks he walked, because all the cabs were taken before he reached the station yard, and also because he hoped the cold air might clear that still-surviving headache. He was glad they were putting out the lamps as he gave up his ticket at the barrier, so that the collector did not recognize him.

He realized that his return was bound to come as a shock, and he hardly knew what reason he could give anyone for his long and peculiar absence; he hardly knew yet what reason he could give himself. He was puzzled, too, by an absence of joy in his heart at the prospect of home and familiar faces; more than by any excitement he was possessed by a deep and unutterable numbness of spirit, a numbness so far without pain yet full of the hint of pain withdrawn and waiting.

Presently he turned off the main road. He remembered that turn, and the curve of the secondary road over the hill to the point where suddenly, in daylight, the visitor caught his first glimpse of the house. Often, as a boy, he had met such visitors at Fiveoaks, hoping that when they reached that particular point of the drive they would not be so immersed in conversation as to miss the view.

Now when he came to the view there was nothing to see, nothing to hear but an owl hooting, nothing to feel but the raw air blowing from the uplands.

He was glad he had sent no wire to tell them of his arrival. He had refrained because he felt the shock might be greater that way than if he were to see Sheldon first, and also because he hardly knew how much or how little to say in a wire; but now he perceived another advantage in not having sent any message—it preserved for a few extra minutes the curious halfway comfortableness of being alive only in the first person singular.

Towards midnight he reached the wrought-iron gates of the main entrance; they were closed and locked, of course, but there was a glow in one of the adjacent windows, and as he approached the small square-built lodge a gap in a curtain revealed a lighted Christmas tree. Odd, because he remembered Parsloe as a tight-fisted bachelor unlikely to spend money on that sort of thing—unless, of course, he had married in the interval; but that was odder still to contemplate—Parsloe married!

It was not Parsloe, however, who opened the door to his persistent ringing, but a half-dressed stranger—middle-aged, suspicious, challenging.

“Well, young man?”

“I’d like to go up to the house, if you’ll let me through.”

“We don’t admit anyone, not without you give your name and business.”

“I know, but you see …” He hesitated, realizing the difficulties ahead—his story, told cold with no corroborations, would sound sheerly incredible. Eventually he added, rather weakly: “If Parsloe were here, he’d know me.”

“Maybe he would, but he ain’t here—having been dead these fifteen months. You’d better be off, sir, dragging people out of bed at this hour.”

The “sir” was some progress anyway; a social acknowledgment that drunk or sober, honest or fraudulent, at least one had the right accent.

“Perhaps I could see Sheldon, then—”

“You can’t disturb Mr. Sheldon either—especially now.”

“You mean there’s a party?” (Of course there would be there were always big parties at Stourton through Christmas and New Year.)

Suddenly the question: “You wouldn’t be Dr. Astley, by any chance?”

Charles was about to ask who Dr. Astley was when he thought better of it and replied hastily, perhaps too hastily: “Yes, that’s who I am.”

But the lodgekeeper was still suspicious. Moving over to a telephone just inside the door, he wound up the instrument, listened, then began muttering something inaudible. Afterwards he turned to beckon Charles inside. “Mr. Sheldon says he’d like a word with you first, sir.”

“Certainly. I’ll be glad of one with him, too.”

Good old Sheldon—taking no chances. The voice at the other end was impersonally wary. “Dr. Astley? Have you come alone?”

No need to say anything but: “Sheldon, it isn’t Dr. Astley—whoever he is. It’s Charles—you know, Charles.”

“Charles?”

“Charles who was … Oh, God, I don’t want to have to go into all that, but remember the Left-Handed Room? … That Charles.”

“Mr. Charles?”

“Yes—Yes!”

Long pause. Then: “I’ll—I’ll come along—immediately—if—if you’ll wait there—for me.”

“Good—but first of all say something to this fellow—he think I’m a fakes. Don’t tell him anything—just say it’s all right.”

“He handed the receiver to the lodgekeeper, who took it, listened a moment, then hung up with more puzzlement than satisfaction. “Well, sir, you’d better wait here, seeing as how Mr. Sheldon says so.”

“Thanks. And please understand that I don’t blame you in the least. One can’t be too careful.”

Somewhat mollified, the man brought forward a chair, then accepted a cigarette that Charles proffered. “Marsh is my name, air. If you’re a friend of the family, you’ll know of course there’s no parties this year on account of old Mr. Rainier being ill.”

“Ill? No, I—er—I didn’t know that.”

“That’s why I thought you might be Dr. Astley. He’s a London doctor they’re expecting.”

“But what about Sanderstead?”

“Dr. Sanderstead wanted to consult with Dr. Astley, sir.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid so. Of course he’s an old man, getting to be. It’s his heart.”

“Where’s the family?”

“They’re all here, sir, except Mrs. Jill and Mr. Julian.”

“Where are they?”

“On their way back from abroad, I think, sir.”

Strange to be edging one’s way into such realizations. The sick man was his father, and yet somehow, the springs of his emotion were dried up, could offer nothing in response to the news but an intensification of that feeling of numbness. He went on smoking thoughtfully. Really, when he came to think of it, Sheldon was the person he came nearest to any warm desire to see. … Marsh continued after a pause: “I could get you a nip of something, sir, if you wanted. It’ll take Mr. Sheldon twenty minutes at least to come down—all the cars are locked up, and it’s a good mile to walk.”

(As if he didn’t know it was a good mile to walk!) He answered: “That’s not a bad idea.”

Marsh went to an adjoining room and came back with two stiff drinks. “Thought you looked a bit pale, sir, that’s why I suggested it.”

“Do I look pale?”

“Just a bit, sir. Or maybe it’s the light.”

Charles walked over to a near-by mirror and stood for a moment examining himself. Yes—there was a queer look; one could call it pallor, for want of an exacter word. Actually, he felt overwhelmingly tired, tired after the long and troubled journey, tired after that knock on the head in the early morning, tired after something else that was difficult—impossible—to analyze. He sipped the whiskey and relaxed as he felt it warming him. “By the way, Marsh—it’s some time since I was here last … any particular changes? You told me of one of them just now, for instance—Parsloe dead. Anything else?”

“You mean among the staff, sir? I’ve only been here fifteen months.”

“Well, the staff or—oh, anything.” He hardly liked to ask direct questions.

“There’s been a few changes in the house, sir—maybe you’ll notice. Mr. Rainier pulled down the old billiard room and built two new ones.”

“Two new billiard rooms? Good God!”

“Well, one of them isn’t much used. There’s just a table in it, in case anyone wants to play. And of course since Mr. Rainier took ill—”

“He’s been ill a long time?”

“Six months, sir, just about. Sort of gradual, it’s been …”

And so on; so that when, eventually, the knock came at the door and Marsh opened it, recognition was silent, tight-lipped, almost wordless till they were alone together. Just “Hello, Sheldon”—and “Good evening!”

Leaving Marsh more puzzled than before, they turned into the darkness of the long curving drive. Out of earshot Charles stopped a moment, feeling for the other’s hand and shaking it rather clumsily.

“Sorry to be sentimental, Sheldon, but that’s how glad I am to see you. Matter of fact, it’s too dark to see you, but I’ve a feeling you look exactly the same.”

“I—I can’t quite collect myself yet, Mr. Charles—but—I—I’d like to be the first to—to congratulate you!”

“Thanks—though I don’t know whether congratulation’s quite the word.”

“It’s so—extraordinary—to have you back with us. I can hardly believe it—”

“Neither can I, Sheldon, so don’t press me for details. All I can tell you is that I was in Liverpool this morning—and don’t ask why Liverpool, because I don’t know any more than you. But I had some money as well as the devil of a headache from having been run down by a car, maybe … that’s all the evidence, so help me God. Before that I can’t remember a thing since—since all sorts of things I don’t want to remember—the war—lying between the lines with shells bursting … years ago, I realize. There’s a sort of dark corridor between then and this morning—don’t ask me about that, either. What you and I’ve got to decide now is how to go about the job of reintroducing me, as it were. … Any ideas?”

“If you’ll give me a little time, Mr. Charles—I’m still rather—”

“I know—bumfoozled is the word old Sarah used to use.”

“Fancy you remembering that.”

“What’s happened to her?”

“She’s still living in the village. Of course she’s very feeble.”.

“Poor old girl. … And too bad about Parsloe—how did that happen?”

“Pneumonia after the flu. Very sudden. We had quite an epidemic about a year ago.”

“The new man seems all right.”

“Marsh? Oh yes. Used to be one of the gardeners.”

“Don’t remember him. … God, what are we gossiping like this for?”

“Just what I was thinking, sir, because there are more important things I must tell you about. I’m afraid you’ll find the house in a rather disturbed condition—”

“I know. I realize I couldn’t have turned up at a more awkward moment—in some ways. Much rather have come when it’s quiet—nobody here—”

“You mean the family?”

“Well yes—bit of a problem, how to let them know.”

“We have to face it, sir.”

“They have to face it, you mean.”

“Naturally they’ll be delighted to see you once they get over the—the surprise.”

“The surprise of finding I’m still alive?”

“Well, after such an interval, and with no news—”

“I know. For God’s sake don’t think I’m blaming anybody.”

“May I say, sir, speaking for myself—”

“I know, I know, and I’m grateful—think it was marvelous the way you kept your head in front of Marsh. Of course he’ll have to know soon, like everybody else, but I was glad you postponed the—er—the sensation. Funny … when I wanted to say something over the telephone that would make you know I was genuine and yet wouldn’t mean a thing to him, the only thing I could think of was the Left-Handed Room—remember how we used to call it that because the door opened the other way?”

“You remember those days very clearly, sir.”

“So clearly it’s like—like headlamps along a road on a dark flight. Too clearly, that is—everything a bit out of focus. It’ll all come right, I daresay.”

“I hope so, sir.”

“Well, let’s not talk about it. … We’ve got this other problem to settle, and my suggestion is what we always used to say when we were kids—leave it to Sheldon.”

“I was about to suggest that too.”

“Well, go ahead—any way you like. And in the meantime if you’ll find me a bedroom that’s a bit off the map I’ll get a good night’s sleep before making my bow at the breakfast table.”

“I’m afraid—er—Mr. Rainier doesn’t come down to breakfast nowadays.”

“I know, Marsh said he was ill. I’m sorry. You’d better go easy when you tell him—the shock, I mean.” He caught Sheldon’s glance and interpreted it. “Don’t worry about me, Sheldon—I know you’re thinking I’m not behaving according to formula, but I can’t help it—I’m too dead tired to face any reunions tonight.”

After a pause Sheldon answered: “I doubt if there is any formula for what you must be feeling, Mr. Charles. I could give you a bed in my own apartments if that would suit.”

“Excellent. … Thank heaven something’s settled. … Been having decent weather here lately?”

“Fairly, sir, for the time of the year. I noticed the barometer’s rising.”

“Good. It was raining in Liverpool this morning.”

He slept a heavy troubled sleep, full of dreams he could not clarify, but which left him vaguely restless, unsatisfied. December sunlight waked him by pouring on to his bed; he stared round, wondering where he was, then remembering. But he could not recognize the room—somewhere in the servants’ wing, he supposed, and he confirmed this by leaning up to the window. The central block of Stourton faced him grandly across the courtyard—there was the terrace, the big curving windows of the dining room, the East Wing with its corner turret. The spectacle found and fitted into a groove of his mind—somehow like seeing a well-known place and deciding it was reasonably like its picture postcards. … He was still musing when Sheldon came in with a tray.

“Good morning, Mr. Charles. I brought you some tea.”

“Thanks.”

“The barometer’s still rising. Did you sleep well?”

“Pretty well. What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock. The family usually begin to come down about nine, but perhaps this morning—we stayed up rather late, you see … on the other hand, they may be anxious. …”

“I understand. You can’t ever be certain how people will react, can you?”

“No, sir.”

“You should have brought an extra cup for yourself. Sit down and tell me all about it. What time did you go to bed? You look fagged out.”

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t been to bed at all. There were so many things to do—I had to talk to Dr. Sanderstead—and then your clothes—you’d hardly wish to wear them again, I think.”

“No?”

“I took the liberty of borrowing a suit from Mr. Chetwynd—”

“Look here, never mind about all that—let’s have first things first. You told them all?”

“Not your father, sir—but I told the others.”

“How did they take it?”

“They were naturally surprised—in fact they could hardly believe me at first.”

“And then?”

“Well, I suppose they did believe me—eventually. They expect to see you at breakfast.”

“Good … but you say you haven’t yet told my father?”

“That was why I went to see Dr. Sanderstead—to ask his advice.”

“Ah yes, of course. You always think of the sensible things, Sheldon.”

“He was rather troubled about the danger of giving the old gentleman a shock—he says he’d like to have a talk with you about it first.”

“All right, if he says so.”

“I also took the liberty of telephoning to Mr. Truslove.”

“Truslove?”

“It seemed to me that—er—he ought to be informed also, as soon as possible.”

“Well, maybe that’s sensible too, though it hadn’t occurred to me. … How about a bath?”

“Already waiting for you—if you’ll follow me.”

“What about the servants, if I meet any of them?”

“They don’t know yet, except Wilson and Lucas—I shall call the others together during the morning and tell them. And Mr. Truslove will be here for lunch—along with Dr. Sanderstead and Dr. Astley from London.”

By that time they were at the door of the bathroom. “Quite elegant, Sheldon—new since I was here, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“From which I gather the family income remains—er—not so bad?”

A wrinkled smile. “Like the barometer, sir—still rising. …”

He bathed, smoked a cigarette, and put on the clothes Sheldon had laid out for him. Brown tweeds—Chet had always favored them, and they fitted pretty well—as children he and Chet could generally wear each other’s suits. And a Netherton tie—trust Sheldon to think of details. Netherton; and a whole cloud of memories assailed him suddenly: strapping on cricket pads in front of the pavilion; strawberries and cream in the tuckshop; the sunlight slanting into the chapel during Sunday services; hot cocoa steaming over the study gas ring in wintertime; the smell of mud and human bodies in a Rugby scrum. … Netherton. And then Cambridge. And then the cadet school. And then France. And then … the full stop. … He controlled himself, leading his thoughts back from the barrier, gently insinuating them into the immediate future. He found he could best do this by adopting a note of sardonic self-urging: come along—trousers, waistcoat, tie, shoes, coat—button up for the great family reunion. “All aboard for the Skylark”—which set him recollecting holidays with his mother as a small boy—never with his father; his father had always been too busy. They used to rent a house at Brighton, in Regency Square, taking servants with them—Miss Ponsonby and a maid named Florrie, and every morning they would walk along the front not quite as far as Portslade, turning back so inevitably that Portslade became for him a sort of mysterious place beyond human access—until, one afternoon while his mother was having a nap, he escaped from the house and reached Portslade a dauntless but somewhat disappointed explorer. “I hope the clothes will do for the time being, Mr. Charles.”

“Fine—just a bit loose in front. Chet must be putting on weight.”

“I’ll have a talk with Mr. Masters sometime today. He has your old measurements, but it might be safer to have him visit you again.”

“Much safer, I’m sure. You think I’ve changed a lot, Sheldon?”

“Not in appearance, sir. You took very fit.”

“And yet there is a difference?”

“In your manner, perhaps. But that’s natural. It’s a nervous strain one can well understand after all you’ve been through.”

“I’d understand it better if I knew what I have been through. But never mind that. Time for breakfast.”

He walked across the courtyard, entering the house from the terrace. No one had yet appeared; the usual new-lit fire was burning, the usual blue flames distilling a whiff of methylated spirit from under the copper dishes. The Morning Post and Times on the little table. A cat on the hearthrug—a new cat, who looked up indifferently and then resumed a comprehensive toilet. Wilson was standing by the dishes, trying hard to behave as if the return of a long-lost son were one of the ordinary events of an English household.

“Good morning, Mr. Charles.”

“Morning, Wilson.”

“What can I get you, sir? Some kedgeree—or ham and eggs—kipper—kidneys—”

“Suppose I have a look.”

He eased a little of his embarrassment by the act of serving himself. He knew Wilson must be staring at him all the time. As he carried his plate back to the table he said: “Well, it’s good to be back.” It was a remark without meaning—a tribute to a convention that did not perfectly fit, like Chetwynd’s clothes, but would do for the time being.

“Yes, indeed, sir. Very glad to see you again.”

“Thanks.” And he opened The Times, the dry and crinkly pages engaging another memory. “You still warm the paper in front of the fire, Wilson?”

“Yes, sir. I always had to when Mr. Rainier used to come down—it’s got to be a sort of habit, I suppose.”

“Queer how one always associates big things with little things. I get the whole picture of my childhood from the smell of toasted printer’s ink.”

“Yes, sir.”

He ate his ham and eggs, scanning the inside news page. Trouble in Europe—the usual Balkan mix-up. Trouble in Ireland, and that was usual too—British officers assassinated. Not much of a paper after the holiday—never was. The usual chatty leader about Christmas, full of Latin quotations and schoolmasterly facetiousness—dear old Times. A long letter from somebody advocating simplified spelling—God, were they still at that? Now that the war was over, it seemed both reassuring and somehow disappointing that England had picked up so many old threads and was weaving them into the same pattern.

Then Chetwynd, eldest of the brothers, began the procession.

“Hello, old chap, how are you?”

(What a thing to say! But still, what else?)

(Miss Ponsonby, his old governess, had once adjured him: When people say “How are you?” the correct answer is “How are you?” If you tell them how you are, you show yourself a person of inferior breeding. … “But suppose, Miss Ponsonby,” he had once asked, “you really want to know how somebody else is, mustn’t they ever tell you?”)

However he answered: “Hello, Chet. How are you?”

“Want you to meet my wife, Lydia. … Lydia … this is Charlie.”

An oversized good-looking woman with small, rather hostile eyes.

And then Julia, plumper than when he had seen her last, but still the same leathery scarecrow—red-complexioned, full of stiff outdoor heartiness.

“Hello, Charles! Sheldon told us all about it, and it’s just too wonderful. I can’t tell you how—”

But then as he kissed her, the fire went out like damp match and they neither of what to say to each other. He and Chet almost collided in their eagerness to serve her with food; Chet beat him to it; he slipped back into his chair.

“Kidneys, Julia?”

“Only scrambled eggs, please, Chet.”

“Not even a little piece of bacon?”

“No, really, Chet.”

“Any news of Father this morning?”

“I saw one of the nurses as I came down—she said he’d had a fairly good night and was about the same.”

“Oh good. … Quite sure about the bacon, Julia?”

“Quite sure.”

“Charles, what about you while I’m here? You don’t seem to have much on your plate.”

“Nothing more for me, thanks.”

“Well, must be my turn then, and I don’t mind admitting I’m hungry. Thrilling events always take me that way. … Too bad Father’s ill—we’d have had a party or something to celebrate.”

“I’m sorry he’s ill, but not for that reason, I assure you.”

“No? Well …” Chet came to the table with his plate, having deliberately delayed at the sideboard till he heard the voices of others approaching. Now he looked up as if in surprise. “Morning, George. … Morning, Bridget. …”

George, a nervous smile on his plump moustached face; Bridget, the youngest of the family, sweet and shy, always ready to smile if you looked at her or she thought you were likely to look at her. George’s wife Vera, and Julia’s husband … an introduction necessary here—“Charles, this is Dick Fontwell”—“Ahdedoo, ahdedoo”—a tall, long-nosed fellow who threw all his embarrassment into a fierce handshake.

Breakfast at Stourton was a hard meal at the best of times, only mitigated by ramparts of newspaper and unwritten permission to be as morose as one wished. But this morning they all felt that such normal behavior must be reversed—everybody had to talk and go on talking. Charles guessed that they were all feeling as uncomfortable as he, with the additional drawback of having had less sleep. During the interchange of meaningless remarks about the weather, the news in the paper, Christmas, and so on, he meditated a little speech which he presently made to them when Wilson had left to bring in more coffee.

He began, clearing his throat to secure an audience: “Er … I really do feel I owe you all sorts of explanations, but the fact is, this whole business of coming back here is in many ways as big a mystery to me as it must be to you—I suppose loss of memory’s like that—but what I do want to tell you is that in spite of all the mystery I’m a perfectly normal person so far as everyday things are concerned—I’m not ill, you don’t have to be afraid of me or treat me with any special consideration. … So just carry on here as usual—I’m anxious not to cause any additional upset at a moment when we’re all of us bound to be upset anyhow.”

He hoped that was a helpful thing to have said, but for a moment after he had finished speaking he caught some of their eyes and wondered if it had been wise to say anything at all. Then Bridget leaned over and touched his hand.

“That’s all right, Charles.”

Chet called out huskily from the far end of the table: “Quite understand, old chap. We’re all more pleased than we can say, God bless. Of course with the old man being ill we can’t exactly kill the fatted calf, but—but—”

“I’ll consider it killed,” he interrupted, just as Wilson arrived with more coffee. They all smiled or laughed, and the situation seemed eased.

Dr. Sanderstead had been expected for lunch, but he arrived a good deal earlier, along with Dr. Astley. Sanderstead was a wordy, elderly, fairly efficient general practitioner who could still make a good living out of his private patients, leaving a more efficient junior partner to take care of the rest. He had been the Stourton doctor ever since the family were children. Accompanied by the London heart specialist, whose herringbone tweeds for a country visit were almost too formally informal, he spent over an hour in the sickroom, after which Astley left and gave him a chance to talk to Charles alone.

They shook hands gravely, then at the doctor’s suggestion began walking in the garden. Five minutes were occupied by a seesaw of congratulations, expressions of pleasure, thanks, and acknowledgments. Charles became more and more silent as these proceeded, eventually leading to a blank pause which Sanderstead broke by exclaiming: “Don’t be afraid I’m going to ask you questions—none of my business, anyhow. Sheldon told me all that you told him—it’s a very peculiar case, and I know very little about such things. There are some who claim to, and if you wished to consult—”

“At the moment, no.”

“Well, I don’t blame you—get settled down first, not a bad idea. All the same, though, if ever you want—”

“That’s very kind of you, but I’d rather you tell me something about my father.”

“I was coming to that. I’m afraid he’s quite ill.”

They walked on a little way in silence; then Sanderstead continued: “I’m sure the first thing you wished to do on coming back to us in this—er—remarkable way was to see him, and for that reason I’m grateful to you for deferring the matter at my request.”

Charles did not think there was any particular cause for gratitude. He said: “Tell me frankly how things are.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. In a man of his age, and suffering from his complaint, complete recovery can’t exactly be counted on—but we can all hope for some partial improvement that will enable him to—to—face a situation which will undoubtedly give him a great deal of pleasure once the initial shock has been—er—overcome.”

Charles was beginning to feel irritated. “You don’t have to break things gently with me, Sanderstead. What you’re hinting at, I take it, is that my father shouldn’t learn of my existence till he’s a good deal better than he is at present.”

“Well—er—perhaps—”

“To save you the trouble of arguing the point, I may as well tell you I entirely agree and I’m willing to wait as long as you think fit.”

“I don’t know how to express my appreciation—”

“You don’t have to. Naturally I’d like to see my father, but if you say he’s not well enough, that settles it. After all this time I daresay we can both wait a bit longer.”

They did not talk much after that. Charles was aware he had rumpled the doctor’s feelings by not living up to the conventional pattern of a dutiful son; but he began to feel increasingly that he could not live up to any conventional pattern, still less could he be “himself,” whatever that was; all he could do was to cover his inner numbness with a façade of slightly cynical objectivity. It was the only attitude that didn’t seem a complete misfit.

A further problem arose later in the morning, but Sheldon broached it, and somehow he found it easier to talk to him.

“Dr. Sanderstead tells me you’ve agreed to his suggestion that for the time being—”

“Yes, I agreed.”

“I’m afraid that opens up another matter, sir. Now that the servants know—which of course is inevitable—I don’t see how we can prevent the story from leaking out.”

“I don’t suppose you can, nor do I see why you should. I’m not breaking any local bylaws by being alive, am I?”

“It isn’t that, Mr. Charles, but your father sometimes asks to see a paper, and I’m afraid that once the story gets around it’ll attract quite a considerable amount of attention.”

“Headlines, you mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wouldn’t like that for my own sake, let alone my father’s.”

“It would doubtless be very unpleasant. A young man from the Daily Post was on the telephone just now.”

“Already? Well, if they think they’re going to make a national hero of me, they’re damn well mistaken. I won’t see anybody.”

“I’m afraid that might not help, sir. It’s their job to get the news and they usually manage it somehow or other.”

“Well, what do you suggest?”

“I was thinking that if somebody were to explain the matter personally on the telephone, giving the facts and using Mr. Rainier’s state of health as ground for the request—”

“You mean get in touch with all the editors?”

“No, not the editors, sir—the owners. You see Mr. Rainier has a large newspaper interest himself, and that makes for a certain—”

“Owns a paper, does he? I never knew that.”

“It was acquired since your time, sir. The Evening Record.”

“Well, if you think it’ll do any good, let’s try. Who do you think should do the talking—George or Chet? Better Chet, I’d say.”

“Well yes, Mr. Chetwynd would perhaps explain it more convincingly than Mr. George. But what I really had in mind—”

“Yes?”

“Lord Borrell has stayed here several times, sir—bringing his valet, a very intelligent man named Jackson. So I thought perhaps if I were to telephone Jackson—”

An hour laser Chet came up to Charles with a beaming smile.

“Everything fixed, old boy. Sheldon wangled it through Borrell of the International Press—there won’t be a word anywhere. Censorship at source. Borrell was puzzled at first, but eventually he said he’d pass the word round. All of which saves me a job, God bless.”

So the story, which became one for curious gossip throughout the local countryside as well as in many a London club, was never hinted at by Fleet Street. The only real difficulty was with the editor of the Stourton and District Advertiser, a man of independent mind who did not see why he should not offer as news an item of local interest that was undoubtedly true and did not libel anybody. A personal visit by Chetwynd to the landlord of the premises in which the Advertiser housed its printing plant was necessary before the whole matter could be satisfactorily cleared up.

Charles spent the morning in a wearying and, he knew, rather foolish attempt to play down the congratulations. Every servant who had known him from earlier days sought him out to say a few halting, but demonstrably sincere words. It rather surprised as well as pleased him to realize that he had been remembered so well; but the continual smiling and handshaking became a bore. There were new faces too, recent additions to the Stourton staff, whom he caught staring at him round corners and from doorways. They all knew his story by now and wished to see the hero of it; the whole thing was doubtless more exciting than a novel because more personal in their lives, something to save up for relatives when they wrote the weekly letter or took their next day off.

Once, on his way through the house, he passed the room on the first floor where his father lay ill. It was closed, of course, but the door of an adjoining room was open, and through it he could see two young nurses chatting volubly over cups of tea. They stared as he went by, and from that he knew that they too had heard and were excited over the news.

When he appeared at lunch, he found Sanderstead and Truslove in the midst of what was evidently a sharp argument. Truslove was the family solicitor, a sallow sharp-faced man in his late fifties. During the little hiatus of deferential how-d’ye-dos and handshaking, the doctor and the lawyer continued to glare at each other as if eager to make an end of the truce. It came as soon as Charles said: “Don’t let me interrupt your talk.”

“What I was saying, Mr. Charles,” resumed Truslove, eager for an ally, “is that the problem has a legal as well as a medical side. Naturally one would prefer to spare your father any kind of shock, but can we be certain that he himself would wish to be spared—when the alternatives are what they are?”

“All I can say,” Sanderstead growled, “is that in his present state a shock might kill him.”

“But we have Mr. Charles to think about,” urged Truslove; which made Charles interject: “Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t bother about me.”

“Very natural of you to say that, Mr. Charles, but as a lawyer I’m bound to take a somewhat stricter viewpoint. There’s the question of the Will.” He spoke the word reverentially, allowing it to sink in before continuing: “None of us should forget that we’re dealing with an estate of very considerable value. We should bear in mind what would be your father’s wishes if he were to know that you were so—so happily restored to us.”

“We should also bear in mind that he’s a very sick man,” retorted Sanderstead.

“Precisely—and all the more reason that his desire, which I am sure would be to make certain adjustment necessary for the fair and equal division—”

Charles drummed his fingers on the table. “I get your point, Truslove, but I’m really not interested in that side of it.”

“But it’s my duty, Mr. Charles—my duty to your father and to the family quite as much as to you. If I feel morally sure that a client of mine—”

Sanderstead interrupted: “If changing his will is what you’re thinking about, he could no more do that than address a board meeting! And that’s apart from the question of shock!”

“Isn’t it possible that a shock caused by good news might give him sudden strength—just enough to do what he would feel at once to be necessary?”

“Thanks for the interesting theory, Truslove. When you want any advice about law, just come to me.”

Charles intervened with a slightly acid smile. “I don’t know why you two should quarrel. You may be right, either of you—but suppose I claim the casting vote? I don’t want to see my father if there’s any chance the shock might be bad for him, and I don’t give a damn whether I’m in or out of his will. … Now are you both satisfied?”

But of course they were not, and throughout lunch, which was a heavy affair with nobody quite knowing what to talk about, he was aware that the two men were engrossed in meditations of further argument.

During the afternoon he tried for a little quiet in the library, but Chet found him there and seemed anxious to express his point of view. “You see, old chap, I can understand how Truslove feels. Legally you’re—well, I won’t say dead exactly—but not normally alive. He’s bound to look at things from that angle. What I mean is, if anything were to happen to the old man—let’s hope it won’t, but you never can tell—you wouldn’t get a look in. Now that’s not fair to you, especially as there’s plenty for everybody, God bless. That’s why I think Truslove’s right—surely there must be a way of breaking good news gently—Sheldon, for instance—”

“Yes, we all think of Sheldon in emergencies. But I do hope, Chet, you won’t press the matter. Truslove tells me there’ll be no difficulty about my resuming the income we all had from Mother—”

“But good God, man, you can’t live on five hundred a year!”

“Oh, I don’t know. Quite a number of people seem to manage on it.”

“But—my dear chap—where? What would you do?”

“Don’t know exactly. But I daresay I should find something.”

“Of course if you fancied a salaried job in one of the firms—”

“I rather feel that most jobs in firms wouldn’t appeal to me.”

“You wouldn’t have to take it very seriously.”

“Then it would probably appeal to me even less. … But we don’t have to decide it now, do we?”

“No, of course not. Have a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“I think I will. Tell you the truth, all this is just about wearing me down. Gave me an appetite at first, but now I feel sort of—”

“You mean all the fuss connected with my return?”

“Oh, not your fault, old chap. After all, what else could you do? But you know what families are like—and wives. Argue a man off his head.”

“But what could there have been any argument about?”

“Well, Truslove and Sanderstead—like cat and dog all day. Personally, as I told you, I back Truslove—but Lydia—well, she’s never seen you before—she can’t help feeling there’s something a bit fishy about it—and of course, old chap, you must admit you haven’t explained everything down to the last detail.”

“I’m aware of that. If the last detail were available, I should be very glad to know it myself.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, though. Far more things in heaven and earth than—than something or other—know what I mean? I accept your statement absolutely.”

“But I haven’t made any statement.”

“Well, at breakfast you did—you said you were all right—normal, I mean. And I’m prepared to take your word for it whatever anyone else thinks.”

“Meaning that your wife believes I’m a fake?”

“A fake or else … Well if she does, she’s wrong, that’s all I can tell her.”

“I hope you won’t bother to.”

“Nice of you to put it that way, but still… Sure you won’t have a drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Cheerio, then. God bless. …”

By evening he had decided to leave. It was not that anyone had been unkind to him—quite the contrary, but he felt that he was causing a disturbance, and the disturbance disturbed him just as much as the others. He had given Truslove and Sanderstead his decision; it merely irritated him that they continued to wrangle. “The fact is, Sheldon, my remaining here is just an added complication at the moment, affording no pleasure either to myself or anyone else—so I’ll just fold my tent and silently steal away. But I won’t go far and I’ll leave you my address so that you can get in touch with me if there’s any need—if, for instance, Sanderstead decides my father’s well enough to see me. Don’t tell Truslove where I am—I don’t want any messages from him—and as for what you say to the others, I simply leave it to you, except that I’d rather they didn’t take my departure as a sign of either disgust or—er—abdication. … Perhaps you could think of something casual enough? And while I’m in Brighton I’ll warm your heart by buying a few good suits of clothes.”

“Brighton, sir?”

“Yes, I always did like Brighton. I’ll be all right alone—don’t worry. If you could pack a bag for me, and get hold of a little pocket money from the family vault or archive or wherever it’s kept—I suppose the hardest thing is to find any spare cash in a rich man’s house. …”

“I can advance it, sir, with pleasure.”

“Good … and put a few books in the bag, some of my old college books if you can find them.”

“Maybe you oughtn’t to overtax your mind, sir?”

“On the contrary, I feel rather inclined to treat my mind as one does a clock when it won’t go—give it a shake-up and see what happens. … Oh, and one other thing—I’d prefer to have the car drive me to Scoresby for the train. I’m so tired of shaking hands with people, and most of the station staff at Fiveoaks—”

“I understand.” Sheldon hesitated a moment and then said; “You really are going to Brighton? I mean, you’re not—er—thinking of—er—”

Charles laughed. “Not a bit of it, Sheldon. Put detectives on me if you like. And to show you it’s all open and aboveboard, you can send a wire booking a room for me at the Berners Hotel.”

“Berners? I don’t think that’s one of the—”

“I know, but I looked it up in the back of the railway guide and it’s in Regency Square—where my mother and Miss Ponsonby used to rent a house for the summer when I was a small boy.”

So much for sentiment; actually when he got there he found the Berners Hotel in Regency Square not quite comfortable enough, and moved to a better one the next day, notifying Sheldon of the change. It teased him to realize that though he did not care for grandeur and did not insist on luxury, he yet inclined to a certain standard in hotels—a standard above that of the clothes in which he had arrived at Stourton. He wished he hadn’t told the Liverpool tailor to throw away his original torn and rain-sodden suit; it might have afforded some clue to the mystery. He pondered over it intermittently, but the effort merely tired him and brought nearer to the surface an always submerged sadness, that sense of bewildering, pain-drenched loss. He was afraid of that, and found relief in recollecting earlier clear-seen days of childhood and boyhood, the pre-war years during which he had grown up to be—as Miss Ponsonby would have said (only a governess could say such a thing outright)—an English gentleman.

Sheldon had packed a few books, chosen almost at random; a further selection, more carefully made, arrived from Stourton two days later. They included several he remembered studying in preparation for Cambridge—Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England, Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Good meaty reading, a little tough in places, suitable for whole mornings on the Promenade in one of the glass shelters; equally suitable for wet days in the hotel lounge. One morning, walking along the cliffs towards Rottingdean, he met an elderly man with a dog; interest in a wreck on the beach below drew them into a conversation which presently veered to books and politics. For three successive mornings afterwards he took the same walk, met the same man, and continued the same conversation, each time more interestingly; but on the fourth morning the man didn’t appear, nor on any subsequent morning when Charles took the same walk. He didn’t particularly mind; indeed, it almost comforted him to think of such mutual contacts as possible without the foolish establishment of names and identities.

Sheldon wrote to him regularly, giving him news of Stourton, but there wasn’t much to relate: Mr. Rainier kept about the same; Sanderstead and Truslove were still quarreling; while the family chafed more restively, finding Stourton rather dull to do nothing in, and wondering how long they must wait before they could decently decide to return to their respective homes. Not, of course, that they wanted the old man to die, but they clearly felt they shouldn’t have been sent for so soon; on top of which Charles’s return had somehow disturbed their equilibrium, for if there is one thing more mentally upsetting to a family than death, it must be (on account of its rarity) resurrection. All of which Charles either deduced from or read between the lines of Sheldon’s direct reportage of facts—such as that Truslove had had an unsatisfactory interview with Dr. Astley, that Chet’s wife was no longer on speaking terms with Bridget, that Chet had taken to spending most of his time practising shots in the billiard room, that the local vicar had paid a discreet visit hoping to see Charles, and that the weather was still fine, but the barometer beginning to fall.

One morning at breakfast, while he was in the midst of reading Sheldon’s latest assurance that things were still about the same, a page boy brought a wire informing him at a glance that things were no longer the same at all. His father had died suddenly a few hours before.

He packed his bag and left for Stourton by the next train, arriving at Fiveoaks towards late afternoon. There he acknowledged the greetings of several of the station staff (noting with relief that the sensation value of his own existence had considerably diminished), and hurried into the waiting car. This time the skies were darkening as the moment of the “view” appeared, but the great house still made its bow impressively.

Sheldon was waiting at the open door to receive him; within the house, in the deliberately half-lit hall, Chet stood holding a whiskey and soda.

“Hello, old chap. Had a good time? Sheldon says you’ve been dosing yourself with sea air—don’t blame you. … Turned chilly these last few hours—what about a drink?”

Charles said he would have one, so Chet marched him into the dining room, where the liquor was kept. “You know, I once went to see a man in London—somewhere in Campden Hill I think it was—sort of artist’s studio—but the chap had built a regular bar, like a pub, at one end of his dining room—awfully good idea, don’t you think? … Well, God bless.”

Charles asked for details of his father’s death and received them; then, alone, he went upstairs and entered the room where the old man lay. The numbness in his heart almost stirred; he touched the dead hand, feeling a little dead himself as he did so. Then he went downstairs to meet the others of the family, among them three recent arrivals, Jill with Kitty, and Julian. Jill was a heavily built smartly dressed woman in her late forties, the eldest of the family and the widow of a civil servant who had left her with a daughter by an earlier marriage of his own. Kitty was fourteen and generally described, even by those who did not dislike her, as “a bit of a handful.” Julian, back from Cannes, where he had been spending the winter, gave Charles a languid salutation and a remark evidently well prepared in advance. “How charming to see you again, Charles! I understand that when you regained your memory you found yourself in Liverpool on a wet day! Your only consolation must have been that it wasn’t Manchester!”

Epigrams of this kind had established Julian’s reputation as the family wit, but they lacked spontaneity and his opening remark in any conversation was generally on a level, however disputable, to which he did not afterwards attain. In appearance he was tall, lean, and handsome in a rather saturnine, over-elegant way; he lived most of his life in fashionable resorts where he played a little tennis, indulged in little friendships, and painted little pictures of scenery which his friends said were “not so bad.”

So now they were all gathered together, the Rainier family, in descending order of age, as follows: Jill, Chetwynd, George, Julia, Charles, Julian, and Bridget. It was a stale family joke to say that they were seven. Like many families who have dispersed, they found conversation hard except in exchanges of news about their own affairs—troubles with servants, new houses, business squabbles, and so on. During the difficult interval between death and the funeral it was Sheldon who took control like some well-built machine slipping into a particularly silent but effective gear. Charles was grateful for this, and especially, too, that Sheldon had arranged a quiet room for him, his old turret room, in which he could rest and read a good deal of the time. He was aware that all the family viewed him with curiosity and some with suspicion, and that intimacy with any of them would probably lead to questions about himself that he could not answer.

A minor but on the whole welcome diversion was caused by the revelation that during the last twelve months of his life old Mr. Rainier had been having his biography written. The author was a young and unknown man named Seabury, who had apparently made a business of persuading rich men that posterity would regret the absence of any definitive story of their lives. Rainier, usually a shrewd detector of flattery, had in this case succumbed, so that the book had been commissioned, a sum paid to Seabury there and then, and a further sum promised “on completion” and “if approved.” When the old man’s state of health became serious, Seabury had evidently begun to fear for the balance of his payment, and so had hurried his manuscript into final shape, hoping perhaps to impress the assembled relatives by a certain fulsomeness of treatment that might be considered additionally appropriate in the circumstances.

The manuscript, neatly typed and with a covering letter, was brought to Stourton by special messenger on the evening before the funeral; Sheldon accepted it and placed it on the hall table; Charles, passing by an hour later, opened it at random. He happened to light on a description of Cowderton, where the Rainier steelworks were situated, and read:—

But what has been sacrificed in the sylvan peace of its surroundings has been gained in the town’s prevalent atmosphere of optimism and prosperity; and for these gifts, connected so visibly with the firm of Rainier, Cowderton must thank the dreams of a lad who was himself born in the heart of rural England.

Charles smiled slightly and did not read any more. He felt that the book, if it were all in such a vein, would probably have pleased his father, while at the same time affording him the additional pleasure of not being taken in by it.

Others of the family, however, got hold of the manuscript and read enough of it to decide it was rather good, though of course they had to be a little patronizing about a mere writer, especially an unknown one, while at the same time nourishing the secret wonderment of all healthy-minded Philistines that the act of writing can be protracted throughout three hundred pages. But the manuscript’s chief value lay in its usefulness as a subject for conversation during the rather hard-going lunch party that assembled towards half-past two the following afternoon. Those who had just seen old Mr. Rainier’s remains lowered into their final resting place in Stourton Churchyard were relaxing after the strain of the ordeal while steeling themselves for another—the reading of the will; and there, at the table, with all the secrets in his pocket, sat Truslove, somehow larger now than life, munching saddle of mutton in full awareness that his moment was about to arrive, and striking the exact professional balance between serious-mindedness and good humor—prepared to respond to a joke if one were offered, or to commiserate with a tear if one were let fall.

It seemed to be a family convention—unwritten, unspoken, even in a sense not consciously thought about—that Sheldon was one of them at such moments, and that as soon as the other servants had left the dining room his own remaining presence need impose no censorship. Chetwynd had been talking business optimism with Truslove. “What we’ve got to do now, old chap, is to plan for peace as efficiently as we planned for war, because there’s going to be no limit to what British industry can do in the future—why, only during the last few weeks one of our war factories turned to making motorcycles—we’re snowed under with orders already, simply can’t cope with them.” This was vaguely pleasant news to the family, though business was always tiresome—and yet, what else was there to talk about? Then somebody thought of the biography, and George asked Sheldon his opinion of it.

“I looked it over, sir, and it seemed quite respectably written.”

“Respectably—or respectfully?” put in Julian, staking out his epigram rather faster than usual.

“Both, I think, sir.”

Sheldon smiled, and then all of them, except Charles, began to laugh, as if suddenly realizing that there was no reason why they shouldn’t. In the midst of the laughter Chetwynd glanced across the table and caught a ready eye. “How about an adjournment to the library, Truslove?”

Half an hour later the secrets were known, and there was nothing very startling about them. The bulk of Henry Rainier’s fortune, amounting after payment of death duties to over one million eight hundred thousand pounds, was divided equally between six of the children enumerated by name, except that Chetwynd, because of seniority and closer contacts with the industrial firms, took over a few additional controlling interests. Stourton was also left to him, as well as the town house in London. A few heirlooms went to various members of the family; there were bequests to servants and a few small gifts to charity. Charles, of course, was not mentioned.

The whole revelation was so unspectacular that when Truslove had folded up the will and replaced it in his pocket there was a general feeling of relief and anticlimax. Any faint fears the family might have entertained (and there always are such faint tears where money is concerned) could now be disbanded; they were all going to stay comfortably rich for the rest of their lives—even richer than most of them had anticipated.

Sheldon had not been present during the actual will reading, but when he next entered Chetwynd was the first to address him, almost jauntily: “Well, Sheldon, he remembered you. You get a thousand.”

“That was very generous of Mr. Rainier.”

“And if you take my advice you’ll put it back in the firm—wonderful chance to double or treble it. … However, we can discuss that later. By the way, I’m taking it for granted you’ll stay with me here?”

“I shall be very pleased to do so, Mr. Chetwynd.”

Chet, it was clear, was already seeing himself an Industrial Magnate, Master of Stourton, and Supreme Arbiter of Family Affairs. There was a touch of childishness in his attitude that prevented it from being wholly unpleasant. Having made his gesture, he now turned to Truslove, whose eye still watchfully waited. “Now, old chap, before we close the meeting, I think you’ve something else to say.”

Truslove rose, cleared his throat, and began by remarking that it was perhaps appropriate at such a moment to turn from a sad event to one which, by being almost contemporaneous, had undoubtedly served to balance pleasure against pain, gain against loss. Indeed, had the late Mr. Rainier been permitted to learn of it, who knows but what … However, they knew his views about that, and the differences that had arisen between himself and Dr. Sanderstead; death had put an end to them, so it was perhaps unnecessary to refer to them again. What he did feel was undoubtedly what they all felt—a desire to welcome Mr. Charles to their midst and to assure him of their unbounded joy at the extraordinary good fortune that had befallen him. “We don’t pretend to understand exactly how it happened, Mr. Charles, but a very famous hymn informs us that God moves in a mysterious way.” A little titter all around the room. “And if our congratulations may have seemed either belated or lacking in expression, I am sure you will make allowances at this troubled time.”

Charles bowed slightly. He did not think their congratulations either belated or lacking in expression—indeed, his chief complaint was that there had been so many of them so many times repeated.

The lawyer continued: “Now I come to a matter nearer to my own province, and one that I must deal with directly and briefly. It has seemed both to Mr. Chetwynd, as the future head of the family concerns, and to myself, as representing in some sense the wishes which I feel would have been those of the late Mr. Rainier, a man whom it was my privilege to know for over forty years, and whose probable intentions I can therefore speak of with some justification …”

And so on. What had happened, clearly, was that Truslove, having lost his battle with the doctors, had talked the family into an equity settlement—each of them agreeing to sacrifice a seventh part of his or her bequest in order that Charles should acquire an equal share. Dressed up in legal jargon, and with a good deal of smooth talk about “justice” and “common fairness,” the matter took ten minutes to enunciate, during which time Charles sat back in his chair, glancing first at one face and then at another, feeling that nothing could have been less enthusiastic than (except for Chet’s and Bridget’s) their occasional smiles of approval. Chet was expansive, like Santa Claus basking in an expected popularity; Bridget was sweet and ready with a smile, as always. But the others were grimly resigned to doing their duty in the most trying possible circumstances—each of them saying good-bye to forty thousand pounds with a glassy determination and a stiff upper lip. They were like boys at a good English school curbing their natural inclinations in favor of what had been successfully represented to them as “the thing to do.” Truslove must have given them a headmasterly pi-jaw, explaining just where their duty lay and how inevitably they must make up their minds to perform it; Chet had probably backed him up out of sheer grandiloquence—“Damn it all, we must give the fellow a square deal”; begun under such auspices the campaign could not have failed. But when Charles looked at George, and Julia, and Jill, and Julian, and Lydia, he knew they were all desperately compelling themselves to swallow something unpleasant and get it over; which gave him a key to the mood in which he felt most of them regarded him: he was just a piece of bad luck, like the income tax or a horse that comes in last.

Suddenly he found himself on his feet and addressing them; it was almost as if he heard his own voice, spoken by another person. “I’m sure I thank you all very much, and you too, Truslove. The proposal you’ve outlined is extremely generous—too generous, in fact. I’m a person of simple tastes—I need very little to live comfortably on—in fact the small income I already have is ample. So I’m afraid I can’t accept your offer, though I do once again thank you for making it.”

He looked round their faces again, noting the sudden amazement and relief in the eyes of some of them—especially Chet’s wife, Lydia. Clearly they had never contemplated the possibility of his refusing. That began to amuse him, and then he wondered whether his refusal had not been partly motivated by a curiosity to see how they would take it. He really hadn’t any definite inclination, either to have the money or not; but his lack of desire for it himself was certainly not balanced by any particular wish that they should be enriched.

Truslove and Chetwynd were on their feet with an instant chorus of objections. Truslove’s were doubtless sincere—after all, he had nothing to lose. But Chet—was it possible that his protests were waging sham war against an imperceptible hope that had dawned in him, a hope quite shamelessly reflected in the eyes of his wife? Was he seeking to employ just a featherweight too little persuasion to succeed? Charles did not believe that Chet would have attempted this balancing act if left to himself, but there was Lydia by his side, and he was undoubtedly afraid of her. Nevertheless he kept up the protesting, and Charles kept up the refusal; the whole family then began to argue about it, with more vehement generosity now that they felt the issue was already decided; but they made the mistake of keeping it up too long, for Charles suddenly grew tired and exclaimed: “All right then, if you all insist, I’ll agree to take it.”

Truslove beamed on what he imagined to be his own victory; Chet, after a second’s hesitation, came across the room and shook Charles by the hand. “Fine, old chap. … Now we’re all set and Truslove can do the rest.” But the others could only stare in renewed astonishment as they forced deadly smiles into the supervening silence.

There were papers they all had to sign; then Charles escaped upstairs. His room was the one he had slept in as a boy, though it had since been refurnished more opulently; it expanded at one corner into a sort of turret, windowed for three fourths of the circle, and from this viewpoint the vista of gardens and skyline was beautiful even towards dusk on a gray day. He was staring at it When Kitty entered. “Oh, Uncle Charles, I must show you this—it’s in today’s Times. …” She held out the paper, folded at the column of obituary appreciations. The item she pointed to ended as follows:—

A lifelong individualist, there was never any wavering in his political and economic outlook, while his contributions to the cause of Free Trade, both financially and by utterance, were continual and ungrudging. A man whose character more easily won him the respect of his foes than the applause of the multitude, he rightly concentrated on an industrial rather than a political career, and though his representation of West Lythamshire in the Conservative interest had been in the strictest sense uneventful, his influence behind the political scene was never entirely withdrawn, nor did his advice go long unsought.

“Uncle Charles, what does it mean?”

“It’s just something—that somebody’s written.”

“But I can’t understand it—at least, I can understand some of the words, but they don’t seem to mean anything. It’s about him, isn’t it?”

He answered then, forgetting whom he was addressing: “It’s a charming letter about my father from a man who probably knew him slightly and disliked him intensely.”

“Why did he dislike him?”

He tried to undo the remark. “Stupid of me to say that—maybe he didn’t dislike him at all. … Run along—haven’t you had tea?”

When he had been her age there had been a schoolroom high tea, with Miss Ponsonby dispensing bread and jam and cakes.

“They’re serving it now on the terrace. Aren’t you coming down?”

Self-possessed little thing; not quite spoilt yet.

“I’ll probably miss tea today.”

“Don’t you fell well?”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

“Did it upset you, going to the funeral?”

“Funerals are always rather upsetting.”

She still stood by, as if she wanted to be friendly. Suddenly she said: “Julian’s very funny, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s quite the humorist of the family.”

“He’s going back to Cannes tonight.”

“Oh, is he?”

“Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

“A cigarette? Well—”

“I do smoke, you know—most of the girls at Kirby do as soon as they get into the sixth.” She had taken a cigarette out of her bag and was already lighting it “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not particularly.”

“I knew you wouldn’t. You don’t give a damn about anything.”

“Do they also say ‘damn’ in the sixth?”

“No—that’s what Mother said to Uncle Chet about you.”

“I see. … Well …”

“But I’ve got to stay here now till I finish it … Don’t you think Sheldon’s rather marvelous?”

“Not only rather, but quite.”

“I think he’s the one who really ought to write a book about Grandfather.”

“Not a bad idea—why don’t you tell him?”

“I did, but he only smiled. He’s so nice to everybody, isn’t he? We had a wonderful Christmas party here last year, before Grandfather was ill—we had charades and one of them was his name—Shell, you know, and then done—but of course everybody guessed it—it was far too easy. Then we had Buffalo—buff, the color, and then a Frenchman answering the telephone—and then the whole word Buffalo in America. … No, it wasn’t Christmas, it was New Year, because Bridget and I had an argument about who had the darkest hair to let the New Year in with … but I did it.”

“You would, I’m sure.”

“Will Uncle Chet have any New Year’s party this year?”

“I shouldn’t think so. … Here’s an ashtray.”

“What I really came for was to say good-bye. Mother wants to get away this evening.” She held out her hand.

“Good-bye, Kitty—nice of you to come up.”

He led her to the door. Then:—

“Uncle Charles, is it true you don’t remember a thing that’s happened to you for over two years?”

“Perfectly true.”

“But how marvelous. Then anything might have happened to you?”

He laughed at that and patted her on the shoulder. “Yes, and forgetfulness may have its points. For instance, I daresay you’d rather I forgot that you smoked a cigarette—or don’t you mind?”

“Perhaps I’m like you—I don’t give a damn,” she answered, scampering out of the room. “Good-bye, Uncle Charles!”

When she had gone he decided he had behaved pretty badly, encouraging her to smoke and swear; there was some imp of mischief in him that drove him to such things, except that “imp” and “mischief” were far too cheerful words for it.

Dinner, a little later, proved another difficult meal. Julian, Jill, and Kitty had already left; others were planning a departure the following day. Julia and her husband had agreed to stay over the New Year, “helping” Chet and Lydia. Lydia said: “Jill and Julian were anxious to say good-bye to you, Charles, but they felt you mightn’t want to be disturbed, especially as Kitty said you weren’t coming down for tea.”

He smiled and said he perfectly understood. Chet talked business again with Truslove, who was staying the night; Chet also drank too much and said that British business was headed for the biggest boom in history, by Jove, always provided the government would keep off their backs. Which led to politics and the family constituency of West Lythamshire: “I’m no politician, old chap, but still if the local association were to make the, suggestion … of course it’s too early yet even to think of it.”

But Chet evidently was thinking of it, readying himself for the doing of his duty, wherever it might lead him.

The following morning, when George and his wife had left immediately after breakfast, taking Bridget with them, Charles suddenly decided to return to London with Truslove, who had a car. They drove away together, amidst noisy farewells from Chet and a few quiet words from Sheldon as the latter stowed away the bags.

“Do you propose to stay in London, Mr. Charles?”

“I’ll let you know, Sheldon. I’ll be all right, anyway.”

“I hope so.”

During the journey through Reading and Maidenhead he told Truslove he had been quite sincere in his original refusal of the equity settlement, and had only agreed to it because it was what the family said they wanted, so if they now cared to go back on the decision, it would still be all right with him.

Truslove, of course, replied that that was out of the question. “In fact, Mr. Charles, you seem to have given this matter far too little thought. A quarter of a million pounds is not to be treated lightly.”

“That’s just the point. I don’t know how to treat it.”

Truslove assured him, entirely without irony, that there would be no trouble attaching to the inheritance. “The bulk of it’s invested in shares of the company—you’ll merely receive the regular dividends.”

“That leads me to what I wanted to say. I’d rather not be connected with the family business at all. I’m not a businessman. If I have to have the money, I’d like to sell the shares immediately and invest the proceeds in government stock.”

“But, Mr. Charles, I—I really don’t advise—”

“Why not? Isn’t it possible to do that?”

“Possible, of course—the shares command a very ready market. But I couldn’t advise it—not as things are.”

“That’s odd—I always thought you lawyers had a passion for government stocks. Aren’t they supposed to be safer than anything else? What about consols?”

Truslove seemed disturbed at the prospect of having to assess the relative merits of consols and Rainier ordinaries. “Naturally I’ve nothing against government securities—no one can have, and I should be the first to advise such prudence in investment, but for … well, perhaps I may let you into a secret—of course the whole matter’s very technical and hasn’t been settled yet, but it was on the cards when your father passed away and I think events will go forward a little quicker now … it’s a question of refloating the entire group of Rainier companies on terms that would of course be very favorable to present holders. I can’t give you any details, but you’ll realize why it would be unwise to dispose of anything at the present moment.”

“Still, I’d rather you sell. I’m not interested in speculation and share movements. I really mean what I say, so don’t wait for me to change my mind.”

“Of course if you give me direct instructions, I can’t refuse. But you realize that, in addition to any question of capital value, the income from government stocks will be very much less?”

“I don’t mind that, either. I’ll probably live very well on a fraction of it. Matter of fact, you might as well know my plans. I’m going to Cambridge.”

“Cambridge?”

“I was going to go there, you know, when war broke out—I’d really taken the entrance examination. Not a bad idea to go on where you left off, especially if you can’t think of anything else to do.”

His rooms at St. Swithin’s overlooked the river and the Backs, and from the first January day when he settled in, he felt peace surrounding him. It was not that he himself was at peace—often the contrary; but he always felt the rooms and the college weighing with him, as it were, in the silent pressures of his mind. His rooms were rather austerely furnished when he took possession; he made them less so by books, pictures, and a couple of easy chairs, yet they still remained—as Herring, his gyp, remarked—a reading gentleman’s rooms. After half a century of experience as a college servant, Herring counted himself fortunate whenever a newcomer to his staircase entered that category.

Charles had visited Cambridge for a week during his last term at Netherton; he had then put up in back-street lodgings while taking the Littlego, which had left him no time to make acquaintances or get much impression of the place except that he thought he was going to like it. He was glad of this now, for it meant that no one remembered him and that his past life was neither known nor inquired about. To be a younger son of a rich industrialist counted for nothing among dons and fellow undergraduates; that he had served in the war merely placed him among the vast majority; and that he made few friends and liked to be left alone was, after all, the not unusual characteristic of reading gentlemen.

He told his Senior Tutor, a harassed little man named Bragg, that he would like to take history; and a further interview with Werneth, the history don, decided him to try for the tripos instead of an ordinary degree. So he acquired the necessary books, began to attend recommended lectures, and dined in Hall for the required nights each week—which is about all a Cambridge life need consist of structurally, until the scaffolding is removed later and one sees how much else there must have been.

Sheldon sent him news from Stourton fairly often, generally to say there wasn’t any news. Still reading, however, between the lines, Charles gathered that Chet and Lydia were failing to evolve a well-controlled household, and that Sheldon was less comfortable than in the earlier days of despotism. Truslove also wrote, reporting progress in his own sphere; transfers of property took time, and it was March before the lawyer could notify him that he no longer possessed any financial interest in the Rainier enterprises. The shares had been sold for seventy shillings (fifteen more than the price at Christmas), and the purchaser had been none other than Chetwynd, who had apparently been glad to add to his own already large holding. Truslove added that he regarded the price as satisfactory, though he still thought the sale unwise in view of a probably much higher price eventually.

Charles wrote back that he was perfectly satisfied, and that if his “unwise” action had been the means of obliging Chet, so much the better. Just about then came the Easter vacation; he did not visit Stourton or see any of the family, but spent the three weeks in an unplanned trip around northern France, visiting Chartres, Lisieux, Caen, and Rouen. Returning to London the day before the Cambridge summer term began, he bought an evening paper at Victoria Station and glanced through what had come to be the almost usual news of famine and revolution somewhere or other on the Continent; not till late at night, in his hotel room, did he happen to notice a headline on the financial page—“Rainier’s Still Soaring: Reported Terms of Bonus.” He read that the shares had topped five pounds and that there was talk of an issue of new stock to existing shareholders in the proportion of two for one. It wasn’t all very clear to him, for he never studied the financial columns and did not understand their jargon; but he realized that from the point of view of immediate profit, Truslove and Chet had been right, and he himself wrong; which didn’t trouble him at all. He was almost glad for his own sake, as well as Chet’s, for he would have had no use for the extra money, whereas Chet enjoyed both spending and the chance to say “I told you so, old chap.” In fact he felt so entirely unregretful about what had happened that he sent both Chet and Truslove short notes of congratulation.

The next day he went to Cambridge and completely lost track of financial news amidst the many more interesting pursuits of term time. He still did not make friends easily, but he joined the “Heretics” and sometimes attended the weekly debating sessions over the fish shop in Petty Cury; he also came to know the occupant of the rooms next to his on the same staircase—a high-caste Hindoo named Pal who was a mathematician and perhaps also a genius. Pal claimed to feel numerals emotionally and to find them as recognizable as human faces; Charles took him first as an oddity, then as a personality, later as a friend. He formed a habit of having coffee in Pal’s rooms once or twice a week.

As summer came, he did most of his reading on the river, generally on the Upper Cam at Grantchester, and sometimes he would portage the canoe across the roadway to the deep tranquil reach beyond the Old Mill. One morning, having done this, he turned to the right, along a tributary; the going was difficult, for he had to slide over sunken logs and push away branches that trailed in the water, but after an arduous yard-by-yard struggle he was suddenly able to paddle into a dark pool overhung with willows; and there, as he rested, a feeling of discovery came over him, as if it were the Congo or the Amazon instead of a little English stream; he felt strangely happy and stayed there all day till it was time to return for tea at the Orchard, which was the Grantchester resort patronized by undergraduates. He was on friendly terms with the old lady there who served strawberries and cream under the apple trees, and when he showed his scratched arms and said where he had been, she answered very casually: “Oh, you must have been up the Bourne—Rupert Brooke used to say how beautiful it was there—he got his arms scratched too.” Somehow the whole incident, with its hint of something seen by no human eye between Brooke’s and his own (highly unlikely, but tempting to contemplate), gave him a curious pleasure which he felt he would spoil by ever going there again; so he never did.

He got on well with lecturers and tutors, and soon acquired one of those intangible reputations, breathed in whispers across High Tables, that rest on anything except past achievement; he lived retiringly and took hardly any part in University activities, yet it had already become expected that he would do well. Werneth had even consented to his taking the first part of the history tripos in July—after two terms of preparation for an examination for which most students took three, and some even six. “But you have a good background of knowledge,” he told Charles, adding with a smile: “And also a good memory.”

On an impulse he could not check quickly enough Charles answered: “It’s odd you should compliment me on my memory, because—” And then he told Werneth about his war injury, and the strange gap of years which he had christened in his own mind the Dark Corridor.

Werneth listened with an abstract attention beyond the range of mere inquisitiveness. After the brief account was finished, he tore a sheet of paper from a pad on his desk and drew a large rectangle. “Not exactly my province, as a historian, but nevertheless quite a teasing problem, Rainier. Your life, from what you say, appears to be divided into three parts—like Caesar’s Gaul?”

“Or like Regent Street,” Charles interjected, beginning to be amused.’

“Or like a Victorian novel,” capped Werneth, delightedly.

“Or like an artichoke,” recapped Charles.

That put them both in a highly agreeable mood. “Let us call the parts A, B, and C,” resumed Werneth, drawing verticals across the rectangle and lettering the segments. “A is your life before the war injury; B is your life between that injury and the moment in Liverpool last December 27 when, according to your statement, you suddenly remembered your name and identity; C is your life since then. Now it is demonstrably true that during Period C—that is to say, at the present time—you enjoy a normally clear recollection of both Period C and Period A, but not of Period B. Am I right?”

“Perfectly.”

“And it must also be inferentially clear that during Period B you could not have had any recollection at all of Period A?”

“Naturally not.”

“Thank you. … There’s only one thing more I should like to ask—and that is if I might send this diagram to my friend Dr. Freeman, of St. Jude’s, along with a brief resume of the facts which it illustrates?”

When Charles hesitated before replying Werneth added: “I won’t mention your name if you’d prefer not.”

Charles then consented. The matter was not referred to at his next meeting with Werneth, but some weeks later the history don asked Charles to stay behind after a lecture. “As I expected, my friend Freeman found my notes on your case extremely teasing. In fact he’d very much like to meet you if you haven’t any objection. You probably know his reputation as a philosopher and psychologist.”

Again Charles was reluctant, and again consented on the understanding that his name was not to be divulged; so the curious meeting took place in Werneth’s rooms. The eminent authority talked to Charles for over an hour in a completely detached and anonymous way, stating as his opinion that Period B would probably return, though there could be no certainty about it or prophecy as to the time required. Charles had several further interviews with Freeman, and began to take a certain pleasure in consulting an expert thus obliquely; he thought it typical of the amenities of Cambridge civilization that such a plan could have been worked out to suit him. At the same time he came to like Freeman personally, so that when his own identity became later revealed through an accident, it did not bother him much.

Charles took a First Class in the first part of the history tripos, which was quite a brilliant achievement in the circumstances. After consultations with Bragg and Werneth, he decided to switch over to economics during the following year—an effective piece of specialization, for he had already gone a certain way in economic history. He was increasingly interested in the background of knowledge and theory behind the lives of men, and the astounding clumsiness of world behavior compared with the powers of the planning mind. To use Werneth’s favorite word, he found the paradox teasing.

During the Long Vacation he stayed in Cambridge, putting in mornings and evenings of study interspersed with afternoons on the river or walks to Grantchester through the meadows; he liked Cambridge during vacation time—the quieter streets, the air of perpetual Sunday, the August sunlight bleaching the blinds in many a shop that would not pull them up until term time. Most of the bookshops remained open, however, and there were a few good concerts. The two months passed very quickly.

Sheldon wrote to him every week, but with no news except of domestic trouble at Stourton—an outbreak of petty thefts due (Charles could judge) to Chet’s refusal to back up Sheldon in some earlier trouble with one of the gardeners. Now that it was too late, Chet seemed to be handling the matter rather unfortunately, dealing out wholesale dismissals to servants who had given years of service, and leaving a staff both too small and too disgruntled to work well. Chet also wrote, giving his side of the question, casting doubts on Sheldon’s efficiency, and asking how Charles, as one of the family, would feel about selling the place. Charles replied instantly that Chet should sell by all means; Stourton was far too big for any modern uses, and family sentiment should not weigh against common sense. Chet did not reply to that, but a few weeks later, at Cambridge, Charles heard from Truslove that Stourton was on the market, but wouldn’t be easy to sell “in these days.”

Then one Saturday, returning to his rooms from a lecture, he found Kitty sprawled on a sofa and Herring teetering doubtfully in the pantry. “Hello, Uncle Charles,” she cried loudly, and then added in a whisper: “That’s for his benefit. He didn’t believe me—I could see that.”

“But why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” Charles began, trying to infuse a note of mild pleasure into his astonishment.

“Because you’d probably have told me not to,” she answered promptly.

He admitted he probably would, and then asked why she had come.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Is it? But—well, many happy returns—but—”

“Uncle Chet promised me a big party at Stourton, but he canceled it at the last moment because he said Aunt Lydia wasn’t very well, and as I’d already got leave of absence from Kirby I didn’t feel I could waste the week end.”

“But you’re not intending to stay here for the whole week end, are you?”

“Oh yes, I’ve taken a room at the Bull. Surprising what a girl can do by herself these days.”

“But if they find out—at Kirby—”

“That I’ve been visiting one uncle instead of another? Will it matter? And I don’t really care if they do find out—I’m tired of school anyway. I’d like to go to Newnham.”

“Anything wrong with Somerville at Oxford?”

“Oh, how you’d loathe to have me anywhere around, wouldn’t you?”

He began to laugh and suggested taking her to lunch.

“Can’t I have lunch here—in the college?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s better than the little German at our school who pretends to be French and gives us art lessons—he gets in an awful temper and then says, ‘In one word I vill not have it.’ ”

They lunched at Buol’s, in King’s Parade, and afterwards he said: “Now, young lady, having invited yourself here, you’ll have to take the consequences. My usual way of spending an afternoon is to punt up the river, and I don’t care how dull you find it, it’s either that or off you go on your own.”

“But I don’t mind at all—I can punt awfully well.”

“You won’t get the chance—I’ll do the punting.”

But she lazed quite happily during the hour-long journey, chatting all the time about school, life, the family, herself, and himself. “It’s made a great difference, you passing that examination, Uncle Charles. I believe the family had an idea you were a bit queer till you did that—now they still think you’re queer, but a marvel too. You’ve quite pushed Uncle Julian off the shelf as the one in the family with brains.”

He made no comment; the effort of digging the pole in and out of the river bed gave him an easy excuse for silence. He didn’t dislike Kitty, indeed there were certain qualities in her—or perhaps there was only one quality—that definitely attracted him.

She went on: “Of course the family don’t really respect brains—they just have a scared feeling that brains might come in handy some day.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know—just the general atmosphere before Mother went away. She’s at Cannes, you know—staying with Uncle Julian.”

They had tea at the Orchard and then returned to her hotel for dinner. “I’m glad you’re showing up with me here,” she said, as they entered the lobby, he in cap and gown as prescribed by University regulations for all undergraduates after dark. “It lets them know I’m respectable even if I am only fifteen. … By the way, how old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Do you feel twenty-six?”

“Sometimes I feel ninety-six—so I try not to bother about how I feel.”

“Are you happy?”

“Oh, happy enough.”

“Can you remember ever being terribly happy?”

He pondered. “Once when I was a small boy and Sheldon visited us at Brighton for some reason, and he took me for a walk along the Promenade instead of Miss Ponsonby.” He laughed. “Such a thrill.”

She laughed also. “And I was happiest once when I’d had a toothache and it began to stop. Before it finished stopping. I really enjoyed the last bit of the pain.”

“Morbid creature.”

“But pain is part of love, isn’t it?”

He was studying the menu. “At the moment I’m rather more concerned with the question of steak versus lamb chops.”

“You would say that, but you don’t really mean it. … Oh, and another time I was happy was Armistice Night, at school. So wonderful, to think the war was all over, wasn’t it? Like waking up on end-of-term morning and realizing it’s really come. But somehow everything’s been a bit of a letdown since, don’t you think? I mean, if you stop now and say to yourself, the war’s over, the war’s over, it can’t keep on making you happy as it did that first night, can it?”

“I’ve practically decided on steak. What about you?”

“Uncle Charles, are you sorry I came here to see you?”

“Well, I’m a little puzzled about what to do with you tomorrow.”

“I’d like to do whatever you were going to do.”

“That’s well meant, but I don’t think it would work. I intended to read most of the day and go to a concert in the afternoon.”

“I’d love the concert.”

“I don’t expect you would. Beethoven Quartets make no attempt to be popular.”

“Neither do you, Uncle Charles, but I don’t mind.”

He smiled, appreciating the repartee whilst resolute to make no concessions throughout the rest of the evening and the following day; he would teach her to play truant from school and fasten herself on him like that. After a long and, he hoped, exhausting walk on Sunday morning, he took her to the concert in the afternoon, and in the evening saw her off on the train with much relief and a touch of wry amusement.

“Uncle Charles, you’ve been so sweet to me.”

“I haven’t been aware of it.”

“Would you really mind if I were to come to Newnham?”

“It isn’t in my power to stop you. But don’t imagine you’d see much of me—the Newnham rules wouldn’t allow it, for one thing.”

“Do you think Newnham would be good for me?”

“Another question is would you be good for Newnham?”

“Won’t you be serious a moment? I wish you’d write to Mother and tell her it would be good for me.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I could do that. It’s for her and you to decide.”

“She says she doesn’t think she can afford it these days.”

“Not afford it? Surely—” But that, after all, wasn’t his business either. If Jill thought she could afford expensive cruises and winterings abroad, and yet decided to economize on her daughter’s education—well, it still remained outside his province.

The girl added, as the train came in: “It’s because trade’s not so good, or something. I think that’s really why Uncle Chet canceled my party, not because of Aunt Lydia.” She mimicked Chet as she added: “Time for economies, old chap.”

“I don’t think you really know anything about it. After all, a party wouldn’t cost—”

“I know, but Uncle Chet wouldn’t think of that. There’s nobody worse than a scared optimist.” She gave him a look, then added: “I suppose you think I heard somebody say that? Well, I didn’t—I thought it out myself. I’m not the fool you think I am.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool at all. But I don’t see how you can know much about financial matters.”

“Oh, can’t I? Uncle Chet used to rave so much about Rainier shares whenever I saw him that I and a lot of other girls at Kirby clubbed together and bought some. We look at the price every morning.”

He said sternly: “I think you’re very foolish. You and your friends should have something better to spend your time on—and perhaps your money, too. … Good-bye.”

The train was moving. “Good-bye, Uncle Charles.”

Returning to St. Swithin’s in the mellow October twilight he pondered on that phrase “in these days.” Truslove had used it in connection with the possible sale of Stourton, and now Jill also, about the expense of sending Kitty to college. Always popular as an excuse for action or inaction, and uttered by Englishmen in 1918 and 1919 with a hint of victorious pride, it had lately—during 1920—turned downwards from the highest notes. There was nothing gloomy yet, nothing in the nature of a dirge; just an allegro simmering down to andante among businessmen and stockbrokers. Trade, of course, had been so outrageously and preposterously good that there was nothing for the curve to do except flatten; the wild boom on the markets could not continue indefinitely. Charles looked up Rainier shares in The Times when he got back to his rooms; he found they stood at four pounds after having been higher—which, allowing for the bonus, really meant that the shares he had sold to Chet for seventy shillings were now more man twice the price. Chet shouldn’t worry—and yet, according to Kitty, he was worrying—doubtless because there had been a small fall from the peak. Her comment had been shrewd—nobody like a scared optimist.

The next morning at breakfast his thoughts were enough on the subject for him to glance at the later financial news, which informed him by headline that Rainier’s had announced an interim dividend of 10 per cent, as against 15 the previous year. It seemed to him good enough, and nothing for anyone to worry about, but by evening as he walked along Petty Cury the newsboys were carrying placards, “Slump on ’Change” and “Rainier Jolts Markets.” He found that the reduced dividend had tipped over prices rather as an extra brick on a child’s toy tower will send half of it toppling. Rainier’s had fallen thirty shillings during the day’s trading, and other leading shares proportionately. It had been something that sensational journalism delighted to call a “Black Monday.”

Still he did not think there was anything much to worry about. The theoretical study of economics was far removed from the practical guesswork of Throgmorton Street, and his reading of Marshall and Pigou had given him no insight into the psychology of speculation. For a week afterwards he ignored the financial pages, being temperamentally as well as personally disinterested in them; not till he received an alarming letter from Sheldon did he search the financial lists again to discover that in the interval Rainier ordinaries had continued their fall from two pounds ten to seventeen shillings. And even then his first thought was a severely logical one—that they were either worth more than that, or else had never been worth the higher prices at all.

Sheldon wrote that Chet was terribly worried, had been having long consultations with bank and Stock Exchange people, and had stayed all night in his City office on several occasions. Charles could not understand that; what had bank or Stock Exchange people got to do with the firm? Surely the Rainier business was principally carried on at Cowderton and other places, not in the City of London; and as for the falling price of the shares, what did it matter what the price of something was, if you didn’t have either to buy or to sell? He replied to Sheldon somewhat on these lines, half wishing he could write a similar note to Chet, but as Chet had not approached him, he did not care to offer comment or advice.

But towards the beginning of December a letter from Chet did arrive; and it was, when one reached the last page, an appeal for a loan. He didn’t say how much, but no sum, it appeared, would be either too small or too great; he left the choice to Charles with a touch of his vague expansiveness, assuring him that it was a merely temporary convenience and would soon be repaid. Charles was puzzled, unable to imagine how much Chet needed—surely it couldn’t be a small sum, a few hundreds, and if it were a matter of thousands, what could he possibly want it for? He felt he had a right to inquire, and did so. Back came a franker, longer, and much more desperate appeal, again saving its pith until the last page, wherein Chet admitted he had been speculating heavily in the shares of the firm, borrowing from banks in order to do so. At first the result had been highly successful; his own constant buying on a rising market had given him huge profits, and with those (uncashed, of course) as security he had borrowed and purchased more. Then the inevitable had happened. Chet didn’t put it in this way; he seemed to think that a conjunction of bad trade, falling share prices, and a request by the bank for him to begin repayment of loans was some malign coincidence instead of a series of causes and effects. If only Charles could help him out with ten or twelve thousand—he’d pay interest, let’s call it a short-term investment, old chap, the badness of trade could only be exceptional, Rainier shares were destined to far higher levels eventually—hadn’t they once been “talked” to twenty pounds? And Chet added that he hated making such a request, and only did so because there was much more at stake than his own personal affairs; Rainier’s was a family concern, there were Julian and Jill and Bridget and Julia and all the others to think about. If he threw his own shares on the market, it would make for a further fall in the price, and that would be bad for the firm itself and so affect the stability of the family property and livelihood.

The letter arrived on a Friday; Charles answered it that same evening, enclosing a check for as large a round figure as he happened to have on hand, and promising more in a few days. But by the following morning the affairs of Rainier’s had already broken out of the financial columns and were invading the news pages of all the daily papers. Apparently the shares had crashed in the “Street” after the Stock Exchange closed the previous evening, the final price being a very nominal half-crown. Accompanying the collapse were wild rumors—some of them, according to a discreet reporter, “of a serious nature.”

That sent him to Bragg to ask for leave of absence; he then wired Sheldon and left immediately for Stourton, reaching the house in the late afternoon. From the cars outside he guessed there was a family conclave before Sheldon told him who had arrived. He found them assembled in the library, already in the midst of stormy argument. Bridget, who was near the door, said “Hello, Charlie,” but the others were too preoccupied to hear this, even to see him at first. It was curious to note the utter disintegration of formal manners in face of such a crisis; to watch a favored few, long accustomed to regard the family business as a rock of ages cleft for them, suddenly contemplating phenomena so normal in most people’s lives—the uncertainties of the future. Charles stayed close to the door, reluctant to intervene; so far as he could make out, the family had been heckling Chet for some time, for his temper was considerably frayed, and at one question he suddenly lost it and shouted: “Look here, I’m not going to shoulder the blame for everything! You were all damned glad to leave things in my hands as long as you thought they we’re going well—”

“As long as we thought you knew what you were up to—we never guessed you were monkeying like this—

“God damn it, Jill—what did you ever do except draw dividends and spend ’em on Riviera gigolos?”

“How dare you say that!”

“Well, if you can suggest there’s been anything crooked in the way I’ve—”

Jill was on the verge of hysteria. “I know my life isn’t stuffy and narrow-minded like yours—but did I have to travel all the way here just to be insulted? Julian knows what a lie it is—he lives there—he’s been at Cannes all the season except when we went to Aix for a month—Julian, I appeal to you—are you going to stay here and allow things like this to be said—Julian—”

George interposed feebly: “Steady now, steady—both of you.”

Julia said, with cold common sense: “I think we might as well stick to the point, which isn’t Jill’s morals, but our money.”

Jill was still screaming: “Julian can tell you—Julian—”

Everybody stared at Julian, who couldn’t think of a sufficiently clever remark and was consequently silent. Meanwhile Chet’s anger rose to white heat. “Look at me—don’t look at Julian! I haven’t had a decent sleep for weeks, while you’ve all been gallivanting about in Cannes or Aix or God knows where! Look at me! I’ve put on ten years—that’s what they say at the office!” And he added, pathetically: “To say nothing of it giving Lydia a breakdown.”

It was also pathetic that he should have asked them to look at him, for his claim was a clear exaggeration; he certainly looked tired—perhaps also in need of a Turkish bath and a shave; but his hair had failed to turn white after any number of sleepless nights. He was still expansive, even in self-pity. Charles felt suddenly sorry for him, as much because as in spite of this.

Julian, having now thought of something, intervened in his sly, high-pitched voice: “I’m afraid it wasn’t your looks we were all relying on, Chet …”

Then Julia, glancing towards the door, spotted Charles. “Ah, here’s the mystery man arrived! Hello, darling! How wise you were to sell Rainier’s at three pounds ten and buy War Loan, you shrewd man! Come to gloat over us?”

It was the interpretation Charles had feared. He stepped forward, nodded slightly to the general assembly. “You’re quite wrong, Julia. … How are you, Chet?”

Chet, on the verge of tears after his outburst, put out his hand rather as a dog extends an interceding paw; he murmured abjectly: “Hello, old chap—God bless. Caught us all at a bad moment. … And thanks for your letter—damn nice of you, but I’m afraid it’s a bit late—a sort of tide in the affairs of men, you know—”

Charles, not fully aware what Chet was talking about, answered for want of anything else to say: “I should have come earlier, but I just missed a train.”

“You missed Chet’s news, too,” Jill cried, still half-hysterical. “Such splendid news! I’ve been traveling all night to hear it—so has Julian—would somebody mind repeating it for Charles’s benefit?”

“I’ll tell him,” Julia interrupted, venomously. “We’re all on the rocks, and Chet’s just the most wonderful financier in the world!”

“Except,” added Julian, “a certain undergraduate who thoughtfully added a quarter of a million to Chet’s bank loan by demanding cash.”

Charles swung round on him. “What on earth do you mean by that?”

“Well, you sold your stuff to Chet, didn’t you?”

“He wanted to buy—I didn’t ask him to.”|

“But he paid you in cash.”|

“Naturally—what else?”

“Well, where d’you suppose he found the cash? In his pocket?”

“You mean he had to borrow from the bank to pay me?” Charles then turned on Chet. “Is this true?”

“’Fraid it is, Charlie. After all, you wanted the cash.”

“Well, you wanted the shares.”

“Wasn’t exactly that I wanted ’em, old chap, but I had to take ’em.”

“But—I don’t see that—surely I could have sold them to someone else?”

“Not at that price. You try dumping sixty thousand on the market and see what happens. I had to take ’em to keep the price firm. Isn’t that right, Truslove?”

Charles peered beyond the faces; Truslove was standing in the shadows, fingering the embroidery at the back of a chair; leaning forward he answered: “That was your motive, undoubtedly, Mr. Chetwynd. But I think we can hardly blame Mr. Charles for—”

“Is it a matter for blaming anybody?” Charles interrupted, with tightened lips. “I can only say that I—I—”

And then he stopped. What could he say? That he was sorry? That had he known Chet was having to borrow he would have insisted on selling in the market? That if he could have forecast a crisis like this, he would have held on to his shares, just to be one of the family in adversity? None of these things was true, except the first. He said, lamely: “I feel at a disadvantage—not having known of these things before.”

“Well, whose fault was that?” Jill shouted at him.

“My own, I’m perfectly well aware. I took no interest in them.”

“It doesn’t cost you anything to admit it now, does it?”

There was such bitterness in her voice that he stared with astonishment. “I—I don’t know what you mean, Jill.”

“Oh, don’t put on that Cambridge air—we’re not all fools! And we haven’t all got queer memories either! If you want my opinion, you can have it—you’re morally liable to return that cash—”

Truslove stepped forward with unexpected sprightliness. “I must say I consider that a most unfair and prejudiced remark—”

Jill screamed on: “I said morally, Truslove, not legally! Isn’t that the way you argued us all into the equity settlement with Charles after Father died? We didn’t have to do it then! He doesn’t have to do it now! But what he ought is another matter!”

Nobody said anything to that, but Julian stroked his chin thoughtfully, while Julia stared across at Jill with darkly shining eyes. It was as if the family were at last converging on a more satisfying emotion than that of blaming Chet, who, after all, was only one of themselves. But Charles was different. He took in their various glances, accepting—even had he never done so before—the position of utter outsider. His own glance hardened as he answered quietly: “I’m still rather hazy about what’s happened. Can’t I talk to somebody—alone, for preference, and without all this shouting? How about you, Chet? … Or you, Julian?” Chet shifted weakly; Julian did not stir. “Truslove, then?”

The room was silent as he and the lawyer passed through the French windows on to the terrace. They did not speak till they were well away from the house, halfway to the new and expensive tennis courts that Chet had had installed just before he decided to sell Stourton if he could. Truslove began by saying how distressed he was at such a scene, as well as at the events leading up to it; in all his experience with the family, over forty years … Charles cut him short. “I don’t think this is an occasion for sentiment, Truslove.”

“But perhaps, Mr. Charles, you’ll allow me to say that I warned Mr. Chetwynd a great many times during recent months, but in vain—he fancied he had the Midas touch—there was no arguing with him. … I only wish he had more of your own level-headedness.”

“No compliments either, please. I want facts, that’s all. First, is the firm bankrupt?”

“That’s hard to say, Mr. Charles. Many a firm would be bankrupt if its creditors all jumped at the same moment, and that’s just what often happens when things begin to go wrong. I daresay the firm’s still making profits, but there are loans of various kinds and if they’re called in just now, as they may be with the shares down to half a crown—”

“Is that a fair price for what they’re worth?”

“Well, there again it’s hard to say—always hard to separate price from worth.”

“What will happen if the loans are called in?”

“The company will have to look for new money—if it can find any.”

“And if it can’t?”

“Then, of course, there’d be nothing for it but a receivership, or at any rate some sort of arrangement with creditors.”

“May I ask you, though you needn’t answer if you don’t want—did Chet speculate with any of the firm’s money?”

“Again, it’s hard to draw a line between speculation and legitimate business practice. Mr. Chetwynd bought rather large quantities of raw materials, thinking prices would continue to rise. In that he made the same mistake as a great many very shrewd and reputable people.”

“Will he be forced into bankruptcy?”

“A good deal depends on what happens to the firm. If it weathers the storm the bank would probably give him a chance—subject, of course, to mortgaging Stourton and cutting down personal expenses to the bone. That applies to the others also.”

“I see. … Now may I ask you one final question? You were saying just now that the firm will need new money. You know how much I have myself. Would such a sum be any use in weathering the storm, as you put it?”

“That also is hard to say, Mr. Charles. I hardly care to advise you in—”

“I’m not asking for advice. I want to know how much the firm needs, so that I can judge whether it’s even possible for me to save the situation at all.”

“I—I can’t say, Mr. Charles. The whole matter’s very complicated. We should have to see accountants, and find out certain things from the banks—it’s quite impossible for me to make an estimate offhand.”

“Well, thanks for telling me all you can. Perhaps we could return by the side gate—I’d like to escape any more of the family wrangle if it’s still in progress. …”

He drove away from Stourton an hour later, without seeing the family again; but he left a note for Chet with Sheldon, saying he would get in touch within a day or two. After a dash across London he was just in time to catch the last train from Liverpool Street and be in his rooms at St. Swithin’s by midnight. He had already decided to help if his help could do any vital amount of good. He couldn’t exactly say why he had come to this decision; it certainly wasn’t any sense of the moral obligation that Jill had tried to thrust on him. And he didn’t think it could be any sentimental feeling about the family, whom (except for Chet and Bridget) he didn’t particularly like, and whose decline to the status of those who had to earn their own living would not wring from him a tear. If sentiment touched him at all it was more for Sheldon and other servants whom he knew, as well as for the thousands of Rainier employees whom he didn’t know, but whom he could imagine in their little houses sleeping peacefully without knowledge that their future was being shaped by one man’s decision in a Cambridge college room. That aspect of the thing was fantastic, but it was true, nevertheless. But perhaps strongest of all the arguments was the fact that the money didn’t matter to him; even the income from it was more than he could ever spend; if he could put it to some act, however debatable, at least it would not be useless, as it was and always would be in his possession. For his own personal future had already begun to mold itself; he would probably stay at Cambridge after obtaining a degree. Werneth had once hinted at a fellowship, and if this should happen, he would be enabled to live frugally but quite comfortably on his own earnings.

End of term came a couple of days later; he returned to London and took a room at a hotel. Having conveyed his conditional decision to Chet and to Truslove, he had now only to discover if his money had any chance to perform the necessary miracle. This meant interviews in City offices with bank officials and chartered accountants, long scrutinies of balance sheets and many wearisome hours in the Rainier Building, demanding documents and statements that took so long to unearth and were frequently so confusing that he soon realized how far Chet’s slackness had percolated downwards into all departments.

One of the accountants took him aside after an interview. “It’s no business of mine, Mr. Rainier, but I know something of the situation and what you’re thinking of doing, and my advice to you would be to keep out of it—don’t send good money after bad!”

“Thanks for the tip,” Charles answered, with no other comment.

During the next two weeks it became a matter of some absorption to him to discover exactly what Chet had been up to. So far he hadn’t detected any actual crookedness—only the grossest negligence and the most preposterous—well, expansiveness was perhaps again the word. Chet had not only bought shares at absurd prices and in absurd quantities; he had done the same with office desks, with electric lamps, even with pen nibs. A small change, apparently fancied by him, in the firm’s style of note-paper heading had condemned enormous stacks of the original kind to wastepaper. An ugly marble mantelpiece in Chet’s private office had cost six hundred pounds. And so far as Charles could judge from his somewhat anomalous position of privileged outsider, every department was staffed by well-paid sycophants whose most pressing daily task was to convince their immediate superior that they were indispensable.

By Christmas Charles had almost readied the same opinion as the accountant—that it would be folly to send good money after bad. Even a total repayment of loans would not alone suffice to lift the firm from the trough of depression into which the entire trade of the country was rapidly sinking; nothing could save an enterprise of such complexity but completely centralized and economical control. Without that a cash loan could only stave off the inevitable for a few months.

On one of those oddly unbusinesslike days between Christmas and the New Year he lunched with Chet and Truslove in Chet’s office and told them this. “I must be frank, Chet. I’ve spent a fortnight looking into every corner I could find, and I’m not much of an optimist as a result. It isn’t only new money that the firm needs, it’s new—well, new other things.”

Chet nodded with an air of magnanimous comprehension. “You’re probably right, old chap. How about a new boss? Suppose I were to swap round with George on the board?” Charles smiled gently. “I know my faults,” Chet ran on. “I’m a fair-weather pilot—good when everything’s on the up-and-up. Nobody can act and think bigger when times are right for it. But these days you want a chap who can act and think small. That’s what put George in my mind.”

Charles was quite willing to subscribe to a theory that left Chet holding all the laurels, but he felt he had to say more. “I’m afraid it isn’t just a matter of changing the pilot. You’ve got to change a good deal of the ship. And you also may have to change the voyage—or perhaps even lie up in harbor for a time and make no voyages at all.”

“Just a figure of speech, old chap—don’t press it too far.”

“All right, I won’t … but take this lunch as an example. Although I’m a guest, you’ll perhaps forgive me for saying it’s a pretty bad lunch. And I know where it comes from—the canteen, as they call it, downstairs. And I’ve seen the prices on the menu, so I know your canteen is either badly managed or a swindle or both.”

“Well, maybe—but surely it’s not so important—”

“It’s one thing with another. The whole place wants reorganising from top to bottom, and I can’t exactly see George as the new broom.”

“Well, let’s assume you’re right—but the more urgent issue still remains. The banks don’t give a damn whether the canteen serves good food or not. They just won’t wait for their money. What do you say, Truslove?”

Truslove temporized as usual. “I think we owe Mr. Charles a deep debt of gratitude for devoting two weeks of his Christmas vacation to making this inquiry. I’m sure everything he has said is very valuable.”

“But some of his cash would be more valuable still—don’t we agree, old chap?”

“That, I understand, is why Mr. Charles has met us here—to give us his decision.”

Both of them looked to Charles, who answered, rather hesitantly: “I was hoping you’d see what I’m driving at without forcing me to a direct reply. In my opinion a loan or even a gift wouldn’t help unless you completely reorganize the firm. That’s all I can say.”

“You mean your answer’s a definite ‘no’?”

“If you insist on putting it that way, but you’ve heard my reasons.”

“Well, I’m damned.” Chet stared gloomily at the tablecloth for a moment, while the waitress came in with coffee. Transferring his stare to the cup, he suddenly turned on her with a vehemence that almost made her drop the tray. “Call this coffee? Take it back and bring something worth drinking. And what’s the cause of the rotten meals we get here? Send up the canteen manager to my office afterwards … and let me look at your hands! Why … damn it, I won’t have this sort of thing—get your week’s wages and don’t come here again!”

Throughout all this Truslove and Charles had looked on uncomfortably. As soon as the girl, too startled and upset to make any reply, had left the room, Charles said quietly: “I’m not sure that was very fair of you, Chet. She wasn’t responsible.”

“What more can I do? Her hands—you should have seen them.”

“Yes, yes … I daresay.”

There was a long silence. Then Chet exploded:—

“Well, have I done anything wrong? You talk about re-organization—what do you mean by it? If it isn’t just a word, tell me. Unless it’s merely that you haven’t got the courage to say outright that you’re not going to risk your precious cash. I’d respect you more for saying that than for hiding behind all this reorganization pi-jaw.”

(“Pi-jaw”—that was the word they used at Netherton for interviews with the headmaster. It stirred in him a little instant pity for Chet.)

“I’m not hiding behind anything.”

“You mean you’d lend the money if we did reorganize?”

Charles was silent a moment; Chet went on: “That’s a fair question, isn’t it, Truslove? Let him answer, then we’ll know where we stand. Let’s have a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ for God’s sake.”

“Very well, then … probably I would.”

Chet beamed. “Fine, old chap. I take back any aspersions, God bless. Now all you’ve got to tell us is what you’d call reorganizing. What have I got to do? Or what’s anybody got to do? And for that matter, who’s got to be the fellow to do it?”

“I—I can’t easily answer those questions, Chet. I’m not a business expert. It’s hardly possible for me to suggest a new board, new managers, new heads of departments—all out of the blue—in a couple of minutes.”

“You mean we ought to have new ones—all of them?”

“I do.”

“You mean you’ve seen enough during these last two weeks to get an idea who’s not pulling his weight?”

“To some extent, yes.”

Then Chet, beaming again, played his trump card. “Well, all I’ve got to say, old chap, is—come here and do the job yourself.” He kept on beaming throughout their stare of immediate astonishment. “Why not? Lend the money, then come and look after it. What could give you a better safeguard? You say you’re not a businessman, but you know enough to have found out what’s wrong—that’s a good deal of the way to knowing what’s right. Truslove, arrange a board meeting or whatever there has to be and get it all fixed up. I’ll resign, and then—”

Charles got up from the table and strode to the window, interrupting as he stared over the City roof tops. “But I don’t want such a job—can’t you understand that? I’ve got my work at Cambridge—”

“You could go back there afterwards—putting things straight mightn’t take you more than a few weeks, once you got down to it.”

“But I’ve no desire to get down to it!”

“Then it’s damnably selfish of you! Worse than that, it’s nothing but hypocrisy the way you’ve led us on into thinking you’d help us! First you make terms for getting us all out of a hole—then we agree to the terms—then you go back on them—”

“But I never made such terms! I never hinted at tackling a job like this myself! I don’t even know that I could do it, anyhow.”

Chet shrugged his shoulder, turning round to the lawyer. “Well, that’s his second ‘no’—I suppose we’ll just have to let the little tick go back to his study books.”

(“Tick”—the worst term of Netherton opprobrium, and one that Charles had never used, even at school, because he had always considered it childish.)

Afterwards, walking disconsolately along Cheapside and through Paternoster Row to Ludgate Hill and his hotel in the Strand, he felt he had considerably bungled the entire interview. He should have said “no” from the first; then there would have had to be only one “no.”

Charles took over control of the Rainier firms in January 1921. To do so he obtained a term’s leave of absence from St. Swithin’s, smiling at the tense in Bragg’s remark: “You would have done very well here, you know.”

“Would have? I still intend to.”

“Well, we shall see, we shall see.”

He practically lived in Chet’s office in Old Broad Street—no longer Chet’s, of course, but he refused to put his own name on the door. At a special board meeting he had been appointed managing director with the consent of the bank creditors, to whom he had turned over his own government securities. The bank men doubtless smiled over the arrangement, since it was one by which they could not possibly lose; while the family, faced with even a thousand-to-one chance, grabbed it gladly if not gratefully. They could not get it out of their minds that Charles was somehow taking advantage of them, instead of they of him; but if (as Kitty had said) they had ever had a scared feeling that brains might come in handy some day, this was undoubtedly the day. The scared feeling developed until they actually believed in him a little, but without reasoned conviction and certainly without affection—rather as if he were some kind of astrologer whose abracadabra might, after all, perform some miracle of market manipulation. That, of course, was their only criterion of success; and it so happened that the mere closing of bear accounts sent up the price of Rainier shares from half a crown to six shillings within a month of his taking control, a rise that considerably helped his prestige though he made no attempt to claim any. Less popular was his early insistence on economies in their personal lives, but after one or two suggestions had been badly taken, he contented himself with sending each member of the family a personal note, merely conveying advance information that the preference dividend that year would not be paid. (The preference shares were all held by the family.) Expected protests came in the form of a personal visit from Chet, telephone calls from Jill, Julia, and George, and a strong letter from Julian in Cannes. He took no notice of any of them, his only concession being an offer to Jill to pay for Kitty’s college education, if she still wanted one.

Kitty came to his office to thank him. “Sweet of you, Uncle Charles. But of course you don’t mind my going to Newnham now you’re not at St. Swithin’s—isn’t that it?”

“Not altogether. Besides, I hope I’ll be back there soon.”

“You mean you haven’t taken on this as a lifework?”

“Good heavens, no!”

“I hear you’re dismissing everybody.”

“Not everybody.”

“And nobody wants to buy Stourton.

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Where do you live?”

“In a little apartment near the British Museum.”

“How appropriate! Can I visit you there?”

“You wouldn’t find me in. I work late most evenings.”

“Won’t you take me to lunch?”

“I was just going to ask you. But there’s no taking—we have it here—on my desk. And it’s pretty bad—though not so bad as it used to be.”

She chattered on about her personal affairs, the new and smaller house Jill and she had had to move into—a little suburban villa at Hendon, with only one maid—“and there’s a house further along the road where a little man kisses his wife on the doorstep every morning at three minutes past eight and comes running past our house to catch the eight-seven—just like you read about in the comic papers.”

“I’m glad you live so near a station. It must be very convenient.”

“I know—you think I’m a snob.”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“I’m not quite certain.”

“You mean you haven’t made up your mind?”

“That would be too flattering to your sense of importance.”

“I believe you do think about me, sometimes.”

“Obviously—that’s why it occurred to me you might go to college.”

“Uncle Charles … what’s going to happen to everybody … whether they go to college or not?”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“I get terribly upset thinking about it sometimes. The little man who runs for the train every day—I’m not really a snob about him, I think he’s wonderful, and it’s beautiful the way you can always tell the time by him, and the way he always catches the train—at least I hope he does, in case somebody like you goes round his firm dismissing everyone who’s late. … Oh, but what’s going to happen, Uncle Charles—eventually?”

“You mean will he stop running?”

“Yes, or will the train stop running, or will he stop kissing his wife, or will you stop being able to dismiss people—I don’t know, it all seems so fragile—the least touch—”

“I’ve had that feeling.”

“Oh, you have?” Then pleadingly: “Don’t make a joke about too much to drink, or lobster for supper. Please don’t make a joke.”

“I wasn’t going to. There isn’t any joke.”

She said somberly: “I know that too, and I’m only seventeen.”

A tap came at the door and a young man entered with a sheaf of papers. When he had gone Charles scanned them through, then apologized perfunctorily for having done so. “But you see, Kitty, I’m terribly busy.”

“Perhaps I’d better leave you to it then?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.” He smiled, escorting her to the door and saying as she left him: “I’m really glad you’re going to Newnham. Write to me when you’re there and tell me what it’s like.”

Then he went back to his desk. The papers included a list of names, over a hundred, of employees who would have to go that week. He glanced down the list, initialed his approval of it, and passed on to another job.

(But what would happen to them? And yet, on the other hand, what else could he do?)

By Easter he had made economies everywhere, yet the continuing malaise of trade kept up a tragic pace. There were few positive signs that his job could be regarded as approaching an end, and it was small satisfaction to know that without his efforts the whole concern would have already foundered like a waterlogged ship. As it was, the pumps were just a few gallons ahead of the still-encroaching ocean. Even the very energies he devoted to the task, his frequent feelings of thanklessness and exasperation, fought for a continuance of effort; he was giving the job so much that he had to give it more, because “if you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you hate it and the part isn’t real.” He wrote that in a letter to Kitty, explaining why he would have to postpone returning to Cambridge for another term. He found he could write to her more freely than he could talk to her, and more freely than he could talk to anyone except Sheldon.

He was still at his desk in the Rainier office when Kitty left Newnham in 1924. The desk was the same, one of Chet’s fantastic purchases that were really more economical to keep and use than to sell in exchange; but the office was different—no longer opulent in Old Broad Street within a few yards of the Stock Exchange, but tucked away in an old shabby building off St. Mary Axe. Convenient, though—within easy reach of Mark Lane Station, and near enough to the river to get the smell of the tide and an occasional whiff of tobacco from the big bonding warehouses.

Much had happened since 1921. He had pulled Rainier’s out of the depths into shallow water; there had even, during the second half of 1923 and first few months of 1924, been a few definite pointers to dry land. The preference dividend was now being paid again, while the ordinary shares, dividendless and without sign of any, stood at twelve shillings and were occasionally given a run up to sixteen or seventeen. Chet had a continuing order with a broker to sell a couple of thousand at the higher figure and buy back at the lower; it was the only speculation Charles would allow, but Chet derived a good deal of pleasure from it, imagining himself a titan of finance whenever he made the price of a new car. Chet still lived at Stourton, though part of the place was closed up; it was really cheaper to live in a house one couldn’t sell than rent another.

The rest of the family had had to make similar economies, but the real pressure bad been relaxed by the resumption of the preference dividend, and they were all comfortably off by any standards except those of the really rich. Jill could afford once more her cruises and flirtations, with no handicaps to the latter except advancing middle age and none to the former save an increasing difficulty in finding new places to cruise to. Julia and her husband lived in Cheltenham, playing golf and breeding Sealyhams; George and Vera preferred town life and had taken a newly built maisonnette in Hampstead. Julian was at Cannes, doing nothing in particular with his usual slightly sinister elegance; once or twice a year he turned up in London, took Charles for lunch to the Reform Club, and worked off a few well-polished epigrams. Bridget had married an officer in an Irish regiment and lived in a suburb of Belfast. She had had one child, a boy, and was expecting another. With George’s girl and Julia’s boy and girl, this made a problematical five as against seven of the previous generation, unless (as Chet put it) Charles hurried up. They were not, however, at all anxious for Charles to hurry up; and as both Lydia and Jill were past the age when any amount of hurry might be expected to yield result, and as Vera was sickly and Julia (so she boasted) had nothing to do with her husband any more, the ratio really depended on Bridget—plus, of course, an outside chance from Charles. Nobody even considered Julian in such a connection.

Much more, though, had happened between 1921 and 1924. The ancient Irish problem had apparently been settled; a conference at Washington had arranged limitation of naval armaments between England, Japan, France, and the United States; someone had almost climbed Everest; the German mark had collapsed and French troops had entered the Ruhr; Mussolini was rebuilding Italy and had already bombarded Corfu; there had been an earthquake in Japan, there had almost been another war with Turkey, there was still a war in Morocco, and there was going to be an exhibition at Wembley.

By 1924 Charles also had changed a little. It was not so much that he looked older—rather that he seemed to have reached the beginnings of a certain agelessness that might last indefinitely. He kept himself fit with careful living and week ends by the sea; faithful to memories, he had bought a small house in Portslade that was not too expensive to keep up in addition to his London apartment—no longer the one near the British Museum, but a service flat in Smith Square. He worked long office hours, and had to make frequent journeys to Rainier factories throughout England; there were certain hotels where he always stayed, and to the staffs of these he was satisfyingly known as the kind of man who gave no trouble, drank little, tipped generously but not lavishly, and always appeared to be wearing the same perfectly neat but nondescript suit of clothes. The fact that he was head of the Rainier firm merely added, if it added at all, to the respect they would have felt for such a man in any case.

In 1924 Charles was thirty and Kitty nineteen. She had done well at Newnham, obtaining a second in the men’s tripos examination, but of course she could not take a degree. On the day that she finally left the college she went direct from Liverpool Street Station to the Rainier offices, hoping Charles might be free for lunch; he was out, but found her still waiting in his private room on his return during the late afternoon.

“Oh, Uncle Charles, did you mind? I felt I must call—I feel so sad, I don’t know what to do with my life—I’ve said good-bye to so many people there seems nobody left in the world but you!”

He laughed and telephoned for tea. “I’m glad I never had the experience of leaving Cambridge knowing it would be for good. It was only going to be for a term, and then two terms, and then a year …”

“And what now? Don’t say you’ve given it up altogether.”

“It must have given me up, anyway.”

“But that’s so awful to think of. You fitted Cambridge life, somehow. Remember that day I came from Kirby and waited in your rooms at St. Swithin’s—just like this, except that the chair was more comfortable?”

“I don’t hold with too comfortable chairs in offices.”

“But you do remember that day?”

“Yes—and so does Herring, I’m sure.”

“God, I always thought it was a shame to drag you from what you wanted to do to run a business, but I must say you’ve done it pretty well—even Mother admits that, but I’ll tell you something that’ll amuse you—just because you’ve done it she thinks it couldn’t have been so very hard and probably other people could have done it just as well.”

“Probably they could. Anyhow, if it releases your mother from any embarrassment of gratitude, it’s a thought worth thinking. Where is she now, by the way?”

“Somewhere in mid-Mediterranean, drinking cocktails. Chet asked me down to Stourton for the week end. Why don’t you come?”

“To be quite frank, because when I do go there, I’m usually bored.”

“You mightn’t be if I were there too.”

He laughed and said he’d think about it, and after thinking about it several times during the next twenty-four hours he rang up Chet and said he was coming. Chet was delighted. Apparently Kitty was in the same room with him when the conversation took place, because he heard her excited voice in the background, then a scuffle to grab the instrument, and finally a torrent of enthusiasm which he cut short by asking to speak to Chet again.

He enjoyed himself at Stourton that week end, and his lack of boredom was not entirely due to Kitty, for there was another guest, a man who had traveled in China and was interesting to listen to if difficult to talk to—a division of labor which suited Charles; and there were also local people, agreeable enough, who played tennis in the afternoons and stayed to dinner. Actually he did not see much of Kitty, who seemed generally to be surrounded by handsome young men in white flannels, and when chances came to join her group he did not do so. He wondered why he did not, and with a touch of quizzical self-scrutiny was prepared to diagnose even a twinge of jealousy; he would really have liked to, just for the chance to laugh at himself, but honestly he could not. Naturally the girl liked people of her own age; but there was another sense in which he had to realize now how old as well as young she was; those youths treated her with such obvious worship, it would not be fair for him to come along with his usual offhand badinage as to a child, and so deflate her adult prestige. And yet that was the only way he knew how to treat her—casually, unsparingly, never very politely. Perhaps that made up the chief reason he kept out of her way.

As soon as the dinner guests had left on the Sunday evening, he began to make his own farewells, for he intended to drive off early in the morning to reach his office by nine. Leaving Chet, Lydia, and Kitty in the drawing room, he sidestepped into the library for something to read in bed. It was a superb July night; he did not feel sleepy, yet he knew he must sleep—he had a busy day tomorrow. One of the library windows was open to admit the warm breeze; there was a full moon, and the illumination, tricked by flapping curtains, played over the books like something alive and restless. He was fumbling along the wall for a switch when he heard a sound behind him.

“Uncle Charles—don’t put on any lights.”

He turned round, startled. She went on: “Why have you been avoiding me? And don’t say you haven’t.”

“Of course I won’t. I have. I know I have. And this is why. I can tell you very clearly, because I’ve been thinking it out myself.”

He made his point about her age, and the young men, and his own offhand manner. When he had finished she said: “It’s too clear, too ingenious.”

“But don’t you think one’s subconscious mind does work ingeniously?”

“Maybe yours does. I’ll bet it would.”

“You see, Kitty, you’re no longer a child.”

“Oh God—for you to tell me that!”

Suddenly the wind dropped, the curtains ceased flapping, the moonlight seemed to focus in a stilled and breathless glare upon her face. It was not exactly a beautiful face, but he knew at that moment it held something for him, touched a chord somewhere, very distantly. He said, smiling: “I’ll try to practise company manners for a future occasion.”

“No, never do that. Be yourself—as you were in all those letters. And if you’d rather have the Cambridge life than run the firm, then give it up—before it’s too late!”

“Now what are you talking about?”

“You—you—because I’m always thinking about you. You’re not happy—you’re not real! But those letters you wrote were real—when you felt crushed and hopeless and things had gone wrong all day, and you used to sit in your office when everyone had gone home and type them yourself, with all the mistakes. … I suppose I’m being sentimental. The little college girl, treasuring letters from the beloved uncle who saved the family from ruin. … But haven’t you finished that yet? Haven’t you done enough for us? You pulled the firm through the worst years—now trade’s improving, Chet says, so now’s your time to get free! Don’t you realize that? You still hanker after the other kind of life, don’t you—study, books, all that sort of thing? When I came in just now and saw you in the moonlight peering along the shelves I could have cried.”

“I don’t see why. I was only looking for the lights and hoping there was a detective novel I hadn’t read.”

“But—but don’t you want—Cambridge—any more?”

“I wonder, sometimes, if I do. … To grow old in a cultured groove, each year knowing more and more about less and less, as they say about those specialist dons, till at last one’s mental equipment becomes an infinitely long and narrow strip leading nowhere in particular—”

“Like the Polish Corridor!”

He laughed. “How do you think of such things?”

“My subconscious—like yours—ingenious. But never mind that—what do you want to do?”

“You talk as if I’d been complaining. Far from it. I’m quite satisfied to go on doing what I am.”

“Managing the firm, increasing the dividends, refloating the companies, a regular Knight of the Prospectus, Savior of the Mites of Widows and Orphans—”

“Now you’re being sarcastic.”

“Can’t you think of anything you’ve ever wanted passionately and still—would like?”

He said after a pause: “Yes, I can, but it’s rather trivial. When I was at school I had a great ambition to paddle down the Danube in a canoe, but my father didn’t approve of the idea and wouldn’t let me have the money for it.”

“Oh, but that’s not trivial—it’s wonderful. And you can afford it now all right.”

“The money, perhaps, but not the time.”

“You ought to make the time.”

He laughed. “If I can steal a quiet fortnight at Portslade I’ll be lucky this year.” He took her aria and led her towards the door. “And now, I’m afraid, since I have to leave so early in the morning—”

“I know. You want to look for a book.” She suddenly took his hand and pressed it over the switch. “Good night, Uncle Charles.”

As he went back to the shelves he heard her footsteps fading through the house—no longer a child, that was true, but she still scampered like one. He searched for a while without finding anything he wanted to read.

Nineteen twenty-five was another improving year, the year of Locarno, the false dawn. It was a year perhaps typical of the twenties in its wishful optimism backed by no growth of overtaking realism; another sixpence off the income tax, another attempt to harness a vague shape of things to come with the even vaguer shapes of things that had been. For the public would not yet look squarely into that evil face (publishers were still refusing “war books”) and few also were those who feared the specter might return. The England hoped for by the majority of Englishmen was a harking back to certain frugalities of the past (lower and lower income tax, smaller and smaller government expenditure) in order to enjoy more and more the pleasures of the present; the Europe they dreamed of was a continent in which everybody placidly “saw reason,” while cultivating summer schools, youth hostels, and peasant-costume festivals in the best tradition of Hampstead Garden Suburb; in exchange for which the City would make loans, trade would thus be encouraged, and taxes fall still further. Mixed up with this almost mystic materialism was the eager, frightened idealism of the Labour Party (both the eagerness and the fright came to a head a year later, in the General Strike); the spread of the belief that the League of Nations never would be much good but was probably better than nothing, a belief that effectively converted Geneva into a bore and anyone who talked too much about it into a nuisance. Meanwhile a vast and paralyzing absence of hostility gripped Englishmen from top to bottom of the social scale, not a toleration on principle but a muteness through indifference; they were not against the League of Nations, they were not against Russia, they were not against disarmament, or the Treaty of Versailles, or the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, or the working classes, or Mussolini—who had, after all, made the Italian trains run on time. Their favorite gesture was to give credit to an opponent (“You’ll find a good many of those Labour chaps are quite decent fellows”); their favorite conclusion to an argument the opinion that, “Ah well, these things’ll probably right themselves in time.”

And amidst such gestures and opinions the postwar England took physical shape and permitted itself limited expression. By 1925 the main features were apparent: arterial roads along which the speculative builder was permitted to put up his 600-pound houses and re-create the problem the roads themselves had been designed to solve; the week-end trek to the coasts and country through the bottlenecks of Croydon and Maidenhead; the blossoming of the huge motor coach, and the mushrooming of outer suburbs until London almost began where the sprawling coast towns left off—while in bookshops and theaters the rage was for Michael Arlen and Noel Coward, two men whose deft orchestrations of nerves without emotions, cynicism without satire, achieved a success that must have increased even their own disillusionment.

In this same year 1925 Rainier’s made a profit that could have paid a small dividend on the ordinary shares; but Charles chose not to do so, despite appeals and protests from the family. And in that same year Lydia died of pneumonia, and Bridget had another baby, and Kitty got herself engaged to a young man named Walter Haversham, who preached Communism at London street corners and had been to Russia. For six months she was swept by an enthusiasm which considerably shocked the family, but somehow did not especially disturb Charles. He saw her once carrying a pictorial banner with Wal (they called him Wal) in a May Day procession; when he met her some weeks later he chaffed her gently about it, saying that workmen on banners always had enormous fists, whether for fraternization or for assault and battery he could never be quite certain—maybe both. He smiled as he said it, but she suddenly flew into a rage, accusing him of being a coward who took refuge in cynicism from the serious issues of the world. “And don’t tell me I’ve lost my sense of humor. I have—I know I have. There isn’t any room for humor in the world as it is today. And it’s that English sense of humor, which everybody boasts about, that really prevents things from being done.”

“You’re probably right. But think of all the things that are better left undone.”

“The day will come when men may be killed for laughing.”

“And that will also be the day when men laugh at killing.”

She went out of his office, banging the door. He did not see her again for several months—till after the General Strike in 1926. One day she rang him up on the telephone. “Uncle Charles, may I come and talk to you?”

“Of course.” He was about to add an invitation to lunch when the receiver was banged down at the other end. Two minutes later she came bounding into his office.

“I rang up from just outside. I thought you might not want to see me after our last meeting.”

“I don’t think I should ever not want to see you. What’s been happening to you all this while?”

“Not much. But I’ve got my sense of humor back.”

“Where’s Wal?”

“He’s gone to Russia—for good. You know I really admire him. He has the courage of what he believes, he’s going to become a Russian citizen if they let him. He wanted me to go with him—as his wife, but I just couldn’t. I’m weak—I couldn’t live in a little cubicle and learn a new language and wear rough clothes—I’d die of misery, even if I really loved him—which I’m beginning to doubt, now that he’s gone. I saw him off at Tilbury and felt awful, and then I went in a little pub near the docks and a fellow was standing in the doorway, playing a mandolin and singing with his mouth all crooked,—you know the way they do,—and inside the bar there was a workman sitting over a glass of beer and looking up at the other man with a funny sort of adoring expression, same as you see people looking up at the Madonna in Catholic pictures, and presently he said to me, quite casual, as if he’d known me for years—‘Gawd, I wish I could do that’ … and I wanted to laugh and cry together. I know I’ll never leave England as long as I live, so here I am—and Wal’s in Moscow.”

Nineteen twenty-six went by, the year of the General Strike, and Germany’s admission to the League of Nations; of an Imperial Conference and trouble in Shanghai; of large socialist gains in municipal polls throughout England, and of Hitler’s climb towards power in Germany. Trade remained good; the stock market pushed up Rainier’s to twenty-five shillings in anticipation of a dividend which Charles again declined to pay. Nineteen twenty-seven brought riots in Vienna and executions in Russia; while for once Englishmen found themselves suddenly and astonishingly against something—they were against the Revised Prayer Book, proposed by the Church Assembly and sent to the House of Commons to be voted on, according to the curious English custom by which a political majority decides the dogmatic beliefs of a religious minority. And during the next year, 1928, the House of Commons again turned down the Revised Prayer Book, as if it tremendously mattered. But this flurry of against-ness was soon exhausted, and Englishmen, including Members of Parliament, resumed their benevolence towards most things that continued to happen throughout the world.

And in that same year 1928 Bridget had another baby, her fourth, and Kitty got herself engaged again, to a young man named Roland Turner, who had advanced ideas about the “cinema,” and was understood to be working on a scenario or something or other that he hoped to sell for a fabulous price to somebody or other, but was otherwise romantically out of a job—romantically, because he wasn’t eligible for the dole yet managed to run a car.

“And I suppose if he did draw the dole and couldn’t run a car, that would be prosaic?” Charles queried, when she told him.

“You still think I’m a snob, don’t you? But I’m not—it isn’t that at all—I’m just lost in amazement, because he always dresses well and goes to the best restaurants, and has a sweet little studio off Ebury Street—I don’t know where he gets the money from, but I do wish you could find him something to do.”

“But I don’t want any scenarios today, thank you.”

“Not that, of course, but he can do all kinds of other things—write and paint, for instance—he does marvelous frescoes, at least they say the one he did was marvelous, but most of it came off during the damp weather. … He can paint machinery, too.”

“Unfortunately we don’t paint our machinery.”

“Pictures of machinery, I mean—he did one for an exhibition, symbolizing something—but I’m sure he could do a serious one, if you wanted it. Don’t you ever have illustrated catalogues?”

Charles smiled. “Suppose you bring him to lunch?”

They met at the Savoy Grill; Roland Turner proved to be rather tall and thin (“lissom” was almost the word); his clothes were impeccable, with just a faintly artistic note in his silk bow tie; his manners were perfect and his choices of food delicate; even his talk was sufficiently intelligent and modulated to what Charles felt to be an exactly determined mean between independence and obsequiousness in the presence of Big Business. Immediately after coffee the youth mentioned an afternoon appointment and decorously bowed himself out, leaving Kitty and Charles together.

Laughing, she said: “He’s got no appointment, he’s just being tactful—giving me a chance to do the Don’t-you-think-he’s-wonderful stuff.” She paused for a few seconds, then added: “Well, don’t you?”

“He’s a very personable young man, and if you like him, that’s the main thing.”

“Personable? What exactly do you mean by that?”

“Attractive.”

“Are you sure it’s not something nice to say about someone you don’t care for?”

“Not at all. I like him all right, and if there’s anything he could do that I wanted done, I’d be glad to give him the job.”

“He was wondering about Stourton—do you think I could take him down there to see Uncle Chet?”

“With what in mind?”

“You’re so suspicious, aren’t you? Well, he has ideas about landscape gardening. … Of course he knows Chet and you aren’t my real uncles.”

“I don’t see how he knows that, unless you told him, and I don’t see that it matters, anyway.”

“I had to tell him—indirectly. You see, Mother discovered him first of all—in Mentone. He was staying with somebody there and they danced a lot—Mother and him, I mean. I think she rather fell for him, because when he came on to London she had him to stay at the house, with me as a sort of chaperon. We weren’t attracted at all in the beginning, but I began to be awfully sorry for him when I saw how bored he was with Mother. He has nice feelings, you know—I don’t think he’d have found it easy to switch over if she’d really been my mother.”

“I’m afraid the point is too subtle for me to grasp.”

“Well—like the Vortex, you know. … Of course Mother was furious.”

“The whole situation must have amused you a good deal.”

“Well, it had its funny side. … Of course his friends don’t like me—they never thought he’d pick up a girl.”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Yes, I think I am. … By the way, he’s having an exhibition of paintings at the Coventry Galleries—you will come, won’t you, and buy something?”

He promised he would, and went to the private view the following week. He didn’t think much of the pictures, but his private view of Roland Turner was worth the journey—that suave young man, again impeccably dressed, saying the impeccably correct things about his own paintings to patrons who greeted him as they walked around, striking another exactly determined mean, Charles felt—this time between modesty and self-esteem. To please Kitty he bought a picture for five guineas—a view of an English country house as Botticelli might have painted it if he had painted English country houses rather badly.

“It’s really very odd, Mr. Rainier,” said the young man, as Kitty proudly stuck the red star on the corner of the canvas, “but you’ve chosen the best thing I’ve ever done!”

“Very odd indeed,” Charles answered, “because I know almost nothing about painting.”

Afterwards he took them both to dinner at Kettner’s, encouraging them in a rather vulgar way to choose all the expensive items—caviare and quail and plenty of champagne. Of course the young man was a poseur, but halfway through the meal he became aware that he himself was posing just as artificially as the Philistine industrialist and champagne uncle. When Turner talked about Stourton (Kitty had evidently taken him there) and how wonderful it was to own such a place, Charles answered: “Oh, it’s an awfully white elephant, really. The house is uneconomical and the farms don’t pay. If it were nearer London my brother could carve it up into building plots, but as it’s only England’s green and pleasant land nobody wants it and nobody can afford it and nobody will pay a decent price for anything that grows on it.”

“But it’s a privilege, all the same, to keep up these old family possessions.”

“It isn’t an old family possession—at least not of our family. My father bought it cheap because the other family couldn’t afford it.”

“Well, he must have admired the place or he wouldn’t have wanted to buy it at any price.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He liked buying things cheap. He once bought a shipload of diseased sharkskins because they were cheap and he thought he could make a profit.”

“And did he?”

“You bet he did.”

“A businessman, then?”

“Yes—like myself. But rather more successful because he had a better eye for a bargain and also because he lived most of his life during a rising market.”

Turner gave a somewhat puzzled sigh. “Well, well, I suppose that’s the system.”

“Except in Russia,” Kitty interposed. Then brightly: “Roland’s been to Russia too.” She must have been remembering Wal.

With a slight awakening of interest as he also remembered Wal, Charles said: “Oh indeed? And what made you go there, Mr. Turner?”

“I wanted to see what it was like.”

“And what was it like?”

The young man smiled defensively. “I don’t think I could answer that in a single sentence.”

“Many people do. They say it’s all marvelous or else it’s all horrible.”

“I didn’t see all of it, Mr. Rainier, and I didn’t think what I did see was either.”

“So you don’t believe in the coming Revolution?”

“I daresay it’s coming, but I don’t particularly believe in it.” And he added, with a gulp of champagne: “Just as you, Mr. Rainier, don’t particularly believe in capitalism, though you go on trying to make it work.”

“I wonder if that’s true.”

“The fact is, Mr. Rainier—perhaps we can both admit it after a few drinks—we neither of us believe in a damn thing.”

Afterwards Charles regretted the conversation and his own pose throughout it, but he remained vaguely troubled whenever he thought of Roland Turner and Kitty; he slightly disapproved of that young man, and felt avuncular in so doing. He did not see them again that year, for they were abroad most of the time, and he himself had many other things to worry about. By April of 1929 he was so exhausted from overwork that, after settling an especially troublesome labor dispute at the Cowderton works, he went to Switzerland for a holiday, despite the fact that it was not a good time of the year—past the snow season, and before the end of the thaw. He stayed at Interlaken, in an almost empty hotel, and while he was there a letter came from Kitty, forwarded from an address in Provence through London. He wondered what she was doing in Provence until he read that she was with Roland Turner, who was engaged in painting a portrait of an Indian rajah. “He’s a very fat rajah,” she reported, “and he’s given Roland five hundred pounds to go on with, which I expect will be all he’ll get out of it, because the picture gets less and less like the rajah every sitting.” Charles replied from Interlaken, expressing pleasure that her fiancé had found such profitable employment—to which he could not help adding that the fee was much higher than the Rainier firm could ever have paid for catalogue illustrations. Two days later came a wire from Avignon: COMING TO INTERLAKEN DON’T GO AWAY EXPECT ME TEN TOMORROW MORNING.

During the intervening day he wondered at the possible cause of her visit, though capricious changes of plan were really nothing to wonder at where Kitty was concerned; the theory he considered likeliest was that the portrait commission had fallen through, and that she and Roland had decided to touch him, as it were, for a Swiss holiday. (He had already discovered, from other sources, that Turner’s never-failing affluence was bound up with his never-failing debts and geared by his skill and charm in cadging.) He did not mind, particularly; after all, he could always go back to London if the situation became tiresome.

It was a cold bright day when he waited on the Interlaken platform. There was still a fitter of shoveled snow in the gutters and against the railings, and the train came in white-roofed from fresh falls in the Simplon-Lötschberg. She was dressed in a long mackintosh with a little fur hat, like a fez, and as she jumped from the train before it quite stopped, it was as if something in his heart jumped also before it quite stopped.

“Oh, Uncle Charles, I’m so happy—I was afraid you’d take fright and leave before I got here! It seems ages since I saw you. How are you?”

“I’m fine.” (Breaking Miss Ponsonby’s old rule.) “And it is ages since you saw me—nearly a year. Where’s Roland?”

“Not with me. I’ve left him. Take me somewhere for a drink—there was no diner on the train.”

In a deserted restaurant-café opposite the station she told him more about it. “I found myself getting silly—saying silly things to all his silly crowd—there’s a regular colony of them wherever he goes. But more than that—after all, I don’t mind so much saying silly things myself, but it got to the point where I didn’t notice when things they said were silly. Softening of the brain—” she tapped her head. “I simply had to take it in time. And I felt sorry for the poor old rajah. He was pretty awful to look at, but at least he knew what’s what with women—which is more than most of Roland’s friends do.”

“So I rather imagined.”

“Of course you really fixed it—that night at Kettner’s.”

“I fixed it?”

“I could see you didn’t like him.”

“On the contrary, I think I began to like him then—just slightly—and for the first time. He has his wits about him.”

“He’d better have—they’re what he lives by. But it’s no good denying it—you don’t like him. I could feel that.”

“Well, I’m not as keen on him as you are.”

“Were.”

“Oh, is it were? Well, in that case there couldn’t be a better reason for breaking off the engagement.”

“But it never pleased you to think of me marrying him. Did it now?”

“Why should that matter to you?”

“Because it does matter! I can’t bear to do things you don’t want, except when you don’t want them to my face—like forcing myself on you here, I don’t mind that—” She suddenly lowered her head into her hands and looked up a few seconds later with eyes streaming. “Can’t you see you’ve spoilt me for other men?”

“But, my dear—that’s ridiculous!”

She went on: “I’m not asking for anything. I can go back by the next train if you’d prefer it. I’ll probably marry someone eventually and be quite happy, but it’ll have to be a man whom you like fairly well and who doesn’t sneer because you do an honest job of work instead of battening on rich people.”

“Battening on poor people is more in my line—according to your former fiancé.”

“Poor Wal—I often wonder what’s happened to him—I really liked him more than Roland. … By the way, I saw the papers—you’ve been having strikes at Cowderton, haven’t you? Was it very serious?”

“While it lasted. That’s really why I came out here—for a rest.”

“Oh God, why don’t you give the whole thing up? You’ve got enough money, haven’t you?”

“For what?”

“To live on, for the rest of your life, at about a thousand a year.”

“Depends on several things—how long I live, how much a thousand a year will continue to be worth, and how long people will pay me anything at all for not working. … But that’s not the whole point, in any case.”

“You mean you want to stay with the firm? It’s still a game, as you said in one of those letters—a game you want to win even if it isn’t worth playing? Haven’t you won enough? … Or maybe it’s more than a game now—it’s become the life-work?”

He smiled. “Perhaps it’s somewhere between the two—more than a game, but not quite a lifework yet. You know, when I first took over the job it was with all kinds of reluctance—because I’d been more or less jockeyed into it by the family crying out to be saved. Well, that was the idea, originally—to save ’em and then be off quick, before they needed more saving. Rainier’s was just something that kept the family going, and I didn’t respect it enormously for that. But then, when I began to look into things personally, I found it kept a good many other families going. Over three thousand, to be precise.”

“I see. Responsibility. Uncle Atlas.”

“You can laugh at me if you like, provided you believe me sincere. I’m not a sentimentalist. I don’t call the firm the House of Rainier, or myself a Captain of Industry, or any of that nonsense. But there is a responsibility, no use denying it, in owning a three-thousand-family business. If I can contrive a little security for those people—”

“But there isn’t any security—as you said yourself when I asked you about your thousand a year. It’s an illusion put up by banks and insurance companies and lawyers and building societies and everybody who goes without what he wants today because he thinks he’ll enjoy it more later on. Supposing some day we all find out there isn’t any ‘later on’?”

“Then, my dear, will come Wal’s revolution.”

“And we shall all make a grab for what we can get?”

“Provided there is anything to get by then. If the whole thing’s an illusion, then the rewards may fade equally.”

“Then you try to comfort those three thousand families by encouraging them to believe in a future that doesn’t exist?”

“They don’t believe in it. Every street-corner speaker warns them not to at the top of his voice. What I do comfort them with, since you put it that way, is enough of a regular wage to buy food and pay their rent and smoke cigarettes and go to the local cinema. That keeps them satisfied to go on waiting.”

“For the big grab?”

“Or for the discovery that there isn’t anything left to grab.”

“Which makes you one degree more cynical than they are. They don’t believe in the security they accept because they’re looking to the revolution, but you don’t believe in either the security of the present or the revolution of the future!”

“Your other ex-fiancé put it even more simply, my dear, when he said I didn’t believe in a damn thing.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself very carefully and for a long time, and I still can’t find an answer.”

“Probably because you’ve been asking it too long and too carefully. The answer to that sort of question ought to fly out—like a child when he’s asked what he wants for his birthday—he always knows instantly without having to think—either a bicycle or a toy train or something. … Oh, I’m quite happy again now. I don’t miss Roland a bit. Just talking to you freely like this makes the difference, though you don’t talk to me freely—there always seems a brake on—I can hardly believe you once sent me those letters.”

“Curious—I don’t remember much about them. If you kept any, I’d like to—”

“Oh, no, never! That would be a really awful thing to do! And of course I know why you were so free in them—because you thought I was too young to understand. I was only the vehicle—the letter box, so to speak—where you posted them to another address.”

A gleam came into his eyes. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Well, what more could I have been in those days? Letters to a schoolgirl. … Of course I was crazy about you—always have been ever since that time at Stourton when I came up to your room and smoked a cigarette. Remember? … It might be fun if you loved me now—we’d have a good deal in common. I sometimes wonder why you don’t.”

“In my slow and careful way I’ve been wondering that too—ever since you stepped off the train.”

“Well, why don’t you—just to be curious?”

“I haven’t said I don’t.”

“Oh no!”

“Would it be so very incredible?”

“It would be fantastic!”

“Then it is fantastic.”

“Darling, you don’t mean—” She seized his hand across the table. “You’re not saying it just to be kind?”

“I don’t feel a bit kind. I feel—well, let’s stick to fantastic.”

“But I—I—I don’t know what else to say for the moment.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

They sat in silence, his hand changing places over hers. A train entered the station opposite; the tick of its electric engine was like a clock measuring the seconds. Presently she said: “There’s the oddest thing in my mind for us to do—if it’s all real and not a dream. Let’s go down the Danube in a canoe, as you always wanted.”

“Yes, we’ll do that. And up the Amazon too, if you like.” His face was very pale. “I’ll take a year off—from the firm and the City and the three thousand families and everything else. Let someone else have his turn. …”

Back at his hotel that night he could hardly believe in the changed future; it was almost as if he had been another person during the day and was now perusing with amazement a report of what had happened to someone else. He was not regretful—far from it—but a little bemused at so many decisions made all at once, somewhat startled that they must all have been his own, yet ready to accept them with a loyalty that might well become more enthusiastic when he had had a chance to think them over.

At breakfast he compared notes and found that her emotions had been similar only as far as a doubt as to whether he could really have meant what he said enough to go on meaning it; he assured her laughingly that he had and did, and immediately happiness blazed across the rolls and honey between them as they planned the trivial details of the day. The future was still fantastic to talk about, even to think about, and they agreed for the time being not to give themselves the even heavier task of explaining it to others. No one expected him in London before the end of the month (the Rainier board meeting was on the thirtieth), and no one knew she was not still in Provence, except Roland and his crowd, who did not count. Jill was in the Aegean, cruising among the antiquities but taking (one suspected) very little notice of them. He and Kitty could have at least two weeks in Switzerland before returning to announce the astonishing news to the family and to the world. Of course they could send the news by letter, but somehow to pull the lever that would release all the commotion even at a distance required a certain fortitude; they decided to enjoy those two weeks first of all.

And so began an interlude that might have been in another world, and almost was. They stayed for the first week in Interlaken, making it a center for mountain trips into the high Oberland. The weather improved after the last big snowfall of the year; the sun dried the drenched meadows, so that they were able to walk by the lakeside to Giessbach, and up the Lauterbrunnen Valley as far as the lower slopes of the Roththal. It was pleasant to see the industrious Swiss polishing up their ballrooms and cocktail bars and funicular railways in readiness for what was to come; but pleasanter still to tramp along the cleared roadways in face of the sun and snow. During the second week they discovered the hotel on the two-mile-high Jungfraujoch, where there was nothing to do but talk and absorb the physical atmosphere of being above and beyond the earth. They liked it enough to stay there till the last day before the necessary return to England.

That last day came, and with it the descent to natural levels—a curious deflation of mood that was easy to interpret as sadness at leaving a place where they had been so happy. Throughout the long rail journey through Berne and Basle to Boulogne the mood persisted—seemed impossible to shake off, being perhaps a physical effect of the changed altitude, they both agreed. They reached London amidst driving rain and had dinner in a restaurant near Victoria Station, saying all the time and over and over again how wonderful it had been in Switzerland and how sorry they were to have returned. The Rainier board meeting was four days away, and it was understood that no announcement of future plans should be hinted at to anyone until then.

The board meeting came, and with it all the commotion. He had not guessed how considerable it would be. He had suspected that the family would not be altogether pleased, but he hadn’t realized they would have so many reasons for being displeased. He soon found that they regarded his year’s absence from Rainier’s as a form of abdication amounting almost to desertion—in spite of the fact that they had long been jealous of what they called his “domineering” over the firm’s affairs. Then also, those who had hoped their children would inherit his personal fortune strongly resented his marriage to anybody at all; he hadn’t anticipated that, even remotely. And finally, all except Jill (and in one sense even including Jill) were manifestly and desperately jealous of his choice. Only Chet seemed to have any genuine tolerance of the idea—a tolerance not quite reaching the point of enthusiasm. He had so long joked about the need for Charles to “hurry up” that now Charles was hurrying up he could not withhold somewhat rueful good wishes.

The party at Stourton to celebrate the engagement was not a successful affair.

Then, in June, quite suddenly, Chet died after a heart attack, and plans for the marriage in July were postponed till autumn; it would have been impossible, in any event, to leave England during all the legal complications that ensued.

The marriage was finally fixed for October. Charles took Kitty to dine at Kettner’s again one night in late September, and for some reason the same mood came upon them as during the journey back from Switzerland five months before. She suggested that on his side, it was due to news in the evening paper—a big stock-market crash in New York, with inevitable repercussions in London.

He was too honest with her to accept that as a reason. “I’m not a speculator. Rainier’s dropped five shillings today, I notice, but it doesn’t affect me or the firm—they can go down ten times as much before it’ll begin to worry me. Matter of fact, everything’s been pushed too high lately, especially in America. I could make a lot of money now if I backed my opinion.”

“What opinion?”

“That the fall will go much further.”

“How would you make money by backing your opinion?”

“Selling short, as they call it. That means—”

“I know—I learnt all about it at Kirby when we used to gamble in Rainier shares. Remember?”

“You must have lost everything.”

“Nearly everything. About thirty-two pounds all together.” She laughed. “Well why don’t you sell short?”

“I will, if it amuses you. But I’d have no other reason.”

“Yes do it—to amuse me. Please, Charles.”

“Then there’s two things I have to do at the office tomorrow morning.” He took out his notebook and made a pretense of writing something down. “Sell short to amuse Kitty. Also get Miss Hanslett to send out the wedding invitations.”

“Who’s Miss Hanslett?”

“My new secretary. You saw her last time you called.”

“Oh, that quiet girl?”

“I suppose she’s quiet. I certainly wouldn’t want her to be noisy.”

“Darling, how soon can we leave—afterwards?”

“You mean for our world tour? Maybe next month. It’ll be too late for the Danube, though, this year. We’d better do the Amazon first. Or the Nile.”

“No, not the Nile—Jill’s there.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Looking at the tombs, I suppose, and having a good time.”

But the laugh they rallied themselves into failed to shift the mood that made him, as soon as dinner was over, confess that he felt tired and would prefer an early night in bed. He dropped her at Jill’s new house in St. John’s Wood, where she was living with a cook-housekeeper, and kept the taxi for his own journey to Smith Square. But his apartment seemed so inexplicably cheerless that after a drink and an attempt to feel sleepy, he called another cab and drove round the West End till he found a film that looked tolerable enough for whiling away the rest of the evening. He stayed in the cinema less than an hour, his restlessness increasing all the time, so that at last he walked out and paced up and down the thronged pavements till past midnight, longing suddenly for the sun and snow of the Jungfraujoch, yet knowing that it was only a mirage of what he would still long for if by some miracle he were to be transplanted there.

Usually when he could not sleep he was quite satisfied to stay up reading, often until dawn; but that night he felt he would be far too restless to concentrate on any book, so he bought tablets and took several on his return to Smith Square. They gave him a heavy unrefreshing sleep, from which he woke about noon to find a penciled letter from Kitty at his bedside. It had been delivered by hand early that morning, and contained, in effect, the breaking of their engagement and an announcement that she was leaving immediately to join her stepmother in Luxor.

PART THREE

THE FIRST GRAY SMUDGE was peering over the hills and it seemed that we both saw it together. “Well, we’ve talked all night—and for the second time. Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

“No. … You were telling me about that letter, the one Kitty left for you. Didn’t it give any reasons?”

“Plenty. But I really think we’d better go to bed if we’re to be in any decent condition tomorrow. The crowd will soon be on us, worse luck.”

“Then why do you have them here?”

“That’s part of another story. Well, I must have a nightcap, even if it is morning. Have one with me?”

We went down to the library, feeling our way in the dim dawn shadows without switching on any of the house lights. Meanwhile he continued: “I’d show you that letter if I had it here, but it’s locked up in my safe in the City. I admit I’m sentimental about it—a little puzzled also. It’s the last word I ever had from her, except picture postcards from all kinds of places. What happened to her afterwards is what she said would happen—except that it didn’t last for long. She married a man she met in Egypt—she was quite happy—and he was a man I liked when I met him, but I didn’t meet him till after she was dead. He had plantations in the F.M.S. and she went out with him there and died of malaria within six months.”

He bent over the decanter, his shape and movements ghostly against the gray pallor from the windows. The moon had gone down, and it was darker than at midnight.

“And then?” I said.

He handed me a drink and raised his own.

“The rest,” he declaimed half-mockingly, “is a simple saga of success. I flung myself into business with renewed but disciplined abandon: I sold short and made more money out of the slump than I’d ever done out of ordinary trading; I accepted directorships in other companies and became what they call ‘a figure in the City’—I even assumed the burden of two other family heritages, by taking over Stourton and by allowing myself to stand for my father’s old Parliamentary seat of West Lythamshire. And a few years later, my affairs having more than survived the storms of 1931 and the doldrums of 1932, I married a lady who had become quite indispensable to me in this struggle for fresh fame and fortune—Miss Hanslett, the quiet girl. That again turned out to be an astonishing success. You never know what these quiet girls can do. From being quiet, she became one of the busiest and cleverest of London’s hostesses—and the miracle is, she’s still quiet—you’d hardly know the machine’s running at all.”

“So different from Miss Hobbs—but that, I suppose, is because you chose her yourself.”

“Or else she chose herself. She was just a girl in the general office first of all, until one evening I was working late and she invaded my private office to ask outright if she could work for me personally. Said she knew the other girl was leaving and she was certain she’d be better than anyone else. After that I simply had to give her either the sack or the job.”

“Anyhow, you made the right choice there.”

He laughed. “Oh yes, and I soon knew it. She was everything she promised. I’ve nothing but praise for her. I’d never have made so much money or acquired such style in after-dinner oratory but for her. She’s intensely loyal, tremendously ambitious for me, and personally charming. I love her more than most men love their wives. She’s guided my career—in fact she’s almost made a personally conducted tour of it. I never do anything, in politics or business, without seeking her advice. She runs Stourton and Kenmore like a pair of clocks—she doesn’t care if I’m in or out to lunch or dinner, or if I go to India or South America for six months or merely to Brighton for a week end. She’s everything a man like me could wish for in a wife—always provided—” He paused and took a drink, then added: “Always provided he’s completely satisfied to be a man like me.”

“And aren’t you?”

He took my arm. “Let’s save up something for another night. I’m going to bed, and after all this, I really think I shall sleep. Tell Sheldon not to wake me till the guests begin to arrive.”

The guests began to arrive in groups during the following afternoon, but I did not see Rainier till tea time, when he appeared on the terrace to greet the assembly; and from then throughout the week end I had no chance to talk with him alone. Nor with Woburn either, for that young man, after initial shyness, turned into a considerable social success. Observing him from time to time I felt there was a certain scientific detachment in his obvious effort to make good at his first fashionable houseparty (he had told me it was his first, and that he had never mixed in that class of society before); it was as if he were exploring himself, discovering his own powers; experimenting with the careless flatteries, the insincere attentions that make up the small change of such occasions; finding that he could do it just as well as people born to it, perhaps even a little better after practice. He was clearly a very adaptable and cool-headed young man, and the whole party was a good deal pleasanter for his being always at hand to pass interesting conversational cues, to make up a bridge four, to play a not offensively good game of tennis, and to dance with otherwise unpartnered matrons. One could almost read in his face the question, too wondering to be smug: Is this all there is to it?

Mrs. Rainier was the perfect hostess as usual, and I should have been lost in admiration at everything she did had it not been a repetition on a larger scale of what she habitually did at Kenmore. All, in fact, was as gay and brilliant and smooth-running as usual, but something else was not quite as usual—and I don’t know how to describe it except as a faint suspicion that the world was already swollen with destiny and that Stourton was no longer the world—a whiff of misgiving too delicate to analyze, as when, in the ballroom of an ocean liner, some change of tempo in the engines far below communicates itself to the revelers for a phantom second and then is lost behind the rhythms of the orchestra.

The simile was Rainier’s as we drove back to London on Monday evening, leaving Woburn and Mrs. Rainier at Stourton. Within a few weeks the same misgiving, many times magnified, had become a headline commonplace; trenches were being dug in the London parks; the curve of the September crisis rose to its monstrous peak. Rainier lived at his Club during those fateful days and we were both kept busy at all hours transcribing reports, telephoning officials, and listening to the latest radio bulletins. Diplomatic machinery had swung into the feverish gear of guesswork and divination: Was Hitler bluffing? What sort of country was this new Germany? Would Russia support the Czechs? When would the bombers come over? Every chatterer could claim an audience; journalists back from Europe were heard more eagerly than ambassadors; the fact that all seemed to depend on the workings of one abnormal human mind gave every amateur psychologist an equal chance with politicians and crystal gazers. And behind this mystery came fear, fear of a kind that had brought earlier peoples to their knees before eclipses and comets—fear of the unknown, based on an awareness that the known was no longer impregnable. The utter destruction of civilization, which had teemed a fantastic thing to on grandfathers had become a commonplace of schoolboys’ essays, village debating societies, and after-dinner small talk; for the first time in human history a sophisticated society faced its own extinction not theoretically in the future, but by physical death perhaps tomorrow. There was a dreadful acceptance of doom in all our eyes as we sat around, in restaurants and at conference tables and beside innumerable radios, listening and talking and drinking, the only three things to do that one could go on doing—paralyzed as we were into a belief that it was too late to act, and clinging to a last desperate hope that somehow the negation of an act might serve as well.

That negation was performed, if performed is the word; talking, listening, and drinking then merged into a sigh of exhausted relief, and only a few Cassandra voices, among whom was Rainier’s, murmured that no miracle had really happened at all. But national hysteria urged that it had, and that one must not say otherwise, even if it hadn’t. Anyhow, the crisis passed, the rains of autumn soaked into half-dug trenches, and as the days shortened and darkened the Kenmore lamplight glowed again in the faces of diseuses and diplomats—Sir Somebody This and the Maharanee of That, the successful novelist and the Wimbledon winner, delegates from somewhere-or-other to the something-or-other conference, as well as visiting Americans who thought they were experiencing a real pea-souper fog because the sun of a November midday had turned red over the roofs.

I went to a good many of those lunches, and somehow, I don’t remember exactly when, it became a recognized thing that I should have a place at all of them unless my duties with Rainier called me elsewhere.

Often they did. Many days during that strange, almost somnambulist winter of 1938-1939 I sat in the Gallery of the House of Commons, listening to dull debates and hearing Big Ben chime the quarters till I saw Rainier get up and push his way through the swing doors with that casualness which is among the specialties of House procedure—a form of self-removal that implies neither rudeness nor even indifference to the speech in progress. Then he would dictate letters in a Committee Room, or order tea, or we might stroll along the usually empty Terrace, watching the last spears of sunset fade from the windows of St. Thomas’s Hospital, or staring over the parapet at a train of coal barges on their way upstream. It was at such moments that I came to know him most intimately, and to feel, more from his presence than from words, that the years he no longer talked about were still haunting; that he was still, as two women had said, vainly searching for something and never at rest. Yet outwardly, and to others, there were few signs of it. Indeed, the disfavor into which he fell as a result of his attitude towards official policy seemed to come rather as a release than as a suppression. It was not that he blamed the government for what had happened at Munich; such blame, he said, when history assessed it, would doubtless be spread over many years and many personages, of which the men of 1938 were but last in a tragic line. He did, however, blame those who had stepped out of panic only to sink back into hypnosis. “These are the last days,” he said to me once. “We are like people in a trance—even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it—like the dream in which you drive a car towards a precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no physical power to press down. We should be arming now, if we had sense,—arming day and night and seven days of the week,—for if the Munich pact had any value at all it was not as a promise of peace to come, but as a last-minute chance to prepare for the final struggle. And we are doing nothing—caught in the net of self-delusion and self-congratulation. We don’t realize the skill and magnitude of the conspiracy—the attempt to reverse, by lightning strokes, the whole civilized verdict of two thousand years.”

Such talk, during the winter of 1938-1939, was heresy in a country that permitted heresy, but could not regard it as in good taste. People began to remark, in advance of any argument about him, that they liked Rainier—this also was a bad sign in a society where likings are rarely expressed except by way of fair-minded prelude to disparagement. And one reflected that there had always been something against his chances of attaining high office—something expressed by his political enemies when they praised him as “brilliant,” and by his political friends when they doubted if he were altogether “safe.” Such doubts were now running high.

In the City, however, safety and brilliance were not held as incompatibles by gatherings of grateful shareholders at annual meetings in the Rainier Building. Here also it was my duty to accompany him, handing out appropriate documents and keeping his memory jogged against forgetfulness of such things as—“You will be glad to know that during the past year we have opened a new factory at West Bromwich where we are now manufacturing a model especially designed for the Colonies.” He made such announcements with a solemnity in which only I, perhaps, detected any ironic note; similarly there seemed to me a touch of disdain in his bent for handling complicated masses of figures, a touch that did not detract from the enormous confidence reposed in him by enriched but usually mystified investors. Nor was that confidence misplaced. Once I said to him: “Leaving sentiment out of it, you haven’t done so badly. You saved the family inheritance, you rescued the money of hundreds of outsiders, and you kept intact the jobs of a whole army of workpeople. You did, in fact, everything you set out to do.”

“There’s only one thing more important,” he answered, “and that is, after you’ve done what you set out to do, to feel that it’s been worth doing.”

That was the day when he took me down to the sub-basement of the Rainier Building to show me the result of certain constructional work that had been in progress there for several weeks. “I’ve allowed it to be supposed that these are new storage vaults,” he told me, as we entered the first of a series of empty catacombs, “but actually I had another thought in mind—and one that it would be too bad to thrust on a group of happy dividend collectors. But the fact is—and entirely at my own personal expense—I’ve made this place bombproof. So you see, something’s been worth doing.” He walked me round like an estate agent. “Comfort, as well as safety,—there’s an independent heating plant,—because it’s no good saving people from high explosive just to have them the of influenza. And another reason—the greatest man of the twentieth century may have to be born in a place like this, so let’s make it as decent as we can for him. A steel and concrete Manger—sixty feet below ground … that’s why I’ve had to keep it a big secret, because you couldn’t expect the investing public to swallow that.”

But we liked the City—“the City of Meticulous Nonsense,” he called it once, after an annual meeting at which somebody had used the adjective in praise of his own attention to the firm’s affairs. “Meticulous,” he echoed, afterwards, “really meaning timid—and how right that it should nowadays be used as a compliment, since so many of the most complimented people nowadays deserve it! Meticulous little people attending meticulous meetings, passing meticulous votes of thanks for meticulous behavior!”

One rainy Saturday we waited several minutes while the homeward rush-hour crowd swarmed in front of the car, taking no notice of the horn until a man, just an ordinary mackintoshed fellow with (I remember) a piece of garden trellis under his arm, called out: “ ’Ere, give the bloke a chawnce!”—whereat the crowd, heeding just as casually as they had been heedless before, made way for us to pass There was no resentment in their faces because we had an expensive car or because we kept them waking a few seconds longer in the rain, no social significance in the appeal to give the bloke a chance, no indication of who the bloke was—I or Rainier or the chauffeur. The very absence of all these things was English, Rainier said—something offhand but good-humored, free but obedient, careless but never heartless.

“But tell that,” he added, “to the Indians in Amritsar, to the Chinese who read the notice in a Shanghai park; ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed,’ to the tribesmen in Irak, to the peasant in County Cork, to the …” But then he laughed. “God, how we’re hated! It isn’t so much because we really deserve it. Even at the bottom of the charge sheet I could quote Santayana’s remark that the world never had sweeter masters. Sweet—a curious adjective—and yet there is a sweetness in the English character, something that’s almost perfect when it’s just ripe—like an apple out of an English orchard. No, we’re not hated altogether by logic. It’s more because the world is tired of us—bored with us—sickened by a taste that to some already seems oversweet and hypocritical, to others sour and stale. I suppose the world grew tired of the Romans like that, till at last the barbarians were excused for barbarism more readily than the Caesars were forgiven for being tough. There come such moments in the lives of nations, as of persons, when they just can’t do anything right, and the world turns on them with the awful ferocity of a first-night audience rejecting, not so much a play it doesn’t want, as a playwright it doesn’t want any more. … But wait till they’ve experienced the supplanters—if we are supplanted. A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history. …”

I remember that afternoon particularly because as we were waiting for the traffic lights in Whitehall we saw Nixon at the curbside vainly signaling a taxi and Rainier had the car stopped to offer him a lift. Bound for Victoria to catch a train, he chattered all the time during the short drive, finally and quite casually remarking; “Oh, you remember that fellow Ransome who took us to tea at his house in Browdley that day when his wife wasn’t there?”

Rainier looked up sharply.

“Rather sad business,” Nixon continued. “She’d gone out to buy a cake, as Ransome thought—must have been hurrying back, because she was carrying it as she ran into the bus … killed instantly … poor chap was in a terrible state, so I heard. Only been married about a year.”

We drove on in silence after dropping Nixon in the station yard; Rainier’s face was strained, tense, as if he had suffered a personal blow. Halfway to Kenmore he tapped on the window, and ordered the chauffeur to turn and drive back. “Let’s hear somebody play the piano,” he said. “That’s the best cure for the mood I’m in.”

We drove to the West End, while I searched the Telegraph for recital announcements. The only one I could find was of the first and only appearance in London of Casimir Navoida, who would give a mixed program of Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, and Ravel at the Selsdon Hall. I had never heard of Navoida, and the fact that Rainier hadn’t either lent no optimism to my expectations. We found a photograph on the rain-sodden posters outside the Hall—the conventionally somber, heavy-lidded profile brooding over the keys. That too was not encouraging, nor was the obviously “paper” audience of only a few score. Nor, for that matter, were the explanatory notes in the printed program—composed, Rainier grimly suggested, by some schoolgirl in a mood of bibulous Schwärmerei. With less distaste we read a paragraph about the performer, though even that was vague enough—merely mentioning a Continental reputation, tuition under Leschetizky (misspelt), a prix-de-somewhere, and an ancient press-agent anecdote beginning—“One morning, at the So-and-So Conservatoire …” Then the door at the rear of the platform opened and this fellow Navoida walked to the piano, gave a hinge-like bow to half-hearted applause, and began. He did not look much like his photograph, though a description could not have omitted the same points—the gloomy profile, wrinkled nape, and upflung hair. We listened with tolerance, soon aware that his playing was not exactly bad. When the interval came I noticed a woman in the seat beyond Rainier’s fumbling for a dropped program; presently he stooped and retrieved it for her. She thanked him with a foreign accent and added: “You think he plays well?”

Rainier answered: “He might be good if he weren’t out of practice.”

“You are a critic?”

“Only to myself.”

“You are not on one of the newspapers?”

“Oh dear, no.”

She seemed both relieved and disappointed. “I thought you might be. I suppose they are here.”

Rainier looked round and included me in the conversation by saying: “Notice anybody? I don’t… I’m afraid Saturday afternoon’s a bad time in London.”

Then Navoida came on again and played the Chopin group. At the next interval she said: “You are quite right. He is out of practice. He played cards till four this morning.”

Rainier laughed. “Stupid of him, surely?”

“Oh, he doesn’t care. He lost much money, also. If only people would realize that he can play so much better than this—”

“Why should they? If he chooses to drink and gamble the night before a concert—”

“Oh no, not drink. He never drinks.”

“No?”

“But gambling is in his blood. It is in the blood of all the Navoidas. If he travels by autobus he will bet on how many people get in at each stop.”

Rainier looked slightly interested. “How do you know all this about him?”

She had just time to reply, as the piano began again: “I am his wife.”

I could judge that throughout the Brahms Sonata Rainier was feeling somewhat embarrassed at having discussed the pianist so frankly, but when the next interval came she gave him no time to apologize. “Oh, I could kill him for being so bad! The foolish boy. … Maybe it was a mistake to come to England at all.”

Rainier answered: “Oh, no need to feel that. But your husband’s concert agent ought to have chosen a better day for a first appearance. Londoners like to get away to the country at week ends.”

“Even when it rains?”

“My goodness, we never bother about rain.”

“Ach, yes, your London climate … when it is not rain, it is fog. … I understand.”

I winked at him, apropos of this foreign belief that English weather is the worst in the world; it is not, Rainier had once said, but the convention is useful in that it enables an English man to appear modest by conceding something that, whether true or false, is of little consequence. All the time that Madame Navoida was bemoaning London rain and fog I was glancing at her sideways and judging her to be forty-five or so—younger, at any rate in looks, than her husband. The light in the concert hall was not particularly kind, and her make-up had either been put on hurriedly or else had got blurred by raindrops; her eyes were brown and rather small, but her forehead had a generous width that somehow compensated; it was an interesting face.

During the Ravel I whispered this to Rainier and received his reply: “I don’t give a damn about her face. And I don’t give a damn about this Ravel either. I only know she amuses me and I’m more cheerful than I was an hour ago. …”

For the next few minutes I heard the two of them in whispered conversation; then he turned to me. “They’re Hungarians, but she lived for a long time in Singapore—hence the English. She also speaks French and German—besides, of course, Hungarian. Writes poetry in all four, so she’d have you believe. Also worships Romance with a capital R. Reads Dekobra and D’Annunzio, but prefers Dekobra—so do I, for that matter. … Altogether rather like a female spy in a magazine story—every minute I expect her to say ‘Hein’ and produce a bundle of stolen treaties out of her corsage. And she says such delicious things—like—‘Ach, your English climate—’ and that bit about gambling being in the blood of all the Navoidas. … I’m trying to think of something half as good as what she’ll say next—remember that game we used to play?”

That was one of the fooleries we would sometimes indulge in during our morning car journeys to the City. There was a certain newspaper shop at a street corner in Pimlico, and outside it, every Tuesday, appeared a picture poster advertising that week’s issue of a publication called Judy’s Paper; and this poster always showed an evening-clothed couple in some highly dramatic situation, captioned by such a sentence as “He refused her a ring” or “She lied to save him.” Most Tuesdays, before we reached the shop, Rainier and I would try to invent something even triter than what we should presently discover, but we never succeeded, so hard is it for the sophisticated mind to think in the natural idiom of the ingenuous. But it made an amusing diversion, for all that.

After further whispering he turned to me excitedly. “She’s said it! I knew she would! She’s just told me that we English are so cold!” At that moment Navoida finished the Ravel and Rainier was able to answer her amidst the applause. I heard him say: “Madame, we are not cold—it’s merely that we have to be warmed up, especially on wet Saturdays. So I beg you to make allowances for us during the rest of your stay here.”

“We are leaving tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Casimir has a concert in Ostend on Wednesday.”

“You’d better take care of him there. It’s a great place for gambling.”

“Oh, that will be all right. We shall go to the Casino and have champagne and Casimir will be lucky—he always is at roulette. It is cards he is no good at—especially poker.” (She pronounced it “pokker.”) “When I saw him playing poker with some Americans at the hotel last night, I knew he would be a bad boy today.”

“I thought you said he didn’t drink?”

“Only champagne. But of course it is so expensive in England. When we were in Singapore we drank nothing but Heidsieck all the time. A bottle every meal. It prevented him from being dysenteric.”

“Probably it also prevented him from being Paderewski.”

“You mean it is not good for him? But consider—if it pleases him, is he not entitled to it? What is the life of a concert artist nowadays? Nobody cares—there is no musical life as it used to be—in Berlin, in Leipzig, in Wien. Only in America they pay an artist well, but I do not want him to go there again.”

“Why not?”

She whispered something in Rainier’s ear and then added: “Of course I forgave him afterwards. He was faithful according to his fashion.”

Rainier let out a shout of sheer glee. “What’s that? What?”

She repeated the sentence. “Do you not know the poem by one of your English poets, Ernest Dowson?” And she began to recite the whole thing from beginning to end, while Casimir, in whom I was beginning to feel a deeper interest after these varied revelations, appeared on the platform to play the Chopin “Black Key Study” as an encore, muffing the final octaves and finishing on a triumphantly wrong note in the bass. “Perhaps you would now like to meet him?” she concluded.

So we trooped round to the little room at the back of the platform where a few mournfully mackintoshed women were loitering while the pianist scrawled his signature across their programs in a mood of equal mournfulness. The entrance of Madame Navoida brought a touch of life to these proceedings, and I noticed then a certain vital quality that made her still an attractive woman, despite sagging lines and the bizarre make-up. As soon as the autograph seekers left she approached Casimir as one making a stage entrance, kissed him resoundingly on both cheeks, and cried: “Casimir, mon cher, tu étais magnifique!” Then, for a moment, she gabbled something incomprehensible and turned to Rainier. “He speaks Hungarian best. I have to tell him he is wonderful now, but soon I shall tell him he was awful—atrocious! Poor boy, he is always tired after a concert—please excuse him. He says he has a headache.”

Rainier answered: “That’s too bad! I was about to suggest that you both had dinner with us somewhere—that is, if you had nothing else to do.”

Her face lit up. “Oh, but we should be enchanted! It is so kind of you. I am sure his headache will get better. But there is one thing I must tell you beforehand—he will not dress. Not even a smoking. Only for the casinos where they will not admit him otherwise—and then he curses all the time. So if you do not mind—”

“Not at all. We probably wouldn’t dress ourselves, anyway.”

“Then he will be delighted.” She turned to her husband.

“Casimir, this is—” And of course another turn. “But I do not know your name?”

I had guessed it would come to that, and I remembered that moment on Armistice Day when all Rainier’s pleasure had disappeared at the enforced disclosure of his identity. I wondered if it would be different with foreigners to whom his name would almost certainly be unknown.

But he answered, with a sort of gleeful solemnity: “Lord Frederic Verisopht—and this—” with a bow to me—“is Sir Mulberry Hawk. …”

Having arranged to meet them at seven at Poldini’s we spent the interval at Rainier’s club, where his spirits soared fantastically. When I reminded him of an engagement to speak that evening at the Annual Dinner of the Gladstone Society he told me to wire them a cancellation on account of urgent political business. “That’s all very well,” I answered, “but then somebody will see us dining at Poldini’s with a couple who look like a rather seedy croupier and a soubrette out of a prewar musical comedy.”

He laughed. “Not if we do what nobody else does nowadays—engage a private room.”

“And what was the idea of introducing me as Sir Somebody or other?”

“To find out whether she reads Dickens. You evidently don’t. … Well, that was partly the reason. The other was to give her a thrill. I’m sure titles do. Poldini’s will too—it’s got that air of having seen better and more romantic days. I rarely go there, so the waiters don’t know me, and I’ve never been in one of their private rooms since my uncle took me when I was twelve years old. That’s a story in itself. I don’t think I ever told you about him—he was a charming and very shortsighted archdeacon, and the only one out of my large collection of uncles whom I really liked. He liked me too, I think—we often used to spend a day together. One evening during the Christmas holidays, we felt hungry after a matinée of Jack and the Beanstalk, so as we were walking to the nearest Underground station he said, ‘Let’s go in here for a snack—and it was Poldini’s. I think he mistook it for some sort of cheap but respectable teashop—anyhow, we walked in, all among the pretty ladies and the young men-about-town; we were the cynosure of every eye, as novelists in those days used to write—because it wasn’t at all the kind of place a Church of England dignitary would normally take his schoolboy nephew to, and my uncle, with his white hair and flashing eyes (the drops he had to put in them made them flash), must have looked rather like Hall Caine’s Christian about to create a disturbance. … Anyhow, old Poldini,—he’s dead now,—scenting something funny about us, pretended all his tables were booked and asked if we’d mind dining upstairs—so up we went, my uncle blinking his way aloft without a word of protest, and presently Poldini showed us into a cosy little room furnished in blue and gold, with a very thick carpet and a convenient chaise longue against the wall and gilt cupids swarming in a suggestive manner all over the ceiling—in fact, Poldini took charge of us completely, recommending à la carte dishes and serving them himself, and as the meal progressed my uncle grew more and more surprised and delighted—still under the impression it was an A.B.C. or some such place; and when the bill came I snatched it up and said I’d stand treat, and he said, ‘My boy, that’s very generous of you’—and by God, it was, for it took all the money he’d just given me as a Christmas present. But I never let him know, and to the end of his life he always used to tell people he’d never enjoyed a better meal than at that eating house off the Strand … eating house, mind you!” He took a long breath and added: “So that’s where we’ll dine tonight—among the ghosts of the past—a couple of milords entertaining the toast of the town—and rather battered toast, if you’ll pardon two bad puns at once.”

When I look back on that evening I remember chiefly, of course, the incident that crowned it; but I can see now that the entire masquerade was somehow Rainier’s last and rather preposterous effort to tease a way into self-knowledge, and that the climax, though completely accidental, was yet a fitting end to the attempt. I realized also, even if never before, how near he was to some catastrophic breakdown—partly from overwork, but chiefly from the fret of things that could not be forgotten because they had never been remembered. And all that day, ever since meeting Nixon, the fret had strengthened behind an increasing randomness of acts and words.

We drove to Poldini’s through the rain, and were glad to find the place reasonably unchanged—still with its private rooms upstairs, little used by a generation that no longer needs such an apparatus of seduction, and therefore slightly melancholy until gardenias and ice buckets revived a more festive spirit. Then, with some commotion, the Navoidas arrived, the pianist rather pale and glum in a long overcoat with an astrakhan collar, and Madame very florid and voluble with heavy gold bangles and ancient but good-quality furs, obviously bewitched (but by no means ill-at-ease) at the prospect of dining intimately with English nobility. We soon discovered that both of them were equally accomplished champagne bibbers, but whereas Madame grew livelier and gayer with every glass, her husband sank after the first half-dozen into a settled gloom from which he could only stir himself at intervals to murmur to the waiter a demand for “trouts”—for there had been some confusion over his order, due perhaps to the waiter’s reluctance to believe that anyone in 1939 would ask for truites bleues in addition to Beluga caviare, steak tartare, and English rosbif. But all that too, and to Rainier’s feverish delight, was in the halcyon tradition—the age of monstrous dinners and fashionable appendicitis, the one most often the result of the others.

Presently, after the popping of the fourth magnum, Madame grew sentimental and talked of her romantic adventures in all parts of the world—a recital garnished with copious quotations from the poets, of whom she knew so many in various languages that I began to think it really must be a passion with her quite as genuine as that for Heidsieck; she liked amorous poetry best, and there was something perhaps a little charming in the way she obviously did not know which was too hackneyed to quote, so that from a worn-out tag of Shakespeare she would swerve into a line from Emily Brontë or Beddoes. A few words she wrongly pronounced or did not understand; she would then ask us to correct her, quite simply and with an absence of self-consciousness that made almost piquant her theatrical gestures and overstudied rhythms. Suddenly I realized, in the mood of half-maudlin pity that comes after a few drinks yet is none the less percipient, that she was a sadly disappointed woman, getting little out of later life that she really craved for, without a home, a wanderer between hotels and casinos, listening to the same old Brahms and Beethoven in half-empty concert halls, tied for the rest of her days to a flabby maestro, yet alive in her illusion that the world was still gay and chivalrous as a novelette.

After Rainier had called for more cognac he asked if she had any ideas for spending the rest of the evening, because he’d be glad to go on to a show if she fancied any particular play. She answered, with enthusiasm: “Oh yes, it is so kind of you—there is one place I have always wanted to go because I have heard so much about it—your famous old English music hall!”

Rainier said how unfortunate that was, because the famous old English music hall no longer existed; there were only assortments of vaudeville turns and dance bands.

“Then perhaps we could go to see Berty Lowe.”

“Berty Lowe?”

“A man at the hotel told me this morning he was acting in London somewhere, and I should like to see him because I once knew an Englishman in Budapest who used to do imitations of him. He always said Berty Lowe was the greatest comedian of the famous old English music hall.”

Rainier had asked the waiter for an evening paper and was now glancing down the list “Yes, he used to be quite funny, but I haven’t heard of him in London for years—he’s a bit passé you know … well, he’s not at the Coliseum or the Holborn Empire … that rather limits the possibilities … wait a minute, though—‘Berty Lowe in Salute the Flag Twice Nightly at the Banford Hippodrome’—”

She clapped her hands ecstatically. “Oh, I should love to go there!”

“But it’s miles away in the suburbs—” he was beginning, but suddenly then I could see the mere caprice of the idea seize hold of him; to drive out to Banford to see Berty Lowe at the local Hippodrome was in the right key of fantasy for such an evening. He handed me the paper. “They call it a riot of rip-roaring rib-tickling—doesn’t that sound awful? Wish you’d ring ’em up and book a box for four at the second house.”

“Salute the Flag,” echoed Madame, with hands clasped. “Oh, I know I am going to love it if it is about soldiers. The Englishman I knew in Budapest was a soldier. It was during the war, but he wasn’t interned at first, because the Hungarians always liked the English, but when he began to send me flowers every day with little notes hidden in them—written in English, of course—the police arrested him for espionage, but when they translated the notes—oh, mon dieu, you should have seen their faces—and his—and mine—because, you see, he was crazily in love with me—crazily—not a bit like an Englishman! Oh, how I wish I had made them give me back those notes. … Casimir, of course, was mad with jealousy.”

Casimir, no longer capable of being mad with jealousy, looked up as a dog will on hearing his name mentioned, then shook his head with a bemused belch over his unfinished crêpes Suzettes.

I went out to telephone.

An hour later we were sitting on four very uncomfortable cane chairs as the curtain rose on Salute the Flag. It had been a mistake, I could see, to have engaged a box; the orchestra seats would have been much more comfortable, and further away from certain plush hangings which, on being merely touched, shook out clouds of dubious-looking dust I gathered from the way we were escorted to our seats, and also from the fact that the other boxes were empty, that our arrival had created a little stir; it would be odd, I thought, but perhaps not absolutely catastrophic, if some member of the audience were to recognize Rainier. However, no one did, despite the fact that some of the actors played at us outrageously—even, by the end of the show, making jokes about “the gentleman in the box who’s fast asleep.” It was true; Casimir was fast asleep. Madame awakened him several times, but he slumped forward again almost immediately; soon she gave it up as a bad job.

As for the play, it had been (I guessed) an originally serious melodrama on a wartime theme, dating probably from 1914 or 1915; its villains had then been Germans of impossible villainy and its heroes English soldiers of equally impossible saintliness. A quarter of a century of lucrative adaptation, however, had merged both the villainy and the saintliness into a common mood of broad comedy burlesque; such patriotic speeches as remained were spoken now only to be laughed at, while the hero’s first appearance was in the always comic uniform of a scoutmaster.

But Madame was puzzled. During the intermission she said: “I cannot understand why they laugh at some of the lines. When the recruiting sergeant made that speech about the British Empire, what was funny about it?”

“It’s just our English sense of humor,” Rainier explained. “We think recruiting sergeants are funny. We think long speeches are also funny. The British Empire has its funny side too. So put them all together and you can’t help making an Englishman laugh.”

“But it was a patriotic speech!”

“Englishmen think them the funniest of all.”

“But in Austria, if anyone laughed at a patriotic speech there would be a riot and the man would be arrested.”

“That just proves something I have long suspected—that Austria isn’t England.”

“You know Austria?”

“I once spent a few days in Vienna on business.”

“Ah, you should have stayed longer and gone to the Semmering and then to Pressburg down the Danube in a steamboat.”

“Curious you should mention it, but that was one of my boyhood ambitions. But in a canoe, not a steamboat.”

“Oh, but that would be more wonderful still! Why did you not do it?”

“Because when I first wanted to, I hadn’t enough money—then later, when I had enough money, I hadn’t the time … and today, whatever I have, there isn’t any Austria.”

“Ah yes, it is so sad. But let us not think about it—see, the curtain rises!”

She said that so much like a musical-comedy cue that I almost expected to see her jump down to the stage and begin a song. However, Salute the Flag was doubtless better entertainment. It continued to be equally hilarious during its second half, though Berty Lowe, as the heavily mustached German general, was actually less funny than some of the smaller parts; there was one especially that had the audience holding their sides—when an English subaltern entered his colonel’s tent (the colonel being a German spy in disguise) to exclaim, between chattering teeth and amidst paroxysms of stammering—“The enemy advances—give the order to attack, or, by heaven, sir, I will myself!” As a rule I do not care for jokes based on any physical defect, but I must admit that this particular player brought the house down by some of the most ludicrous facial contortions I have ever seen—the whole episode being topped by the final gag of a doorknob coming off and rolling across the stage when he banged his exit.

It was difficult to keep up or down to such a level, but the play romped on with a good deal of vulgar gusto until the last scene, evidently the dramatic high-spot of the original play, when the heroine, threatened by the villain with a revolver, cried: “You cannot fire on helpless womankind!”—whereat another woman, of suggestive male appearance and elephantine proportions, invaded the stage from the wings brandishing weapons of all kinds from tomahawk to Mills bomb. Crude, undoubtedly; but the Banford audience loved it, and were still laughing throughout the perfunctory finale in which all the cast rushed on to the stage to chase off the villain and line up for a closing chorus.

As we left the theater I saw that Rainier’s mood had changed. He almost bundled Madame and her husband into the car, and spoke very little during the ride back to London; she chattered to me for a while, but Rainier’s moods had a queer way of enforcing their atmosphere upon others, and she also was somewhat subdued by the time we reached their hotel in Russell Square and set the two of them down on the pavement.

“Good-bye, my lord,” she said to Rainier, evidently remembering her manners but not the name. But she remembered mine. “Good-bye, Sir Hawk.”

Casimir nodded grumpily as she took his arm to help him up the hotel steps. The last we saw was her effort to get him through the revolving door. It should have been funny, but perhaps we had had enough laughter for one evening; it wasn’t funny, therefore, it was somehow rather sad.

“Of course she’s ruined him,” Rainier commented, as we drove away towards Chelsea.

“What makes you think that?”

“His playing. I could tell he was good once.”

“Well, he’s ruined her too. She can’t get much fun out of life, watching over him wherever they go. Incidentally, I think she was rather shocked by our rough island humor.”

“Probably it was too unsanitary and not sexy enough for her.”

“And then that fellow’s stammer. I suppose on the Vienna stage you couldn’t have an officer stammering—only a private.”

“God, yes—that stammer … they kept it in—and the doorknob coming off as well. … But the gag at the end was new.”

“Sounds as if you’ve seen the show before.”

He was thoughtful. “Yes, I think I have.”

“Not surprising. It’s been played up and down everywhere for years.”

“But more than that—more than seeing it before—I—I—” He turned to me with a curious abrupt eagerness. “Do you mind if we drive around for a while before going home?”

“Of course not. … But what’s happened? You look—” I stopped, but he cut in sharply: “Yes, tell me—what’s the matter with me—how do I look?”

I said, meeting his eyes and speaking with as little excitement as I could: “You look as you did when I first saw you staring at a mountain because you thought you recognized it—through the train windows that Armistice Day.”

“Armistice Day,” he repeated. Then he added, quietly, almost casually: “I was in hospital … I mean on that first Armistice Day—the first one of all. The real one.” He suddenly clutched my sleeve. “Yes, I remember—I was at Melbury!”

I said nothing, anxious not to, break any thread of recollection he was about to unravel, and afraid of the tension in my voice were I to speak at all.

“There were so many hospitals,” he went on. “I was at Sennelager first—then Hanover. Then they exchanged the shell-shock and t.b. cases through Switzerland. So back home—Birmingham for a time—then Hastings—and another place near Manchester … then Melbury. That was the last of them. … I’d like to go to Melbury.”

I still couldn’t answer; I was afraid of breaking some kind of spell. He seemed to read this into my silence, for he went on, in a kindly voice: “Do you mind? Or are you very tired?”

“No, I’m not tired.” My voice was all right, but I was still apprehensive, and more so than ever when I realized he wanted to go to Melbury that very night, immediately. I added something about Hanson being probably tired, even if we weren’t—after all he’d driven us to Banford and back, and to ask him now to make another excursion into the distant suburbs …

“Yes, of course—glad you thought of it.” He was always considerate to servants. “We’ll drop him here and send him home by taxi. Then I’ll drive—or perhaps you’d better if you think I’ve had too much to drink.” He was already reaching for the speaking tube, and had given the new instructions before I could think of anything else to say at all, much less frame an objection. Hanson pulled up at the curb, showing no more curiosity than a good servant should. But it was still pouring with rain, and he must have thought it odd to choose such a night for a pleasure drive.

Rainier moved next to me in the chauffeur’s seat; as I drove off he said he hoped I knew the way.

“Through Stepney and Stratford, isn’t it?”

“Don’t ask me—I’ve never been there since—since the morning I left.”

You remember it was a morning?”

He turned to me excitedly. “Did I say morning? Yes, it was … and if I can only see the place again—”

“You won’t see much tonight, I’m afraid.”

“I didn’t see much last time, either—it was too foggy. God—that’s something else. … Just let me talk on anyhow. Don’t feel you have to answer—I know it’s hard to drive these juggernauts on a wet night—why does my wife always buy such monsters?—and we have four of them.”

“Nothing to stop you buying a small car yourself if you wanted.”

“But I’m not interested in buying cars.”

I laughed and said: “Well, you can’t have it both ways. If you’re not interested in cars, you can’t blame Mrs. Rainier for buying the kind she thinks is suitable for a rich man who isn’t interested in cars.”

“True, true. …” The side issue had lowered the tension.

We drove through the almost deserted City, past Aldgate and along the wide, brilliant, rococo Mile End Road. It was midnight as we crossed Bow Bridge, five minutes past as we reached the fork of the road in Stratford Broadway; I had to drive slowly because of the slippery tram rails. Once I stopped to inquire from some men drinking at a coffee stall; they waved us on into the deepening hinterland of the suburbs. The slums here lost their sinister picturesqueness, became more and more drably respectable: long vistas of lamplit roads, with here and there a block of elementary schools rising like a fortress over the roof tops, and at every shopping center the same names in a different order—Woolworth, Maypole, Sainsbury, Home and Colonial, Lyons. We passed an old-fashioned church with a new-fashioned sign outside it, proclaiming the subject of next Sunday’s sermon—“Why Does God Permit War?”—and that set Rainier improvising on the kind of sermon it would be—“very cheerful and chummy, proving that God isn’t such a bad sort when you get to know Him”; and then abruptly, in the tangental way so characteristic when he was inwardly excited, he talked again of his favorite uncle the archdeacon. “He never preached a sermon on ‘Why Does God Permit War?’ To begin with, I don’t suppose he ever thought about it, and if he had, he’d probably have answered ‘Why shouldn’t He?’ He took it for granted that the Deity minded His own business, and that ‘God’s in His Heaven’ was just Browning’s way of putting it. All this craze for bringing Him down to earth and appealing to Him at every turn would have struck my uncle as weak-kneed as well as in appallingly bad taste. And yet, in his way, and on the outskirts of Cheltenham, he lived an almost saintly life. He would never kill insects that strayed into the house, but would trap them in match boxes and set them free in the garden. He approved of hunting, though, and thought the smearing of a girl’s face with fox blood after her first ride to hounds was a rather charming custom. All in all, I don’t suppose he was any more inconsistent than the modern parson who tries to combine Saint Francis, Lenin, and Freud into one all-embracing muddle.”

We drove on through Leytonstone; there the tramlines ended and we could put on a little speed. It was just after one o’clock when we reached the market square in the center of Melbury; I pulled up and looked to him for further instructions. He was peering through the window and after a moment I wound the window down on my side. The rain had increased to the dimensions of a storm, and a solitary policeman sheltering under a shop awning called out to us: “Looking for somewhere?”

Rainier turned at the sound of the stranger’s voice.

“Yes, the hospital,” he answered. “Where’s the hospital?”

“You mean the new one or the old one, sir?”

“The old one, I think.” Then in a sudden rush: it’s on a hill—has big gates and a high wall all round it.”

The policeman looked puzzled. “That don’t sound much like either of ’em.” Then, as I was about to thank him and drive off, he came towards the car, leaned in, and said, with a glance across me to Rainier: “You wouldn’t be meanin’ the asylum, would you, sir?”

PART FOUR

HE WAS SO TIRED OF stammering out to a succession of doctors all he knew about himself that eventually he jotted it down on a single sheet of notepaper for them to refer to at will. He had recently been transferred to Melbury from another military hospital, and the change had some what upset him, because it meant beginning everything all over again—contacts with new doctors, nurses, and patients, the effort to find another corner of existence where people would presently leave him alone. Besides, he didn’t like the place—it was too big, too crowded, and altogether too permanent-looking. Overworked psychiatrists gave him treatments that were supposed to have done well in similar cases, but perhaps it was part of his own case that he didn’t feel any similar cases existed, though he admitted there were many worse ones; he also felt that the doctors—grand fellows all of them, he had no specific complaints—aimed at raising a statistical average of success rather than his own individual cure.

That particular morning in November he began the regulation mile along the cinder paths, glad that the fog had kept most of his fellow victims indoors. Only alone did his various symptoms ever approach vanishing point, and amidst the fog this sense of aloneness was intensified so reassuringly that as he continued to walk he began to feel a curious vacuum of sensation that might almost be called contentment. Walking was part of the encouraged regimen at Melbury; extensive grounds surrounded by a fifteen-foot spiked wall permitted it, while an army greatcoat kept the cold air from penetrating his thinnish hospital uniform.

Suddenly, as he neared the main entrance where the name had been painted over (though it was still readable in burnt letters on brooms and garden took—“Property of the So-and-So County Asylum”)—suddenly, as the heavily scrolled ironwork of the gates loomed through the fog, a siren screamed across the emptiness beyond—a factory siren, already familiar at certain hours, but this was not one of them, nor did the sound stay on the single level note, but began soaring up and down in wild flurries. A few seconds later another siren chimed in, and then a third; by that time he was near enough to the gates to see two uniformed porters rush hatless out of the lodge, shouting excitedly as they raced up the shrouded driveway. For the moment—and he realized it without any answering excitement—there was no one left on guard, no one to stop him as he passed through the lodge into the outer world, no one to notice him as he walked down the lane towards the town. Behind his mute acceptance of things done to him, there was a slow-burning inclination to do things for himself, an inclination fanned now into the faint beginnings of initiative; but they were only faint, he had no will for any struggle, and if anyone ran after him to say “Come back” he would go back.

Nobody ran after him. The lane turned into the main road at the tram terminus; a small crowd was already gathering there in groups, chattering, laughing, greeting each newcomer with eager questions. Nor had the sirens stopped; they were louder now, and joined by tram bells, train whistles, a strange awakening murmur out of the distance. He walked on, still downhill, edging into the roadway to avoid people, glad that the fog was thickening as he descended. Soon he was aware of some approaching vortex of commotion, of crowds ahead that might cover all the roadway and envelop him completely; he felt as well as heard them, and a nagging pinpoint of uneasiness expanded until, to relieve it even momentarily, he turned into a shop at the corner of a street.

The inside was dark, as he had hoped, revealing only vague shapes of counter, shelves, and merchandise; it seemed to be a small neglected general store, smelling of its own shabbiness. The opening door had tinkled a bell, and presently, as his eyes grew used to the dimness, he saw an old woman watching from behind the counter—thin-faced, gray-haired, rather baleful. He tried to ask for cigarettes and began to stammer. He always did when he talked to others, though he could chatter to himself without much trouble—that was one of the points he had noted for the doctors, though he suspected they didn’t believe him, and of course it was something he couldn’t prove. Just now, with all the extra excitement, his stammer was worse than ever—not a mere tongue-tie, but a nervous tic that convulsed his entire head and face. He stood there, trembling and straining for speech, at last managing to explode a word; the woman said nothing in answer, but after a long scrutiny began sidling away. He relaxed when she had gone, hoping she would just return with the cigarettes and not oblige him to say more, wondering if she would think it odd if he stayed to smoke one of them in the shop. Anyhow, it was good to be alone again. Then suddenly he realized he was not alone. A girl had entered, or else had been there all the time and he hadn’t noticed; she too was waiting at the counter, but now she turned to him and began urgently whispering. “She’s gone to fetch somebody—she knows where you’re from.”

He stared hard, trying to isolate her face from the surrounding shadows.

“You are, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

“She knows you’re not supposed to be out.”

He nodded again.

“Not that I’d blame anybody for anything today. The war’s over—you know that? Isn’t it wonderful … ? And you certainly don’t look as if you’d do any harm.” She smiled to soften the phrase.

He shook his head and smiled back.

“Well, if you have given them the slip, I wouldn’t stay here, old boy, that’s all.”

He smiled again, a little bewildered; somebody was talking to him normally, casually, yet personally too. It was a pleasant experience, he wished it could go on longer, but then he heard the old woman’s footsteps returning from some inner room behind the shop; with a final smile he summoned enough energy to walk away. A few seconds later he stood on the pavement, blinking to the light, aware of the prevalent atmosphere as something pungent, an air he could not breathe, a spice too hot for his palate. Shouts were now merging into a steady sequence of cheers, and through the pale fog he saw a tram approach, clanging continuously as it discharged a load of yelling schoolchildren. He turned away from the clamor into a side street where two rows of small houses reached upwards like flying buttresses astride a hill; presently he came to a house with a dingy brass plate outside—“H. T. Sheldrake, Teacher of Music.” He spoke the name, Sheldrake, to himself—he always tested names like this, hoping that some day one of them would fit snugly into an empty groove in his mind. No, not Sheldrake. There was the sound of a piano playing scales; he listened, calming himself somewhat, till the playing stopped and shrill voices began. That made him move on up the hill, but he felt tired after a short distance and held to a railing for support. Just then the same girl caught up with him.

“What’s the matter?”

He smiled.

“I followed you. Thought you looked a bit off-color.”

He shook his head valiantly, observing her now for the first time. She was dressed in a long mackintosh and a little fur hat like a fez, under which brown straight hair framed a face of such friendly eagerness that he suddenly felt it did not matter if she saw and heard his struggles for speech; rather that than have her think him worse than he was. He wanted to say: You should see some of the other fellows up there—what’s wrong with me is nothing—just a stammer and not being able to remember things.

While he was planning to say all this she took his arm. “Lean on me if you like. And talk or not, whichever you want. Don’t be nervous.”

After that he decided to say merely that he was not really ill, but only tired after walking further than usual; he began bracing himself to make the effort, smiling beforehand to console her for the ordeal of watching and listening. Then a curious thing happened; it was like taking a rush at a door to break through when all the time the door was neither locked nor even latched. He just opened his mouth and found that he could speak. Not perfectly, of course, but almost as easily as if he were talking to himself. It made him gasp with an astonishment so overwhelming that for the moment he expected her to share it. “Did you hear that? I wasn’t so bad then, was I?”

“Of course you weren’t. Didn’t I tell you not to be nervous?”

“But you don’t know what a job I have, as a rule.”

“Oh yes I do. I heard you in the shop. But that old woman would scare anybody. Where d’you want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, this street doesn’t lead anywhere.”

“I was just—walking.”

“But weren’t you trying to get away?”

“Not—not exactly. I hadn’t any real plans. I just came out because—well, because there was nobody at the gate.”

“Do they look after you all right?”

“Oh yes.”

“I’ve heard they’re a bit rough with some.”

“Not with me.”

“All the same, you don’t really like the place?”

“Not—not very much.”

“Then you oughtn’t to be in it, surely?”

“There’s nowhere else, until I get all right again.”

“How can you get all right again when you’re not happy in a place?”

He had often asked himself the same question, but he answered, parrying the idea: “Perhaps I wouldn’t be very happy anywhere—just now.”

“But the war’s over—doesn’t that make any difference?” She came near to abrupt tears, then dashed a hand to her eyes and began to laugh. “Silly, that’s what I am—everybody’s gone silly today. Seems an awful morning to end the war on, doesn’t it?—I mean, you’d almost think the sun ought to shine—blue skies—like a picture. …” She almost cried again. “Shall we stroll down?”

She gripped his arm as they slowly descended the hill. His walk was pretty good, and he was suddenly proud of it—just the faintest shuffle, nobody would notice. When they reached the piano teacher’s house he hesitated. “I’d rather not get mixed up with the crowd—if you don’t mind.”

“Righto—we’ll keep well away.” She added: “So you don’t like crowds?”

“Not very much.”

“Or hospitals?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“Well, that’s fine. If I keep on trying I’ll really get to know you.”

They both laughed; then she said: “There’s a place where we could get some hot coffee, if you like that.”

The Coronation Café was a cheap little place along the Bockley Road, patronized mostly by tramway men on duty who stopped their vehicles outside and dashed in with empty jugs, leaving them to be filled in readiness for the return trip. All day long these swift visitations continued, with barely time for an exchange of words across the counter. But today, the eleventh of November, 1918, drivers and conductors chatted boisterously as if they were in no hurry at all, and passed cheery remarks to the couple who sat at the marble-topped table in the window alcove. They could see the man was a soldier by his greatcoat, and it was a good day for saying cheery things to soldiers. “Wonder ’ow long it’ll take to git the rest of you boys ’ome, mate?” … “Maybe they’ll march ’em to Berlin now and shoot the old Kaiser.” … “Seems queer to ’ave the war end up like this—right on the dot, as you might say.” … “Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just a rumor, like them Russians comin’ through.” … “But it’s all in the papers, see—it sez the Germans ’ave signed a what’s-a-name—means peace, don’t it?” All this and much else in snatches of news and comment. The proprietor always answered: “You’re right there, mister”—“That’s just what I always said meself,” or, if the remark had been especially emphatic: “You ’it the nail straight on the ’ead that time, mister.” Towards noon the fog grew very thick indeed and drivers reported crowds still increasing at the busy centers; workpeople had been sent home from offices and factories, as well as children from all the schools. Then the trams stopped running, impeded by fog and crowds equally, and as there were no more customers at the Coronation Café the proprietor set to work behind his counter, polishing a large tea urn till it glowed in the gloom like a copper sun. Presently he came over to the table. He was a little man, pale-faced, bald, with watery eyes and a drooping mustache.

“Wouldn’t you two like a bite o’ somethin’?”

The girl looked to her companion, saw him frame a word and then begin to struggle with it; she intervened quickly: “Sounds a good idea. What have you got?”

“Eggs, tha’s about all. ’Ow d’yer like ’em—soft or ’ard?”

Again she looked across the table before answering. “Oh, middling’ll do.”

“That’s the ticket. That’s ’ow I like ’em meself. And two more coffees?”

“Righto.”

“Keep yer warmed-up a day like this. War’s over, they say, but anybody can the of pewmonia.”

“That’s a fact, so bring those coffees quick.”

He went away chuckling; then the girl leaned across the table and said: “Don’t look so scared. He won’t bite.”

“I know. But I’m always like that with strangers—at first. And besides—I don’t think I’ve enough money.”

“Well, who cares about that? I have.”

“But—”

“Now don’t start being the gentleman. You were telling me about yourself when that fellow came up. Go on with the story.” He stared at her rather blankly till she added: “Unless you’d rather not. Your mind’s on something else, I can see.”

“I’d just noticed that sign outside.” He pointed through the window to a board overhanging the pavement above the café doorway—the words “Good Pull-Up for Carmen” were dimly readable through the fog. “Carmen,” he muttered. “That gives me something—why, yes … Melba.”

“Melba? Oh, you mean the opera?” She began to laugh. “And Melba gives me peaches. What is this—a game?”

“Sort of. I have to keep on doing it, one of the doctors say—part of his treatment. You see, I’ve lost my memory about certain things. It’s like being blind and having to feel around for shapes and sizes.”

“I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize, or I wouldn’t have laughed.”

“Oh, that’s all right—I’d rather you laugh. I wish everybody would laugh. … Now what was it you were asking me before?”

“Well, I was wondering why you had to be in a hospital at all, but now of course I understand.”

“Yes—till I get thoroughly better. I daresay I will—eventually.”

“And then your memory’ll come back?”

“That’s what they think.”

“But in the meantime what are you going to do?”

“Just wait around till it happens, I suppose.”

“Isn’t there some way of tracing any of your relatives and friends? Advertising for them, or something like that?”

“They’ve tried. Some people did come to see me at the hospital once, but—I wasn’t their son.”

“I’ll bet they were disappointed. You’d make a nice son for somebody.”

“Well, I was disappointed too. I’d like to have belonged to them—to have had a home somewhere.”

He then gave her some of the facts he had written out for the doctors—that he had been blown up by a shell during 1917, and that when he recovered consciousness he was in a German hospital somewhere, unidentified and unidentifiable. Later there had been an exchange of wounded and shell-shocked prisoners through Switzerland, and by this means the problem had been passed on to the English—but with no more success. He had been a pretty bad case at first, with loss of speech and muscular co-ordination, but those things had gradually returned—perhaps the memory would follow later. Altogether he had spent over a year in various hospitals, of which he liked the one at Melbury least of all. “Mind you,” he added, seizing the chance to say what he thought of saying before, “I’m miles better than some of the others. You’d think so too if you saw them.”

“And that’s why you shouldn’t see them at all. Doesn’t exactly help you, does it?”

“No, but I suppose all the hospitals are so crowded—there’s no chance to separate us properly.”

The proprietor, coming up with the coffee and eggs, saw them break off their conversation suddenly. “Gettin’ a bit dark in ’ere—I’ll give yer a light,” he murmured, to satisfy a dawning curiosity. Standing on a bench he pulled the chain under a single incandescent burner in the middle of the ceiling; it sent a pale greenish glow over their faces. He stared at them both. “You don’t look so chirpy, mite. Feelin’ bad?”

“He’s just tired, that’s all.” And then, to get the fellow out: “Bring a packet of cigarettes, will you?”

When he had gone she leaned across. “That’s what you were trying to ask for in the shop, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but I didn’t really need them.”

“Oh, come, I know what you need more than you do yourself. Don’t be scared of that little chap—he means all right.”

The proprietor returned to their table with the cigarettes. “Looks to me as if ’e might ’ave the flu, miss. Lots o’ flu abart ’ere. Dyin’ like flies, they was, up at the ‘orspital a few weeks ago.”

When he had gone again she comforted: “There now, don’t worry. If you don’t like it here, let’s eat and then we’ll be off.”

“It isn’t that I don’t like it, only—only I’d rather them not come after me, that’s all.”

“Why should they?”

“He mentioned the hospital. He knows I’m from there, just as you did when you first saw me. It’s in my face—the way I look at people. I haven’t a chance—even if I knew where to go. They come round the wards every night at six. If I get back by then there’ll be no trouble.”

“You really mean to go back?”

“There’s nothing else to do.” He smiled wanly. “You’ve been very kind to bring me here.”

“Oh, don’t talk like that.”

“But you have. I’m grateful. Maybe I’ll be more satisfied now, because I shall know I’m not really well enough to be on my own—yet.”

They ate in silence for a few moments after that; then she went up to the counter and paid the bill. “One and tenpence, miss. Can’t make it any more or I would. An’ if I were you, I’d get your pal ’ome pretty quick. ’E don’t look as if ’e ought to be aht, an’ that’s a fact.”

A moment later the fog was curling round them in swathes, fanning the sound of cheers over distant invisible roofs. She took his arm again as they walked to the next corner, then turned through quiet residential roads away from the center of the town. But at one place jubilant householders were dancing round a bonfire, and to avoid passing through the blaze of light they made a second detour, along alleys that twisted more and more confusingly till, with a sudden rush of sound, they were back in the main street, caught in a madder, wilder throng. Already the war had been over for several hours, and the first shock of exultation was yielding to a hysteria that disguised an anticlimax. The war was over … but now what? The dead were still dead; no miracle of human signature could restore limbs and sight and sanity; the grinding hardships of those four years could not be wiped out by a headline. Emotions were numb, were to remain half-numbed for a decade, and relief that might have eased them could come no nearer than a fret to the nerves. A few things were done, symbolically; men climbed street lamps to tear away the shades that had darkened them since the first air raids in human history; shop windows suddenly blazed out with new globes in long-empty sockets. The traffic center at Melbury was like a hundred others in and around London that day; the crowds, the noise, the light, the fog. Beyond a certain limit of expression there was nothing to say, nothing much even to do; yet the urge to say and to do was self-torturing. So, as the day and the night wore on, throngs were swayed by sharp caprices—hoisting shoulder-high some chance-passing soldier on leave, smashing the windows of tradesmen rumored to have profiteered, making a fire of hoardings that proclaimed slogans for winning the now-extinct war, booing the harassed police who tried to keep such fires in check. From cheers to jeers, from applause to anger, were but a finger touch of difference in the play of events on taut nerves.

Presently a girl summoning help for a soldier in hospital uniform who had fainted provided a new thrill—compassion; within a few seconds the crowd was entirely swept by it, pressing in on the two donors with cries of pity, indignation, and advice to do this and that.

“Give ’im air! Keep back there! Pick ’im up and carry ’im inside—I got some whiskey—give the poor chap a nip. … No, ’e shouldn’t ’ave no alco’ol, not without a doctor. … Phone the ’orspital, they’ll send an amberlance. … Christ, I wouldn’t let ’im go there if ’e was my boy—they kill ’em, that’s what they do up there.”

Presently a few men carried the soldier from the pavement into a grocery, whose owner nervously unbarred his front door to repeated knockings. Inside the shop the stream of advice would have continued indefinitely, but for the girl, who kept saying she would take him home.

“Better ’ave a doctor first, miss.”

“I’ll get a doctor when he’s home.”

“Where’s ’e live?”

“Not far away.”

“Wounded badly, was ’e?”

“No, he’s all right—just fainted, that’s all. See, he’s coming round now—if I can get him home—”

“Your ’usband, lidy?”

“That make any difference?”

“Come to think of it, I seem to ’ave seen your face before.”

“Maybe you have, old boy, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stand any of your lip. Come on now, and give me a hand. If I could get a cab—”

“Not much chance o’ that, miss, not on a night like this.”

But the shopkeeper, anxious to get them all off his premises, whispered to her, while the others were still arguing the point: “I’ve got a van and my son’ll drive you. Think your friend can walk to it?”

“Oh yes, I’m certain he can. Let’s try.”

It proved to be a large van, smelling of miscellaneous foods and soaps; its driver was a thin youth who easily made room for them on the front seat. After he had inched his way out of the yard he lit a cigarette and began proudly: “You ain’t supposed to drive these vans till you’re eighteen, but Dad don’t tell nobody. Where to, miss?”

“D’you know the Owl—the other side of Bockley?”

“You bet I do. Biffer’s place?”

“That’s it. But stop in the lane just before you get there.”

“Right you are. Won’t arf be a journey though, in this fog. ’Ow’s the patient?”

“Fine. You keep your eye on the road.”

That’s all right I could drive round ’Ere blindfold. Aren’t you on at the Empire this week?”

“If there’s any show at all. They said there wouldn’t be tonight.”

“I saw the show in Bockley last week. Jolly good.”

“Think so? I thought it was rotten. Look where you’re driving.”

“Sorry.”

“Good of you to take us, anyhow, even if we do get killed on the way.”

“Don’t mention it. Be in the army meself next year.”

“Not now the war’s over, will you?”

“Won’t they ’ave me because of that?” He looked puzzled and rather disappointed.

“Maybe they will—if you live that long.”

“Pretty quick, ain’t you, miss? Reminds me of that scene you ’ad in the play, when you kept tellin’ orf that fat old gent with the mustaches. I could ’ave larfed.”

“Why the devil didn’t you then? You were supposed to.”

“My dad’ll stare when I tell ’im it was Paula Ridgeway. ’E didn’t recognize you. Went to the show same as I did, only ’e don’t see so well lately.”

They drove on, slowly, gropingly, chattering meanwhile, avoiding the main streets as far as possible, and especially the road junctions and shopping centers where crowds were likely. Melbury and Bockley were adjacent suburbs, completely built over in a crisscross of residential roads that afforded an infinity of routes; but once beyond Bockley the rows of identical houses came to an end with the abruptness of an army halted, and the wider highways narrowed and twisted into lanes. They pulled up eventually at the side of a hedge.

“’Ere y’are, miss. The Owl’s just rahnd the corner. Sure I can’t tike yer no further?”

“This’ll do fine. We can walk now.”

He helped them out. “Sure you know where y’are?”

“Yes—and thanks.” She was fishing in her bag for a coin when he stopped her. “No, miss—you send me a signed picture of yourself, that’s what I’d rather ’ave. … ’Is nibs feelin’ better? That’s good. Well, it’s bin a pleasure. Good luck to both of you. Good night, miss.”

She waved to him and he drove off, leaving them alone.

“Where are we going?”

“Home—at least it’ll do for one.”

“But—I—I have to get back to the hospital.”

“We’ll see about that tomorrow.”

“But this place—I don’t understand—”

“It’s the Owl Hotel if you like the word. Call it a pub to be on the safe side. I know the landlord.”

“Will he mind?”

“The odds are he won’t even know, old boy, not in the state he’ll be in tonight.”

She guided him a little way along the lane, then through a side gate into a garden where the shapes of trees loomed up at regular intervals. “Lovely here when the summer comes—they serve teas and there’s a view.”

“What name was it he called you?”

“Paula Ridgeway. It’s not my real name, though. What’s yours?”

“Smith—but that’s not real either.”

“You don’t remember your real name?”

He shook his head.

“Well, Smith’s good enough. Come on, Smithy.”

As they found their way along a path, the silent blanket of fog was pierced by a murmur and then by a paleness ahead, the two presently merging into a vague impression of the Owl on this night of November the eleventh, 1918. A two-storied, ivy-clustered, steep-roofed building, ablaze with light from every downstairs room, and already packed with shouting celebrants of victory; a friendly pub, traditional without being self-consciously old-world. Established in the forties, when neighboring Bockley was a small country town, it had kept its character throughout an age that had seen the vast obliterating spread of the suburbs and the advent of motor traffic; it had kept, too, the sacred partitions between “private” and “public” bars—divisions rooted in the mythology of London life, and still acceptable because they no longer signify any snobbish separation, but merely an etiquette of occasion, dress, and a penny difference in the price of a pint of beer. Even the end of a great war could not shatter this etiquette; but with the sacred partitions still between, the patrons of both bars found community in songs that were roared in unison above the shouting and laughter and clatter of glasses. They were not especially patriotic songs; most were from the music halls of the nineties, a few were catchy hits from the recent West End revues. But by far the most popular of all was “Knees Up, Mother Brown,” a roaring chorus that set the whole crowd stamping into the beer-soaked sawdust.

On the threshold of the Owl Smith felt a renewal of nervousness, especially as the girl’s entry was the signal for shouts of welcome from within. She pushed him into a chair in an unlighted corner of the lobby. “Stay there, Smithy—I won’t be long.” A group of men pressed out of the bar towards her, dragging her back with them; he could hear their greetings, and her own in answer. He sat there, waiting, trying to collect his thoughts, to come to terms with the strange sequence of events that had brought him to a noisy public house in company with a girl who was something on the stage. A few people passed without noticing him; that was reassuring, but he suspected it was only because they were drunk. He decided that if anyone spoke to him he would pretend to be drank also, and with the safeguarding decision once made the waiting became easier. He watched the door into the bar, expecting her to emerge amidst a corresponding roar of farewells, but when she did come, it was quietly, silently, and from another direction. “I managed to get away, old boy, and believe me it wasn’t easy. Come on—let’s go before they find us.”

She led him through another door close by, and up a back staircase to the first floor, turning along a corridor flanked by many rooms; she opened one of them and put a match to a gas jet just inside. It showed up a square simple apartment, containing an iron bed and heavy Victorian furniture. He stared around, then began to protest: “But how can I stay here? I can’t afford—”

“Listen, Smithy—the war stopped this morning. If that’s possible, anything else ought to be. And you’ve got to stay somewhere.” She began to laugh. “You’re safe here—nobody’s going to bother you. I told you I know the man who runs this place—Biffer Briggs—used to be a prize fighter, but don’t let that frighten you. … It’s cold, though—wish there was a fire.”

She suddenly knelt at his feet and began to unlace his boots. Again he protested.

“Well, you must take your boots oft—that’s only civil, on a clean bed. I’ll come up again soon and bring you some tea.”

He took off his boots as soon as she had gone, but the effort tired him more than he could have imagined. The day’s strains and stresses had utterly exhausted him, in fact; he almost wished he were back at the hospital, because that at least promised the likelihood of a known routine, whereas here, in this strange place … but he fell asleep amidst his uneasiness. When he woke he saw her standing in front of him, carrying a cup of tea. She placed the cup on the side table, then fixed the blankets here and there to cover him more warmly. She was about to tiptoe away when he reached out his hand in a wordless gesture of thanks.

“Awake, Smithy?”

“Have I been asleep?”

“I should think you have. Four solid hours, and this is the third cup of tea I’ve made for you, just in case. … God, I’m tired—tell you what, old boy, I’ve had just about enough of it downstairs.”

“It’s late, I suppose.”

“One A.M. and they’re still hard at it.”

“Do you live here?”

“Not me—I just know the Biffer, that’s all. I reckon everybody’s living here tonight, though. Hope the noise won’t keep you awake—it’ll probably go on till morning.”

“I shan’t mind.”

“You sleep well?”

“Sometimes.”

“Lie awake thinking about things?”

“Sometimes.”

“About who you are and all that?”

“Sometimes.”

Her voice softened with curiosity as she looked down at him. “Drink it up, Smithy. What does it feel like—to think of the time before—before you can remember?”

“Like trying to remember before I was born.”

She gave his hand an answering touch. “Well, you’re born again now. So’s everybody. So’s the whole world. That’s the way to look at it. That’s why there’s all this singing and shouting. That’s why I’m drunk.”

“Are you?”

“Well not really with drinks, though I have had a few. It’s just the thought of it all being over—I’ve seen so many nice boys like yourself, having a good time one week and then by the next … Oh well, mustn’t talk about that—better not talk any more about anything; you’re too sleepy; and so am I. How about making a bit of room?”

Without undressing, except to slip off her shoes, she lifted the blankets and lay down beside him. He felt her nearness slowly, luxuriously, a relaxation of every nerve. “Tell you what, old boy, I’m just like a mother tonight, so cuddle up close as you like and keep warm. … Good night, Smithy.”

“Good night.”

“And Paula’s the name, in case you’ve forgotten that as well.”

But he felt no need to answer, except by a deeper tranquillity he drew from her, feeling that she was offering it. The crowd were still singing “Knees Up, Mother Brown” in the bars below. It sounded new to him, both words and tune, and he wondered if it were something else he had forgotten. He did not know that no one anywhere had heard it before—that in some curious telepathic way it sprang up all over London on Armistice Night, in countless squares and streets and pubs; the living improvisation of a race to whom victory had come, not with the trumpet notes of a Siegfried, but as a common earth touch—a warm bawdy link with the mobs of the past, the other victorious Englands of Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer.

Presently, as he lay listening, he fell asleep in her arms.

In the morning he had a temperature of 103. He didn’t know it; all he felt was a warm, almost cosy ache of all his limbs, as well as a trancelike vagueness of mind. She didn’t know it either, but his flushed face and incoherent speech made her telephone for a doctor. A majority of the other occupants of the Owl on that first morning of Peace were also flushed and incoherent, though from a different cause. The Biffer himself, sprawling, disheveled, and half undressed, snored loudly on a sofa in the little room behind the private bar; Frank, the bartender, boastful of never having touched a drop, languished in sober but melancholy stupor on the bench in the public bar, watching the maids sweep sawdust and broken glasses into heaps. Other persons, including a second bartender, a waiter, and several dilatory patrons who had either declined or been unable to go home, were not only fast asleep in various rooms and corridors, but likely, to remain so till many more hours were past. It had been a night in the history of the Owl, as of the world.

The only doctor who heeded the call proved, on arrival, to be extremely bad-tempered. As she met him in the lobby he took a sharp look round, eyeing distastefully the prostrate figures visible through doorways. “Daresay you know how busy I am—three Bockley doctors down with the flu—I’m trying to do the work of five men myself, so I hope you haven’t brought me here for nothing. I know Briggs—known him for years—he drinks too much and I’ve told him he’ll die of it—what more can I do? A man has a right to die as well as live the way he chooses—anyhow, a doctor can’t stop him. By this time she had led him upstairs and into the bedroom. He walked across to the bed, took one look, and swung round angrily. “What’s the idea? Who is he?”

“He’s been a soldier. He’s ill.”

“But I thought it was Briggs. … You had no right to drag me out here—who are you?”

“A friend of the Biffer—like yourself.”

“Well, I’ve no time for new cases,”

“But he’s ill. Can’t you see that?”

“How much did he drink?”

“Nothing. It isn’t that.”

“How do you know?”

“I was with him.”

“You’re his wife?”

“No.”

“Well, what is he to you? And what’s he doing here? You call me away from my regular patients—you tell me it’s urgent—I hurry here because Briggs is an old friend—” But by this time he had drawn back the blankets. “Why, God bless my soul, the man’s in his uniform. …”

“I told you—he’s been a soldier.”

“He’s still a soldier—he belongs to a hospital.”

“Aren’t you going to help him at all?”

“Can’t interfere in a military case—all I can do is notify the authorities. What’s the fellow’s name? … Ah, here it is—”

“But he’s terribly ill.”

“He’ll be sent for.”

“But you can’t leave him like this!”

“You don’t need to instruct me in my duty.”

Smith half heard all this as he lay on the bed, his mind tremulous with fever and his body drenched in perspiration; he heard the door close and then saw her face coming towards him out of a mist.

“I bungled that, Smithy. I’m afraid the old boy’s gone back to tell ’em you’re here.”

He smiled. He didn’t care. She seemed to read that in his face. She went on: “Yes, you think it doesn’t matter, you’d just as soon go back—but would you, when you once got there? You don’t really want to be in a hospital again. … Or do you?”

He smiled again, more faintly. He was too ill to speak.

“Well, if you die, it’ll be pretty hard to explain you being here, but if you weren’t going to die I wouldn’t be so pleased at having let you go. So you’d just better stay here and not die, Smithy.”

He kept smiling as if the whole thing increasingly amused him.

Thus it happened that when, towards twilight, the doctor revisited the Owl, striding into the lobby in an even greater hurry and temper than before, she met him there with answers rehearsed and ready.

“Well, young lady, I’ve made arrangements about that man. The Melbury Hospital will send an ambulance this evening.”

“But he’s gone!”

“What?” She repeated: “He’s gone.”

The doctor flushed and seemed on the verge of an outburst, then suddenly began to cough. She thought he looked rather ill himself. When he could regain breath he said more quietly: “You’d better do some explaining. Where has he gone? How did he get away?”

She offered him a chair. “Maybe he wasn’t so ill. Perhaps he was just drunk, as you said.”

“Nonsense! He’s a shell-shock case, if you know what that is—has delusions that people are against him. Men like that can be dangerous—might have a crazy fit or something.” He began to cough again. “Now come on, don’t waste any more of my time. Tell me where he is.”

She was facing him steadily when all at once his coughing became worse; he struggled with it for a while and then gasped: “Where’s Briggs? Let me talk to him about this.”

“He’s out.”

“Well, I’ll call again later when I’ve finished my round.” He seemed to have a renewal of both energy and anger as he stalked out of the room, for he shouted from the doorway:

“It’s all a pack of lies you’ve been telling—I know that much!”

But he did not call back later when he had finished his round. In fact he never did finish his round. He collapsed over the wheel of his car half an hour later, summoning just enough final strength to pull up by the roadside. It was a lonely road and they did not find him till he was dead. The flu of 1918 was like that.

Later in the evening a military ambulance drove up to the Owl and drove away again after a few minutes. The Biffer was emphatic in his assurance that there must have been some mistake—nobody on his premises was ill. But he called the driver and the two attendants into the private bar and hospitably stood them drinks.

The flu had other victims: Biffer Briggs himself, Frank the bartender, Annie the maid; they recovered. But an old man named Tom who for decades had odd-jobbed in the Owl garden died quietly, like ten millions more throughout Europe; indeed the war during all its years had not taken so many. But because the larger claims were made without horror they were surrendered without concern, and the Owl was far less perturbed when three fourths of its occupants were ill and near to death than on a night some months before when a German air raider had dropped a solitary bomb in a meadow miles away.

Meanwhile Lloyd George was organizing his khaki election; the world grew loud with promises; the ex-Kaiser was to be hanged; the losers must pay the whole cost of the war; the armies of the victors were all to come home and find work waiting for them; the new world was to be one of peace and plenty for Englishmen. Among all the promises a few things were real and immediate: a vote for the women, and gratuities to the men as they put off their uniforms—sums in cash that ranged from the field marshal’s fortune to the private soldier’s pittance. The morning these were announced Paula took the newspaper upstairs along with the breakfast tray, but said nothing till she was holding a thermometer to the light. “Well, Smithy, you’re down to nearly normal, so I reckon I can tell you the other good news—the government owes you some money.” She read him the details and added: “So stop worrying—you’ll be able to pay for everything soon.”

“But in the meantime?”

“Now what’s bothering you?”

“I hate to seem inquisitive, but—I mean—you—you probably aren’t so well off as—as to be able to afford—to help me—”

“Darling, I’m not well off at all, but helping you isn’t bankrupting me, either. And why should you hate to seem inquisitive?”

She sat on the bed waving the thermometer happily. “I’m afraid you’re too much of a gentleman, old boy. After all, you don’t know what you are, do you? Maybe you’re a lord or an earl or something. Can’t you remember going to Eton? You talked a good bit lately while you were in a delirium, but it was all war stuff—not very helpful. You’ve been pretty bad, incidentally—know that? This morning’s the first time you’ve dropped below a hundred.” She poured out a cup of tea. “All the others caught it too—good job I didn’t.”

“You’ve been living here?”

“Living and lifesaving. The flu closed the theater so I’d have had nothing else to do, anyway.”

“I still don’t see how you can afford to help me like this.”

“Darling, I’ll let you into a secret—I’m not paying for your room, but if it makes you feel better, you can turn over anything you like as soon as the government gives you the money.”

“That’s another trouble. I can’t be demobilized till I’m officially discharged from hospital.”

“Well, hurry up and get better, then they’ll discharge you quick enough.”

“But—in the meantime—don’t you see?—I can’t hide—like this—in somebody else’s house!”

“But you don’t have to hide. I’ve talked to the Biffer about you already.”

“You mean he knows I’m here—and where I come from?”

“Yes, and he doesn’t mind. Doesn’t give a damn, in fact. I knew I could fix it.”

“But—why does he think you’re doing all this for me?”

“Well, why do you think I am?” She laughed. “It’s just a hobby of mine. Now listen to this—it’s the Biffer’s idea, not mine. He says for the time being—when you’ve got over this flu and are strong enough—why don’t you do a bit in the garden same as old Tom used to? If you like, that is. Might be good for you to have a quiet job in the fresh air—you wouldn’t have to talk to people much. And it’s lovely here when the summer comes.”

Something flicked against his memory. “You said that once before.”

“Did I?”

“The night we came here—as we walked through the garden in the fog. You said—‘It’s lovely here when the summer comes.’ ”

“Well, it certainly is, but I don’t remember saying it. And you’re the one who’s supposed to forget things!”

“That’s why I’m always trying to remember them—things that have happened before.”

The Biffer’s not minding was a mild way of expressing his willingness to co-operate. He was, in truth, delighted to join in any outwitting of authority, which he visualized as the same malign power that had placed so many restrictions on his wartime management of the Owl. Jovial, obese, and somewhat thick-witted after the hundreds of collisions his skull had withstood in years gone by, he remained the product of an early education that had taught him to read printed words with difficulty and to believe them with ease; so that he did indeed believe the things he could read with least difficulty—which included the sporting pages of the daily papers, Old Moore’s predictions, and “powerful articles” by the more down-writing journalists of the day. He had a few fierce hatreds (for such things as red tape, government interference, and Mrs. Grundy) and a few equally fierce affections, such as for Horatio Bottomley, “good old Teddy” (meaning the late King Edward the Seventh), and Oxford in the Boat Race. He took pride in the oft-repeated claim that “there ain’t a more gentlemanly House than the Owl in all London,” and that it should shelter a victim of the things he most hated added zest to a naturally generous impulse. “Pack of Burercratic busybodies,” he exclaimed, during his first meeting with the victim. “Just let ’em come ’ere, that’s all. I’ve still got strength to give ’em what I gave the Gunner!” What he had given the Gunner (at Shoreditch on May 17,1902) was a straight left hook in the fourteenth round—this being the peak of his career, and one which, in money and fame, he had never afterwards approached. But he had bought the Owl with the money, and the fame, carefully husbanded too, had survived pretty well within a ten-mile radius of his own brass-bound beer engines.

So Smith began to work in the garden of the Owl; and in the meantime President Wilson crossed the Atlantic to be cheered as a new Messiah in the streets of London, Rome, and Paris; English, French, and American troops held the Rhine bridgeheads; the first trains crept again through the defiles of the Brenner; and in the great cities of central and eastern Europe revolution and famine stalked together.

It was the Biffer’s second-favorite boast that from the garden of the Owl you could see “the Palace” on a dear day—the Alexandra Palace, that was, seven miles west across the Lea Valley; in the other direction the trees of Epping Forest made a darkly etched panorama that grew brown, and then suddenly green, as spring advanced. There was only preparatory gardening to be done until that time, but then the grass grew long in a single week and a line of daffodils flowered in every window box. Hardly anyone visited the garden during the daytime, and by evening, when a few already preferred to take their drinks out of doors, Smith was in bed and asleep, except on Sundays, when Paula would generally pay a visit if her show were playing in or near London.

Of course he knew she didn’t come to see him only, but chiefly the Biffer and the crowd in the bar, who all seemed to be her friends and greeted her with vociferous cordiality; naturally she spent a good deal of the time with them, and it wasn’t easy to get away for a solitary chat with a semi-invalid. She managed it, though, as a rule, meeting him in the garden and walking with him along the Forest paths as far as the big beech trees. He enjoyed such walks, because it was dark and he still shrank from meeting people; but he also shrank from the thought that he might be dragging her away from much livelier company in the bar. He tried to tell her this.

“Don’t you worry, Smithy. I won’t let you bore me.”

“But you have such a good time with the crowd.”

“I know—that’s because I like people. Can’t help it. But don’t think so little of yourself—you’re included. Gives me plenty of fun to see you getting better like this, week by week.”

“Yes, I think I am getting better.”

“You only think you are?”

“I still don’t like to talk to people, though.” He tried to explain. “It isn’t so much fear of them as a sort of uneasiness—as if I really oughtn’t to be alive, and everybody knows it and wonders why I still am. I know that’s foolish, but it isn’t enough to know—I’ve got to feel, before I can free myself.”

“You will, Smithy. You’ll suddenly feel you’re free as air one of these days.”

“If I do, I’ll have you to thank—chiefly. You’ve given me so much of your tune.”

“Oh God, don’t start being grateful. Listen, I’ll tell you something. If you oughtn’t to be here, neither should I, and I wouldn’t be, but for luck. A house I was living in was hit by a bomb—I was asleep in one room and two people were killed in the next. I wasn’t going to tell you that—thought it might upset you to be reminded of the war, but now maybe it’ll cheer you up to think we’re born like that. They did their best to finish us off, Smithy, but we managed to trick ’em somehow or other. That’s the way to feel, and it’s easier now the war’s over and there’s a future.”

“I’d like to feel that, if I could.”

“You will. You’ll go on getting better, and then one night I’ll see you in the front row of the stalls, watching the show.”

“Yes, I’d like to see you act.”

“Oh, don’t come for that reason. I don’t act—I’m just a comic.”

“I will come, when I’m better.”

“That’s a promise, now!”

There wasn’t only the question of his reluctance to meet strangers. Any prospective employer, no matter how sympathetic, would ask for details of his history, his army discharge papers and so on, and if it came out that he’d escaped from a mental hospital the authorities would certainly send him back there, at least for tests and observation, and if he were sent back, even for a short time, he felt terribly certain he would get worse again. There was nothing for it but to stay where he was and be thankful for such a sanctuary; it was really an astounding piece of good fortune ever to have found it. So he stayed, pottering about the Owl garden and gradually returning to the world of ordinary awareness. There came a day when he could open a newspaper and face whatever catastrophe the turn of a page might reveal; another day when he could pick up an exciting novel without perilously identifying himself with one or other of the characters. He was recovering.

Sometimes while he was busy in the garden the landlord, puffing and sweating in his shirtsleeves, would bring out a couple of pints of beer. He took a naïve, childlike interest in his protégé. “Easy does it, mate—don’t work your head off. Seen the paper? They ’aven’t ’anged the old Kaiser yet, but it looks like they’ll do for this chap Landru—supposed to have murdered twenty women—what d’you think of that?”

Smith didn’t have to answer much, because the Biffer was always glad to talk, especially about his favorite diversion, which was a word competition in a well-known weekly paper. He usually sent in several entries; they consisted of some supposedly apt comment on a selected phrase. The prize-winning comment generally had wit, or at least a double meaning; but the Biffer could never grasp that, and his hard-wrought efforts were invariably trite, and just as invariably failed to score. But every night in the private bar he would discuss them with his regular customers, and in the daytime he was glad enough to add the new gardener to his list of consultants. The latter, encouraged to take a rest from work and study the weekly contest, soon developed an inkling of what might stand a chance, and from time to time made suggestions that the Biffer dutifully incorporated into his own efforts. Suddenly one of them won a prize of a hundred pounds, and never since his epic fight with the Gunner had anything happened to give the Biffer a greater feeling of elation. His first response was to insist on an equal split, paid over there and then in five-pound notes, for he believed (more truly than he realized) that the gardener’s emendation might have helped. But that was not all. In the Owl bar that same evening, under stress of many drinks and congratulations, he could not withhold credit as well as cash from his collaborator. “Quiet well-spoken sort of chap—stammers a bit—been shell-shocked in the war. Matter of fact, they ’ad ’im locked up in that big guv’ment hospital at Melbury till the poor chap got away. I reckon that’s a fine joke on them guv’ment busybodies—a feller they make out is off ’is chump goes and thinks up something that wins a hundred quid!” And the more the Biffer contemplated this extremely ironic circumstance, the more he repeated and elaborated it over a period of several hours and before changing audiences.

A few evenings later Smith was tidying up in the greenhouse; but it was a Sunday and there had not been much to do. It was hardly time for Paula to come yet, even if she did come; he knew she was at Selchester that week—perhaps it was too far away. The uncertainty as to whether she would come or not made a curious little fret inside him; it didn’t matter so much if she wasn’t coming provided he hadn’t looked forward to it in advance. That brought him to a realization of how much he did look forward to her visits. Of course, now that he was getting better he didn’t expect to see her so much; she had been kind while he was ill, he mustn’t trade on that. And another thing was curious—his memory of the night she had brought him to the Owl, every word she had said, little intimacies of physical presence, details that swung like lamps amidst the background of fever and delirium. He could hardly believe that certain things had happened at all, that she had so comforted him throughout that long night of Armistice. There had been no other nights like that, there never would be, neither in his life nor in the world’s. He could not expect it; and it was natural that their relationship, begun in such a wild vacuum of despair and ecstasy, should by now have become a more normal one.

Suddenly the greenhouse door opened and she stood there in the sunlight, breathless. “Oh Smithy, you’ve got to go—immediately! Drop those things and don’t stay here a moment longer. I’ll pack your bag—I’ll find where everything is—meet me in the Forest by the beech trees in half an hour! But go now—don’t waste any time—”

“But what’s the matter? What on earth’s happened?”

“Two men from Melbury Hospital talking to Biffer in the bar. They’ve come for you.”

“For me?” He stared at her, bewildered at first, then enraged and indignant. “They want to take me back? They still want to get me?”

She ran to him, holding him, trying to stop his cries. “Don’t shout—and don’t argue—just go as I tell you!” She pulled him out of the greenhouse and across the garden to the side gate. “Wait for me—you know where—I shan’t be long.”

They met again, under the trees. He was calmer; he had waited, smoking cigarettes and thinking things out. The day had been hot and pockets of warm air lingered amidst the fast-cooling shades. The Forest was very beautiful, and something in him was beginning to respond to beauty, as to anger and indignation also. He sprang to eagerness as he saw her approach, carrying bags and parcels. They stood still for a moment, while she regained her breath. “It’s all right—nobody saw you—we’re safe so far. The men have gone—the Biffer got mad and said he’d give ’em what he gave the Gunner.” She laughed. “But of course that wouldn’t help—they’ve got the law on their side—the law and the doctors. … I didn’t say much to Biffer. He means well, but as soon as he’s had a few drinks he tells all he knows, which isn’t much as a rule, but it’s too much just now. So he’d better not know about us till he finds out.”

“Us?”

“Well, of course. We’re going together, aren’t we?”

“But how can—I mean—”

“Are you being the little gentleman again?”

“It’s not that, but isn’t it time—”

“Listen, Smithy, I’m only trying to help you—”

“I know that, but it’s time I began helping myself.”

“What a moment to think of it!”

“It isn’t that I’m not grateful, but—”

“I know, you feel independent. Well go on your own then, but where will it take you? You haven’t an idea. One place is as good as another, what’s wrong with Selchester then? I’m there for the week and after I’ve gone you can do as you like. … You’ve got those ten fivers in your pocket, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then hand over half to me.”

He did so, willingly and seriously; she took them with a laugh. “Thanks, Smithy—you’ll feel better now.”

They reached Selchester late at night, after a confused journey by various trains and buses; but all the way he had been aware of a barrier rising between them, so that at Selchester Station she summoned a cab and did not suggest that he accompany her. “You’ll be all right, Smithy—the town’s full of pubs and lodgings—I reckon you’d rather choose one yourself. I lodge with the company, of course. Well, good night—you’re safe here if you look after yourself, and you will, won’t you?” She leaned up and gave him a sudden kiss—the first she had ever given him, but he knew it meant less than her hand touch the first time they had met. “Good night, old boy,” she repeated.

“Good night, Paula.”

When her cab turned the corner and he was left alone with the crowd of strangers in the station yard, he felt suddenly, hopelessly lost. It was a sensation of sheer panic for the moment, but he conquered it—as if he had seen a loathed insect and shudderingly ground it with his heel. He walked into a near-by hotel and engaged a cheap room under the name of Smith. They gave him a very small attic with dormer windows and a view over the railway goods yard; throughout the flight he kept waking up with a start whenever express trains screamed by, but somehow he did not mind that kind of panic; it was the inner kind that paralyzed him—or rather, could not quite paralyze him any more, since he had fought it, alone and so terribly, after she had gone. How comforting, as well as fearful, that word alone was; he wanted aloneness, because it was the hardest training ground for the kind of strength he also wanted; and yet, once he had that strength, he knew he would not wish to be alone. And he knew, too, that his feeling for Paula was no longer an eagerness to submit, like a child; but something positive, strong enough to demand equality, if there were ever to be any further relationship between them at all. He knew there probably could not be. That warm outpouring pity had saved his life, but he could only keep his life from now on by refusing it. Lying awake that night in the Station Hotel, he made up his mind that he would not try to see her in Selchester that week; she would be busy, no doubt, with rehearsals and performances; and he, too, ought to be busy—looking for a job if the town offered any, and if not, deciding where else to go.

For five days he walked about Selchester alone. He visited the Cathedral, sat for hours in the Close under the trees, spent an afternoon in a very dull municipal museum, watched the trains in and out of the railway station, read the papers in the free library. None of these pursuits involved conversation, and—except to waitresses and the maid at the hotel—he did not utter a word for anyone to hear. Sometimes, however, during walks in the surrounding country, he talked to himself a little—not from eccentricity, but to reassure himself of the power of speech. There were a few factories also that he scouted around, wondering if he should ask for a job, but sooner or later he always found a door with a notice “No Hands Wanted.” He knew that subconsciously he was glad, because he still feared the ordeal of cross-examination by strangers.

One rainy afternoon he sat in the refreshment room at the railway station, drinking a third cup of tea that he did not want and staring at an old magazine that he was not reading. Curious how one had to simulate some normal activity or purpose in life, even if one hadn’t one, or especially if one had a secret one; in a town café he could not have stayed so long without attracting attention, but at the station it was merely supposed he was waiting for a train. Trains were things people waited hours for; one did not, unless one were peculiar, wait hours for a desire to clarify itself. But that was what he was waiting for. It was Saturday; he had been in Selchester almost a week. He had a definite desire to go to the theater and see the show, but he could not decide until he felt certain what his desire signified. If it were weakness, an urge to go back on his pledge to himself, he would not give way; he could endure plenty more of the aloneness, it would not break him. But, on the other hand, supposing it were not weakness but strength—supposing it meant that he could now walk into a theater as normally as into a library or museum, could face the crowd and the lights and the excitement without a qualm?

He had walked past the theater several times and had judged the kind of show it was from bills and photographs; nothing very uplifting, but probably good entertainment, and it would be interesting to see what she was capable of. Thus, he made his desire seem casual, normal, almost unimportant, until suddenly he decided he was strong and not weak enough to go. He got up and walked briskly to the counter to pay for the tea. “Gettin’ tired of waitin’?” remarked the girl, with mild interest “The Winton train’s late today.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling. “I think I’ll get a breath of fresh air.”

He left the station and walked through the rain to the center of the city, feeling more and more confident.

It was an odd thing, this loss of memory; he could not remember personal things about himself, yet he had a background of experience that gave him a certain maturity of judgment. He had probably been to many theaters before, just as he had probably been to schools and received a decent education. There were things he knew that he could only have picked up from school-books, other things that he could only have learned from some forgotten event. It was as if his memory existed, but was submerged; as if he could lower a net and drag something up, but only blindfold, haphazardly, without the power of selection. He could not stare into the past; he could only grope. But by some kind of queer compensation, his eyes for the present were preternaturally bright; like a child’s eyes, naïve, ingenuous, questioning.

In such a mood he sat in the third row at the first house of the Selchester Hippodrome that night and looked upon a show called Salute the Flag, described on the program as “a stirring heart-gripping drama, pulsating with patriotism and lit by flashes of sparkling comedy.” Actually it was a hangover from wartime, having begun in 1914 as a straight melodrama with no comedy at all, but with many rousing speeches that audiences in those days had liked to cheer. Then, as the war progressed and the popular mood changed from that of Rupert Brooke to that of Horatio Bottomley, the patriotic harangues were shortened to make room for the writing in of a comic part, which speedily became such a success that by 1918 the show had developed into a series of clowning episodes behind which the dramatic structure of what had once been a very bad play appeared only intermittently. Nobody knew the authorship of the original, or of any of the later accretions; successive actors had added a gag here and a gag there; every now and then the show became too long, and the parts left but were naturally those that elicited neither laughs nor cheers, no matter how essential they were to the original plot. But nobody minded that—least of all the audiences who paid their ninepences and shillings in the few remaining small-town English theaters that had so far escaped conversion into Cinema houses. Salute the Flag had certainly helped to preserve the very existence of such a minority; it had also made a great deal of money for a great many people. Probably, in the aggregate, it had been more profitable than many a better-known and well-advertised West End success.

Smith found it endurable, even before the moment when Paula appeared. Her part in the play was trivial, that of an impudent girl at a hotel desk who got people’s bedrooms mixed up, but in one of the other scenes she stepped out of the part for a few impersonations in front of the drop curtain; he thought them pretty good, not from any definite competence to judge, but because of the warm vitality that came over the footlights with them, her own rich personality, full of giving—even to a twice-nightly audience. Evidently the audience too were aware of this, for they cheered uproariously, despite the likelihood that few had seen the originals, which included Gerald du Maurier, Gladys Cooper, Mrs. Pat Campbell, and the ex-Kaiser. They cheered so much that she came on again to give an impression of a society woman telephoning her lover, all smiles and simperings, in the midst of grumbling at her maid, all scowls and snarls—a bit of broad unsubtle farce that demanded, however, a sure technique of changed accents and facial expressions. She did not appear again till the final scene in the last act, when the heroine, a nurse, unfolded a huge and rather dirty flag in front of her, and with the words “You kennot fahr on helpless womankind” defied the villain, who wore the uniform of a German army officer, until such time as the entire rest of the company rushed on to the stage to hustle him off under arrest and to bring down the curtain with the singing of a patriotic chorus.

Smith was halfway down the aisle on his way out of the theater when an usher touched him on the arm. “Excuse me, sir, one of the artists would like you to go behind, if you’d care to. She says you’d know who it was.”

He hesitated a moment, then answered: “Why, of course.”

“This way, sir.”

He was led back towards the stage, stooping under the brass rail into the orchestra, stepping warily amidst music stands and instruments, then stooping again to descend a narrow staircase leading under the stage into an arena of ropes and canvas. The usher piloted him beyond all this into a corridor lined by doors; on one of them he tapped. “The gentleman’s here, miss.” A moment’s pause. “I expect she’s dressing, sir—you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back.”

Again, after the usher had left him, he felt the beginnings of panic, but it was different now—an excitement that he fought only as much as he wanted to fight it. And the door opened before he could either yield or conquer to any extent.

“Oh, Smithy—Smithy—you kept your promise!”

She dragged him into the room with both hands and closed the door. It was a shabby little dressing room, with one fierce light over a mirrored table littered with paints and cosmetics; playbills and an old calendar on the wall; clothes thrown across a chair; a mixture of smells—grease paint, burnt hair, cigarettes, cheap perfume, lysol. She wore a dressing gown over the skimpy costume in which she was soon to appear again.

“I didn’t see you till the end—glad I didn’t—I’d have been so excited I’d have ruined the show.”

He said, smiling: “I enjoyed it very much—especially your part.”

“Oh no, Smithy, you don’t have to say things like that. … Tell me how you are! Better, I can see—or you wouldn’t be here. But what have you been doing with yourself all week?”

“Oh, just looking around. Have to find some sort of a job, you know.”

“Any luck?”

“Not so far. I somehow don’t feel Selchester’s a very good place to try.”

“We’re going on to Rochby next week. More chance in a place like that, maybe.”

“I daresay I’ll get something somewhere.”

“And you feel better?”

“Oh yes—fine.”

The call boy shouted through the door, “Five minutes, miss.”

“That means I’ve only got five minutes.” She paused, then laughed. “I do say intelligent things, don’t I?”

He laughed also. “They keep you pretty busy—two shows a night.”

“Yes, but this is Saturday, thank heaven. You’d be surprised what a rest Sunday is, even if you spend most of it in trains.”

“You leave in the morning?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“But it isn’t far.”

“About three hours. We have a long wait at Bletchley. Somehow that always happens. I seem to have spent days of my life waiting at Bletchley.”

“I don’t think I know Bletchley.”

“Well, you haven’t missed much. There’s nothing outside the station except a pub that never seems to be open. Oh God, what are we talking about Bletchley for? … I’ve got some money of yours, you know that? Or did you forget?”

“No, but—”

“Well, I’d better give it back since I’m off in the morning.”

She began to fumble in her dress. “I carry it about with me—doesn’t do to leave fivers lying loose.”

“Oh, but you mustn’t—”

“Well, you don’t think I’m going to keep it, do you?”

“I—I—never thought about it, but—”

“Did you think I was going to keep it?”

“Well—I don’t know—it would have been quite fair—after all, you’d done so much—”

“Listen, you little gentleman—I kept it because I thought I’d have to help you again, and I thought you’d feel better if I was spending your own money! But now you are better, thank God, and you don’t need my help, so here you are!” She pushed the notes into his pocket. “I’ve got to go on again in two minutes, so don’t make me angry! You’ll need that cash if you’re looking for a job. … What sort are you looking for?”

“Any kind, really—”

“Outdoor or indoor?”

“I’m not particular about that, provided—well, you know some of the difficulties—”

“You’re scared they’ll ask you too many questions? What you’d really like is for someone to stop you in the street and say—‘I don’t know who you are, or what you’ve been, and I don’t care either, but if you want a job, come with me.’ Isn’t that the idea?”

He laughed. “Yes, that’s exactly the idea, if anyone would.”

“You wouldn’t mind what the job turned out to be, though?”

“I think I could do anything that I’d have even the faintest chance of getting.”

“Figures? Keeping books?”

“Oh yes.”

“A bit of talk now and again—even to strangers—in that charming way you have?”

“I wouldn’t choose that sort of job, but of course—”

“You mean you’re still bothered about meeting people?”

He hesitated. She went on: “Well leave that out. What about a bit of carpentry mixed up with the bookkeeping?”

“Why carpentry?”

“Why not? … Back at the intelligent conversation, aren’t we?” The call boy knocked again. “Well … I suppose it’s got to be good-bye till we meet again—unless you want to see the show through twice—you’d be a fool if you did.”

“Perhaps I could meet you somewhere afterwards?”

“We always have supper together on Saturday nights—all the company, I mean—it’s a sort of regular custom, wherever we are. Of course I could take you as my guest, but there’d be a crowd of strangers.” Abruptly her manner changed. “Smithy, would you really come?”

“Do you want me to come?”

“I wouldn’t mind a bit, it’s what you want that matters. You’re free as air now—that’s how you always hoped to be. And they can be a rowdy gang sometimes. So please yourself, I’m not inviting you anywhere any more … but if you are coming, say so now, then I can tell them.”

He felt suddenly bold, challenging, almost truculent. “I’ll come, and I don’t care how rowdy they are.”

She flashed him a smile as she slipped off the dressing gown and put final touches to her make-up. “Number 19, Enderby Road—that’s near the cattle market—about eleven-thirty. You don’t need to hang around here for me—just go straight to the house at the time. I’ll come sharp—ahead of the others. See you then.”

The rain had stopped; he took a long walk in the washed evening air, then sat on a seat in the Cathedral Close and smoked cigarettes till the chime of eleven. He could not quell his nervousness at the thought of meeting so many strange people for the sort of evening party that was a weekly custom of theirs—that in itself made him an outsider. He half wished he hadn’t said he would go, and it occurred to him that of course he didn’t have to—if he failed to turn up, that would be the end of it. But the reflection, though tantalising tip to a point, had the stinging afterthought that he would then not see her again.

Enderby Road was a quiet cul-de-sac of Edwardian houses, most of them let to boarders; Number 19 looked no different from the others, but had a gas lamp outside the front gate. He waited there, watching for her after the Cathedral clock chimed the half-hour; it was comforting to reflect that nobody knew him yet—he was just an anonymous man standing under a lamppost Presently she turned the corner, her walk breaking into a scamper as she saw him. “On time, Smithy—I mean you are, I’m not. But I hurried to be ahead of the others—I didn’t even stop to clean off the make-up.”

She led him into the house. “Wait in the hall while I go up and finish.”

He waited about ten minutes; the hall was dark and smelt of floor polish with an added flavor—which he took practically the entire time to detect—of pickled walnuts. Near him stood a bamboo hall stand overloaded with hats and coats; the staircase disappeared upwards into the gloom with thin strips of brass outlining the ascent. Voices came from a downstairs room. He wondered what he should say if anyone came out of one of the rooms and accosted him, but when the thing happened it turned out to be no problem at all; the voices stopped, a thin old man with a high domed forehead suddenly emerged through one of the doors, collided with him, murmured “Pardon,” and disappeared along the passage. After a moment, he returned, collided again, murmured “Pardon” again, and re-entered the room. Then the voices were resumed.

Soon after that she came down the stairs two at a time, to whisper excitedly: “Now I’m ready.”

They entered the room, in which—despite the voices—there was only one person, the thin old dome-headed man; he was sitting at the dining table with a large book open before him, propped against the cruet. The domed head rose over the book as from behind a rampart.

“Mr. Lanvin—this is Mr. Smith.”

“A pleasure to meet you, my dear sir.” He smiled, but did not offer to shake hands. Then he closed the book slowly, and Smith could see it was a Braille edition. Somehow that gave him peculiar confidence; Lanvin could not see him, could only judge him by his voice; so for the time being he had only one thing to concentrate on.

Lanvin was placing the book exactly in its place on a shelf; it was clear he knew by touch and feeling every inch of the geography of the room. “So you are to join the weekly celebration, Mr. Smith?”

“That seems to be the idea. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind? I’m a guest like yourself, though I’ve been one before. I warn you—they’re a noisy lot—though no noisier than I used to be in my young days. If they weary you later on, come over and talk to me.”

Smith said he certainly would, and Mr. Lanvin began to talk about Shakespeare. It seemed he had been reading The Merchant of Venice, taking the various parts in various voices. “I used to be quite a good Shylock, though I say it myself—and of course it’s a fine acting part, and the trial scene has wonderful moments. But taking it all in all, you know, it’s a bad play—a bad play. Why do they always choose it for school use? The pound of flesh—gruesome. The Jewish villain—disgustingly anti-Semitic. And a woman lawyer—stark feminism. … Oh, a bad play, my dear sir. You’re not a schoolmaster, by any chance?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Because if you were, I should like to … but never mind that. Since my eyes compelled me to retire from the stage I’ve spent a great deal of my time reading, and do you know, the Braille system gives one a really new insight into literature. You see, you can’t skip—you have to read every word, and that gives you time to think for yourself, to criticize, to revalue—”

Meanwhile the door had reopened and a heavily built, red-faced, pouchy-eyed man stood in the entrance, waiting till he was quite sure he had been seen before stepping further into the room. Eventually he did so, exclaiming: “Paula, my angel, so this is the friend you spoke of?”

She completed the introduction; the red-faced man’s name was Borley. He lost no time in dominating the scene. “Fine to have you with us, old chap.” And then, dropping his voice to an almost secret parenthesis and leaning over the table with the gesture of one about to unveil something: “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but the food in English boardinghouses is always in inverse proportion to the size of the cruet. The larger the cruet, that is, the worse the food. Now this is a perfectly enormous cruet.” He gave it a highly dramatic long-range scrutiny. “You’d think it ought to light up or play music or something—it’s really more like a municipal bandstand than a receptacle for Mrs. Gregory’s stale condiments.”

Just late enough to miss these remarks the landlady entered with a trayful of small meat pies. Smith had to be introduced to her also, and it was Mr. Borley who made haste to do this. “Mrs. Gregory, I was just remarking on the quality of your food, and I perceive from yonder succulent morsels that all I have said will soon be amply demonstrated!” Whereupon Mr. Borley delivered a portentous wink all round the room while Mrs. Gregory bounced the tray on the table without much response. She looked so completely indifferent to the bogus compliment that Mr. Borley’s joke was somewhat dulled. “Glad to serve you all,” she muttered. “I do my best, as the saying goes—consequently is, I keep my reg’lars.”

“You not only keep us, Mrs. Gregory, but we keep you—and proud to do it!”

She shuffled out of the room, leaving Mr. Borley to proffer the dish of pies with an air of controlled distaste. “Well, the risk’s yours, Smithy. Don’t mind if I call you Smithy, do you? That’s what she calls you.”

Rather to his surprise, after all this, Smith found the pies excellent. He said so to Mr. Borley, adding that he was even hungry enough to have another.

“Right you are, then—and fortified by your example I’ll even try one myself.” Mr. Borley then began eating and hardly stopped throughout the entire rest of the evening He added, with his mouth full: “But if you’re a hungry man, God help you at Mrs. Beagle’s!”

Smith did not see how the food at Mrs. Beagle’s, whoever and wherever she was, could be any concern of his, but he had no time to explore the point because another member of the party had just arrived—a young man in tweeds, puffing at a pipe, almost like a magazine advertisement of either the tweeds or the pipe; he had a pink, over-handsome, rather weak face to which only premature dissipation had begun to lend some interest. Once again Mr. Borley officiated at the introduction, and while he was still performing two other persons entered, one a pale thin girl with a large nose and spotty complexion, the other an elderly silver-haired man of such profoundly sorrowful appearance that the beholder could not keep back a first response of sympathy. Mr. Borley had to summon all his technical powers to hold attention against such competition, but he did his best by shouting the further introductions.

The silver-haired man smiled and bowed, while the girl marched on Smith, delivered a crunching handshake, strode to the window, stared out for a moment as if deeply meditating, then swung round with husky intensity. “Oh, Mr., Smith, hasn’t it been a wonderful day? I’m sure you’re a rain lover like me!”.

Smith felt somewhat cheered by a feeling that in this encounter all the others were standing round to see fair play, especially when the tweedy youth nudged him in the ribs. “Don’t worry about her—she’s always like that. Why Tommy married her nobody can imagine—not even Tommy any more … can you, Tommy?”

Here a sharp-nosed, jockey-sized man with bloodshot blue eyes and straw-colored hair came across the room to be introduced, shook hands wordlessly and continued to do so while he glanced around with concentrated expressionlessness. Presently, turning his eyes on Smith, he whispered: “What made you first take an interest in slumming?” He went on, before Smith could think of any reply: “We’re just a low vulgar crowd. Rogues and vagabonds, they called us in Shakespeare’s time—am I right, Lanvin? We have no homes, we live in dingy lodginghouses in every middle-sized town in England, we know which landlady counts the potatoes, which theater’s full of fleas, and which has a roof that leaks on the stage when it rains. None of your high’ class West End stuff for us—we lure the coppers, the orange peel, and the monkey nuts and we spend our one-day-a-week holiday chewing stale sandwiches in Sunday trains.”

Mrs. Gregory then came in with what was evidently the main dish—quantities of fried fish, chip potatoes, and hot peas; meanwhile Mr. Borley had been out and now reappeared carrying a crate of bottled beer. The party began to find places at the table while the sorrowful-looking man, whose name was Margesson and whom one would have expected to speak like an archbishop boomed across the table quite unsorrowfully and with the zest and accent of an auctioneer: “Ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you that we shall soon be at the mercy of Mrs. Beagle.” Here followed a chorus of groans and catcalls. “So I’m not going to keep you from the really serious business of the evening, which is to eat the last decent meal we shall have for a week. Before we begin, though, and speaking as the senior member of this company,—bar Lanvin, who’s a permanent resident,—may I offer you a welcome, Mr. Smith, and beg you to take no further notice of that truncated nitwit Tommy Belden, nor of that moon-faced stewpan, Richard Borley, nor of …” He had an insult for each of them, culminating in the arrival of a fat over-powdered woman with a large smile she bestowed upon everyone from the doorway, whereupon Margesson turned on her and exclaimed: “Now, Miss Donovan, you old bag of bones, don’t stand there ogling the men—come and meet our guest, Mr. Smith, commonly called Smithy—”

And so it went on. Not till weeks later, when he had got to know them as human beings, did he realize that they had behaved with extra extravagance that evening in order to put him at his ease, and that the insults were a convention in which they took particular pride—the more horrific and ingenious, the warmer the note of friendliness indicated. A climax came when Margesson, at the end of dinner, rose to make an appeal on behalf of an actor whom they had formerly known and who had fallen on bad times, Margesson’s speech began: “Ladies and gentlemen, if such there still are among this depraved and drink-sodden gathering—some of you, even in your cups, may remember Dickie Mason, one of the dirtiest dogs who ever trod the boards of a provincial hippodrome—”

The party lasted till after three in the morning, and was only then dissolved at the energetic request of Mrs. Gregory, who said the neighbors were being disturbed. Towards the end of it, Margesson took Smith aside and said: “Well? Can you stand us?”

Smith answered with a laugh: “I think so. I’m having quite a good time, anyhow.”

“The train’s at ten tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, Paula told me.”

“Some people sleep late, that’s all.”

That seemed another odd remark, but he didn’t begin to grasp its significance till later on when several people shook hands or clapped him on the back with the remark: “See you tomorrow, Smithy.”

Paula walked with him to the corner of the road. He said: “I’m really glad I came—they’re a warmhearted lot, and it’s nice of them to expect me to see them off in the morning.”

“I’d better tell you what else they expect. They think you’re coming with us—to Rochby and all the other places.”

“But—”

“Now don’t begin to argue. Maybe I’ve bungled again—you’ve only got to say so, and the whole idea’s dropped. But there’s a job for you if you want it. In fact it’s just about a hundred jobs rolled into one—you’ll find that out, if you take it on, and if you don’t like it or something better turns up, then you’re free to go like a shot.”

He said quietly: “What did you tell them about me?”

“Just part of the truth. I said you’d been ill, that you were better now, that you were a friend of mine, and that you wanted a job. … But all that didn’t get it for you—don’t worry.”

“What did, then?”

She laughed in his face. “I may as well go on telling the truth, even if you hate me for it. I think it was probably because they could all see you were such a gentleman.”

Afterwards he realized the meaning behind the remark. The other members of the company were not gentlemen, nor ladies either, in the restricted sense of the word. They could act the part, successfully—even terrifically; no duke or baronet ever wore an opera cloak or swung a gold-knobbed cane with such superb nonchalance as Mr. Borley—indeed, it is extremely probable that many a duke and baronet never possessed an opera cloak, or swung a gold-knobbed cane at all. And that, of course, was the point. The gentlemen in Salute the Flag lived up to the ninepenny-seat idea of gentlemen; they were much realer than the real thing. So also in speech and accent nobody could approach Paula for aristocratic hauteur: when, in her impersonation of a duchess, she exclaimed to a footman, “Do my bidding, idiot!” the blue blood became almost as translucent in her veins as in those of Mr. Borley when the latter addressed the German officer—“You contemptible hound—you unmitigated cur—you spawn of a degenerate autocracy!”

In private life, so far as members of a second-rate touring company could enjoy any, they tended to keep up the manners and moods of their professional parts, combining them with a loud geniality expressed by a profusion of “old boys” and hearty back-slappings; yet behind all that they well knew the difference between the real and the too real, and how the same difference was apt to be recognized by others. Hence the usefulness of Smith. He had a way with him, despite—or perhaps because of—his shyness, diffidence, embarrassments, hesitations. Where Mr. Borley’s loud and overconfident “Trust me till the end of the week, old chap” failed to impress a country tradesman, Smith could enter a shop where he wasn’t known and ask for what he wanted to be sent to his hotel without even mentioning payment. And where even Mr. Margesson could not, with all his sorrowful glances, persuade a small-town editor to print as news a column of disguised and badly composed puffery, Smith could rewrite the stuff and have the newspapers eager for it.

No doubt it was for somewhat similar reasons that Nicholas Nickleby became a success with the company of Vincent Crummies—except, of course, that Nicholas graduated as an actor. Smith did not aspire to that, but he speedily became almost everything else—advance press agent, scene painter, bookkeeper, copy writer, toucher-up of scenes that were either too long or too short or not wholly successful, general handy man, odd-jobber, negotiator, public representative, and private adviser. He was always busy, yet never hurried; always pleasant; yet never effusive; always reserved, yet never disdainful. In short, a perfect gentleman.

There certainly could not have been devised a more likely cure for all that remained of his mental and temperamental difficulties. The constant meetings with strangers, the continual handling of new problems and thinking out of extempore solutions, the traveling from one town to another, the settlement in new lodgings—all combined to break down the pathological part of his shyness; yet shyness still remained, and with it there developed an almost ascetic enjoyment of certain things—of rainy hours on railway platforms with nothing to do but watch the maneuvers of shunting in a goods yard, of reading the numbers on houses in a strange town late at night, knowing that one of them hid a passing and unimportant destiny. His work also brought him into contact with average citizens of these many provincial towns—the barber, the tobacconist, the stationmaster, the shopkeepers who were given a couple of free seats in exchange for a playbill exhibited in their windows, the parson who sometimes preached a sermon attacking the show as indecent (good publicity if you could get it), sometimes the parson who came himself with his wife and children, but most often the parson who neither attacked nor patronized, but just passed by in the street with a preoccupied air, recognizing the smartly dressed strangers as “theatricals” and therefore in some vaguely opposite but no longer warring camp. One of these clerics, with whom Smith got into conversation, commented that the Church and the theater were now potential allies, being both sufferers from the same public indifference—“Your leaky roof and my leaky roof are the price paid for the new cathedrals of Mammon.” Whereupon he pointed across the street to a new cinema advertising a film which, so it turned out after further conversation, they had both of them recently enjoyed.

Smith saw a good deal of Paula during these busy days and even busier evenings, but somehow their relationship did not seem to progress to anything warmer or more intimate. Outwardly he became just as friendly with a few of the others, especially with young Ponderby, the tweedy youth, whom he grew to like. Ponderby was not much of an actor; his job depended entirely on the possession of astoundingly conventional good looks. In Salute the Flag all he had was a couple of lines; he rushed into the general’s headquarters with the cry, “The enemy are attacking! Give the order to advance!”—whereupon the general, who was a spy in disguise, was supposed to look sinister while Ponderby backed towards the door, delivering his second line as an exit: “Or if you don’t, sir, then, by heaven, I will myself!” This was designed to bring a round of applause, and by careful attention to timing and movement Ponderby usually got one. Margesson, who managed the company, was very strict about everyone getting his “round.” There was a technique about such things: you stood in the doorway, hand on the doorknob, staring hard and throwing your voice up to the farthest corner of the gallery—if the “round” didn’t come, or came too sluggishly, you rattled the doorknob and repeated the final line with greater emphasis.

One Saturday, in the town of Fulverton, Ponderby spent the morning drinking in an attempt to destroy the effect of too much drinking the night before; by midafternoon, when he and Smith happened to be alone together in the lodginghouse, it was clear that he could perform in the evening only with extreme hazard, if at all. He had done this sort of thing several times before, so Smith neither believed nor disbelieved a story of bad news from home; but he felt some sympathy for the youth, especially as he knew this latest offense would probably cost him his job. Ponderby knew this too, and as the hour approached for the first show he took quantities of aspirin and pick-me-ups, all of which only added to his symptoms of physical illness. By six o’clock he was begging Smith to take over his part, as the only way by which Margesson might be placated; after all, provided the show wasn’t interfered with, Margesson might not care—the part was so small, and the clothes would fit too. Smith was reluctant to agree; he didn’t feel he would be any good as an actor, even in the least possible part; but then Ponderby wasn’t good either, so that argument didn’t carry far. And it was undoubtedly true that the part, though small, was structurally important, so that a last-minute cut would be extremely awkward; and Saturday, also, was the best night for Fulverton audiences. Everything forced him to an eventual consent, subject to Margesson’s approval; but he still did not like the idea.

He went to the theater earlier than usual and found Margesson in the midst of some trouble with scene shifters; when he said that Ponderby was ill and he himself could take his part, Margesson merely answered in a hurry: “Had too much to drink again, I suppose. … All right then—mind you get your round.”

He did not have any chance to tell Paula about it, but the news that he was taking Ponderby’s part caused little surprise; he was such a handy man, and the part was only two lines—there seemed nothing very remarkable about the arrangement.

He was a trifle nervous as he changed into the uniform of a British second lieutenant, but not more so than he often was at times when people would never guess it. Quite a natural nervousness too; he knew that many actors and public speakers were always like that, it was really abnormal not to be. Something in the look of himself in the mirror struck a half-heard chord in his submerged memory; he did not come on till the middle of the last act, so he had time to smoke cigarettes and try to catch the chord again, but that was stupid; the more he stared at himself in the mirror, the less he could remember anything at all. Then suddenly, with a frightening stab of panic, he asked himself what Ponderby’s lines were—he had never thought of memorizing them, because he assumed he knew them so well; he practically knew the whole show by heart, for that matter—they all did. But now, when he sought to speak them to himself, what the devil were they? He tried to visualize that part of the play: the general at his desk, twirling his mustaches and muttering “Hein” under his breath—that was to show he was a spy in disguise; then Ponderby rushing in—“The enemy are attacking! Give the order to advance!” Now why should a second lieutenant tell a general what to do? Never mind—that was part of the play. Anyhow, Ponderby backed across the stage—not too quick, though—give the general time to give some more twirls and look suspicious; then on the exit—“Or if you don’t, sir, then, by heaven, I will myself!” That was it; and wait for the round. … He said it all over again to himself: “The enemy are attacking—give the order to advance—or, if you don’t, sir, then, by heaven, I will myself!” Twenty words—the smallest part in the show. Saying them over a third time, he heard the call boy’s “Ready, sir.”

He went out into the wings, standing where he could see the general at his desk. The general (little Tommy made up with comic mustaches) was rifling drawers with a terrific amount of noise (exactly as a spy wouldn’t do), glancing through piles of paper in search of a stolen treaty—even if it were there, he was going through them so fast that he couldn’t possibly find it; but that again had to be done or nobody would get the point—anything else was what Margesson called “this damsilly West End pansy-stuff where you come on the stage and light a cigarette with your back to the audience and call it acting.” Smith stood there, waiting for the cue, which was the word “Hein.” He felt a little queer; he was going to do something he had never done before; it would be awful if he did it badly, or didn’t get his round; the only comfort was that Ponderby did it pretty badly himself.

Suddenly he heard the general say “Hein.” It electrified him, like a word spoken inside his own head; he felt his feet as items of luggage that didn’t belong to him as he marshaled them for the forward rush. His first impression was of a dazzling brilliance and of the curious fact that there was no audience at all; then, as he stared to verify this, faces swam out of the darkness towards him: row upon row, stalls, boxes, circle, balcony, all were returning his stare from tens of thousands of eyes—quizzically, he thought at first, as if they were aware that this was the supreme moment of all drama and were anxious to compare his performance with previous ones by Irving, Coquelin, and Forbes-Robertson … but then, with a flash of uneasiness, he saw malevolence too, as if they hated him for not being Irving, even for not being Ponderby. He knew he had to conquer this uneasiness or it would conquer him, just as he knew he had to rush up to the general’s desk and say “The enemy are attacking—give the order to advance!” He saw Tommy eyeing him watchfully—that was part of the play, but Tommy’s eye held an extra watchfulness, as if he were hating him too—for not being somebody else.

And then a very dreadful thing happened; he began to stammer. It was the old, the tragic stammer—the one that made his face twist and twitch as if he were in a dentist’s chair; he stood there, facing the general, facing the audience, facing God, it almost seemed, and all he could do was wrestle with the words until they came, one after the other, each one fighting to the last.

The audience began to titter, and when he crossed the stage to struggle with the rest of the words they were already yelling with laughter. “Or if y-y-you d-d-don’t, sir, then, b-b-by G-g-god, I w-w-will m-m-myself!” The laughter rose to a shriek as he still stood there, waiting, trembling, with lips curving grotesquely and hand fumbling at the door; and when he finally rattled at the knob till it broke off and rolled across the stage into the footlights, the whole house burst into hilarious shouting while the lads in the gallery stamped their feet and whistled through two fingers for over a minute.

He got his “round” all right.

He left the stage in a daze, somehow finding himself in the wings, passing faces he knew without a word, yet noting for agonized recollection later that some looked anxious, others puzzled, a few were actually convulsed with laughter. Alone at last in the dressing room he closed the door, locked it, and for several minutes fought down an ancient resurrected hell of fear, mental darkness, and humiliation. Several knocks came at the door, but he did not answer them. Later, when the wave had passed over and he knew he was not drowned but merely swimming exhausted in an angry sea, he summoned enough energy to change his clothes. By that time the play had reached the final scene in which all the company would later be on the stage—he waited for the cue, “You cannot fire on helpless womankind,” followed by the cheers and rough-and-tumble of the rescue party. Backstage would be deserted now; he unlocked his way into the corridor and escaped through the stage door into an alley by the side of the fire staircase. As he turned the corner he could see a long queue already forming for the second performance, which reminded him that Ponderby’s part must be played by someone else in that; Margesson would have to arrange it; anyhow, that was a trifle to worry about, a mere pinhole of trouble compared with the abyss of despair that he himself was facing.

Of course he must leave; they would not wish him to stay; he could offer no explanation, because there was none that would not repeat his humiliation a hundredfold.

Hurrying across Fulverton that night, across the brightly lit Market Street full of shoppers, through the side roads where happy people lived, it seemed to him that someone was always following, footsteps that hastened under dark trees and dodged to avoid street lamps; an illusion, perhaps, but one that stirred the nag and throb of countless remembered symptoms, till it was not so much the ignominy of what had happened that weighed him down as the awareness of how thinly the skin had grown across the scar, of how near his mind still was to the chaos from which it had barely emerged. He hurried on—eager to pack his bag and be off, away from Fulverton and the troubled self he hoped to leave by the same act of movement; for surely place and self had some deep association, so that he could not now think of Melbury without… and then the renascent fear in his soul took shape; they were still trying to get him back to Melbury—they had been trying all the time, while he, falsely confident during those few weeks of respite, had gone about with an increasing boldness until that very night of self-betrayal. And such stupid, unnecessary self-betrayal before a thousand onlookers, among whom was one, perhaps, who did not laugh, but rose from his seat and quietly left the theater, taking his stand on the pavement where he could watch every exit. … Suddenly Smith began to run. They should not get him—never again. He stopped abruptly in the next patch of darkness, and surely enough the footsteps that had been following at a scamper then also stopped abruptly. He ran on again, dodging traffic at a corner and almost colliding with several passers-by. It was man to man, as yet—the enemy were attacking, give the order to advance! He turned into the short cut that led directly to his lodgings—a paved passageway under a railway viaduct. Then he saw there was a rope stretched across the entrance and a man standing in front of it.

“Sorry, sir—can’t get by this way tonight.”

“But—I—what’s the idea? Why not?”

“Can’t be helped, sir—it’s the law—one day a year we have to keep it closed, otherwise the railway company loses title.”

“But I must go—I’m in a hurry!”

“Now come on, sir, I’m only doing my duty—don’t give me no trouble—”

Suddenly he realized that there was more than one enemy; this man was another; there were thousands of them, everywhere; they probably had the district surrounded already. …

“Come along, sir, act peaceable—”

“Peaceable? Then why are you carrying that gun?”

“Gun? Why, you’re off your chump—I’ve got no gun! D’you mean this pipe?”

But he wasn’t taken in by that, any more than by the nonsense about the railway company and its tide; he jumped the rope, hurling the fellow aside, and ran along the passageway; in a couple of minutes he had reached the lodginghouse, whereas it would have taken ten by the road.

He had hoped to have the place to himself, knowing that on Saturday nights most landladies did their week-end shopping. But he had forgotten Ponderby, who shouted a slurred greeting from the sitting room as he passed by to climb the stairs. “Hello, Smithy—get along all right? Knew you would—nothing to it—damn nice of you, though, to help me out …”

He heard Ponderby staggering into the lobby and beginning to follow him upstairs, but the youth was very drunk and made long pauses at each step, continuing to shout meanwhile: “Was Margie wild? I’ll bet he would have been but for you. Why don’t you come down and have a drink with me—you deserve it. … Friend indeed and a friend in need—that’s what you are—no, I’m the friend in need and you’re the … oh well, never could understand the thing properly. What’re you doing up there? Not going to bed yet surely? What time is it? Maybe I’d better go to bed, then they’ll all know I’ve been ill. … What’s that? Can’t hear what you say. …”

Smith repeated: “No, don’t come up, I’m coming down.”

“All right, Smithy—I’ll go down too and get you a little drink. Must have a little drink—you deserve it.”

By this time Smith had packed; he was naturally a tidy person, and having to do so regularly had made him expert and the job almost automatic. As he descended the stairs he felt calmer, readier to do battle with the forces arrayed against him; and that made him feel a little warm towards the weak healthy boy who never did battle at all, but just drank and debauched himself in a bored, zestless way. He turned into the sitting room, where Ponderby lay sprawled again on the sofa, head buried in the cushions.

“Hello, old boy—was just mixing you a drink when this awful headache came on again. Don’t mind me—sit down and give me all the news.”

Smith did not sit down, but he took the tumbler, which was almost half full of neat whiskey, poured most of it back into the bottle, and sipped the remainder. He did not usually drink, but he hoped now it might help to steady his nerves, might give him greater calmness for the journey, wherever that was to be.

“Tell me all the news, Smithy. Don’t mind me—I’ve got an awful head, but I’m listening.”

Smith said there was no particular news to tell.

“Oh, I don’t mean the theater—damn the theater—I mean news. Heard the paper boy in the street an hour ago—shouting something—went out and bought one—there it is—couldn’t read it, though—my eyes gave out on me. What’s been happening in the world?”

Smith stooped to pick up the paper with momentary excitement; was it possible that already … no, of course not—an hour ago was actually before the thing happened, apart from the time it would take to make a report and get it printed. He glanced at the headlines. “Seems those two fellows have flown across the Atlantic—Alcock and Brown.”

“Flown across the Atlantic? That’s a damn silly thing to do—but I’ll tell you what, it’s better than being an actor. Well, drink a toast to ’em, old boy—what d’you say their names are?”

“Alock and Brown.”

“Alock, Brown, Smith, and Ponderby—drink to the lot of us. Sounds like a lawyer’s office—that’s the job I used to have—in a lawyer’s’ office. Damn good lawyers, too—wouldn’t touch anything dirty. That’s why they got so they wouldn’t touch me. Rude health like mine in a lawyer’s office—out of place, old boy—sheer bad taste—frightens the clients. So one fine day I did a skedaddle from all that messuage. Know what a messuage is? Lawyer’s word. …”

Smith said he must go, if Ponderby would excuse him.

“Go? Not yet, surely—wait till the others come—don’t like to be left alone, Smithy.”

“I’m sorry, but I really must go now.”

Then Ponderby raised his head and stared.

“Right you are, then … but good God, what’s the matter? Been in a fight or something?”

“I’ve got to go. Good night, Ponderby.”

“Nighty night, Smithy. And don’t think I’ll ever forget what you’ve done.”

You won’t and neither will anyone else, Smith reflected, picking up his bag and hat in the lobby and walking out of the house. Nobody saw him. The night was warm and dark. He wondered why Ponderby had asked if he had been in a fight, and at the first shop window he stopped and tried to catch his reflection in the glass. He smiled—he had forgotten to comb his hair; it showed even under his hat, rumpled as if—well, yes, as if he had been in a fight. That was easy to repair, since he carried a pocket comb, and at the same time he took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. Then he did more than smile, he actually laughed, because of the color of the handkerchief afterwards. He had forgotten to clean off the make-up. All the way across Fulverton, then, he must have been looking like that—if anyone had seen him, but nobody had—until Ponderby. Oh yes, there was the man with the gun—but it had been very dark just there, under the viaduct. He wiped off the make-up and threw the handkerchief over a fence.

He knew they would go to Fulverton Station first of all, especially for the night train to London; but he was not such a fool as to do anything so obvious. There was a station about twelve miles away, on a different line—Crosby Magna it was called; if he walked throughout the night he would be near the place by dawn and could take the first train wherever it went. He did not feel particularly tired; the whiskey had fortified him, and a certain rising exultation as he left the outskirts of Fulverton kept him tramping at a steady three miles an hour. It must be just about the close of the second performance by now; they would be taking curtain calls, then chattering in the dressing rooms, looking forward to the usual Saturday supper at the lodginghouse. A decent crowd; he had been happy with them. He began to look back upon that life with a certain historic detachment; it was all over, and it would have had to be over soon, anyway, for a reason that now, for the first time, he admitted to himself. He had been growing too fond of that girl; gradually but insidiously the feeling had been growing in him, so that soon the only freedom he could have found would have been either away from her or with her altogether; it would soon have become impossible to keep on seeing her continually and meaninglessly in trains, dining rooms, theater backstages: impossible much longer to have suppressed the anxieties he had already begun to feel about all the chance contacts of their daily lives—whether she would be in or out at a certain hour, or would happen to sit next to him here or there, or who the man was who met and talked with her so long after the show. Such things had not mattered to him at first, partly because he had been so humble about himself—why should she bother about him at all, what had he to offer? She loved life, she loved people—be honest about it, she loved men. He had even, at first, experienced a sardonic pleasure in seeing her warm to the chance encounters that fill the spare moments of stage life—his look, as he said good-night to her when he was going home to bed and she to a party somewhere, had often contained the message—Have a good time, you’ve done all you can for me, the rest I must do myself; so thank you again and good luck.

That was his message to her now, as he walked from Fulverton to Crosby Magna and heard the chime of midnight from a distant clock. But he knew that it could not have been so had he stayed with the company, so that actually his leaving was well-timed, an escape from bondage that would soon have become intolerable.

He reached Crosby Magna towards dawn—a small deserted country station on a single line. There was a time-table pasted up from which he discovered that the first train was a local to Fellingham at ten minutes past five. He had over an hour to wait, and spent it leaning against his bag on the station platform. He felt rather drowsy; it was pleasant to rest there, with the sunrise on his face. Presently he realized that a man was staring down at him.

“Waiting for the train, sir?”

“Yes.”

“It’s due in now. I’ll get you a ticket. Where to, sir?”

“Er … Fellingham … single …”

He dragged himself to his feet and followed the man into the small booking hall.

“Fellingham, there you are, sir. Not traveling with the company this time?”

“What?”

“Couldn’t help recognizing you, sir—I was at the theater in Fulverton last night. Very funny indeed you was, sir—funniest bit in the whole show. Well, here’s your train, sir.”

He insisted on carrying Smith’s bag and choosing a compartment for him, though the train was practically empty. It was, indeed, one of those trains that seem to exist for no reason at all except to wander through the English countryside at hours when no one wants to travel, stopping here and there at places where no one could possibly have any business, especially on a Sunday morning, and all with an air of utter vagrancy, like that of cattle browsing or a woman polishing her nails—a halt here for several minutes, then an interval of movement, even a burst of speed, then a slow-down to hardly a stop at all, and so on. Fellingham was only forty-odd miles from Crosby Magna, but the journey, according to the time-table, would take over two hours. But it was pleasant enough to look out of the window on field and farmstead in the early morning, the lonely roads disappearing into a hazy distance, a stop for the guard to throw out a parcel to a man who stood by a crossing gate waiting for it, long maneuvers of shunting in and out of sidings to detach various empty wagons. No sound when the train stopped save that of the brakes creaking off the wheels and the breeze rippling the grasses in near-by fields. Whenever he put his head out of the window at a station, another head, red-haired and a boy’s, was leaning out three coaches in front, and this somehow began to suggest that he and the boy were alone on the train—final survivors of something or else first pioneers of something else.

Presently the horizon began to show a long, low-lying cloud, but a few further miles revealed it as a line of hills—rather high hills, they looked, but he knew they could not be, because there were no high hills in that part of England.

Of course he would not go all the way to Fellingham; that would make the trail too easy, especially after the porter at Crosby Magna had recognized him—unfortunate, that had been. He would get out at some intermediate station and make his way elsewhere across country.

The train had stopped again by the time the hills became clear—a station called Worling. He thought this would do as well as any other, and was just about to jump down to the platform when his bag flew open, spilling some of the contents on to the compartment floor; by the time he had them repacked the train was off again. But it did not really matter; one place was as good as another.

The train cantered on, like horses now more than cattle, steadily, at a good pace, as if anxious to reach some friendly stable; the track wound more closely into the uplands and soon entered a long shallow valley under a ridge that rose rather steeply at one point into two rounded summits; you could not tell which was the higher, but neither was very high—maybe seven or eight hundred feet, with a saucer-shaped hollow between. Just under the hill the roofs of a village showed amongst the trees, but the train turned capriciously away from it, choosing to stop at a station called Rolyott that was nothing but a shed in the middle of fields. He got out there, handing his ticket to the solitary porter, who stared at it for a moment and then said something about Fellingham being three stations further on; Smith smiled and said that was all right, and as the train moved off again the redheaded boy who was always looking out of the window saw him smiling and smiled back. That made him feel suddenly cheerful. And besides, the air was warm, blended with scents of hay and flowers, and the tree-hidden village looked tempting even at the end of a long road; he set out, walking briskly. A few hundred yards from the Station, withdrawn into a hedge so that no one could see it save by search or chance, a broken signpost pointed to the ground, and he had to climb through nettles to decipher its stained and weather-worn letters: “To Beachings Over, I Mile.”

He walked on, murmuring the name to himself, as he always did with names—Beachings Over, Beachings Over; and then Beachings Over came into view—a group of gray old cottages fronting a stream over which slabs of stone made bridges. There was a square-towered church as well, a public house called for some undiscoverable reason the “Reindeer”—a ledge in the stream where the water sparkled as it curled over green reeds. And beyond the village rose the sunlit ridge—one hill now quite clearly higher than the other, but only a little higher, and between them that gentle turfy hollow.

He crossed one of the stone bridges. A man coming out of a house stared with friendly curiosity and said “Good morning.” A fluff of wind blew a line of hollyhocks towards him. An old man was clipping a yew hedge along the vicarage wall. A sheep dog stirred in the shade and opened a cautious eye as he passed. He felt: This is home; if they will let me stay here, I shall be at peace. He turned off the road by a path towards an open field that climbed steeply. Near at hand was a cottage, with a buxom elderly woman tending the garden. “There’ll be a nice view from the top this morning,” she said knowingly as he came near. “Five counties they say you can see, on a clear day.” He smiled and then she said: “Leave your bag here if you like—it’ll be quite safe.”

“Good idea. … Thanks very much. And could I—perhaps—trouble you for a glass of water?”

“Water if you like, sir, but cider if you prefer.”

“Well, yes indeed, if it’s no trouble.”

“No trouble at all, sir—I’ll just have to go round to the stillage.”

“Stillage?”

“That’s where we keep it, sir, being that cool off the stone, you’ll be surprised.”

She came back with a pint-sized mug, which he drained gratefully.

“Glad you’re enjoying it, sir—it’s good cider, that I do say, though I brewed it myself.”

He wondered if he should offer to pay her, but she saw his look of hesitation and added with swift tact: “Don’t you worry, sir—you’re very welcome. Maybe when you’ve climbed up and down again you’ll feel like some cold beef and pickles and a nice raspberry tart—we serve meals, you know, all day on Sundays.”

“You get many visitors?”

“Hardly a one, but we’re ready for ’em if they come. Gentleman once told me this was the prettiest village in all England.”

“Certainly it might be. … Well, thank you again—perhaps I will want that meal.”

He resumed the climb, feeling glowingly free after the drink and without his bag. The sky was dappled with clouds like sails, the smell of earth and grass rose in a hot sweetness. He walked steadily, stopping only to look back when a chime floated upwards from the church tower; Beachings Over, its gardens and roofs, lay in the fold of the valley as if planted there. He climbed on till the ridge was close at hand, beyond the next field and the next stone wall, the two hills curving against the sky. After a little time he reached the saddle between, and there, hidden till the last moment, lay a pool of blue water, blown into ripples under passing cloud shadows. It looked so cool he took his clothes off and bathed—there in sight of all the five counties, so it amused him to think. Then he lay in the sun till he was dry, feeling the warmth of sun and cider soaking into every nerve. Presently he dressed, found a shady spot under a tree, and closed his eyes.

The sun on his face woke him; it had moved round the sky but was near the horizon and no longer hot. His glance followed the curve of the hill and came to rest on the already graying pool; he was surprised to see a girl there, perched on a jutting rock and paddling her feet. He watched her for a moment, quietly fitting the picture into his mind before recognition came, and with it a curious mounting anger because he suddenly knew why it was he had grown so desperately in love with her; it was because she had made him so, because she followed him about everywhere, because, from the moment of their first meeting, she had never let him go—despite all acting and casual behavior and false appearances. And she had followed him even to Beachings Over.

Aware that he was watching her, she turned and then came towards him, high-stepping barefoot over the grass.

“Smithy—you’re really awake? Why did you run off like that? Were you ill? What’s been the matter? … The woman at the cottage said you were here—said you’d left your bag, so you’d have to come down, but I didn’t want to wait, and yet I have waited—hours—while you’ve been asleep. …”

“I’m—I’m—sorry.”

“For keeping me waiting? It’s my fault—I could have wakened you any time, but you looked so tired and you hadn’t shaved—I guessed you’d been out all night somewhere.”

“But I’m so terribly sorry—no, not for that—for what happened before then—at the theater—”

“Oh, that? Darling, you shouldn’t ever have taken it on, but it didn’t matter—got the biggest laugh in the whole show—Margie even said he’d change the part if Ponderby could do it that way, but he was afraid he couldn’t. Anyhow, he’s going to keep in the bit where the doorknob comes off—that’s good for a laugh any time.”

“But do they think I did it deliberately?”

“I told them you did—I swore you fixed the whole thing with Ponderby just for a gag; Ponderby said you had too, I made him—they all thought it was marvelous, but then they think you are marvelous, anyhow.”

“Marvelous?”

“Well, you know—unpredictable. One of those shy ones who suddenly blaze out and startle everybody and then go shy again. What’ll you do next? Maybe fly the Atlantic like those two fellows. Maybe murder somebody or elope with a duchess. It’s all part of being a gentleman. You’re privileged—like the boys on Boat Race Night.”

“Paula—why do you talk like that?”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” She bent over him. “There’s such an indefinable je ne sais quoi about you, darling.”

“What did you follow me here for?”

“To bring you back, of course.”

“But I’m not coming back.”

“Oh, it’s only Sunday evening—there’s no show till six tomorrow night in Polesby—you don’t have to make up your mind till tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’m not coming back. I can’t go back. Don’t you realize how I felt—”

“I know—don’t try to tell me—I saw you on the stage and I was the only person who knew for certain you weren’t acting—because I’d seen you like that before, in the shop at Melbury. Remember?”

He said grimly: “It wouldn’t be very easy to forget—any more than last night.”

“Except that you’re not bound to go on the stage, ever again, so what does it matter? Whereas at Melbury you were like that all the time—except with me.”

“Yes, except with you.”

“Maybe there’s something about me too—so far as you’re concerned.”

He moved restlessly. “There was something then, but there’s a barrier between us now, compared with how we were in those days.”

“There’s only this between us, Smithy—I remember when you needed me, and I’m sure I’m not going to hang around when you don’t need me any more. But I thought you might need me today—that’s why I’m here.”

“I feel just the opposite—you were so generous when I did need you I’ve hated to feel you could still do things out of pity as you’re doing now.”

“That’s not just the opposite—it’s the same.”

“It’s why I’ve kept away from you, anyhow, because I can do without you, I know I can, I must.”

“Oh God, don’t boast. I can do without you too, for that matter. Let’s be independent as hell. Let’s each fly in different directions and wonder why for the rest of our lives.” She began to pull on her stockings. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Now you mention it.”

“Let’s go down. The woman at the cottage said she could give us—”

He interrupted, laughing: “I know. Cold beef and pickles and raspberry tart.”

“I said we’d have it.”

“You’re right about that.”

He helped her to her feet and they stared about them for a moment.

“Smithy, how did you manage to find such a heavenly place?”

“As so many things happen—pure chance. My bag flew open as I was going to get out of the train somewhere else. How did you find I was here?”

“Darling, it was so easy. I asked at Fulverton Station, and they said you hadn’t been there, so of course I thought of Crosby Magna—”

“Of course? Why of course?”

“Well, it was pretty obvious you’d think it wasn’t so obvious—and then the porter there remembered you, and the guard remembered you’d walked towards the village, and the woman at the cottage said you were up here staring at the five counties,—it is five, isn’t it?—everybody remembered you, old boy. You aren’t terribly good at making people forget you.”

“They certainly won’t forget my performance last night.”

“Back again on the same old subject? I told you they all thought it was marvelous.”

“Then why did they think I didn’t stay for the second show?”

“I told them it was because you suddenly got scared of how Margie would take it—I said it was just like you, to put on a gag like that and then get scared about it.”

“Seems to me you thought of everything.”

They began the descent amidst the gathering twilight, striding down upon Beachings Over as from the sky. A curl of blue smoke rose from the huddle of roofs, the church bell was ringing for evening service. Something in the calm of that darkening panorama kept them silent till they were within sight of the cottage; then she said: “Oh, by the way—I told the woman you were my husband.”

“Why?”

“Because she’d have thought it queer for me to be chasing up a hill after any man who wasn’t.”

“Is there anything else you’ve told anybody about me?”

“There isn’t yet, Smithy, but there might have to be. I’m always ready.”

She took his arm as he unlatched the gate that led through an avenue of hollyhocks to the cottage. It was small and four-square, with windows on either side of the front door; at one side of the porch a board announced “Good Accommodation for Cyclists.” The woman who had given him the cider led them smilingly into a room that opened off the flagged lobby; it was evidently the parlor, crowded with old-fashioned furniture, pictures, and photographs. A yellow piano with a fretwork front lined with faded silk occupied most of one wall; an oval mahogany table stood in the center. The single window was tightly closed, yet the room smelt fresh and pleasant. He opened the piano and struck a few of the yellow keys; the strings twanged almost inaudibly. Inside the closed space of the room they felt embarrassed to begin a conversation, especially while the woman kept chattering in and out as she prepared the table. She told them her name was Mrs. Deventer and that her husband had been a sailor, so badly injured at Jutland, poor man, it was a mercy he died. “But there, there, that’s all over now and never no more, as the saying is. … You’ll take some nice ripe tomatoes with your beef, perhaps, sir? And how about a drop of something to drink—there’s my own cider but if you’d prefer anything else my girl can run over to the Reindeer and fetch it. … ’Tain’t far, you know—nothing’s very far in the village—that’s what I always feel when I go into Chelt’nam—that’s our nearest town, you know—I go there once a year, or maybe twice—it’s a wonderful place, but my, it does so make you tired walking through all them streets—we ain’t got only the one street here, and that’s plenty when you’re gettin’ old. …”

She talked and talked, bringing in everything she could think of till the table was crowded with tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, a huge loaf of bread, a pot of tea in case they wanted it, and a jar of chutney, her own special make. At length there could not possibly be anything else to bring in, and she left them reluctantly, with a slow smile from the doorway.

He said: “Well?”

“Well, Smithy?”

“You look thoughtful, that’s all.”

“Darling, I was just wondering what you had against me.”

But the door opened again—Mrs. Deventer bringing in a lighted lamp. “I thought you’d maybe want it. Longest day of the year, round about, but it still gets dark. … Maybe you’ll be stayin’ the night? You’ve missed the last train either way by now, I suppose you know that. Of course there’s rooms at the Reindeer, but mine’s as good, I always say, and cheaper too.”

The yellow lamplight glowed between their faces after she had gone.

“Possessive woman,” he remarked. “My cider, my girl, my chutney, my rooms.”

“Room, she said. Didn’t you see the notice outside—‘Good Accommodation for Cyclists’? But I don’t suppose one has to be a cyclist.”

He said, after a pause: “I don’t know why you should wonder about me like that. How could I have anything against you? Except for the same reason that I couldn’t.”

“Too subtle, darling, unless you tell me what the reason is.”

“I love you.”

Her voice leapt to the reply: “Smithy, you do? You do really? I’ve loved you ever since I first set eyes on you—as soon as I saw you in that shop I thought—there’s my man. Because I’m possessive too—my man, my chutney, my room—all mine.” And suddenly she took his hand and leaned down with her cheek close to it. “I could have killed you, though, while you lay on top of that hill, fast asleep. Killed you. … Oh, God, I’m so happy. … What’s the name of this place?”

“Beachings Over.”

“Beachings Over. … I’ll get us from that—forever. Remember the game you used to play with names?”

Later, in a room so consecrated to cyclism that even the pictures were of groups of pioneer freewheelers, he asked her if—when he had fully recovered—if he did fully recover, of course—and if he found a job that could support them both—if and when all those things happened—would she marry him?

She said she would, of course, but without the delay. “I think it’s only two weeks they make you wait.”

“But—” He seemed bewildered by her having stolen, as usual, the initiative. Then he said, slowly and with difficulty: “I’m not right yet. I’m not even as near to it as I thought I was. For half an hour last night I felt the return of everything bad again—black—terrifying. I’m better now, but less confident.”

She said she didn’t mind, she would look after him, because she had just as much confidence as ever.

“And there’s another thing—”

“Another, Smithy?” She was trying to mock him out of his mood.

“Wouldn’t they ask me a lot of questions at the registry office?”

“You mean questions about yourself that you couldn’t answer?”

“Yes.”

“They might ask you one question never have—and that is if you’ve been married before.”

“Of course I haven’t.”

“How can you be certain, old boy, with that awful memory of yours?”

He pondered to himself—yes, how could he be certain? He hadn’t any logical answer, and yet he felt fairly certain. When people had visited him in those hospitals, relatives of missing men who hoped he might turn out to be someone belonging to them, he had similar hopes, but only of finding a home, parents—never a wife. Did that prove anything? She watched the look on his face, then added with a laugh: “Don’t worry—I’ll take a chance on it if you will.”

Eventually it was agreed that they should go to Polesby the next day, announce their plans to the company, and ask for a few weeks’ holiday. She was sure Margesson would agree, if they approached him fairly and squarely; he liked both of them, and the slack season was on. They rose early and took a walk to the end of the village, discussing a future of which Beachings Over seemed already to have become a part. “Oh, Smithy, isn’t it beautiful? I didn’t see it like this yesterday—I was so worried about finding you—but it’s just the sort of place I’ve always dreamed of. I know that’s sentimental—but stage people are—they love the sweet little cottage idea, though most of them would be bored to death if they ever got one—mercifully they don’t, as a rule—they either die in the poorhouse or save enough to buy a pub on the Brighton Road. …”

She chattered on, and soon it was time to walk back to the cottage for Mrs. Deventer’s excellent breakfast, pay their bill, and assure her they would return soon for a longer stay. The old lady was delighted, keeping up the farewell greetings all the way down the avenue of hollyhocks to the front gate. By the time they passed the post office the morning papers were just being unloaded; Smith bought one and scanned the front page during the mile-long tramp to the railway station. Mostly about Brown and Alcock, he told her, summarizing the newly announced details of the first Atlantic flight in history. Not till they were settled in the train did she glance at the paper herself. Then, after a few moments’ desultory reading, she looked up with a suddenly changed expression. “Smithy!”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t want it to come as a shock to you, but there’s something here that looks as if—” she hesitated and then gave a short laugh—“as if they can’t come up to you … for being crazy.”

“Who can’t?”

“Brown and Alcock.”

“But I don’t know what you mean.”

“Better read this—and don’t let it upset you—probably it’s not anything serious.”

She handed him the paper, pointing to a small paragraph on an inside page. It was headed “Assault under Viaduct—Fulverton Man Injured,” and ran:—

That he was assaulted by an unknown man was the story told to the Fulverton police last night by Thomas Atwill, railway policeman, who was found unconscious under the Marshall Street viaduct at a late hour. Taken to the Cottage Hospital, Atwill stated that he had been on plain-clothes duty to prevent pedestrians from using the footpath under the viaduct, it being necessary to do this for one day each year in order to preserve the company’s legal title to the right of way. Shortly after nine o’clock a man endeavored to break through the temporary barrier erected for this purpose, and when Atwill sought to remonstrate with him, he received a severe blow on the head. Describing his assailant as young, rather tall, and clean-shaven, Atwill said he was a gentleman, not a “rough.” The police are investigating the unexplained disappearance of a member of a local theatrical touring company.

He put aside the paper, stared at her for a moment, then let his head fall slowly into his hands. When he looked up he was very pale. The train was stopping at Worling, where a crowd of farm workers waited on the platform. She had only time to say: “Darling, if anyone gets in, don’t look like that.”

Nobody got in, and his controlled features relaxed.

“Oh, Smithy … you don’t remember?”

“I remember jumping over—it wasn’t a barrier—just a rope. And if I hit the fellow, it was accidental—a push that made him fall, maybe with his head on the pavement—I didn’t look back, I was running.” He added, leaning forward with both hands on her knees: “I do want you to know that I’m not a homicidal maniac rushing about committing crimes and then forgetting about them. When I said that last night for half an hour I felt the return of all the bad things, I meant things in my own mind—fears that I had to fight down … but they were in my own mind, and I did fight them down, I never lost control. I want you to believe that—no matter who else disbelieves it.”

“I believe it, Smithy. But there are—as you say—people who wouldn’t.”

“I know that.”

“We mustn’t go to Polesby.”

“I mustn’t. You can. You’re in no danger—on your own.” He cried out, with sharp bitterness: “Perhaps you’ll stay clear of me after this.”

Ignoring that, she said: “Probably the man isn’t seriously injured if he recovered consciousness so soon—”

“You don’t need to comfort me.”

“But it’s true—the whole thing’ll blow over if he’s not badly hurt—and also if we don’t go to Polesby. London’s a better idea. If we change at Saxham we can get a London train from there. We’ll find somewhere to stay—where no one will know who we are. London’s the best place for that. We both have enough money to last for a time.”

“But what about you—your job? They’ll expect you at Polesby tonight. They’ll know we’re together.”

“They’d be fools not to know that, anyway. I swore I’d never come back unless I brought you with me. … Darling, don’t look so anxious. I believe you. This is just bad luck—it somehow doesn’t count. …” She took his troubled head in her arms and rocked it gently against her. “I can’t help laughing, though, at one thing.” She picked up the paper and reread, crooningly, as to a child: “ ‘Atwill said he was a gentleman, not a rough.’ That’s you all over, Smithy—I always said so.”

They left the train at Saxham, but had just missed the best London train of the day; four hours to wait for the next. The interval was pleasantly spent in strolling about the ancient town. The second London train came in late, and they were told to change again at Santley Junction—“but it all helps,” she said, “if anyone were trying to follow us.” They reached Santley towards dusk and had to cross a platform crowded with waiting passengers. When the next train came in, also late, it was already so full that only tussling and scrimmaging could make further room; but eventually this was accomplished and they found themselves in a compartment occupied by an uncountable number of shouting children, all in nominal charge of an elderly, shabby, but bright-eyed clergyman who gestured apologies for his own inability to subdue the din. “It’s been their great day,” he explained, forcing a way for the newcomers. Then he helped them, quite unnecessarily, to put up their bags and parcels on the rack, adding with a smile: “Not hostile—only heedless.” As soon as the train restarted the children shouted with renewed abandon, leaning out of the windows, jumping on the seats, breaking into song choruses that were taken up by other children in adjacent compartments until the whole train, nearing London, became one long pandemonium streaking through suburb after suburb, over bridges across blazing highways, through smoke-filled tunnels, past rows of back gardens from which shirt-sleeved householders watering their flowers looked up to wave good-humoredly, alongside commons where lovers did not stir as the sudden crescendo engulfed them. At short range, however, it was harder to ignore, a sheer wall of sound behind which three adults, lips to ear and then ear to lips, could only contrive an intermittent mouthing of words.

“It’s their annual outing,” said the parson, still feeling some need to apologize. “We aim at discipline but—” He gave a little wrinkled smile.

Smith nodded, and Paula, from the other side, whispered loudly in his ear: “If this bothers you, let’s get out at the next station and find another compartment.”

“No, no, it’s all right.”

And later, from the parson: “I hope you don’t find their high spirits too exhausting.”

“They don’t, evidently,” she answered.

“I know—amazing, isn’t it? Don’t believe I ever shouted like that when I was a boy. Terrific!”

“Good thing you keep a sense of humor about it.”

“Oh yes. I don’t mind the row so much, but I’m scared when they lean out like that—I’ve warned them over and over again but I can’t make them listen.”

Smith suddenly intervened: “Do you think I could? Perhaps coming from someone else—a stranger? … Now boys, supposing you stand away from those windows!”

The different voice, pitched over the wall of sound, somehow reached its goal; the swarming clusters turned, sharply disconcerted, nonplused, ready for rebellion but sensing control; then the different voice continued, releasing them a little: “That’s right, sit down—plenty of room for all of us. What about another song?”

From further along the train came the chorus of “Keep the Home Fires Burning”; they joined in it, one by one, a gradual deafening surrender, while the stations flashed by more frequently and the suburbs merged into the slums. She whispered in his ear exultantly: “Smithy, how marvelous! And to think I was afraid they were bothering you!”

The parson was also pleased. “I really am extremely obliged to you, sir.”

“Not at all.”

“Astonishing!”

“Just as much to me, I assure you. I didn’t know I could deal with ’em,”

“You must have a knack. … I haven’t any—with children. You’re going to London?”

“Yes.”

“In a great hurry when you arrive?”

“Not particularly.”

“I wonder whether you could spare, then—say five minutes? I always have trouble with them at railway stations, and the Mission’s only across the street. If you would …”

“Certainly—if I can. The magic may not work the second rime.”

“Let’s have faith that it will.”

At the terminus it was as if the whole train burst open, a human explosion on to the platform, yells and hangings of doors while the parson watched Smith bring gradual order out of the chaos. Then began the slow marshaling of two hundred youngsters into line, their realization that a new personality was in command, and their acceptance of the inevitable—truculent at first, then indifferent, finally quite cheerful. But the operation took considerably more than five minutes; it was over a quarter of an hour before the children had all been escorted through the busy station precincts to a side street whence they could be safely dismissed to their homes.

The parson stood beaming on the pavement. “I really cannot express my gratitude. I hope you haven’t been too much delayed.”

“Oh no.”

“You mean you had no plans for—the evening?”

“Well—er—nothing special.”

“Then I wonder—if you really have nothing else to do—it would give me great pleasure if you’d both dine with me—”

It was Paula who answered, in the instant way in which she decided everything: “Why, yes, we’d be glad.”

The parson wrinkled another smile and began fumbling his way through a passage running by the side of the Mission building into an unkempt garden; beyond it stood a large ugly soot-black three-story house. He unlocked the front door, admitting them into a lofty hallway totally unfurnished down to the bare boards of the floor. “I don’t think names are at all important,” he said, ushering them further into a room, “but mine is Blampied.”

“Smith,” said Paula.

He offered them chairs, following their glances round the room with a perverse pride. “Isn’t this a terrible house? It was built in 1846, when parsons were supposed to live in style. Twenty rooms—I only use five. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, this, and my housekeeper’s. This is the best. We live in squalor punctuated by small simple meals of excellent quality—onion soup tonight, if you happen to like it.”

Meanwhile an elderly gaunt-faced woman was preparing the table, showing neither surprise nor any other emotion at the presence of guests, and needing no instructions from the parson. Presently the three were sitting down before big bowls of the soup; there was nothing else but cheese, he warned them, but they could have more soup if they wanted. It was so good that they did, and asked for it with enthusiasm. Meanwhile the parson chattered on, a cordial increasingly inquisitive host.

“You two people have much further to go?”

Smith said: “No, not very far.”

“You live here in London?”

“Er … yes.”

“Don’t let me keep you, but don’t go till you want to.”

She said: “Oh, there’s plenty of time.” It was as if she were reluctant to leave.

“Yes, the buses and trams run late. I expect you can get to your home that way.”

“I—I think so.”

“You only think so?”

“Matter of fact, we haven’t got a home—yet. We’ve got to look for one.”

Smith flashed her a warning glance, but she went on: “I don’t suppose it’ll be very hard.”

The parson’s curiosity seemed to become less rather than more as he responded: “If it’s the slightest help to you, please stay here for the night. My housekeeper can find you bedding, and there are fifteen rooms to choose from.”

“That’s awfully kind of you, but—”

“Just as you please, of course. Only I thought your husband looked tired.”

“He’s not my husband—yet.”

The parson smiled. “To be sure … but after all—fifteen rooms? Enough—one would think.”

Then suddenly she said: “Maybe, as you’ve got a sense of humor, you can help us. … We want to get married, but it has to be quiet—we don’t want anyone to know—”

“Runaway?”

“Yes, that’s it … maybe you know of a registry office somewhere near?”

“There’s an office nearly across the street, but for sheer quietness, why don’t you allow me to marry you in my own church? Hardly anyone ever comes to any of the services—it would be we most unnoticed marriage I could possibly imagine. …”

So they were married at St. Clement’s, Vale Street, London, N.W., and as they left the church after the ceremony newsboys were racing down we street offering extra editions—“Peace Treaty Signed at Versailles.” It was June 28, 1919. The bridegroom bought one of the papers on his way with his bride to their home further along Vale Street—a tall Victorian house that possessed the initial advantage of being owned by a deaf old woman who lived in the basement and offered the higher floors for rent. She had agreed to let them have two big furnished rooms, plus bath and kitchenette, for a pound a week; there was also an oblong walled garden they could share with other tenants, but of course they never did. After several weeks of living in the house they still hadn’t said more than “Good morning” and “Good evening” to the people who occupied the floors above and below; and an especially odd thing was that the man who lived above was a policeman.

But they were happy. It was strange, in a way; they had hardly any money and so far no jobs, and they were half scared of every knock on the door, because a daily visit to the newsroom of the free library revealed that the police were still probing what had already attained some small renown as “the Fulverton case.” The victim was said to be “still improving,” but that began to seem almost ominous, since anything short of recovery showed how seriously he had been hurt; and one morning there was an even worse sound in the news item: “Hospital authorities at Fulverton report no change in the condition of Thomas Atwill, who is still suffering from head injuries as a result of an assault by an unknown man under a railway viaduct three weeks ago.”

The unknown man felt sincere remorse over the fate of the innocent Atwill, but even that could not dim the joys of a partnership that was half fun, half fear, so that every falling asleep was like an unspoken prayer for safety and every waking up a miracle of survival. Sometimes they would hear the policeman clumping down the stairs and back again in his heavy boots, and she would run to the window to look out and come back saying—“It’s all right, Smithy—it’s there—go to sleep.” That was a joke between them, because they had once agreed that nothing in the world could be more reassuring than a London policeman, half-dressed, going downstairs at midnight to put out an empty milk bottle on a front doorstep—a symbol that no harm would come, that God was somewhere over the policeman’s roof and theirs.

They felt their chief danger might come from a chance recognition in the streets, and for this reason they avoided the better-known parts of London where country visitors might be expected to sight-see; they also kept indoors most of the day, discovering almost with surprise how quickly the time passed and how little the restrictions bothered them, provided they were together. They would do most of their shopping late at night, economy combining then with prudence, for just before closing time in those unfashionable districts the butcher and greengrocer and fishmonger would sell off cheap what was left of their day’s supplies. While she was bargaining Smith would often stop to listen to some street-corner orator haranguing the multitude—the multitude consisting, as a rule, of a few apathetic onlookers, workingmen with one hand round the bowl of a pipe and the other in a trouser pocket. “The typical English attitude,” Blampied commented afterwards, “good-humored, tolerant, vaguely skeptical—skeptical just as much of the truth as of lies. What a lot it will take to move men like that, but when they do move—they ever move—what a cataclysm!”

They were beginning to feel a friendly intimacy with the parson, all the friendlier because his attitude was such a quaint mixture of particular inquisitiveness and general incuriosity. He could put the most intimate questions—once he asked: “Are you and your wife so united that you could use the same toothbrush?” Yet he never mentioned or fished for information about Smith’s background or parentage, until one day, when they were having dinner with him as they had come to do rather often, he suddenly asked: “What shall I say if somebody traces you here and questions me about you?”

They stared at him with such disconcerted blankness that he added: “Didn’t you say it was a runaway marriage?”

They knew him so well by then that they did not particularly mind having betrayed themselves by the startled stare; and the fact that his later remark gave them an easy cue for evasion tempted them all the more to tell him nothing but the truth. Paula looked across the table to Smith, caught and exchanged a glance, then began: “Yes, it was certainly runaway, but probably not the kind you’re imagining. We aren’t likely to be troubled by objecting parents. Mine are both dead, and his are …” She looked again at Smith.

Blampied nodded, as if satisfied, but Smith addressed him with a smile: “There wouldn’t be much point in deceiving you, would there?”

“Depends what you want me to do. If you want me to lie about you to others, at least you must tell me the truth about yourself.”

“That sounds a rather unusual standpoint—for a clergyman.”

“Perhaps I’m a rather unusual clergyman.”

“Well, here’s an unusual story.”

“Good … go ahead.”

Smith then spoke briefly of his war injury and resultant lack of memory. He called it a lack now, not loss—“because I don’t feel any loss. It doesn’t really bother me any more—there are days and nights when I never even think about it … but there it is, all the same. Perhaps I ought to have told you when you married us.”

“Why?”

“Well, signing my name in the register. Smith may not be the true one.”

The parson, sitting at the head of the table, half rose and extended his arms over their shoulders. “But it was you I married,” he said, “not your names.”

“So it doesn’t matter?”

“Not a bit. And it’s perfectly legal and binding. Is that all you have on your conscience?”

“Not quite all.” Encouraged by a further look from Paula, Smith went on to relate the incongruous mishap to Thomas Atwill under the railway viaduct. Blampied listened with increasing interest; once or twice his face twisted into a smile; they were so accustomed to his taking the oddest possible view of things that it did not surprise, although it considerably relieved them when at the end of the recital he began to laugh. “It’s the idea of a railway company having a right of way that tickles me! Know anything about rights of way?”

This seemed a side issue, but most of Blampied’s conversations avoided anything in the direct line of argument. Smith said no, not very much.

“They’re trying to close them all over England. You must come with me sometime on one of my crusades. I make a nuisance of myself on village greens every now and again—just by way of a holiday from London. I inform the villagers of their ancient heritage—the commons and the pastures and the paths across the fields that the landlords have stolen and will go on stealing, whenever they get the chance. A clerical predecessor of mine, John Ball by name, made a similar nuisance of himself six hundred years ago or thereabouts—but I think he must have been much more of an oratorical spellbinder.” He added, coming back to the point, “So that’s why you two children are in hiding? You’re afraid that if anything should happen to Thomas Atwill—”

“Oh, he’ll get better all right,” Paula intervened hastily, “but even when he does it could be troublesome if we were traced because—because—” She looked across the table, adding: “We’ve told you so much we may as well finish—don’t you think so, Smithy?”

Smith said: “I mentioned that the war injury affected my memory. It also—at one time—had other effects. They sent me to Melbury—the big hospital for shell-shock cases. I was on their dangerous list.”

“You mean liable to die?”

“Well no—liable to live—but dangerously.”

Again Blampied laughed. “I see. I really begin to see.”

They both joined him in laughing, glad to ease their embarrassment by so doing. Then the parson came behind Smith, putting his arm affectionately round the young man’s shoulders. “You needn’t worry. The reputation of crank and misfit gives me a certain freedom of reply. If, for instance, I’m asked if I know anyone named Smith, and I say I never heard the name before, it’ll merely give rise to an extra legend. …”

The more they came to know Blampied the more they realized his remarkableness and the less they felt they completely understood him. At their first meeting in the train he had seemed just the timid, unworldly parson of fiction, almost of caricature, bearing his cross in the form of Mission boys he could not control and summer outings he must have loathed. Later he showed himself more perplexingly as a mixture of ascetic and gourmet—only onion soup for dinner, but how good it had to be. Later still, when he described “crusades” that had sometimes led to rough-and-tumble fights on village greens and once at least to his own imprisonment, he almost became the conventionally unconventional “fighting parson.” And beyond that, but by no means finally, there was the visionary, the mystic. It was not easy to analyze or estimate the sum total, and many persons with whom he came into contact had long since given up the task as either hopeless or unprofitable. But one could not meet and talk to him for ten minutes, in any one of his moods, without an impression of stature—mental, moral, psychic, or perhaps some blending of all three. And he had also (as Smith found out when he came to work for him) an astoundingly various collection of intimate friends.

Most of these friends lived abroad, so that occasions for personal meetings were rare; but he corresponded, regularly and voluminously, and it was this task that had lately made him aware of failing eyesight, and so of the need for someone to help him with it. Smith gladly volunteered, and it became a habit that two or three mornings a week Blampied would dictate slowly while the other took down in a longhand that soon developed into a private shorthand, marked by curious abbreviations and a general meaninglessness to the outsider. Afterwards, at his leisure, Smith would rewrite or type the letters in full. They went to most of the corners of the world—a hotelkeeper in Yokohama, a university professor in Idaho, a train conductor on the Orient Express, an Austrian soldier lying wounded in a hospital in Salzburg, an editor in Liverpool, a rubber planter in Johore, a woman head of an advertising agency in Brisbane … these were a few out of the twenty-odd. All, it appeared, were people whom Blampied had met at one time or another. “I used to travel a good deal, before the war put an end to it, and now, I fear, I have neither the zest nor the money to resume. But for a few shillings’ worth of stamps each week, I can almost achieve the same object. … This morning, for instance, I shall write to M’sieur Gaston Auriac, Rue Henri Quatre, Antananarivo, Madagascar. We met only once—on a steamer between Capetown and Durban, but we talked for long enough to make the discovery of each other. Maybe you were surprised when I asked you whether you and Paula could use the same toothbrush? You see I have never married, so I don’t know whether physical oneness goes as far as that—but I do know that in the realm of mental and spiritual things there can be a similar oneness—the knowledge that yours and mine are no longer yours and mine, but ours for every possible use. And this awareness, once acknowledged by both parties, lasts forever. Gaston and I may disagree about this and that, but because our thought processes are in the same world, there’s a sense in which we can use each other’s minds. We’re both impervious to sentimentality and mob optimism, and both of us also, if I may so express it, are accustomed to think proudly. … We found that but during our three-hour talk seven years ago, and though we have never met since, we both know that it must still be true, despite all the changes that have taken place in the world about us. … Just now, we’re in the midst of an argument as to the right way to treat Germany now the war’s over. Gaston thinks the Allied armies should have pushed on to Berlin, even at the cost of an extra year of fighting, and men have broken Germany into fragments, acting with ruthless severity on the lines of delenda est Carthago. … I, on the other hand, would have offered terms of simply astounding generosity—lifting the blockade the day after the Armistice, forbearing to ask for meaningless and uncollectable reparations, and inviting all the defeated countries into an immediate conference on equal terms to discuss the disarmament and rehabilitation of Europe. As you can imagine, we’re enjoying as violent a discussion as the somewhat intermittent mails to Madagascar will permit. But the point is: both of us are still thinking proudly. Gaston is no frenzied sadist wishing to destroy for the sake of destroying; I am no milk-and-water humanitarian yearning over a defeated enemy merely because he is defeated and has been an enemy. Both of us have the same aim in view—the cure of the thousand-year-old European disease; both methods have succeeded at various times throughout history—his, I admit, more often than mine. Either might succeed today. But what will not succeed, and what we both know will not succeed, is the unhappy mean between the two—the halfway compromise between sentiment and vengeance—the policy of safe men playing for safety? He added, smiling: “So you see, Mr. Smith, why it did not shock me the other day to hear that you had been classed at one time as a dangerous man. All my friends are dangerous men.”

Smith came to enjoy the work of transcribing these letters, and sometimes also he helped with Church and Mission activities, especially those for which Blampied had little ability, such as children’s organizations. He found that his experience on the train had been no fluke, but the result of an apparently inborn aptitude for handling youngsters. Even the most stubborn, and from the worst slum homes, responded to his instinctive offering of ease and discipline; in fact it was the most stubborn who liked him and whom he liked the most. He began holding classes in the Mission building, classes that did not invade the religious field (which he did not feel either the inclination or the authority to enter), but touched it variously and from neglected angles—classes on civics, on local history, on London and English traditions. He was so happy over all this that it came to him with a sense of retrospective discovery that he must like children—not sentimentally, but with a simple, almost casual affection. “You’d have made a good schoolmaster,” Blampied once said, and then, when Smith replied he wasn’t sure he’d care to spend all his time with children, the other added: “Exactly. Good schoolmasters don’t. Anyhow, you can help to make up for the fact that I’m a bad parson.”

“Do you really think you are?”

“Oh yes. Ask anybody round here. People don’t take to me. I haven’t an ounce of crowd magnetism. And then I’m lazy. Only physically, I think, but then that’s the only kind of laziness most people recognize.”

“I think you’re old enough, if you don’t mind my saying so, to be forgiven a certain amount of physical laziness.”

“Yes, but I’m not lazy in the forgivable ways. If I went to Lord’s to watch the cricket they’d think I was a sweet old clergyman who deserved his afternoon off, but as I’m only lazy enough sometimes to go without a shave—”

Smith laughed, knowing what he meant, for while it could not be said that the parson neglected his professional duties, it was certainly true that he made no effort to make himself either a worldly success or a beloved failure—the two classifications that claim a roughly equal number of adherents among the clergy. Nor, despite the fact that he inclined to High Church fashions, did he join the fanatical brotherhood of those who systematically disobey their bishops; his own disobediences were personal, casual, almost careless—wherefore his bishop disliked him all the more. So did various influential parishioners to whom he refused to toady; while the poor, to whom he also refused to toady, rewarded him with a vast but genial indifference. A few devoted lay workers ran the adjacent Mission, but they were not devoted to him, and when they pushed on him such tasks as the supervision of the annual outing it was with the knowledge and hope that he would have a bad time. Nor did they care for his church services, which they thought cold and formal; they realized, correctly, that he was not the kind of cleric to “drag the people in,” and from time to time they plotted, more or less openly, to have him supplanted by some energetic slum parson who would unite both Church and Mission into a single buzzing hive. But it is by no means easy to dislodge a parson of the Church of England, and Blampied had suffered no more than a gradual reduction of dues and stipend during his twelve years of office.

He was, in fact, though he hardly realized it because his wants were so few, very close to the poverty line. He wore the shabbiest clothes; he lived on the simplest and cheapest of foods, though always well-cooked; he paid cash to tradespeople, but owed large sums to local authorities for taxes and bills of various kinds. About a month after his first meeting with Smith, his housekeeper fell suddenly ill and died within a few days; he was a good deal upset by that, but admitted that it had saved him from having to get rid of her, since he could no longer afford the few weekly shillings for her part-time services. It was then he suggested to Smith and Paula that they should move into the house and live rent-free in return for similar help; they were glad to consent, since their own money was rapidly dwindling.

Out of the unused fifteen they chose two large attic rooms with a view over roof tops northward as far as Hampstead and Highgate, and it was fun to begin buying the bare necessities of furniture and utensils, searching the Caledonian Market for broken-down chairs that could be repaired and reupholstered, discarded shop fittings usable as bookshelves, an old school desk that showed mahogany under its coating of ink and dirt. Gradually the rooms became a home, and the entirely vacant floor beneath encouraged a kinship with roofs and sky rather man with the walls and pavements of the streets.

Towards the end of September Blampied received a quarterly payment which he chose to devote to a crusading holiday rather than to paying arrears of his borough council rates; having invited Smith and Paula to join the expedition, he took them for a week into rural Oxfordshire “making trouble wherever we go,” as the parson put it, though that was an exaggeration. The question of country footpaths was, he admitted, his King Charles’s Head—every man, he added, should have some small matter to which he attaches undue importance, always provided that he realizes the undueness. Realizing it all the time, Blampied would puzzle over ancient maps in bar parlors, inquiring from villagers whether it was still possible to take the diagonal way across the fields from Planter’s End to Marsh Hollow, and generally receiving the answer that no one ever did—it was much quicker to go round by the road, and so on. “I reckon you could if you tried, mister, but you’d ’ave a rare time getting’ through them nettles.” A few more pints of beer would perhaps elicit the information that “I remember when I was a kid I used to go to school that way, but ’twouldn’t be no help now, not with the new school where it is.” Yet those, as the parson emphasized, drinking his beer as copiously as the rest, were the paths their forefathers had trod, the secret short cuts across hill and valley, the ways by which the local man could escape or intercept while the armed stranger tramped along the highroads. All of which failed to carry much weight with the Oxfordshire men of 1919, many of whom, as armed strangers, had tramped the highroads of other countries. They obviously regarded the parson as an oddity, but being country people they knew that men, like trees and unlike suburban houses, were never exactly the same, and this idea of unsameness as the pattern of life meant that (as Blampied put it) they didn’t think there was anything very odd in anyone being a little odd.

Several times the parson spoke on village greens to small, curious, unenthusiastic audiences, most of whom melted away when he suggested that there and then they should march over the ancient ground, breaking down any barriers that might have been erected during the past century or so; but in one village there was a more active response, due to the fact that the closing of a certain path had been recent and resented. It was then that Blampied showed a certain childlike pugnacity; he clearly derived enormous enjoyment from leading a crowd of perhaps fifty persons, many of them youngsters out for a lark, through Hilltop Farm and up Long Meadow to the gap in the hedge that was now laced with fresh barbed wire. Smith found he could best be useful in preventing the children from destroying crops or tearing their clothes; he thought the whole expedition a trifle silly but pleasingly novel. Actually this particular onslaught had quite an exciting finish; the owner of the property, a certain General Sir Richard Hawkesley Wych-Furlough, suddenly appeared on the scene, backed by a menacing array of servants and gamekeepers. Everything pointed to a battle, but all that finally developed was a long and wordy argument between the General and the parson, culminating in retirement by both sides and a final shout from the General: “What the hell’s it got to do with you, anyway? You don’t live here!”

“And that,” as Blampied said afterwards, “from a man who used to be Governor of so many islands he could only visit a few of them once a year—so that any islander might have met his administrative decisions with the same retort—‘What’s it got to do with you? You don’t live here!’ ”

The notion continued to please him as he added: “I was missionary on one of those islands—till I quarreled with the bosses. I always quarrel with bosses. …”

Gradually Smith and Paula began to piece together Blampied’s history. Born of a wealthy family whom he had long ago given up no less emphatically than they had him, he had originally entered the Church as a respectable and sanctioned form of eccentricity for younger sons. Later, even more eccentrically and with a good deal more sincerity, he had served as a missionary in the South Seas until his employers discovered him to be not only heretical, but a bad compiler of reports. After that he had come home to edit a religious magazine, resigning only when plunging circulation led to its bankruptcy. For a time after that he had dabbled in politics, joining the early Fabians, with whom he never quarreled at all, but from whom he became estranged by a widening gulf of mutual exasperation. “The truth is, Smith,” he confessed, “I never could get along with all the Risers-to-Second-That and the On-a-Point-of-Orderers. If I were God, I’d say—Let there be Light. But as I’m not God, I’d rather spend my time plotting for Him in the dark than in holding committee meetings in a man-made blaze of publicity!”

He formed the habit of talking with the two of them for an hour or so most evenings, especially as summer lagged behind and coal began to burn in a million London grates. To roof dwellers it was a rather dirty but strangely comforting transition—the touch of smoke-laden fog drifting up from the river, the smell of smoldering heaps in parks and gardens, the chill that seemed the perfect answer to a fire, as the fire was to the chill. For London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most autumnal—its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone. There was a charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, “The nights are drawing in,” as if it were a spell to invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter. Indeed no phrase, he once said, better expressed the feeling of curtained enclosure, of almost stupefying cosiness, that blankets London throughout the dark months—a sort of spiritual central heating, warm and sometimes weepy, but not depressing—a Dickensian, never a Proustian fug.

Those were the happy days when Smith began to write. As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer. He turned out countless articles and sketches that gave him pleasure only because they contained a germ of what was in his mind; but he was never fully satisfied with them himself and consequently never more than slightly disappointed when editors promptly returned them. He did not grasp that, because he was a person of no importance, nobody wanted to read his opinions at all. Presently, by sheer accident, he wrote something that fitted a formula; it was promptly accepted and—even more important for him at the time—paid for.

After he had worked all morning he would often set out in the afternoon with Paula on a planless excursion decided by some chance-met bus; or sometimes they would tramp haphazardly first to the left, then to the right, mile after mile, searching for books or furniture in old, gas-lit shops, and returning late at night through the narrow defiles of the City. They liked the City, the city with a capital C, and especially at dusk, when all the teashops filled with men, a curious democracy within a plutocracy—silk-hatted stockbrokers buying twopenny cups while at the same table two-pounds-a-week clerks drank similar cups and talked of wireless or motor bicycles or their suburban back gardens. And afterwards, as Paula took his arm on the pavement outside, they would be caught in the human current sweeping along Old Broad Street in a single eastward stream, then crossing Liverpool Street like a flood tide into the vast station delta. He loved to see those people, so purposeful and yet so gentle, so free and yet so disciplined, hurrying towards the little moving boxes that would carry them home to secret suburbs—secret because they were so unknown to one another, so that a bus shuttling all day between Putney and Homerton gave one a mystical curiosity about all the people in Homerton who had never seen Putney, and all the people in Putney for whom Homerton was as strange as—perhaps stranger than—Paris or New York. There was something fantastic, too, in that morning and evening migration, huger in man miles than any movement of the hordes of Tamerlane, something that might well be incomprehensible to the urban masses of the future, schooled to garden cities and decentralization. But there could never be such romance as in the pull of steam through the Bishopsgate tunnels, or faces that stared in friendly indifference as trains raced parallel out of Waterloo.

He wrote of such things, and he wrote as he saw—a little naïvely, as if things had never been seen before—like the line drawings of a child, with something of the same piercing simplicity. It probably helped him, as Blampied said, to have forgotten so much about himself, because into that absence came an awareness far beyond the personal reach—the idea of the past as something to be apprehended in vision rather than explored in memory. He wrote, too, of the countryside as he had seen it: of the men in the pubs with their red faces shy over mugs of beer—old couples outside their cottages on summer evenings, silent and close, yet in that silence and closeness telling all there is in the world—a peddler unlatching a gate with slow steps towards a lonely house—farm workers at midday, asleep under trees—a little road over the hill, curving here and there for no reason at all … scene after scene, as a child turns pages in a loved picture book, yet behind the apocalyptic wonderment of it all there was something to which talks with Blampied had added shape and quality—the vision of a new England rooted far back in the old, drawing its strength from a thousand years instead of its weaknesses from a hundred.

“Follow that vision,” Blampied once said. “Follow it wherever it leads. Think it out. Write it down. I’d say preach it if the word hadn’t been debased by so many of my own profession.”

“I couldn’t preach, anyhow. No more public appearances for me after the last one.”

“But preaching doesn’t need a pulpit. All it needs is what you have—a faith.”

“Is yours the same faith?”

“You have your vision of England, I have mine of the world—but your England will fit into my world.” He added, after a pause: “Does that sound arrogant? Maybe. We mustn’t be afraid of a secret arrogance. After all, we are spies of God, mapping out territory lost to the enemy when faith was lost.” His eyes twinkled as he touched his collar. “It isn’t this, you know, that makes me say so. Religion’s only one of the things that can die without faith. Take another, for the sake of something you may feel I’m more impartial about—take the League of Nations. It’s sickening now of that deadliest of modern diseases—popular approval without private faith; it will the because it demanded a crusade and we gave it a press campaign, because it’s worth our passion and we deluge it with votes of confidence and acts of indifference. It might have sprung alive out of the soul of a saint; it could only be stillborn out of a clause in a treaty. It should have been preached until we were all aflame with it; instead of which it’s been flattered and fawned upon till most of us are already bored with it. Sometimes I’ve even thought we should have given it ritual—a gesture to be made whenever the name’s mentioned, like the sign of the Cross for the faithful, or—for the faithless—blowing out the match after the second man’s cigarette.” As if reminded by that he pulled out his pipe and began to fill it as he continued: “This is a good moment to say how much I hope you’ll stay with me here—both of you. That is, if you’re happy.”

“We’re very happy. But I have to think of how to make a living.”

“Life’s more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don’t ever join them. They’re the gravediggers of our civilization—the safe men, the compromisers, the money-makers, the muddlers-through. Politics is full of them, so is business, so is the Church. They’re popular, successful—some of them work hard, others are slack; but all of them can tell a good story. Never were such charming gravediggers in the world’s history—and part of their charm is that they don’t know what they are, just as they don’t know what we are, either. They set us down as cranks, oddities, social outsiders, harmless cranks who can’t be lured by riches or placated by compliments. But a time may come when we, the dangerous men, shall either be killed or made kings—because a time may also come when it won’t be enough to love England as a tired businessman loves a nap after lunch. We may be called upon to love her as the Irish love Ireland—darkly, bitterly, and with a hatred for some who have loved her less and themselves more.”

After another of their talks he told Smith of a friend of his in Liverpool, editor of a provincial paper with a small but influential circulation. Apparently Blampied, unknown to Smith, had sent some of his literary work for this man to see; and now had come a request to see not only more of the work, but the writer of it. “So I hope you’ll pay him a visit, because whatever project he has in mind, or even if he hasn’t one at all, I know you’ll like him personally.”

“Another dangerous man?” Smith queried.

Blampied nodded with an answering smile.

Smith was eager to go as soon as possible; after further communication an appointment was made for just after Christmas. Paula and he spent the intervening week in a glow of anticipation, culminating in a Christmas dinner in their own attic room, with Blampied as a guest. They decorated the place like children and found him like a third child in his own enjoyment of the meal and the occasion. Later in the evening he gave them, to their complete astonishment, an almost professional display of conjuring tricks; after which Paula offered some of her stage impersonations, including one of a very prim Victorian wife trying to convey to her equally prim Victorian husband the fact that she rather thought she was going to have a child. Towards midnight, when Blampied had drunk a last toast with them and gone down to his rooms below, they sat on the hearthrug in the firelight happily reviewing the events of the evening, and presently Smith remarked that her impersonation of the Victorian wife was new to him—he didn’t remember her ever doing it on the stage, but he thought it would have gone very well if she had.

“But it wasn’t written then,” she answered. “I write all my own sketches—I always did—and I wrote this one last night when you were downstairs talking to Blampied. I suppose it was on my mind—the subject, I mean—because I’m in the same position, except that I’m not going to be prim about it.”

He took her into his arms quietly, sexlessly, as they sat before the fire. Those were the happy hours.

The next day, as if their happiness were not enough, Blampied brought them news of another kind. It was now many weeks since they had last seen any mention of the Fulverton case, and though they felt easier about it they still opened newspapers with a qualm. But that morning Blampied had been searching old papers for something he wished to trace and by sheer accident had come across something else. “It seems that your Thomas Atwill left hospital more than a month ago, and though of course that doesn’t mean the case is closed, I daresay the news will be a load off your mind.”

It so definitely was that the idea occurred to them to celebrate by doing things they had been nervous of for so long—a regular evening out. They asked Blampied to join them, but he excused himself on the score of work; before they left the house, however, he shook hands with Smith and wished him a pleasant trip, for it had been arranged that he should leave that night for Liverpool. Even though it would only be for a few days, the impending separation added spice to the evening. They went first to the Holborn Empire to see little Tich, then for supper to an Italian restaurant in Soho. When they emerged, still with a couple of hours until train time, he saw a hansom cab swinging along Coventry Street, temptingly out of place on a cold December night, but for that very reason he waved to it, telling the man to take them anywhere, just for the ride. Under the windy sky the blaze of Christmas still sparkled in the shops as they drove away, jingling north and west along Regent Street, through Hanover Square and past Selfridge’s to Baker Street, with ghosts of Londoners stepping out of then tall houses (“And if I mistake not, my dear Watson, here is our client just arriving”), bidding them Godspeed into the future; and because they both had faith in that future they were drenched in a sort of wild ecstasy, and had the cabby drive them round and round Regent’s Park while they talked and laughed and whistled to the parrots every time they passed the Zoo.

Those were the happy moments.

Later, on the platform at Euston, walking up and down beside the train, she said she wished she were going with him, though she knew they couldn’t afford it, the little money he was beginning to make by writing wasn’t nearly enough for such unnecessary jaunts. “I know that, darling, but I still wish I were going with you, and if you were just to say the word, like the crazy man you are, I’d rush to the booking office and buy a ticket—which would be stupid, I don’t really mean it—Smithy, I’m only joking, of course. But I’m part of you—I’ll only be half alive while you’re away—we belong to the same world, as Blampied says about his friends—”

“I know that too. There’s something right about us—about our being together here. And Blampied wants us to stay.”

“I’d like to stay too. I love that old ugly house.”

“So do I. And d’you know, I don’t want to remember anything now—anything I’ve ever forgotten. It would be so—so unimportant. My life began with you, and my future goes on with you—there’s nothing else, Paula.”

“Oh, what a lovely thing to tell me! And by the way, he said he hoped you wouldn’t remember.”

“Blampied?”

“Yes. He’s devoted to you.”

“I should be proud to think so, because I’m equally devoted to him.” He kissed her laughingly. “Must we spend these last few seconds talking of someone else?”

“But he isn’t altogether someone else. He’s part of us—part of our happiness—don’t you feel that?”

“Darling, I do—and I also love you!”

“I love you too. Always.”

“The whistle’s going—I’d better get inside. Good-bye, Paula.”

“Good-bye, old boy.”

“That’s the first time you’ve said ‘old boy’ for weeks!”

“I know, I’m dropping it. Now I’m not a touring-company actress I don’t have to talk like one. I can impersonate anybody, you know—even the wife of a writer on a secret errand to an editor in Liverpool. …” The train began to move. “Oh, darling—come back soon!”

“I will! Good-bye!”

He reached Liverpool in the early morning. It was raining, and in hurrying across a slippery street he stumbled and fell.

PART FIVE

RAINIER BEGAN TO TELL me most of this during the drive back from Melbury that night; a few minor details, obtained afterwards from other sources, I have since fitted in. We drove to his Club, because Mrs. Rainier was at Stourton; after perfunctory greetings to a few members in the lobby he ordered drinks to be sent up to the suite he usually lived in when Kenmore was not in use.

He had talked rapidly during the car journey, but now, in quieter surroundings, he seemed to accept more calmly the fact that there was much to tell that he could at last quite easily recall. Once, when I thought he was growing tired and might remember more if he rested for a while, he brushed the suggestion aside. “You see I want to tell you all I can in case I ever forget it again, and if I do, you must remind me—you must—understand?” I promised, and he continued: “Not that I think I shall—it’s too clear in my mind ever to be lost again. I could find Blampied’s old house in Vale Street now if I tried—Number 73, I think it was—or maybe 75—that much I have forgotten, but I suppose I can’t expect memory to come back without the normal wear-and-tear of years. Or can I? Has it been in a sort of cold storage, with every detail kept fresh?”

We laughed, glad of an excuse to do so, and I said it raised an interesting point which I wasn’t expert enough to decide. He then resumed: “Because I actually feel as if it all happened only the other day, instead of twenty years ago. That house of Blampied’s, for instance—it had four dreadful bay windows, one on each side of the front door and two others immediately above in the room that wasn’t occupied—the attics hadn’t got any bay windows. There was a pretty grim sort of basement, too, where the housekeeper lived—she didn’t have to, she chose it because she was crazy enough to like it. She was a queer woman altogether—God knows where Blampied picked her up or how long she’d been with him, but he cried when she died, and looked after her cat—which was also a queer animal, an enormous tabby—spent most of its life sleeping, probably because of its weight—it had won a prize as the biggest cat north of the Thames.” He added, smiling: “I daresay you think I’m inventing this—that there aren’t prizes for big cats. But some newspaper ran a competition as a stunt—two first prizes, for North and South London—and Blampied’s housekeeper’s cat won one of them.”

No, I thought—you’re not inventing; you’re just enjoying yourself rather indiscriminately, as a child frolics in the sand when he first reaches the seashore; I could see how, in the first flush of recollection, the mere placement of the past, the assembling of details one after the other, was giving him an intense pleasure, and one by no means discountenanced by his use of words like “grim” and “dreadful.”

He went on like that for some time, going back over his story, picking out details here and there for random intricate examination; and carefully avoiding the issue that was foremost in my thoughts. Then, once again, I saw that we had talked till dawn and well past it, for there was already a pale edge to the window. I switched off his bedroom light and pulled the curtains; far below us the early morning trams were curving along the Embankment. We watched the scene for a moment; then he touched my arm affectionately. “Time for an adjournment, I think. I know what’s in your mind, it’s in mine, too, but it’s too big to grasp—I’m collecting the small things first. You’ve been good to listen to me. What have we on Monday?”

My thoughts were so far away I could not give an immediate answer, though of course I knew. He laughed at my hesitation, saying he hoped I should not lose my memory just because he had regained his. By then I had remembered and could tell him: “Anglo-American Cement—ten-thirty at the Cannon Street Hotel.” To which he replied, almost gayly: “The perfect closure to all our conversation. …”

“Don’t you want me for anything tomorrow?”

“No, I’ll sleep most of the day … at least I hope so. … Good night.”

If this is a difficult story to tell, it may be pleaded in partial defense that the human mind is a difficult territory to explore, and that the world it inhabits does not always fit snugly into any other world. I must admit that I found the fitting a hard one as, some thirty-six hours later, I watched the sunlight stream through stained-glass windows to dazzle the faces of Anglo-American Cement shareholders. From the report afterwards sent out with the dividend I find that Rainier spoke as follows:—

“You will be glad to know that our sales have continued to increase throughout the year, after a somewhat slow beginning, and that prospects of continued improvement are encouraging. The government’s national defense preparations during the September crisis of last year led to additional consumption of cement throughout the country, and this, at prices we were able to obtain, resulted in generally satisfactory business. During the year we opened a new plant at Nottingham which we expect to enhance production very considerably during the coming year. Your directors are constantly watchful for any opportunities of further economies, either by technical developments or by the absorption of competing companies, and with these aims in view, it is proposed, in addition to the usual dividend of 10 per cent, to issue new shares at forty-two shillings and sixpence in the proportion of one to five held by existing shareholders.” (Loud applause.)

We had had no chance for private conversation on our way to the meeting, for the secretary of the company had driven with us; and afterwards there was a directors’ hotel lunch that did not disperse until almost three o’clock. As I went to retrieve our hats at the cloak room I overheard comments on how Rainier had been in grand form, looking so much better; wonderful year it had been; wonderful the way he’d pulled the Anglo-American out of its earlier doldrums—remember when the shares were down to five bob?—nice packet anyone could have made who’d helped himself in those days—well, maybe Rainier did, why not?—after all, he’d had faith in himself, faith in the business, faith in the country—that’s what was wanted, pity more people didn’t have it.

Later, as we were driving away, I repeated the compliments to Rainier, thinking they might please him. He shook his head somberly. “Don’t call it faith. I haven’t had faith in anything for years. That artist fellow, Kitty’s young man, told me that when he was drunk—and he was right. Faith is something deeper, more passionate, less derisive, more tranquil than anything I’ve ever felt in board rooms and offices—that’s why peace won’t come to me now. … God, I’m tired.”

“Why don’t you go home and rest?”

He stared at me ironically. “So simple, isn’t it? Just go home and rest. Like a child. … Or like an old man. The trouble is, I’m neither. Or else both.” He suddenly patted my arm. “Sorry—don’t take any notice of my bad temper.”

“I don’t think you’re bad-tempered.”

“By the way,” he said smiling, “I’ve just thought of something—it’s a queer coincidence, don’t you think?—two of my best friends I first met quite accidentally on trains … Blampied and yourself. …”

“I’m pleased you should class me with him.”

“Why not? He talked to me—you listen to me—even when I want to talk all night. That’s another thing I ought to apologize for—”

“Not at all—in fact if it helps you now to go on talking—to continue the recollections—”

“I don’t think I’ve much more to say, unless there’s anything you’d particularly like to know?”

There were many things’ I wanted to know, but for the present I felt I could only mention one of them. “Those articles you wrote, some of which were published—”

“Yes?”

“What papers did they appear in?”

“The Northern Evening Post took two or three—the worst. The others—don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they fell in the gutter when the car hit me.”

“You were carrying them—then?”

“Yes, I was on my way to see the editor.”

“A pity you hadn’t taken copies.”

“It was before the days I bothered about carbon paper. You see, I never behaved like a full-dress author. I used Blampied’s typewriter because he had one, but I didn’t card-index anything or call the room where I worked a study or self-consciously burn any midnight oil. Matter of fact, I was in bed by ten on most nights, and I wrote if and when I felt like it. I never thought of the word ‘inspiration’ as having anything to do with me—it was a continual vision of life that mattered more than words in print, but if I did get into print I had more ambition to be alive for half a day in a local paper than to be embalmed forever between covers on a library shelf.”

“All the same, though, those articles might have been collected in book form.”

“Blampied thought of that, and Paula and I once made a choice of what we thought were the best—but I wasn’t very keen on the idea, and it certainly wasn’t likely any publisher would have been either. I remember it chiefly because the evening we were choosing them Blampied came in and found us huddled together on the floor with the typed pages surrounding us. He asked, ‘What are you two planning—the book or your future?’—and Paula laughed and answered ‘Both.’ ”

We had entered Palace Yard, passing the saluting policeman and a swarm of newsboys carrying posters about Hitler. As we left the car a few seconds later Rainier added: “It’s odd to reflect, isn’t it, that at that very moment a few hundred miles away a man whom we had never heard of was also planning a book—and our future.”

We crossed the pavement and entered the Gothic doorway; the House, as always, seemed restful, almost soporific, on a summer afternoon.

“And you’ve never written anything like those articles since?” I queried, after a pause.

“I’ve been too busy, Sir Hawk, as the lady called you, and possibly also my prose style isn’t what it used to be. I did write one book, though—or perhaps Sherlock would have called it a monograph—the title was Constructive Monetary Policy and an International Cartel—I hope you’ve never heard of it.”

I said I had not only heard of it but read it.

“Then I hope you didn’t buy it when it first came out, because I came across it the other day on a barrow in the Farringdon Road, marked ‘Choice’ and going for fourpence.”

I smiled, recognizing the familiar self-ridicule by which he worked himself out of his moods. We walked on through cool corridors to the Terrace and found a table. As nearly always, a breeze blew over the parapet, bringing tangs of the sea and of wharves, a London mixture that added the right flavor to tea and buttered toast and the special edition of the Evening Standard. More bother about Danzig; Hitler had made another speech. Some Members came along, stopped at our table to exchange a few words of greeting; one of them, seeing the headlines, exclaimed: “Why don’t they let him have it, then maybe well all get some peace?”—but another retorted indignantly: “My dear fellow, we can’t let him have any more, that’s just the point, we’ve got to make a stand—eh, Rainier?” Rainier said: “We’ve got to have peace and we’ve got to make a stand—that’s exactly the policy of the government.” They passed on, uncertain whether he had been serious or cynical (and that uncertainty, now I come to think of it, was part of the reason why he hadn’t climbed the higher rungs of the Parliamentary ladder).

He looked so suddenly exhausted after they had gone that I asked if he had been able to sleep at all during the previous day and night.

“Not much. A few hours yesterday morning after you left. The rest of the day I devoted to an investigation.”

“Oh?”

“I went to Vale Street to look for Blampied’s old house. It’s disappeared—been pulled down to make room for one of those huge municipal housing schemes. All that part of London seems to be changed—and it’s certainly no loss, except in memories. I couldn’t even find anybody who remembered Blampied.”

“That’s not very surprising.”

“Why not?” He stared at me sharply, then added: “D’you mean you don’t believe he ever existed?”

“Oh, he existed all right. But he died such a long time ago.”

“When?”

“In 1920.”

“Good God! Within a year—of—of my—leaving—like that.”

“Not only within a year. Within a month. January 1920.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I also spent part of yesterday investigating. I searched the obituaries in newspaper files and found this.” I handed him a sheet of paper on which I had copied out the following from the Daily Gazette of January 17, 1920:—

We regret to announce the death at the age of seventy-four of the Reverend John Sylvester Blampied, for many years Rector of St. Clement’s Church, Vale Street, North London. Pneumonia following a chill ended a career that had often attracted public attention—particularly in connection with the preservation of ancient footpaths, a cause of which Mr. Blampied had been a valiant if sometimes tempestuous champion. His death took place in Liverpool, and funeral services will be held at St. Clement’s on Friday.

Rainier stared at the paragraph long enough to read it several times, then handed it back. His face was very pale. “Liverpool? What was he doing there?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“I—I think I can guess. He’d gone to look for me.”

“We don’t know that.”

“But isn’t it probable?”

“It’s—it’s possible. But you couldn’t help it. You couldn’t help finding out who you were.”

“I can’t help comparing what I found with what I lost!”

“You didn’t lose permanently. You’ve got it all back now.”

“But too late.” He waved his arm with sudden comprehensive emphasis. “Isn’t it too late? I’m down to ask a question in the House shortly, but not that question, yet it’s the only one worth asking or answering … isn’t everything too late? I should have stayed in that London attic. There were things to do in those days if one had vision to do them but now there’s neither time nor vision, but only this whiff of putrefying too-lateness. It was almost too late even then, except that by a sort of miracle there came a gap in long-gathering clouds—an incredibly last chance—a golden shaft along which England might have climbed back to glory.”

“Less lyrically, you mean you’d like to set the clock back?”

“Yes, set it back, and set it right, and then wind it up, because it’s been running down ever since Englishmen were more interested in the price of things on the market than what they could grow in their own gardens.”

“I see. A back-to-the-land movement?”

“Back anywhere away from me unrealness of counting able-bodied men as a national burden just because they’re listed as unemployed, and figures in bank ledgers as assets just because they’re supposed to represent riches. Back anywhere from the mood in which poor men beg me for jobs in Rainier factories and rich men for tips about Rainier shares.”

“All the same, though—and you’ve often said it yourself—the Rainier firm gives steady employment to thousands—”

“I know, I know. But I know too that the way that made Rainiers rich was the opposite of the way to make England strong.”

“Yet if war comes, won’t the riches of Rainier have been of some benefit? After all, the new steelworks you were able to build two years ago, and the mass-production motor plant—”

“True—and what a desolate irony! But only half true, because strength is only half in tanks and steel. The other half is faith, wisdom—”

A House servant approached and said something in his ear; he answered, consulting his watch: “Oh yes. I’ll come at once.” Then he added to me: “It’s time for that question.”

We left the table and walked through the Smoke Room to the Lobby; then we separated, he to enter the Chamber, I to watch and listen from the Strangers’ Gallery.

Again, as earlier at the Cement meeting, I was in no mood for correct secretarial concentration; from where I sat the main thing that impressed me was his strained pallor on rising to speak; in the green-yellow glow that came on as dusk fell his face took on a curious transparency, as if some secret hidden self were flooding outwards and upwards. But that, I knew, was a mere trick of artificial light; the House of Commons illumination flatters in such a way, often gilding with spirituality a scene which is not, in itself, very remarkable—a few Members going through the formality which would later entitle them to boast of having “raised the matter in the House,” than which, except for writing letters to The Times, fortunate generations of Englishmen were never called upon to do more. That afternoon the benches were thinly populated, nothing important was expected, and I find from newspaper reports that the following took place:—

Mr. Charles Rainier (Conservative: West Lythamshire) asked whether a consignment of trade catalogues dispatched by a business firm in his constituency had been confiscated by the port authorities at Balos Blanca, and whether this was not contrary to Section 19 of the recent Trade Convention signed at Amazillo.

The Right Honorable Sir George Smith-Jordan (Conservative: Houghley), replying for the Government, said he had been informed by His Majesty’s Consul at Balos Blanca that the reported confiscation had been only partial and temporary, affecting a certain section of the catalogues about which there appeared to have been some linguistic misunderstanding, and that the greater part of the consignment had since been delivered to the addressees. As to whether the action of the port authorities had or had not been an infringement of any clause of the Amazillo Trade Convention, he was not in a position to say until further information had been received.

Mr. Jack Wells (Labour: Mawlington) asked whether, having regard to the general unsatisfactoriness of the incident, His Majesty’s Government would consider the omission of Balos Blanca from the scheduled list of ports of call during the proposed Good-Will Tour of the British Trade Delegation in 1940.

The Right Honorable Sir George Smith-Jordan: No, sir.

Immediately after that, Rainier picked up his papers and walked out, leaving the Mother of Parliaments to struggle along with barely more than a quorum till after the dinner hour. Meanwhile I left the Gallery, in which a small crowd of provincial and foreign visitors had been defiantly concealing their disappointment at the proceedings below, and met him in the Lobby; he was gossiping with strangers, but behind the façade of casualness I saw how haggard he looked, his face restlessly twitching in and out of smiles. Seeing me approach he made a sign for me to wait while he detached himself from the crowd—they were constituents, he explained later, and constituents had to be humored, especially when one’s majority had been only twelve last time. “They’re so proud because they heard me ask about that catalogue business—they have a touching belief that a question in Parliament pulls invisible wires, sets invisible forces in motion, works invisible miracles all over the world.”

Passing through the Smoke Room again on the way to the Terrace we saw the name “McAlister” on the notice board that announced current speakers; Rainier smiled and said that was fine—McAlister always gave one a chance to stroll for half an hour with the certainty of not missing anything. “By the way, I’m dining at the Historians’ Club’ so I don’t think I’ll need you for the rest of the evening.”

“Are you down to speak?”

“I’m not on the program but I daresay I’ll be asked.”

“You don’t have to go if you’d rather not. I can make up some excuse.”

“What’s the idea—encouraging me to shirk?”

“I thought—perhaps—you might be feeling rather exhausted.”

“Not a bit of it now. I’m game for more wan a speech at a Club dinner. You’d be surprised if you knew what’s in my mind.”

We stepped into the cool evening air and began walking towards Westminster Bridge. He had given me a cue to say what I had been planning most of the day.

“My advice would be to put the whole thing out of your mind, now that it’s happened at last, and there isn’t a gap any longer. You ought to be satisfied.”

“Satisfied?” He swung round on me. “When you say that I wonder if—if you quite realize—what it all amounts to?”

“Oh yes, I do. It means that so far as there was ever anything abnormal in your life, you’re now completely cured.”

We came near the Bridge, a blaze of illumination from lines of trams, and in that light I saw such anguish in his eyes that I could only repeat, with an emphasis that somehow drained away as the words were spoken: “Utterly and completely cured.”

“You don’t really think that’s all it amounts to? You must know there’s only one thing that matters—only one thing left for me to do.”

“And that is?”

“I must find her.”

So there it was squarely before us, the issue that had of course been in my mind, that I had done a pathetic best to make him shirk by conscientiously shirking it myself. We walked a little way in silence.

“After all these years,” I said at length, “it doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I must try.”

“It was up to her, surely, to look for you—yet apparently she never did.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t care. And besides—there’s my son. She was going to have a child.”

“But even a return of memory can’t prove it was a boy.”

He smiled. “No, but I hope so. I’ve always wanted a boy. He’d be eighteen now. I must find him … both of them.”

“And if by chance—not that I think there is much chance—but just for the sake of argument—if you should happen to succeed, what then?”

He answered with a certain impregnable simplicity: “Then I should be happy again.”

“Possibly, but apart from your own personal happiness … Look here, why not think it over—not now—but later—calmly—when you’re alone?”

“I’m calm now, and it doesn’t particularly help me to be alone when I think. I was thinking it over very clearly all the time I was asking that question in the House.”

“Yes, I could see you were—but that doesn’t meet my point, which is that you haven’t—you can’t have—reckoned with all the complications—”

“Complications? You’ll be telling me next I ought to consult old Truslove!”

“Actually I wasn’t thinking of legal complications at all, though they doubtless exist. It’s other kinds you’d find most disagreeable—newspaper publicity, gossip and scandal that wouldn’t do you any good politically,”

“I think I’ve had enough good done to me politically.”

“And then of course there’s your wife. Whatever your private feelings are, and of course it’s none of my business, you ought at least to consider her position.”

“Anything I ought to do now is nothing compared with what I ought to have done before.”

“But that’s in the past—irrevocable.”

“No, not if she and I can find each other again.”

“It seems to me we’re talking about different persons.”

“Oh, I see.”

We walked on for another spell of silence. Then I said: “But you don’t even know that the … the other woman’s alive?”

He was silent for a while. “Do you?” I pressed.

“No, that’s true.” Then suddenly: “But if she is, and I can find her, then nothing on earth will stop me—neither publicity, nor politics, nor …” He turned to me abruptly. “I don’t want to be dramatic. Let’s leave that to the journalists, who’ll have the job of making a nine days’ wonder of it.”

“Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll have more important news, the way events are going.”

As we turned into the Smoke Room the board showed that McAlister was still speaking. A group of Members at one of the tables greeted Rainier chaffingly and asked him to join them; as if relieved to be rid of the argument he gave me a nod of friendly farewell and sat down with them, completely master of himself so far as voice and manner were concerned. But I heard one of them say, just as I was entering the corridor: “You look pretty washed-out, Rainier—what’s the matter? Hitler getting on your nerves?”

I went back to my rooms in Bedford Square and spent the evening with the latest editions of the papers. But I could not keep my mind on the fast-developing European crisis; my thoughts were full of Rainier and his story; I mused upon his whole life as I now knew it: childhood at Stourton, with the despotic father and adored mother; schooldays; then the war, the hospitals, the brief unmemoried idyl; then the return to the routine struggle that had brought him wealth, power, and a measure of fame. I could not but feel his personal drama near to me as I turned on the radio for the larger drama of our times, for that too had reached a moment of desperate retrospect.

About midnight I strolled into Tottenham Court Road and watched the crowd pouring out of theaters and restaurants; when I returned there was a letter pushed under the door. It was from Rainier, enclosing another letter. He wrote:—

I said I would let you see that last note Kitty wrote me; here it is, and whatever it means to you, to me, rereading it just now, it meant as much more as you can possibly imagine. Yrs. C.R.

The letter from Kitty, dated September 30, 1929, was as follows:—

My dear Charles,

I’m writing this in a hurry, but after thinking things out as slowly and carefully as even you could—in fact I’ve been gathering together many thoughts I began to have the moment we left the Jungfraujoch last April, in the train and on the boat, and then again off and on ever since, and especially in the restaurant tonight—Dearest, it wasn’t the weather or the altitude or the stock market—it was our own hearts sinking a little, and I’m going to face that frankly, because I doubt if you ever would or could. I can’t marry you, Charles dear—that’s what it amounts to. We’ve had marvelous times, we’d still go on having them, we have so much in common, the same way of seeing things, the same kind of craziness (though you keep yours in check more than I do)—you could make me perfectly happy if only I were selfish enough not to care or stupid enough not to notice that at some point in the final argument you waver and turn away. So here’s my decision—No, darling, while it’s still not quite too late; and here are my plans—I’m leaving London immediately, I’ll have gone before you read this—I shall probably join Jill (wherever she is, Luxor, I think) not tragically, but in a mood to see what fun I can find—and I usually can. I’m sending this by special messenger because I want it to reach you before you go to the office, so that you won’t send out those invitations and then have to cancel them—as for selling short to amuse me, it wouldn’t amuse me, I’m afraid, but if you think it would amuse you, why don’t you do it? Dear Charles, I want you to be happy, to be amused, to do things because you desire them, not because you’re urged or tempted; I wish we could be and do all we talked of on the mountain, but the fact is, I’m not the one for you, though God knows the mistake was excusable for both of us, because I’m nearly the one—I claim that much and it’s something to go on being proud of. But “nearly” isn’t enough for a lifetime—it would be too hard to strain after the hidden difference. And there’s something else that may sound utterly absurd, but let me say it—sometimes, especially when we’ve been closest, I’ve had a curious feeling that I remind you of someone else—someone you may have met or may yet meet—because with that strange memory of yours, the tenses get mixed up—or don’t they? But Charles, because I am so nearly the one, and because I love you more than anyone I shall ever marry, will you forgive me for this upset and stay friends?—K.

I went to his City office the following morning and waited till after ten o’clock (he usually arrived at nine); then I rang up his Club and was told he had left very early, giving no forwarding address. It was a day of such important engagements that I went over to the Club immediately, hoping to find out more than they would tell me over the telephone.

The porter, who knew me, said he had left about six, by car.

“Hanson was with him then?”

“No, sir, he drove alone. It wasn’t his usual car—quite a small one, a brown two-seater.”

“But he hasn’t got a two-seater.”

“Well, he went away in one—that’s all I can tell you, sir. I think it was an Austin, but I’m not sure.”

“And he left no message for me?”

“No, sir—no message for anybody, except that he’d be away till he got back. That was his phrase. He seemed in a very cheerful mood. I thought maybe he had some good news, but it don’t look like it from today’s papers.”

“Well I expect I’ll hear from him—it’s all right.”

I went away as if I thought it really was, because I was anxious not to start gossip at the Club. Then I went back to the City office and pretended the mystery was cleared up—he’d had to go away for a few days on an important political errand; I telephoned to cancel all his appointments for the day, giving the same story, except that to those in the political world I made out it was a business errand. There were certain advantages in belonging to two worlds. I wondered if I should hear from him, by either wire or telephone as the day proceeded, but no message came, and in the late afternoon I drove to Stourton. There were several cars outside the main entrance, but none was a brown two-seater; I hadn’t really expected it. Woburn met me on the threshold. “What are you doing here?” he greeted me, as if he owned the place.

“What are you doing here, for that matter? Still on the catalogue?”

“No, I’ve finished that and several more since. I’m just a guest.”

“Well, that’s very nice.”

“There’s going to be a big party this week end.”

There was, and that was what I had come about. “Where’s Mrs. Rainier?”

“On the terrace—dispensing cocktails and small talk with her usual glassy proficiency. Just a local crowd—they’ll go soon.”

“Let’s join them.”

I realized then, as soon as I saw her in the distance, how keenly my sympathies had been enlisted for a woman whose glassiest proficiency could hardly help her much in the situation that was now so rapidly developing. As we shook hands she seemed to me rather like a pathetic tightrope walker doing her tricks in confident unawareness that the rope was about to be cut.

The crowd were mostly neighbors whom I had met before, but there was one fresh face—Sir William Somebody, whom I knew to be a retired diplomat who lived on his pension in a farmhouse rented from the Rainiers. Mrs. Rainier introduced me with the remark that perhaps, having just driven from London, I could give him the latest news. “Sir William thinks the situation’s far worse than people realize.”

I passed on what news there was; then a girl called Cynthia exclaimed: “We mustn’t miss the wireless bulletin. Hasn’t he been making another speech today?” (It had come to the point where an unrelated “he” could only refer to Hitler.)

“Just words, nothing but words,” someone else muttered.

“Better than actions, anyhow.”

Mrs. Rainier intervened lazily: “Oh, I’m not so sure of that as I used to be. I mean, when you’re waiting for something to happen, and rather dreading it …” She went on: “Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you’re certain it’s the wrong road and you tell them, but they won’t listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?”

“A parable, darling. Please interpret.”

She seemed embarrassed by being the focus of attention—which was unusual of her. “No, thanks, Cynthia. That’s been enough words from me.” She laughed and came round with: the cocktail shaker, refilling the glasses, including her own.

Sir William resumed: “Well, if he does march into Poland, we shall fight.” Then suddenly he pointed to the great avenue of elms for which Stourton was famous. “Look at those trees—planted two centuries ago, deliberately, by someone who thought of a time when someone else would see them like this. Who could do such a thing today?” Nobody informed him, and after a pause to deposit an olive stone in an ashtray he went on: “The most we do is to bury things under foundation stones so that future civilizations can dig into our ruins and wonder.”

We all laughed, because after a few drinks what can one do but laugh; then in ones and twos the party dispersed and drove away in its cars. I went to the library and turned on the radio for the news bulletin; Hitler’s speech had been just another threat to march. Somehow one didn’t believe he would; there had been crises before, ending up in a deal; so that one had the half-cynical suspicion that both sides were secretly arranging another deal and that the wordy warfare was just shadowboxing, face saving, anything but a prelude to the guns. While I was listening Sheldon entered to announce that dinner would be almost immediately, and that Mrs. Rainier had said “not dress.”

“Good—since I haven’t brought anything.”

“I think Mrs. Rainier anticipated that.”

“Very thoughtful of her.”

“You left Mr. Rainier in the City?”

“Er … yes.”

“Then you’ll be going back in the morning?”

“I expect so.”

He nodded and went to the door, then turned and asked: “What’s going to happen, do you think?”

“Can’t tell yet, but it looks pretty serious.”

He said, still standing in the doorway: “I mean what’s going to happen to Mr. Rainier?”

He went on, facing my stare: “You said he’s in the City.”

“I didn’t say that. I said I left him there.”

“Don’t you know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Isn’t that rather peculiar?”

“Many things are peculiar, Sheldon.”

“Are you worried about him? … You must excuse me, I have a special reason for asking.”

“I’m sure you have. It might even be the same reason I have for not answering.”

He came back into the room. “Mr. Harrison … has he gone away to look for somebody?”

“I really don’t think I can discuss—” Then something in his glance made me add: “But supposing he had—then what?”

He smiled his slow slanting smile. “Then you don’t need to worry.”

“I didn’t say I was worrying at all. But why don’t I need to?”

“Because he won’t succeed in finding the person he’s looking for.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he never has succeeded.”

He left the men, and a few minutes later the dinner gong sounded. When I joined Mrs. Rainier in the dining room, with Sheldon standing at the sideboard, I had a feeling they had been exchanging glances if not words about me, but I could not say much during dinner, on account of Woburn’s presence. As if by tacit agreement we left him most of the talking, which he kept up very agreeably throughout the meal—he was really a very adaptable young man, you would have thought him born and bred at Stourton, except that most of those who had been were so much leas smoothly articulate. I was wondering how I could shake him off afterwards, but Mrs. Rainier did it for me, saying outright that she expected I had some business to talk over, so if Woburn would excuse us …

“Do you mind if we have a fire?” she asked, as soon as we were alone in the dining room. I helped her to remove the heavy screen, saying something about the night being cold for the eve of September.

“It isn’t that,” she answered, kneeling on the hearthrug. “But it makes a more cheerful background when so many uncheerful things are happening.”

Looking at her then, I realized for the first time how much more she was than merely vivacious and attractive; her face had a beauty that poured into it from within—a secret, serene radiance. She went on, stooping to the fire: “You’ve saved me the trouble of calling at the office tomorrow—I wanted to ask about something.”

“Good job you didn’t, because I’m not sure Mr. Rainier will be there.”

“Oh? He’s gone away somewhere?”

“Yes.” I remembered him saying she was never surprised at any of his movements. “And as I don’t know when exactly he’ll be coming back, I was wondering about the week-end plans.”

“The political situation’s so serious I doubt if we’d have had the party anyway. Yes, let’s cancel it.”

“That’s what I was going to suggest.”

“Nice of you, but why didn’t you telephone?” She added hastily: “Not that I’m not pleased to see you—I always am—but it gave you the journey.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind. I’m equally pleased to see you.”

She laughed. “Now we’ve had the exchange of compliments—”

She didn’t know what else to say, I could see that; and after a pause I resumed: “What was it you wanted to ask about if you had called at the office?”

“Oh yes, maybe you can tell me just as well. Why did you and Charles drive out to Melbury the other night?”

The sheer unexpectedness of the question nonplused me for a moment. In the meantime she went on: “And don’t blame Hanson—he wasn’t to know he’d overheard such a tremendous secret!” She was laughing.

“Oh, not—er—exactly a secret.”

“Well a mystery.”

I said to gain time: “And you were going to pay a special visit just to ask that?”

“Yes, indeed—I’ve been terribly curious ever since I heard about it.”

“Then it’s my turn to say why didn’t you telephone?”

“Perhaps because I wanted to see your faces when I asked you—it’s so much harder to hide something that way!” She laughed again. “Won’t you let me in on the puzzle? Melbury’s such an odd place for anyone to make a trip to.”

It suddenly occurred to me that she had to know, and now was the chance to tell her. I said: “Mr. Rainier was once in a hospital at Melbury.”

In the blaze of fresh firelight I could see the laughter drain away from her face and a sudden pallor enter it; but in another second she was smiling again.

“Well it seems a queer reason for driving somewhere in pouring rain in the middle of the night. For that matter Charles was at other hospitals too—he was pretty badly hurt in the war, you know. It even affected his memory for a time. I never knew quite how much you had gathered about all that—” She was striving to seem very casual.

“Just the main facts, that’s all.”

“He told you them himself?”

“Yes.”

The smile remained as if fixed to her face. “Oh, I’m so glad, because it shows how close you must have been to him as a friend. He doesn’t often talk about it to anybody. And to me he never talks about it.”

“Never?”

“No, never. Isn’t that strange? But then he’s so little with me—and mostly we have business or politics to talk about. Our marriage is a very happy one, but it’s never been—well, close is perhaps the word. We’ve never even had a close quarrel.”

“But you love him?”

“Well, what do you think? I adore him—most women do. Haven’t you noticed that? All his life he could always have had any pretty woman he wanted.”

“So it isn’t surprising that he got the pretty woman he wanted.”

“More compliments? … Oh, but you should have seen the girl he was engaged to when I first became his secretary. I was his secretary—you knew that too, I suppose? She was much prettier than me, and younger. Kitty, her name was. She married somebody else and died—I can’t think why—I mean why she married somebody else, not why she died—she died of malaria—I suppose there’s no reason at all for that, except mosquitoes. I think they’d have been very happy—she and Charles, I mean, not the mosquitoes—but she’d have tried to make him give up the business. I know that, because she told me.”

I could catch a note of hysteria subdued behind her forced facetiousness; I said, as calmly as I could: “You knew her well, then?”

“Only by talking to her while she used to wait in the office for Charles.”

“Tell me—if it isn’t impertinent to ask—were you also in love with him then?”

She laughed. “Of course. Right from the first moment I set eye on him. … But that didn’t make me jealous of Kitty—only a bit envious, perhaps. I wonder how it would have worked out—Charles without all the business and politics. Of course he found out later I was the one to help him in that, and so I have—I’ve done my best to give him everything he wants—success—his ambitions … and yet sometimes lately I’ve thought … well, like my parable.”

“Parable?”

“Cynthia called it that during cocktails, don’t you remember? About going somewhere with someone and having doubts about it being the right road, but there’s nothing you can do but plod along until the other person begins to doubt. And then, of course, if you admit that you had doubts all the time, as likely as not he turns on you and says—well, why didn’t you warn me?”

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“Because he wouldn’t have taken any notice if I had. In fact he might not even have married me—and I wanted him to marry me. After Kitty died he threw himself into business more than ever—which gave me my chance—oh, I admit I was quite designing about it. So was he. He found how good I was—what a valuable merger it would be. He was always clever about mergers. …”

“Did that entirely satisfy you?”

“No, but I thought it might lead to something that would—to the real closeness. But it’s hard to get close when so many things are in the way. … May I have a light?” She was reaching for a cigarette on the side table and I could see that her hand was trembling. She added, as I held the match: “Do you want a drink in exchange?”

“I think I’d rather wait till later.”

“Later? Well, how long do you expect to sit up and talk parables?”

I said then: “Mrs. Rainier, I think I’d better tell you more about the visit to Melbury.”

“Oh yes, the mystery—do please tell me everything! What did you find there?”

She was smiling as I began to tell her, and the smile grew faint as I proceeded, then appeared again in time for the end. I told her all that was important for her to know—the fact of his earlier marriage, his life during those brief months immediately afterwards, and how that life had come to an abrupt finish. I did not try to make it easier for her by a gingerly approach to the problem, or by minimizing its complexities. And I told her how he had reacted to the recent return of memory—his first excitement, then his calmer determination and bitter regret for the years between. Finally I told her that though it seemed to me highly unlikely that after two decades he would succeed in tracing someone who hadn’t apparently succeeded in the much easier task of tracing him during the same interval, and though the gap of years gave legal as well as every other kind of sanction to what had happened since, she must be prepared for the faint possibility; and that if it happened the publicity would be neither pleasant for her nor helpful to his position.

“He must know that too.”

“Yes, but in his present mood he doesn’t care.”

“Oh, he doesn’t care?” She said that so softly, so gently, still smiling. I tried to think of something to express the wave of sympathy that overcame me; in the end I could only give her my silence. Presently she touched my hand and said: “Thank you for telling me all this.”

“I must say you take it very well.”

“Did you expect me to make a scene?”

“No, but … when I try to imagine your feelings …”

“I don’t feel anything yet, at least not much, but I keep on thinking of what you said—that he doesn’t care!”

“I know it’s terrible but—”

“Oh, no, it’s wonderful! He’d throw over everything—his future—his ambitions—everything—if he could find her!”

“In his present mood he thinks so.”

“Don’t keep saying ‘in his present mood.’ Maybe his present mood is himself, and all the other moods were false. … How do we know?”

“There’s one thing we do know—that people are remembered as they were last seen—and twenty years is a long time.”

She turned to me with brightly shining eyes.

“How sad that is, and how true.”

“And from your point of view—how fortunate.”

“Oh no, no—I wish she were still as he remembers her. I wish there were such a miracle. If all of us could go back twenty years—how different the world would be! I want him to be happy, I always have. … Now will you have your drink?”

“If you will too.”

She went over to the table and mixed them; I could see she was glad of something to do. Stooping over the glasses she continued: “I suppose he told you a great deal more than you’ve told me?”

“Only details.”

“Ah, but the details—those are what I want to hear. Did he remember things very clearly?”

“Yes.”

“Places and people?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me some of them.”

I hesitated, again catching the note of hysteria in her voice; she added: “It doesn’t hurt me—as much as you think. Tell me some of them. … You say he met her first at Melbury?”

“Yes—on that first Armistice Day.”

“And they were married in London?”

“Yes.”

“Where did he propose to her? Did he tell you that?”

“A village in the country somewhere—I think it was called Beachings Over.”

“Beachings Over … an odd name.”

“England is full of them.”

“I know—like Nether Wallop and Shallow Bowells. …” She turned round with my drink. “And war coming to them all again. Do you think there’s still a chance of avoiding it?”

“There’s always a chance of postponing it.”

“No—we’ve had enough of that.”

“I think so too.”

“But we’re not ready yet, are we?”

“We’re terribly unready. We missed our ways years ago and found a wide, comfortable road, fine for sleepwalkers, but it had the major drawback of wandering just anywhere, at random.”

“Charles always thought that, but as a rich man it wasn’t easy for him to say so. Being rich tied his hands and stopped his mouth and took up his time—so that the wasted years wasted him too. …”

“I think he’s begun to realize that.”

“Yes, he’s sure of something at last. … Another drink?”

“No, thanks.”

A long pause. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, is there?”

“Are you talking about—er—the country—or—er—”

“Both, in a way.”

“I think one can make up for lost time, but one can’t salvage it. That’s why his quest is so hopeless.”

Her voice softened. “So you think that’s where he’s gone—to look for her?”

“It’s possible. … But to look for her as she was, and that’s impossible.”

The hysteria touched her voice again. “Tell me another detail—no matter how small or trivial—please tell me—”

“I think you’re needlessly upsetting yourself.”

“No, it isn’t upsetting—it’s—it’s almost helping me in a way—tell me something—”

“I’d rather not, and besides, it’s hard to think—”

“Oh, but you said he talked all night and you’ve only talked for an hour so far. There must be hundreds of things—names of places or incidents that happened here or there—or how she looked. …”

“Well … let me see …”

“How did she look? Did he remember her well?”

“He seemed to, though he never described her exactly—but he did say—I believe he said when they first met she was wearing a little fur hat like a fez. … Or no, I may have mixed things up—that was Kitty when she stepped out of the train at Interlaken.”

“Interlaken?”

“They had a holiday there—he and Kitty.”

“I know. And she was wearing a little fur hat like a fez? Or the other one? Or both, maybe—but wouldn’t that be rather improbable?”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry—it was like me to choose a detail I’d get confused over.”

She put her hand in mine. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve been very kind. I wish I’d known you better—and earlier. Thank you again.”

“You understand that I’m anxious to help both of you?”

“Yes, I understand. But I don’t know how you can.”

“Anyhow, there’s a sort of chilly comfort in thinking how unimportant all one’s personal affairs are these days.”

She got up and began walking to the door. “Yes, but when that sort of comfort has chilled one quite thoroughly, the warmth comes—the feeling that nothing matters except personal feelings … the what-if-the-world-should-end-tonight mood.”

We shook hands at the doorway, and there she added, smiling: “Perhaps our world is ending tonight. …”

I stayed in the drawing room a little while after she had gone; then I thought it would be only civil to find Woburn. He was in the library, listening to the radio. “Still nothing definite. You know, if there’s a war, I want to get in the Air Force.” We had another drink and talked for about an hour before going upstairs.

I had asked Sheldon to call me at seven; he did so, bringing in a cup of tea. “I thought you’d wish to know the news—it just came over the wireless.” Then he told me.

I got up hurriedly. It was a perfect late-summer morning, cool and fresh, with a haze of mist over the hills. Woburn had brought a small radio into the breakfast room; we hardly exchanged a greeting, but sat in front of the instrument, listening as the first reports came through. Presently Mrs. Rainier entered, stood in the doorway to hear a few sentences, then joined us with the same kind of whispered perfunctory good-morning. The bulletin ended with a promise of more news soon, then merged into music.

That was how we had breakfast on that first morning of the second war—to the beat of a dance band and with the sunlight streaming through the windows of Stourton.

After breakfast we heard the news repeated, and found the strain almost intolerable. We strayed about the gardens, the three of us, then came back to the radio again; this time there were a few extra items, reports of half the world’s grim awakening.

The newspapers came, but they were already old—printed hours before.

I telephoned the City office, and had to wait twenty minutes before the line was clear.

Then Woburn, after wandering restlessly in and out of rooms, said he would take a long walk. I think he would have liked either Mrs. Rainier or myself or both of us to suggest accompanying him, but we stayed each other with a glance. “He’s a nice boy,” she said, when he had gone.

“Yes, very.”

“Does Charles like him?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I always hoped he would. I feel we’ve almost adopted him, in one sense.”

“I sometimes think he feels that too.”

“I’d like him to feel that … I once had a child, a boy, but he died. …”

“I never knew that.”

“Charles would have made a good father, don’t you think?”

“Yes … he must have been terribly disappointed.”

“What will Woburn do now?”

“He said he’d join the Air Force.”

She moved restlessly to the radio, where the music had suddenly stopped. Another news item: the Germans had crossed the Polish frontiers at many places; the war machine was already clanking into gear.

“I can’t stand this—I half wish now we’d gone with him for the walk. Don’t leave me alone here—you don’t have to return to the City, do you?”

“No, not yet, anyhow. I just rang up the office. They haven’t had any news or message.”

“Oh … let’s go somewhere then. I’ll drive you. There’s nothing else to do—we’ll go mad if we sit over the radio all day.”

We took her car, which was an open sports Bentley, and set out. The Stourton parkland had never looked more wonderful; it was as if it had the mood to spread its beauty as a last temptation to remain at peace, or, failing that, as a last spendthrift offering to a thankless world. We passed quickly, then threaded the winding gravel roads over the estate to an exit I had not known of before—it opened on to the road to Faringdon. Through the still misty morning we raced westward and northward; but at Lechlade the sun was bright and the clock showed ten minutes past ten. A few miles beyond Burford the country rolled into uplands, and presently we left the main road altogether, slowing for tree-hidden corners and streams that crossed the lanes in wide sandy shallows, till at last in the distance we saw a rim of green against the blue.

“Perhaps it will be a simpler England after the war,” was one of the things she said.

“You’re already thinking of after the war?”

“Of course. The next Armistice Day, whenever it comes.”

“It’ll be a different England, that’s very certain. Not so rich, and not so snobbish—but maybe we can do without some of the riches and all the snobbery.”

She nodded: “Maybe we can do without Stourton—and Bentleys.”

“And two-for-one bonus issues.”

“And guinea biographies like the one somebody once wrote about Charles’s father.”

“And parties for His Excellency to meet the winners of the Ladies’ Doubles.”

She laughed. “And champagne when you’ve already had enough champagne.”

“How can we be so absurd—on a day like this?”

“Maybe it isn’t so absurd.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Oh, just somewhere in England, as the war bulletins may say one of these days.”

We drove on, mile after mile, till at a turn of the road the hills ahead of us sharpened into a ridge and at the same turn also there was a signpost which made me cry out, with a sudden catch of breath: “Did you see that?”

“I know. I wanted to come here.”

“But—you shouldn’t—it’s only torturing yourself—”

“No, no. I promise I won’t be upset—see, I’m quite calm.”

“But all this probing of the past—”

“That’s where the future will take us, maybe—back to the past. A simpler England. Old England.”

And then we came upon the gray cottages fronting the stream, the square-towered church, the ledge in the stream where the water sparkled. We parked our car by the church and walked along the street. A postman late on his morning rounds stared with friendly curiosity at us and the car, then said “Good morning.” A fluff of wind blew tall hollyhocks towards us. Somebody was clipping a hedge; an old dog loitered into a fresh patch of shade. Little things—but I shall remember them long after much else has been forgotten.

There seemed no special significance anywhere, no sign that a war had begun.

But as we neared the post office I caught sight of something that to me was most significant of all—a small brown two-seater car. I walked over to it; a man saw me examining the license. “If you’re looking for the tall gentleman,” he came over to say, “I think he took a walk up the hill.”

I turned to Mrs. Rainier. “Charles?” was all she whispered.

“Might be. It meets the Club porter’s description and it was hired from a London firm.”

We turned off the main road by a path crossing an open field towards the hill; as we were climbing the chime of three quarters came up to us, blown faint by the breeze. The slope was too steep for much talk, but when we came within a few yards of the ridge she halted to gain breath, gazing down over the village.

“Looks as if it has never changed.”

“I don’t suppose it has, much, in a thousand years.”

“That makes twenty seem only yesterday.”

“If we meet him, what are you going to say?”

“I don’t know. I can’t know—before I see him.”

“He’ll wonder why on earth we’ve come here, of all places.”

“Then well ask him why on earth he’s here. Perhaps well both have to pretend we came to look at the five counties.”

She resumed the climb, and in another moment we could see that the summit dipped again to a further summit, perhaps higher, and that in the hollow between lay a little pond. There was a man lying beside it with arms outstretched, as if he had flung himself there after the climb. He did not move as we approached, but presently we saw smoke curling from a cigarette between his fingers. “He’s not asleep,” I said. “He’s just resting.” I saw her eyes and the way her lips trembled; something suddenly occurred to me. “By the way, how did you know there were five counties?”

But she didn’t answer; already she was rushing down the slope. He saw her in time to rise to his feet; she stopped then, several yards away, and for a few seconds both were staring at each other, hard and still and silent. Then he whispered something I couldn’t hear; but I knew in a flash that the gap was closed, that the random years were at an end, that the past and the future would join. She knew this too, for she ran into his arms calling out: “Oh, Smithy—Smithy—it may not be too late!”

We Are Not Alone

James Hilton

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

IN A SMALL CATHEDRAL town where changes are few, there are always people who remember who used to live in a particular house, what happened to them there and afterwards, and so on. Thus, when a chain-store company bought a site at the corner of Shawgate and sent men to break up the old Georgian frontage, there were reminders all over the town—“That was where the little doctor lived.” It was a long time ago. The house had never been occupied since, and for a reason that made passers-by stare curiously as the picks swung through the dust clouds. In due course the job reached a stage when the whole of an inside wall was exposed, and on it, still hanging, a smashed picture which a workman sold for half a crown to a bystander. It proved on examination to be a faded etching of angels grouped around an arch of flowers, but when viewed at more than arm’s length the whole design took on the likeness of a human skull. Some forgotten Victorian artist must have thought this clever; he could hardly have imagined that it would ever be so appropriate.

For the little doctor, who had lived in that house for years, was finally hanged for the murder of his wife. A young woman was charged with him, and she too was sentenced to death. The case attracted a good deal of attention at the time, not only amongst the general public but in legal circles also. “The framing of the indictment to include both prisoners,” says one authority, “was perfectly logical and proper, for English law holds that if murder is committed, joint responsibility can be established against any number of persons without regard to the question of who struck the fatal blow. Thus it was possible throughout the Newcome trial to ignore the problem (interesting but perhaps insoluble) of individual behavior during the crucial hours. All the same, the defense seems to me to have been somewhat mismanaged; indeed, it was generally admitted afterwards that Sir Guy Lockhead made a cardinal mistake in putting Dr. Newcome in the witness box to face a Crown cross-examination. My own plan, had I been defending Newcome, would have been to stress the undoubted fact that all the evidence was circumstantial, and to urge that it was the duty of the prosecution to prove it to the hilt rather than expect my client to refute it. I am inclined to think that if this had been done, an opposite verdict might have been returned (even against the racial and political feeling that was aroused by the nationality of the female prisoner); for there was much in the doctor’s favor had not his hesitations, inconsistencies, and farfetched explanations created such a bad impression.”

Thus one of the leading jurists of the day. He was not present at the trial, nor is it likely that his balanced scrutiny would have been affected by the picture I have in my own mind, of a grey day, herald of winter, the gas jets in the courtroom dimmed and flickering, so that as daylight faded, the shapes of judge, jury, and prisoners swam in a greenish twilight: the muffled Cathedral chimes each quarter hour, the hissing of the heating apparatus, voices that droned on more and more slowly as if they must die at last in darkness.

The little doctor, as I saw him then, was very quiet and still. But once, during some evidence of a particularly repetitive kind, there came into his quietude a sudden emptying of consciousness that could only mean one thing, and that an extremely shocking thing in a man on trial for his life. He had dozed off! His head nodded for a moment, till a warder tapped him so vigorously on the shoulder that he nearly slid to the floor.

“The court would be obliged if the prisoner would pay attention.”

“I beg your pardon,” answered the little doctor, almost inaudibly.

If you were born in Calderbury during the first decade of the twentieth century, David Newcome may well have ushered you into the world, for he had begun to practise in 1899. A year after that he married the daughter of a rural dean; they had one child, a boy. Jessica mixed with the best Cathedral society and was always on the committee of this, that, and the other. David didn’t share many of her interests; sometimes he went to Sunday service with her, but more often not, for a doctor has all the best excuses. He was generous, however, with subscriptions, and some of the Cathedral people called him “our doctor” because of his wife. Perhaps that was really why they also called him “little,” since it was not he who was less than average in height, but Jessica who was more. She was five feet ten, which is tall enough in any woman.

Perhaps too there was endearment in the diminutive, for a film of guilelessness often covered his brown eyes when he looked one over; and when he examined a child, one could think of two children examining each other. He had beautiful hands, simple manners (no manners at all, Jessica sometimes said), and a way of telling the truth if he thought you needed it. “There’s nothing the matter with you,” he would declare, quite simply, and leave you to try another doctor if you wanted coddling. His voice was quiet, and to those who preferred their own he would listen for a while—or, at any rate, seem to be listening. He smoked cherry-wood pipes which he bought for a penny each, and he always wore the same sort of dark blue suit. When he was seen about the town with Jessica people would say, acknowledging her by the adjective they bestowed on him, “There goes the little doctor.”

Calderbury was a pleasant town in those days. I always thought it the right kind of place for civilized living—small enough to be walked through in half an hour, yet of a dignity and importance beyond mere size. Its Cathedral was good fourteenth-century Gothic with later accretions, and the only building of any rival conspicuousness was the massive stone jail, built in the thirties by an architect who took an evidently depressing view of the extent and permanence of Calderbury’s criminality. The town itself, though you had heard of it, was probably one that you missed visiting thirty years ago, if only because the railway had sent it no more than the branch line of a branch line. Yet this was perhaps a lucky chance, for after half a century this line had come to easy terms with the town’s prevalent mood, so that the time-table could conveniently dismiss the inquirer with a sentence: “See trains to Marsland and thence about five times daily.”

Behind the streets rose the Knoll, a wooded hill surmounted by a stone obelisk; the best way to climb it was by the footpath from the steep part of Shawgate, beyond a row of Georgian houses. The little doctor lived in one of these. It was well-built and elegantly proportioned, but rather dark, owing to a cedar tree in the back garden and close-mesh curtains which, for front windows right on the street, were a needed barrier to the inquisitive. Calderbury folk were not more than normally curious, but the doctor’s house stood halfway up the hill and most people climbed slowly, with halts to stare at shop windows, dogs in the gutter, or the butcher’s boy freewheeling dangerously down. Assuredly the interior of Jessica’s drawing-room, if visible, would have added to these attractions. It was very prim and chintzy, with water colors and illuminated mottoes and a model of a church, carved in sandalwood, which a missionary uncle had brought back from Ceylon.

Along the side of the house ran a narrow alley, flanked by rows of white shells, spoils from some unidentifiable seashore. These pointed the way to the doctor’s surgery, which, at some earlier period of its existence, had been a lean-to greenhouse, so that a faintly horticultural atmosphere still clung to its shelving and glass roof, even though the former was crowded with bottles and the latter covered by adjustable paper blinds. It was, if you came to think about it, an exceedingly cramped, unsuitable, and ill-arranged structure, but it had, for David, the incomparable advantage of being a place apart.

Not that, in any conscious way, he had grown tired of Jessica. It was rather that his attitude towards her had leveled into a passive acceptance of her status as his wife; no flicker of impulse disturbed something which was not quite serenity and not quite boredom either. This condition, which some people flatteringly call happiness, David did not call anything; he did not even think about it. He just did his job, year by year, and would have been tolerably content with the wrong sort of wife if only he could have had the right sort of child. It didn’t seem, as the years went by, that Gerald was going to be that. There was a nervousness in the boy that was almost pathological, and none the less so because Jessica regarded it as mere naughtiness. Upon this point of interpretation David and Jessica had their rare quarrels; for the boy’s tantrums stirred David to a degree of patience which to Jessica was an added irritation. Curious foolery, so it was reported by those who had access to overlooking windows, went on in the Shawgate garden between father and son—foolery in which it would have been hard to say whose behavior was the more fantastically infantile. Jessica always thought the whole thing was rather disgraceful. But when Gerald developed one of his notorious crying fits it was David who would devote hours to pacifying him, fighting the enemy with fear-stilling hands; for David knew the terror a child can have when a shadow climbs a wall, or when a train screams through a station, or when, in some story book, a page is turned shudderingly upon a hated picture. And he knew how terror can sometimes fascinate till the dreaded thing is loved and the mind twists into lonely corridors; he knew, too, that nothing is terrible if it is not felt to be. For there was that picture of angels looking like a skull; by some chance the boy liked it, and was overjoyed when David produced a real skull—relic of student days—to give meaning to what had hitherto been a merely entertaining mystery. And David, demonstrating thus, was inspired to do so by an intrepidity he could hardly explain—a desire to establish one thing at least of which the boy should never be afraid; and that was Death.

David’s practice was one of the best in Calderbury, but that was not so very good, and there was nothing sensational about it—thousands of small-town doctors followed a similar routine. The brass plate said “Physician and Surgeon,” and of these functions the latter consisted of emergency work and operations on his own patients at their homes or in the local hospital. In those days there was less specialization and more all-round versatility; David could clip off an appendix or chisel a mastoid with as much confidence as he would invade territory now held by the dentist and the chiropodist. He was, indeed, an excellent surgeon and there was a sense, difficult for the laymen not to misinterpret, in which he enjoyed a morning at the operating table. Physicking was the more arduous, since it entailed a daily tour of Calderbury’s narrow streets, the climbing of innumerable dark and steep stairways, and—every evening except Sunday—a two-hour session in the surgery. You did not, unless you belonged to Cathedral society, make a special appointment to see the little doctor. If you were well enough you came, you waited, and you were seen. And if, unfortunately, you weren’t well enough, then a familiar phenomenon turned the corner of the street—the little doctor on a very shabby bicycle, with his bag strapped to a carrier over the rear mudguard. The streets of Calderbury were mostly steep and cobbled, and he rode along them with a degree of peril well orchestrated by experience. He always said that he couldn’t afford to motor, and when it was suggested that he could, he fell back on a second line of defense by saying that cycling gave him hard exercise and that otherwise he would have none. But the truth was probably that he disliked changes and found it hard to make up his mind for them. So he went on cycling throughout the year, in rain and cold wind, and fog; and one day in 1910, after a crash into the back of a farm cart on Lissington Hill, it was wondered amongst Calderbury citizens whether he would buy a car at last. But no; he bought another bicycle. And he had, by the way, a peculiar style of mounting and dismounting: he would wheel the machine a few paces, stare at it intensely for a second or two, and then, with an extraordinary upward and sideways leap, launch himself on to the saddle by means of a projecting “step” on the back axle. I never saw another cyclist do anything like it, and I do not know whether the little doctor was ever taught it in those far-off nineties when people were taught cycling, or whether he invented it himself.

He was well liked in Calderbury. He did not waste much time in spoken sympathy, or even seem to worry much if his patients died, though he was sometimes inclined to boast if they didn’t die—as when, for instance, in an epidemic that killed scores of other doctors’ patients, all of his recovered. He spoke of it as if it were some unique athletic feat of his own that deserved a trophy. But this boasting was only juvenile and superficial. Actually he was no more appalled by death than by life—he had seen it too often, and knew from what agonies it could bring release. He had, quite unsentimentally, a sense of human fellowship that passed beyond tearful bedside faces to the sublime muteness of suffering—contact compared with which mere personal grief was exhibitionism. And there was something more, a sense of the sheer awfulness of physical existence that gave him sympathy with every whimpering child, yet also, remotely, with the ills he had to combat, so that he could muse upon the progress of a disease as he might upon the quickening of spring in his own back garden.

A large map of England hung on the wall of the surgery waiting room; Cornwall was yellow, Devon red, Hampshire cream, and you couldn’t tell the difference between Cumberland and Westmoreland because they were so far away at the top. There was an oblong mahogany table with nothing on it but a plantless plant pot and some tattered magazines. On the mantelpiece a gilt clock ticked loudly under a glass dome, and above this hung a framed diploma certifying in a very spidery handwriting something that nobody ever bothered to stand on a chair and read. Fifteen chairs, in fact, were ranged against the four walls, and when they were all occupied the assembly, with the big table in the middle, looked like some fantastic board meeting. You had time to notice all these things while waiting for your turn. And at intervals the inner glass-paneled door would open, a patient would emerge and the next one rise eagerly; and then you would hear two distinctive good-evenings: the one that meant “You’re calmer now, you can go away easier in mind; things aren’t quite so bad, are they?”—and the other that meant “You’re worried, I know. Please tell me all about it; I’m here to help you.” And when, on summer nights, the sunlight slanted in, you could watch the yellow bars climb up from the Isle of Wight to Birmingham—never higher because of the roof across the street; and after they had gone away altogether Susan would come in with a lighted taper for the gas. It burned green and pale, with a hissing sound. And then the inner door opening again…“Good evening”—“Good evening…” Oh, little doctor, please be kind to me when it comes my turn…

So, as a child, one watched and prayed while the Cathedral bells chimed the quarters; and the prayer was answered. He was kind, none ever kinder. Once, when he had pulled out a loose tooth not quite painlessly, he promised a child a real steam engine with real steam. It was absurd, since it would cost far more than the fee, and no one expected anything to come of it—no one except the child, who believed and waited in vain. But a story came from the man who kept the town’s toy shop—that David had been there to buy the steam engine, but that Jessica interfered and wouldn’t let him spend the money. One could hardly blame her.

The trouble with genius (because I think, in some ways there was a touch of that quality in the little doctor) is that it is essentially alone. The most you know is that it is there; you cannot really come to terms with it; it is something that gives and cannot take. There were times when David sat by the bedside of old and dying people, and something passed between them in a finger touch; but you could no more describe it or analyze it than you can trap the wisp of memory that strays from a forgotten dream. And it came again in his jokes with children. Most of these look rather silly on paper, but here is one which was remembered because it shocked Jessica so much. There were mice in the kitchen of the house and she had sent for Tom Riddle, who was Calderbury’s vermin catcher and insect exterminator—a friendly little fellow with a drooping moustache and a squeaky voice. It so happened that he arrived in the midst of a children’s party and announced himself as “the mice man.” This seemed to amuse David enormously and he began a sort of game with the children to find how many other kinds of men would rhyme with “mice man”—“rice man, ice man, nice man,” and so on. Whereupon Teddy Farrell suggested “Christ man” (he was the seven-year-old son of the Arch-deacon and had probably caught the phrase from one of his father’s sermons), and David, laughing like a child himself, began to make a jingle of it:—

Mice man or Christ man,

So long as you’re a nice man—

but Jessica wouldn’t let him get any further. She thought it was blasphemous, and even more urgently wondered what Teddy would go home and tell his father.

I daresay I was too old, when I first met him, ever to know the little doctor in this childlike and more elemental sense. I was twelve and had for years suffered from recurring bouts of asthma. Other doctors had grown tired of me; patent medicines had been tried in vain. So I went at last to David, and it was then, one summer evening, that I watched the sunlight climb the counties over the map. When my turn came I sat in the leather armchair that had a footrest and a swivel arrangement for tilting backwards, and described (as clearly as only a bright grammar-school boy can) exactly what was the matter with me. Was it very serious? Would I ever get better? Was there a cure?

“I don’t really know,” David said (it was one of the things which a doctor should never say and which David often said), and after looking puzzled for a moment added: “But I think you ought to keep a diary.”

“I do,” I answered, rather proudly.

“And do you put in it everywhere you go every day?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you must go on doing that, and you must also put down how the asthma is every day…Do you like detective stories?”

I said I did, and he lent me Trent’s Last Case.

For two months I kept that diary, noting each day where I went and how much better or worse I was. Then I went to see him again. “Ah,” he said, “now we can behave as if we were from Scotland Yard. A crime has been committed and we must look for clues. I see that on April nineteenth, after visiting your Uncle Richard, you had a particularly bad attack. Now what’s your hypothesis?”

That was just how a boy of twelve, and top of his class, liked to be talked to; and in less than a week a theory was formulated. Just cats. Uncle Richard had a cat, and so had other people whom I knew and visited; I liked cats and always fondled them at every opportunity. But David wasn’t satisfied till he had taken me to Chancey Gardens.

Chancey was a place about fifty miles away where there were, and perhaps still are, side shows, a small zoo, and an amusement park. The expedition required a whole day, and it seemed remarkable, to others much more than to me, that David should hand over his affairs to a colleague in order to give a schoolboy an outing. But we had a good time. We tried the merry-go-round and the test-your-strength machines, and afterwards we ate ice-cream out of penny cones. Then we looked in at the lion house, where I promptly began to sneeze and gasp for breath. “You see?” David said, quite pleased with himself. “Any of the cat tribe, apparently…now that’s very remarkable…”

So I avoided the cat tribe, and the asthma left me. Whenever I met David again he would ask me how I was, but I felt that he already half-knew and was for that reason less interested. I always hoped he would take me somewhere again (in fact I used to dream he would), but he never did, and our trip to Chancey became a strange memory in the end. Because I loved the little doctor, and it was because of me, partly, that he was hanged.

CHAPTER ONE

ONE COLD GUSTY NIGHT in December a boy rang the bell of the doctor’s house in Shawgate, and when Susan came to the door left word that there had been an accident to a dancer at the local theatre and would the doctor please come at once. Bestowing her usual skeptical scrutiny on such a messenger, Susan pressed for further details, but the boy could give none and ran off home, leaving her to waken David from the peacefulness of a last pipe in the surgery. He had had a busy day and was tired, but when she reported the message he nodded vaguely and began putting things in his bag.

“At the theatre, Susan? A dancer?”

“So the boy said. I don’t know why they should send for you, anyway—Dr. Cowell lives much nearer.”

“I’d better go.”

“It’s probably nothing much. Shall I light your bicycle lamp for you?”

“Oh, I think I’ll walk. It’s only over the hill past the Cathedral.”

“But it’s a rough night.”

“Do me good to get some fresh air. I can walk it in ten minutes.”

He put on his overcoat, wrapped a muffler round his neck, pulled the brim of his hat well down, and set out. He often walked if his destination were near the Cathedral, for the steepness of Shawgate made cycling hardly worth while. Besides, for a late evening call, it was a good way of waking up. Many times on similar occasions he had conquered the inertia of the body, moving in sheer automatism through the dark streets until physical effort or mental curiosity provoked a liveliness. And if anyone had said there was anything especially fine in such self-discipline, he would have answered that it was just a job, and that no one hated it sometimes more than he.

A rough night, indeed. There were few strollers in such weather, and the Cathedral, chiming the hour of ten, seemed to bowl the strokes along the corridors of the wind. It was one of those nights when, in imagination, the centuries slipped back and Calderbury was again a fortress of souls with a priestly garrison; every lighted window hinting at safety amidst peril, the warm, tranquil comfort of men who felt they were safe because they knew they were saved. Such an atmosphere had lingered from the age of Chaucer to the age of Dickens, and though modernity might seem to efface it in the daytime, there only needed a dark night for its return. It harbored, too, a feeling that earth and stones could hold some secret essence of all that had happened around and about them, so that after a thousand years a street became almost animate, leaning its walls a little forward to catch the sound of friendly footsteps. David felt that his own footsteps were friendly, both to past and to present; that he was a part of the continuous agony of existence that had clustered about this ancient hill since the first mason carved the first gargoyle. And even longer; for the whole span of centuries from cathedral to cinema was but a scratch upon the heritage of a million weather-beaten years.

So he mused (being slightly pagan and pantheist as well as Christian, and slightly agnostic about all of it) as he turned the angle whence Shawgate makes its steeper aim direct to the Cathedral towers. And because he was tired and a little breathless from climbing against the gale, he halted a moment by a street lamp; and again because there was a playbill of the local theatre in a shop window near by, he crossed the pavement to give it a second’s glance.

It advertised a show called Les Nuit [sic] de Paris, which it described as “A Riot of Mirth-Provoking Naughtiness, Direct from the Gay Capital, with a Galaxy of Continental Stars.”

The Theatre Royal in Calderbury dated from the fifties and had been modernized at various times to conform with fashions that afterwards made it seem more outmoded than ever; in structure it was the type that Crummies had played in, with horseshoe auditorium and a long-disused and very lofty “gods.” In its day it had ministered to the cream as well as to the milk of Calderbury society—even clerics had occupied its uncomfortable red plush seats to watch Mrs. Ebbsmith push her Bible into the fire, or to see Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn dive into a tank of real water and come up dripping to take a curtain call. Which, of course, was somewhat before the little doctor came to Calderbury, and a good deal before the first picture camera flickered in a converted mission hall off Briargate. By the time of Les Nuit [sic] de Paris the theatre had sunk to a level from which not even clerical visitation could or would effect a rescue. Stucco had peeled off the outside walls, the words “Theatre Royal” were spelt in empty sockets for which nobody could afford lights, moth and fleas inhabited the plush-hung boxes that nobody ever entered. The very boards of the stage sagged with dry rot, which was, indeed, the cause of mishap during the third act of one of those Parisian nights.

That third and last act was nearly over when David arrived. He found nobody on duty to admit or question him. Entering by the stage door, he made his way along a dimly lit corridor echoing with the sound of excessively nasal singing. Then he pushed through another door and found himself stumbling against a heap of bright-colored dresses. Here a stout man in shirt sleeves seemed to be manipulating scenery.

“I’ve been sent for—” began David.

“Just a minute,” answered the stout man, suddenly hauling till the veins of his forehead stood out; whereat the singing swelled into climactic frenzy, whistling and shouting answered it, and a moment later an avalanche of girls swept past the little doctor as he waited, bag in hand. They chattered together, some rough-voiced and crudely spoken, a few round-shouldered and flat-chested; one girl coughed and clung momentarily to an iron pillar; another stopped to scratch herself. It was a new atmosphere for him, but full of pathological landmarks, signals of flesh and blood which stood, so many of them, at danger. The girls shed their skirts to make another heap of clothes, and from this, as from some multi-petaled flower, there rose a mingled smell of dust, cheap perfume, old wood, and human bodies.

“I’m a doctor. Someone sent for me about an accident here.”

The stout man turned a casual eye. “Accident?” Then, into space: “Hey, Jim! Know anything about an accident?”

“To one of your dancers,” David added, recollecting.

A voice answered: “We ain’t got only one dancer. She slipped as she came off, if you call that an accident.”

The stout man jerked his hand. “Maybe it’s her. You’ll find her along there.”

“Thank you.”

David walked between cliffs of slowly swaying canvas till he came to a group of girls wiping grease paint from their faces. They took no notice of him and after a moment he asked: “Is there a girl here who dances?”

“Oh, you mean What’s-her-name? Try the door right at the end.”

He walked farther till a closed door stopped him; he tapped on the panel, but there was no answer; then he turned the handle and found the room empty. He went back to the girls.

“There’s nobody in.”

“No? Then she must have gone home.”

“But—well, I’m a doctor—I was sent for to see this girl—or to see someone, at any rate—about an accident.”

“An accident?”

“Hasn’t there been an accident? Didn’t she slip and hurt herself?”

“Don’t know, I’m sure. We weren’t on during her turn.”

Had they been less casual, had they been able to confirm or deny or explain anything, he would probably have concluded that since the girl had been well enough to go home she could not have been very badly hurt. And he would probably have gone home then himself, assuming his summons to have been a thing done hastily and afterwards regretted. But that air of casualness, so foreign to the routine of his own profession, stiffened his conscientiousness to the point of obstinacy; even if the whole thing were a hoax or a false alarm, he could not now be satisfied till he had definitely established it so. After some trouble he extracted the girl’s temporary address from the stage doorkeeper: Number 24, Harcourt Row.

He walked there in a drizzling mist; the wind had calmed suddenly, and the bare trees hung tired and still and heavy with raindrops. One might have noticed then that he wasn’t really little at all, merely that his well-proportioned figure marked a difference from the common identification of size and strength. There was something resolute in his stride along the pavements, and a look of quiet challenge in the way he turned the corner of the Row and glanced up at the dark facade.

At Number 24 an elderly woman answered his continued ringing; she had to unlock the door. He knew her by sight; she knew him in the same way; and only this prevented the voicing of her resentment at being dragged out of bed at such an hour. Even as it was, her manner was far from cordial. When David had stated his business she muttered truculently: “Well, so far as I know she’s in bed and asleep by now. She had her key. I never wait up. It’s bad enough to let to theatricals without having to keep their hours.”

“Is that her room immediately above the porch?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“There’s a light in the window.”

“And I suppose you want me to see if anything’s the matter?”

“Just find out if she sent for me, that’s all. You see, somebody sent for me.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve hoaxed a doctor,” she retorted, as she shuffled along in her slippers and began to climb the stairs. David remained in the dark hallway, trying to recall her name—ah yes, she was Mrs. Patterson; her husband had been Joe Patterson—worked at the brewery—diabetic—died of it—one of Cowell’s patients. A doctor remembers things that way. He could hear the creak of the joists as Mrs. Patterson walked over them, the sound of a door opening; he could smell stale cooking and stuffy rooms. He had waited in so many houses, had climbed so many stairs to so many bedrooms, that his nerves as well as his ears and eyes and nostrils had acquired a curious sensitivity to the atmosphere of an interior; and now, waiting in that small lodging house in Harcourt Row, awareness came to him of something strange and unusual. He had no time to wonder what it was, or even whether it had any existence outside his own mood; for Mrs. Patterson creaked her way down the stairs carrying a lighted candle.

“You’d better come up and see her. I can’t understand a word she says—she’s foreign. She’s hurt her arm, by the look of it.”

“All right.”

He followed upstairs, till the woman opened the door of a very small room, crowded with shabby furniture and lit by a single unshaded gas light. A bed occupied most of the space, and on this sat a girl. David saw her face first of all through a wall mirror that happened to be in line with it; stained with grease paint, it struck him disturbingly, so that he stared for a moment, hardly realizing that the eyes he met in the glass could really be seeing him also.

They were amber-brown, curiously matched with reddish-tinted hair; matched, too, in their pained, difficult eagerness, with the set of lips and mouth. David went to her. He saw at once that her left wrist, resting over her knee as she sat, hung limply. She did not speak, but pointed to it, and when he stooped and held it, feeling what was amiss, her lips parted and blood came rushing into the marks that her teeth had made.

“It is broken?” she said.

“I’m afraid so,” he answered simply, kneeling to open his bag on a chair. He noticed then that a piece of stocking stuck to her leg in a smear of blood and dirt; nothing much, but the kind of thing he was always careful about. After bandaging the wrist he set about to clean this cut and asked Mrs. Patterson for warm water.

“You’re going to have to rest for a while,” he said to the girl. She nodded, but he was not sure that she knew what he meant.

“You dance, don’t you?”

Again she nodded.

“Well, you’ll have to rest. You can’t dance with an arm in a sling, and that’s what you’ll have to have.” He spoke plainly, as he always did, but with compassion and increasing doubt as to whether she understood him. “You know some English?” he queried.

“Ein wenig…a little…”

He smiled more easily. “That’s about how much I speak your language, too.”

He was prepared then for the torrent of words that usually outpours if one confesses even a slight knowledge of a stranger’s tongue; but to his surprise she was silent.

He tried to make conversation but soon come to the end of his scantily recollected German. He had never been in Germany or spoken the language colloquially; and it was fully fifteen years ago that he had studied it for some very elementary examination. Since then he would lazily have accepted the statement that he “knew German,” but now, on such sudden demand, he found he could not remember equivalents for even the commonest words. And her own meagre English did nothing to help him out. But he did manage to ask why she hadn’t waited for him at the theatre, since she had sent for him there.

“I didn’t send for you,” she answered, in German. “It was the boy who sells chocolates. He sent for you. He said you were always so very kind.”

David was just as embarrassed as most men would be by such a remark.

She went on: “He called you ‘the little doctor’—is that right? … ‘Der kleine doktor?’”

Which completed his embarrassment, for he was one of those people who can live a whole lifetime without seeing or hearing the most obvious thing about themselves. He had not really known that he was called “the little doctor” until that moment, and he did not quite know whether he liked it or not; and, anyhow, the disclosure left him shyly disconcerted. And beyond all that he was troubled, perhaps by the rescoring of ancient mind tracks that the translation effort had entailed. He kept smiling the more steadfastly because he had used up all his German, and into a silence, as he packed his bag to go, came a revelation of her own mute solitariness in suffering. This made him feel towards her as to all such sufferers—that nothing could ever ease the embrace of pain and its victim except a gentle blessing on that embrace; and such a blessing he gave, in secret, on her behalf.

“Good night,” he said, adding that he would call and see her again on Monday morning.

On the way back to his house it occurred to him that he did not even know her name. He stopped again at the shop window and glanced down at the playbill till he came to “Leni Arkadrevna, Whirlwind Danseuse from St. Petersburg.” Goodness, he thought; that must be the one!

On Monday, when he called, the girl had left. “She just went off yesterday morning, same as the theatricals always do of a Sunday.”

“But she had a broken wrist! She couldn’t be any use like that!”

“Well, maybe she had to go with the rest of ’em. Not that they seemed to have much to do with her, and you can’t hardly blame them, with her not speaking the language.”

“But weren’t there other foreigners in the company? Wasn’t it a French play?”

“Bless you, they was all English except her. And the show’s not really foreign—it’s just what they call it to make it sound better. She acted a Russian dancer, so I suppose that’s why they gave her the name.’

“It wasn’t her real name, then?”

“Shouldn’t think so. They never have real names.”

“Do you know where the company’s moved on to?”

“That I couldn’t say for sure, but I’ve an idea it might be Addington or Polesby or one of them places. They’d tell you at the theatre, I daresay.”

But David didn’t bother to ask at the theatre. His curiosity was soon exhausted, for the theatrical world had seemed so unfamiliar when he had entered it momentarily that he could now accept any strangeness in its behavior. He was not passionately interested in the way touring companies functioned. Nor did he often think about the Russian-German-French girl (or whatever she really was) during the weeks that followed. He supposed she must be getting on all right somewhere or other; but it wasn’t his business, and he had too much other business, to inquire. He didn’t even put her down in his book, because he had forgotten her stage name, and, anyhow, he wasn’t going to send in a bill. And this was not wholly generosity, but partly mere trouble saving; for he had no secretary, and the extraction of small sums from patients who left the town was rarely worth the time and effort it would involve.

CHAPTER TWO

THE NEW YEAR CAME in, and life for the little doctor continued pretty much as it had throughout a number of old years; busily partitioned, and with its own private trouble (about Gerald) to fill the gaps between; a dull life if one could not guess the interest in his job that solely sustained him. He did not talk much about that job; he did not even have time to think about it, in an abstract sense, save when he was alone. Then his work would acquire a totality in which separate items might be puzzled over like a problem, but never ached over like a worry.

He did not have many free moments. Most of his day was occupied with hospital work or visiting, he took his meals with Jessica, and in the evening there was the surgery; after which he was often tired enough to go to bed and very promptly to sleep.

Once a week, varying the routine, he spent a whole day in Sandmouth. He had several patients in that rising watering place—Calderbury folk who, retired and rich, lengthened their lives by means of sea air, half-yearly dividends, and (he always hoped) the confidence they reposed in his own regular visits. He was inclined to smile at his confidence (since there were so many excellent doctors in Sandmouth); nevertheless, he enjoyed his day trips to the sea. He took few definite holidays, and if he did, he and Jessica and Gerald went away for a fortnight, which was much longer than he cared to be idle. But the Sandmouth excursions were pleasantly enforced by his work; he did not add that he liked them all the more because he made them by himself. They happened on Fridays, as a rule, and began by a morning cup of tea in the surgery long before anyone else in the house was astir; then came the walk to the station up the hill, through the Cathedral Close, and down the hill the other side. He liked that walk. It was a different life that one saw before seven in the morning—an hour at which all good deans and archdeacons were asleep, but at which in wintertime the lights were burning in innumerable little houses, workmen were washing over kitchen sinks, and their wives frizzling bacon and poking fires that had been banked down the night before. The working-class population of Calderbury was larger than a visitor might have suspected; indeed, within a few hundred yards of the Cathedral, in houses picturesquely ivy-clad, were conditions of overcrowding as deplorable as any in the more notorious slums of the big cities. David knew this. Presumably the Cathedral authorities knew it also, since they owned the property.

One summer morning he caught, as usual, the seven-five—an absurdly early train, but there was no other till afternoon, and in those days travelers were at the mercy of the railway schedule. (To-day the buses leave for Sandmouth every hour from Calderbury Market Square, and do the journey, without change, in seventy minutes.) But the doctor did not mind the two and a half hours of starts and stops, of chuff-chuffing through the dappled countryside, with the tang of sea in the air for the last twenty miles. It gave him a chance to read the paper and a detective novel, to talk to some casually met stranger, to smoke his pipe, and (as a last resort) to do nothing at all but sit back and think. That girl of Mrs. Pembar’s—was it a blood dyscrasia or just an abnormal sensitivity? And old Doubleday’s self-styled “rheumatics,” which was really osteo-arthritis and would kill him in the end, what was to be done—was there anything that could be done? For that matter his own son…Mysterious flesh and bones and juices—so sweet for pleasure, so sour for pain; prison of man and empire to microbe; but beyond all that, as in Gerald, the dark alchemy of the mind that no brain surgery could explore. It was a problem that always beguiled him, and one to which, had he been granted time and the chance to specialize, he would have devoted himself. But his approach to it was, for those days, eccentric; he believed that mind was more than physical brain, and different from it in character—something that neither the surgeon’s knife nor the analyst’s reagents could reveal. He felt that it was, in a sense, pure God-stuff, and that the treatment of mental disease must leave the sphere of physical things and become spiritual, even mystic. The staff at Midchester County Asylum, of which he was on the Board and which he visited regularly, chaffed him about this and called him “the Witch Doctor,” and he chaffed them back by saying that it was a title he would gladly accept, and would they please appoint him officially?

In Sandmouth that Friday morning the June sun blazed in a manner almost justifying the railway posters, and Station Avenue, sloping down to the Pierhead, was brilliant with the litter of cafe advertisements and stalls piled with colored buckets and gift pottery. Trams heaved over loops, while down every side street boarding-house maids breathed in the far-famed Sandmouth ozone through the dust and smells of their basement areas. David walked briskly along pavements jammed with children sucking sticks of “rock” and grown-ups dawdling with precautionary mackintoshes; then he turned the corner by the Pierhead and threaded his way along the Promenade. Here the main army of holiday-makers paraded, beach photographers touted for custom, and the wire cages attached to lampposts filled up with banana skins and chocolate wrappings as fast as Corporation scavengers could empty them. Sandmouth on a summer day was not a wholly beautiful sight, but it was always human enough to be abundantly interesting, and when the weather was good David liked to walk by the edge of the waves, noticing the faces of deck-chair loungers and stumbling over sand holes dug by frantic children.

That morning the sea was warm and calm, but the sky had a watery brightness foretelling clouds which, soon after midday, threw down spots of rain. It was during the afternoon that he made his visits; they were usually finished by five, so that he could comfortably catch the five-thirty. But the call at Mrs. Drawbell’s lengthened because a niece staying with her had taken a chill, and the call at Major Sanderson’s lengthened because the Major insisted on describing a new kind of indigestion he had acquired—to which David listened with sympathy combined with growing apprehension about the time. In the end he reconciled himself to losing the train, though actually, had he hurried, he could have caught it. He was like that—he would rather decide to miss something than have the uncertainty of chasing after it. There was no other train till the nine-seven, so he had three hours to spare. He strolled down Station Avenue to the Promenade where grey skies were breaking into one of those spectacular sea-horizon sunsets which can only be likened to picture-postcard views of themselves which would never attract the discriminating purchaser. The air, however, was cool and full of fragrances lifted by the rain, and now that the evening promised to be fine the crowds were beginning to emerge from hotels and boarding houses. David reached the Pierhead and, on sudden impulse, paid his twopence and clicked on to the wooden planks. There was something in the sound of walking on them, and in the splash of waves below, that gave him memories too far and strange to be analyzed; he had not been on Sandmouth Pier for years. It was a quarter of a mile long, terminating in a pavilion in which summer concert parties gave twice-nightly performances. One of these was imminent as he neared the festoons of colored electric globes that marked the pavilion entrance, and for a moment he watched the audience trickling in twos and threes past the pay booth. He noticed that the concert party advertised themselves as “The Cheerybles”; presently, approaching a placard more closely than before, his eye caught a programme announcement. One of its items engaged something in his mind that made him pause. “Leni Arkadrevna,” he read, “Whirlwind Danseuse from St. Petersburg.” Then he remembered, and on a second sudden impulse that evening he turned to the pay booth and bought a shilling deck-chair seat facing the open-air stage. The show was just beginning.

He did not find it very entertaining, but a certain innocent curiosity about most things made it hard for him to feel bored; indeed, as he watched and listened to the rather feeble acting, and singing, a slow dreamy contentment came over him, focused slightly by the anticipation of seeing his ex-patient again. At any rate, with the alternative of nothing else to do, he did not regret the whim that had brought him to such a place. He enjoyed awareness of the massed humanity around him and of the snaky sea underneath—a hint of peril in such an assembly. And he was amused by a young man with an attractive smile who came jauntily forward and sang a song with words something like:—

“Poor old England isn’t in the picture,

Everything is foreign, you’ll agree,

The table and the chairs,

The carpet on the stairs, Were made in Ger-man-ee!

But when you go out into the garden,

Nestling in a little plot,

There’s the sweetest English rose

That in the summer grows,

And that’s the only bit of English that we’ve got!”

A piquant prelude to the appearance of a whirlwind dancer from St. Petersburg who spoke German. But, to his surprise, she didn’t appear, and her item on the programme was omitted without explanation; till suddenly, from the unison with which a particular chorus was sung, he realized that the show was over and the audience beginning to get up and move away. After a pause he rose with them and sauntered towards the exit, puzzled, but hardly troubling much. When, however, he passed a man in Pierrot costume who was about to enter the pay booth, he asked what had happened to the girl dancer. The question ignited something.

“Happened to her? You can well ask that!”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

Just then another Pierrot rushed up and said something in the ear of the first one, whose response was to throw up his arms with a gesture of despair. “My God—she would! And now what do we do? A doctor—where the devil can we find a doctor?”

“I am a doctor,” said David quietly.

“You?”

“Yes.”

“No kidding?”

“My name is—”

“Oh, never mind—for heaven’s sake go round and see what’s up. Take him along, Jim.”

Jim led the way through the rows of empty deck chairs, now awaiting their second audience, behind a wooden screen, and eventually to the back of the stage. It was part of David’s experience to be guided by devious routes to strange places, there to take charge of emergencies that occasioned him no real surprise. Only the mildest curiosity inspired him to ask his question again—what had happened to the girl? Was she ill? “It’s only luck if she isn’t dead.”

“Oh?”

“Shut herself in and turned on the gas, mister. What d’you say to that?”

But all David could say to that was a rather surprised: “Gas on the end of a pier?”

“Yes, mister. Gas an’ electric light and water and telephone—all in them pipes. You wouldn’t think it, would you?”

Soon they came upon an excited group of concert artists and Pier officials. Someone was fanning a door backwards and forwards, and there was much eagerness to describe, rather confusingly, what had taken place. The girl, it seemed, had missed her cue for the whirlwind dance business, and nobody had had time to find out the reason for her absence until after the last curtain, when a locked door and a smell of gas were discovered and reported. The door was easily opened with the key of another door; then the girl was found, sprawled over a couch, half-dressed in the costume of her act, unconscious and breathing heavily in the tainted atmosphere. The tap of the radiator had been full on.

David took in the scene professionally, noting the absence of skin discoloration and the comparative steadiness of the pulse. But most of all he noticed that her injured wrist, the one he had attended in Calderbury six months before, was badly swollen.

There came over him at these times a sort of natural dignity, so that when he asked the crowd to disperse and leave him alone in the room, they did so without much demur.

“Nothing to be alarmed about,” he said, reassuringly.

“You mean she’ll pull through?” queried a thin man in evening clothes.

“Yes, shell be all right soon.”

“You really think so?”

“Why, of course.” And he added, almost as if he were speaking to himself: “These walls are only matchboarding—they’re full of draughts. I don’t think anybody could do such a thing here without stopping up the cracks…it’s extraordinary, the way people don’t think of these details…”

“Well, there’s one detail you can think of to save me the trouble, doctor.”

“Yes?”

“As soon as she comes to you can tell her she’s got the sack.”

David looked up inquiringly.

“I’m the manager and I don’t stand for this sort of thing. So you can tell her—see?”

David was still looking up.

“And tell her to clear out before we fetch the police! She could be locked up for this!”

“I wouldn’t fetch the police if I were you,” said David quietly. “It wouldn’t do your show any good.”

The manager banged the door, and David began—artificial respiration, a hypodermic, just the routine procedure. He went to work with his usual precision, yet with something more than his usual awareness of irrelevancies: the little wooden dressing room, even shabbier than the brick one at Calderbury; the spotted mirror; the litter of paints and powders in front of it; an out-of-date trade calendar hanging on the wall; and—after a little while—the sound of piano and voices striking up the opening chorus of the second show. Odd background, odd accompaniment. And since it is often the oddest things that are apt to move one, so, as he looked at her, noting the closed eyes, the slightly parted lips, and the rise and fall of the breath, what touched him most to pity were the soles of her bare feet, hunched under her as she lay, and dirty from contact with the unswept floor boards.

Presently she opened her eyes. They blinked to consciousness as she realized where she was, then focused to new astonishment at the sight of him; while her mouth, trying the German words before she spoke, twisted into a half-smile.

“You? I must be dreaming! How can it be you—here?”

And he answered, with the foolishness of sheer simplicity: “I come here every Friday.”

“Der kleine doktor am jeden Freitagl”

He sat beside her, rebandaging the wrist, trying to think of German words.

“You must take care. This is bad…Am I hurting you now?”

“Only a little.”

“You should have rested—I told you that…”

“I couldn’t.”

“You mean you danced with your wrist in this condition?”

“Yes—until to-night.”

“But it must have been terribly painful—the vibration—”

“It was driving me mad.”

“But, my dear girl—why on earth—why—was that why—you tried to—”

She shook her head.

“Then why?”

“Just—that there was nothing else.”

“Nichts anders?”

“Nothing except night after night—like this.”

“Couldn’t you go back to your own country?”

She shook her head again.

“You have no parents there—no relatives—no friends?”

“No one.”

“Is that why you are unhappy?”

All at once tears began to roll down her cheeks, streaking the grease paint; she did not make a sound, and there was no movement but that of the tears. Neither did David move, but his stillness and silence had compassion.

After a pause she smiled. He asked the reason and took to his heart a schoolboy translation of her answer: “Because I am so glad you didn’t tell me not to cry…and I knew you wouldn’t…”

A doctor is so familiar with most of the things that can happen to minds and bodies that little can startle him. He learns to divide his effort into separate compartments, so that while attending to one patient he does not think of the last or of the next. Moreover, he can leave the operating table or the bedside, switching off his attention, as it were, whenever he feels he has done all he can; and this judgment he can reach unfettered, since there are others to humanize it after he has gone.

Little of which applied to David’s position in a girl’s dressing room at the back of the pavilion on Sandmouth Pier. He did not know what more he could do, yet he did not feel he could say good-night and leave her. There was much he could have explained but for the language obstacle, at least an ease he could have given to the leave-taking. And while he was thus hesitating and wondering, a man arrived with an envelope which the girl opened; it contained a week’s wages and notice of summary dismissal. She showed it, smiling wryly as she did so; then, with a shrug, she began to change out of her costume into ordinary clothes. She had no shyness.

“You see, I must go now. They will not have me any more,”

“But where will you go?”

“Away from here. Somewhere. I don’t know.”

He could see she was anxious to leave before the second show ended, and he thought this was a good thing if she could manage to do it. He helped her to dress, therefore, and when she was ready they left together through a back door. Nobody seemed to notice them.

“The cold air will help you,” David said, as they began to walk along the Pier towards the shore. He had to take her arm because she staggered a little. He noted that it was half-past nine; he had missed the last train to Calderbury. That meant staying overnight and taking the first train in the morning.

It was a clear night, full of stars; the chain of lights round the curve of the bay glittered across the intervening sea; the Pier lights at intervals threw moving shadows across her face. She could not walk without clinging to him for support, as he soon realized, especially when a cool wind rose into flurries. She was feeling now the full effects of the strain she had undergone, and in her touch was something remote and slumberous, as if half her consciousness were still far away, ready to respond only to a call that followed it as far. David kept silent for a long while, unwilling to disturb, even by expressing it, a sympathy which he felt was real between them. In a distant way he thought it strange that he should thus be pacing Sandmouth Pier at night, but he found it familiar that someone near him should be needing help, should fear a future. There was a sense in which he too had fear, though less personally; just that it often seemed to him that the injustice of the world could only lead to some vast and doomful reckoning. Even in the microcosm of Calderbury he felt this whenever he climbed rickety stairs to attend illness that fresh air or good food could have prevented. Something must happen some day to such a precarious social balance; cathedral bells would not always ring upon an acquiescent world. He never spoke of this, because it was in essence a mystic feeling, beyond any words in which he could convey it to anyone he had ever met. Yet with this girl he had a curious awareness that communication was possible, that the very urgency of the moment formed a link between her own hot despair and his own cool foreboding. He began to talk in a mixture of English and German. “You’re not really tired of life. You’re tired of pain and loneliness and hopelessness. You don’t really want to die. The time to die is when you have something to die for—the time to be tired of life is when life is tired of you…” And so he talked, stumbling over the words, yet with a deeper sureness that was like the breaking in of a new instrument by a virtuoso. She clung to him then with far more than her uninjured arm, till at last a physical drowsiness conquered and he knew that she was almost asleep as she walked.

They left the Pier and threaded through the crowds on the still frequented Promenade. He led her to her lodgings, an apartment house dingy even for a back street in a seaside town. He imagined that would be the end of their meeting, but at the house there was a surprise. By some lightning spread of gossip, the landlady had learned of happenings at the Pier Pavilion, with the result that she stood truculently in the front hall, hips firm and lips tightened. “I’ll have no sooicides in my house!” came her immediate greeting, as David helped the girl up the flight of steps to the porch. “No turning the gas on here and blowing us all up while we’re in our beds! Here’s your bag—you can take it and go! And if that’s your gentleman friend I hope he knows all about you!”

David didn’t know what to do, and he was a little upset, as he always was by scenes outside the realm of pathology. He could pacify a frenzy within the walls of Midchester County Asylum, but he shrank from the less tolerable madness of those whom the world called sane. He could think of nothing but to take the girl away immediately, which meant to walk to the cab stand at the corner and drive somewhere; but of course the cabman wanted an address, and the only one that occurred to him on the spur of the moment was the Victoria Hotel, where he intended to stay himself, and where he had occasionally stayed before. So they drove there, the girl by this time so desperately tired that she could hardly stand up in the hotel lobby. The clerk, recognizing David but not quite sure of his name, appraised his companion curiously, wondering if she had drunk too much and if she were his wife. It was all rather odd, but none of his business; but he thought it odder still when, on being presented with the register for signature, David had to question the girl before he wrote her name. Then he wrote “Leni Krafft.” He asked for two single rooms, and the clerk allotted them on the same floor. Then the doctor asked for a trunk call to Calderbury and the clerk overheard him explaining why he couldn’t return home that night. But (or so at any rate he said afterwards) the clerk suspected that the doctor might not be giving the right explanation.

David did not sleep well. He was puzzled and a little perturbed. He knew that in the morning he could not simply pay the two bills together, say good-bye, and never see the girl again. There comes a degree of contact where one cannot, without injury, untwist the fateful into the casual. He knew she had hardly any money. He knew she had no friends. He knew she had no job, and could not get one till her wrist had mended, and that she spoke only a few words of English. He knew her state of mind, and what it had so recently led her to attempt. He alone knew all these things about her. And he knew other things from experience, for there were folks in Calderbury, happy enough now, who at one time would have put an end to themselves but for his patient soothing of ruffled minds. It wasn’t that he ever argued much or was noisily cheerful; it was something that came to him instinctively out of his own feeling for the terror and beauty of life, something harmonious where all else made discord. And he had also the professional interest that every doctor takes in his patient, a desire to finish a job and pass on to another job. It was hard to know what to do in a case like this, but he well knew that to do nothing at all would be impossible for him.

In the morning they breakfasted together in a room that faced blue seas and a sunny sky. She looked much better, having slept off most of the ill-effects of the night before; but there was still in her face the set of some profoundly tragic experience. He talked during the meal as if no problems had to be encountered, but afterwards he told her that he would lend her money which she could repay when she got another theatre job. “Sandmouth’s a good place to recuperate for a few weeks—by that time your wrist ought to be better. Find some quiet lodgings where you can take things easily, then next Friday I’ll call and see how you’re getting on. I come here, as I told you, every Friday.”

“You are so kind…If everyone were as kind as you…”

Something in the little crushed smile she gave him as she said this made him reply: “I believe you’re still worrying. Tell me what it is. Perhaps I can help you.”

“No…no more…”

“All right. I’ll see you again next Friday.”

“You are so kind,” she repeated, evading the question he had hinted. But he was not really very curious.

After breakfast they found a comfortable boarding house, the sort that announced itself as a private hotel, in a street leading off the Promenade. She left her bag there and paid a week’s rent in advance, for which she had money enough of her own. Then they shook hands, and she gave him the little crushed smile again, and he went off to the station to catch the morning train. He was in Calderbury by noon. It irked him to cram all his visits into half a day, but he felt some compensating satisfaction in having done one of those things he ought to have done; even more, he felt he could now put the matter completely out of his mind for a week.

CHAPTER THREE

THE LITTLE DOCTOR WAS modest, if one had to think of a single adjective for him; but his modesty was more accurately a lack of worldly ambition combined with a dislike of comparing himself with other people. It never occurred to him that he was a better doctor than his colleagues (though he was), and if anyone had suggested that this made him too good for Calderbury, he would have replied that nothing was too good for Calderbury. He cared little about money or position and had long ceased to regret the brilliant career that had once been forecast for him and was now out of reach. Indeed to every might-have-been he offered the crowning indignity of forgetfulness, save when some specific reminder nudged him.

Such a reminder was the German primer which he took down from a dusty shelf on the Thursday after meeting Leni in Sandmouth. Since he had to see her the next day he thought he might as well look over a few words. The book brought memories of student days in London, when he had walked the wards at St. Thomas’s Hospital and lodged near by in Battersea. He had studied German then with some idea of having a year’s specializing in Vienna, but the plan was abandoned when his father died and left far less money than had been expected. Feeling that he must begin to earn something to support his mother, he had then used up a small inheritance to buy a general practice in a Manchester suburb, where for several years he was both overworked and under-rewarded. He fell ill, debts accumulated, his mother died, and eventually there was nothing left but to sell out at a loss and take a long holiday. After this he bought the Calderbury practice, then an inferior one, and settled down in the more congenial atmosphere of a small cathedral market town. But he still could not convert his skill and effort into anything that would pay rates and bills. He was one of those men who have no knack of extracting financial profit, and very soon he might have become that pathetic thing, a bankrupt doctor, had not Jessica taken his affairs in hand.

Jessica was a year or two older than he. Even in those days she had had a tough, leathery skin (the result of much gardening) and a rigid eye (the result of much chairmanship of small meetings). Indefatigable at the tea urn, both in drawing-rooms and in church halls, she might have made an admirable colonial bishop’s wife—and, indeed, would have if a certain young vicar, since raised to the episcopacy, had not preferred someone far less suitable. After that she had taken pains to marry the little doctor.

And he, worried by debts (not really worried, but just bothered, for botheration was as much as anything connected with money could ever cause him), allowed himself for a short time the necessary illusion that passive willingness was really active desire.

It had been, by outward signs, a successful marriage. Jessica had reorganized all of David’s life that was reorganizable; the house at the corner of Shawgate was bought with her money; and though David jibbed at complete supervision of his business affairs, her secret interferences were more frequent and more considerable than he ever suspected. She turned a loss into a profit and David gave her all the credit for doing it without any profound conviction that it was worth doing.

Friday morning came—only a few hours after he had closed the German primer at his bedside. The day promised to be fine, and as the train left Calderbury the twin towers of the Cathedral rose above a film of mist that covered the town. They looked spectral, sailing through the sky when a curve of the line kept them long in view. Presently the line crossed the water meadows to the bridge over the river, then entered a cutting. It was all such a simple thing, to travel these few miles, yet that morning it seemed to David inexpressibly strange and lovely. He opened his paper and began to read, but as soon as the train emerged from the cutting his eyes wandered again, over fields where cattle stood and where the steam from the engine, rolling in little clouds, caused them hardly to stir. Serene and secure, this world, poised on an edge it could not glimpse. The train wheels caught a rhythm which, for some reason, translated into German words, words that he must have read in the text-book the night before:—

Noch erkannt und sehr gering

Unser Herr auf der Erde ging…

Lissington…Stamford Magna…Pumphrey…Marsland Junction. One changed there, and, with nothing else to do for ten minutes, one often watched the tank engine shunting round to the other end of the train, ready for the return journey to Calderbury. Then the second train came in, for Creston and Sandmouth only. The little doctor found a compartment, saw someone he knew slightly, nodded, and settled down with his paper again. For half a mile the express went back along the same line, then at the junction swerved aside to show the single track to Calderbury wandering away into a green distance. And somehow, vagrantly, the thought came to David that Calderbury was lost and that the line was trying to find it.

At Sandmouth he walked immediately to the Promenade, turning into the side street where the clifflike boarding houses soared from area basement to attic, bourgeois castles, flaunting their cruets on bay-window dining tables with an air of buxom integrity. How little it mattered where anything happened compared with what did happen; and this sense of fatefulness came to him as he climbed the flight of steps that led to one of the closed front doors. He was really rather nervous about this visit, and with some idea of getting it over he took it first on his list.

The landlady showed him to a room on the first floor overlooking the street. He had not, a week earlier, disclosed his own profession, lest admission might be refused to a sick person; and now he thought it simpler to keep up the assumption of some private friendship with the girl. He was startled a little, though he made no comment, when the woman said: “I don’t think your young lady’s very well. Maybe it’s her arm. I’d take her to see a doctor if I were you.”

A moment later he was investigating. The girl seemed less agitated in mind—that was something; she greeted him cheerfully. But her wrist was still inflamed and obviously painful—which was not surprising, after her previous neglect of it. He told her frankly that it was her own fault for not obeying the instructions he had given her at Calderbury; how could she possibly have danced with broken bones chafing each other at every sudden movement? And now, as a result, the mending would be more difficult; there might even be complications; at any rate, she would have to carry her arm in a sling for weeks.

She nodded when he had finished, accepting both the situation and the blame for it. That made him smile and ask, more gently: “Do you like it here?”

She nodded and smiled back.

Yes, she was more cheerful; that was a great deal—more important, really, than her wrist.

“I think you’d better stay another week—since it seems to be doing you good. You’re not lonely?”

“No.”

“Made any friends?”

“The landlady’s little boy. I take him for walks sometimes.”

“Good. Can you understand anything he says?”

“He doesn’t talk a great deal. And I’m learning English lessons from a book. I never had time before.”

Up to then he had talked in German; now he said, in English: “I shall have to brush up my German, too, then we’ll be quits. Do you really like children?”

“Yes, indeed.”

He had a sudden idea.

“I’ve got a little boy, you know. He’s nine. It would be a change for him to come to Sandmouth, but I’ve never known quite what to do with him while I make my round of visits. I wonder if…if I were to bring him next week…I could leave him in your charge for a few hours?”

“Yes, please.”

“But I’m afraid he’s not quite an ordinary little boy.”

“No?”

“He’s rather nervous and excitable—and sometimes difficult—do you know what I mean?”

“I don’t mind. Please bring him.”

It was just an idea, and one which, had he thought twice, he might never have put forward; for it was always possible that Jessica would object, and he disliked arguing with her. Jessica, however, was glad enough to have Gerald out of the house for a day, and quite indifferent when David explained that he had a patient at Sandmouth who had promised to act as nursemaid while he made his calls.

The arrangement, therefore, stood; but it entailed a good deal of trouble which Jessica herself would scarcely have thought worth while. David did not mind. He was careful to wait at the very front end of the stations at both Calderbury and Marsland Junction, so that the train did not rush by as it entered the station; that always terrified Gerald, and David understood as if it were the most natural thing in the world; which, indeed, he knew it was, in Gerald’s world. And then there were the actual hours of travel, during which the boy was apt to get tired and fidgety, so that he sometimes made himself a nuisance to others in the compartment.

Nevertheless, they reached Sandmouth without trouble and called immediately at the boarding house. David was a little apprehensive, because Gerald was apt to take sudden dislikes to strangers; but the first encounter seemed to him to pass well enough, and he left on a tiptoe of hopefulness that did not quite amount to confidence. When he called back later in the afternoon he found the two of them eating pink ice cream out of huge cones. “Ice cream is a thing you should never have unless you know where it comes from!” Jessica would have exclaimed, indignantly; but David, neither knowing nor caring where it came from, merely smiled: for the boy at that moment looked just like any other boy. It had been a dream that that should begin to happen some day.

“How did you manage?” he asked later.

“All right.”

“He’s really been good?”

“Yes.”

“He can’t help it, you know, even when he isn’t. Wasn’t he frightened at all—by anything?”

“He didn’t like the big waves when we walked along the beach, but I made him laugh.”

“You did?”

“I said things in German. I said, ‘Hurtig mit Donnergepolter entrollte der tückische Marmor’—and he began to laugh and then made me say it over and over again.”

David smiled eagerly. “You know, that’s just the way I do it too—anything to make him laugh, anything I can think of, when he gets into one of those panics. I believe that’s the only way to tackle them until he can tackle them himself.”

“Is it true that when he was younger he was run over by a train?”

“Good God, no! Did he say that? Oh, he’s an awful little story-teller—you mustn’t believe everything he says. He just imagines things, you know, and everything he imagines is more the truth to him than what really happens. That’s why he has these panics—through imagining things. He doesn’t really tell lies.”

“I know.”

“If you do know, you belong to a very small minority, I can tell you. And I think he must feel you do—that’s why you get on so well with him.”

He had been talking English and she German most of the time. They couldn’t either of them be sure that the other grasped an exact meaning; but David didn’t care. He had never found it possible to put everything he meant into speech; indeed, he had sometimes felt that words offered a merely surface exactness that was both an illusion and a danger. That was why he avoided scientific jargon, preferring to write on medical certificates “bad cold,” because he knew well enough that a bad cold might mean anything, and that a bad cold was in this respect rather like life. And so, listening to Leni’s German, which she no longer tried to simplify for him, he caught the mood rather than the detail, and felt no more eager to dispel an occasional word obscurity than Whistler must have wanted the mists to disappear before he would paint a sunset.

The following Friday he took Gerald to Sandmouth again. The repeated experiment was almost too successful, for the boy enjoyed himself so much that when the time came to return to Calderbury he burst into tears and refused to be comforted. That, clearly, was as big a danger as anything else; and David, promising that he should sec Leni again, was privately aware that it had better not happen. It would be disastrous if Gerald should develop some deep attachment that could not continue; and how could it, since the girl would soon recover and be at work again? At least he assumed so, and she assumed so too; for her money was coming to an end, and even if she could not dance again for some time (as she certainly could not), there might be some other temporary job to tide over the interval; they had talked over that possibility together, and he had been quite optimistic about her getting a commercial post requiring knowledge of German.

They walked to the railway station, the three of them, with these thoughts and possibilities somewhat strangled by the need for pacifying Gerald. He made a scene on the platform, clinging to Leni’s hand and refusing to budge. “Good-bye,” said David, harassed by all this, as he leaned out of the window when the struggle was over. “Good-bye—and good luck about the job…” Something in her eyes made him add, as the guard began whistling: “By the way, if it doesn’t come off—the job, I mean…” Then the train began to move. “Well, write and let me know,” he added, lamely.

She didn’t have to write and let him know. Jessica wrote. Jessica, in fact, handled the situation as she always handled situations—masterfully, with a fine eye for essentials and a bold seizure of opportunities. She was a shrewd woman, and after Gerald’s successive Fridays at Sandmouth and his delighted chatter about them, it did not take her long to realize that whatever had happened there had been fortunate. In her remarkably efficient way she wished well to the boy, though the well-wishing hardly lessened her impatience of his tantrums. If someone else had both the knack and the inclination to deal with them, then by all means let it happen. “Who is this woman who looks after Gerald when you’re in Sandmouth?” she asked David.

David had acquired a habit of reticence about his patients’ private affairs, added to which there was the vagueness that existed in his own mind when he asked himself who Leni was. Come to think about it, he simply didn’t know.

“She’s just a patient of mine—she broke her wrist.”

“Is she a lady?”

David wondered, not so much whether she was or not, as whether Jessica would think her one or not. At length he said: “Oh yes, I should say she is.”

“Living by herself?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of family?”

“She hasn’t any.”

“Of course not, silly, if she lives by herself. I meant what kind of family does she come from?”

“I don’t know—I really don’t know much about her affairs.”

“Is she well off?”

“Oh no, on the contrary—in fact—”

“In fact, you’ve already decided not to send her a bill—I thought as much!”

“No, no—I was going to say that she’s quite poorly off—at the moment she’s trying to find work.”

“She wants a job, then? I suppose she’s presentable in appearance?”

“Presentable?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t notice, would you? You never do notice the most obvious things about people. What I’m really wondering is if she’d come here to help with Gerald.”

“You mean to live here?”

“Why not, if she wants something to do?”

“Well…”

“You don’t think she’d come?”

“I don’t know…I hadn’t ever thought about it.”

“My dear David, you never think of anything. Give me her address and I’ll write to her.”

“The address…ah, let me see now—I think I can remember it—it’s the Salway Private Hotel, Beach Street.”

“Her name first, stupid—I can’t write without knowing that, can I?”

“Krafft—Leni Krafft.”

“Goodness—it sounds foreign.”

“Oh yes, I forgot to tell you—she is foreign—and she doesn’t speak much English.”

“Oh, really now? She’s not a Hottentot, by any chance, or a wild woman from Borneo? You’re always so vague about these things.”

“She’s German.”

“Well, that’s all right. At any rate it might have been worse. The Murdochs always had German governesses. What made her leave Germany?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I shall write to her, anyhow. I suppose she can understand a letter written in plain English?”

“Oh yes.”

So Leni got a letter written in plain English. It offered her the job of looking after Gerald at a salary of sixty pounds a year if she proved satisfactory after a trial.

Leni came to Calderbury in March. “You’d better meet the train,” said Jessica, “since you’re the one who knows her”; and David said all right, he would if he got through his visits in time; otherwise Susan would have to do the recognizing as best she could. But it happened that he did finish in time, though it was dusk when he reached the station. The station-master nodded as he climbed to the platform.

“Evening, doctor. Off on your travels ?”

“No. I’m just meeting somebody.”

“Train’s late to-night. Only just left the junction. Twenty minutes yet if you’ve anything else to do.”

“No, thanks, I don’t think I have. I’ll just walk up and down.”

“Well, it’s good exercise, they say.”

A laugh—silence—his own footsteps thudding softly on the wooden planks—chimes from the Cathedral—a quarter to five. And as he walked he began to think, really for the first time in his life, about Leni. She was coming to Calderbury. She was coming to live in his house. It was odd the way these things happened.

He watched the darkness fill the sky and absorb the lights of Calderbury into a faint glow over the roof tops. He heard five chimes from the Cathedral, the last stroke blown a little sad by a wind that suddenly veered. Then, with a whang of wire and a small answering clatter, the signal fell. The train emerged from the cutting across the river, clanked over the iron bridge, and came streaking through the water meadows like a familiar friendly ghost. Whereat Calderbury’s one porter held himself ready for the improbable event of any one requiring his services. “G’d evening, doctor.”

They talked for a moment about the porter’s little girl, who had been ill and was now recovering.

The train was in.

“Shall I take ’is luggage, sir?”

“Whose luggage?”

“Your friend’s. Thought you was meeting a friend.”

“Oh yes…but…it’s a lady. I don’t know whether she’ll have any luggage. Well, maybe she will… Yes, take it down!”

She was already stepping out of the train, carrying a suitcase and a wicker basket.

“Leni!”

“Oh, du kleine doktor!”

They didn’t know what else to say to each other at first. There was the business of handing over the luggage, surrendering her ticket, passing the barrier with the small crowd from the train. People who knew David kept up a chorus of good-evenings. On the way down the steps to the street level he said: “Gerald’s looking forward to your arrival.”

Leni exclaimed in German: “I couldn’t believe I was really coming!”

“It was Jessie’s idea—I don’t know why I never thought of it myself.”

The porter, walking ahead, pricked up his ears. Afterwards he reported: “They didn’t talk much, but when the doctor said something she answered in some foreign lingo and ’e seemed to understand it all right from the way he smiled back at ’er…”

CHAPTER FOUR

LENI SETTLED DOWN AT the house in Shawgate and Gerald was happy. It was miraculous, the success she had in calming the boy’s nervousness and brightening his moods whenever they darkened; she could do it as well as David, and, of course, the trouble had always been that David had so little time for doing it. Now, instead of Jessica’s rigid discipline of scoldings and repetitions, Leni imposed her more elastic sway; and Jessica, freed from an irksome duty, seemed satisfied. David was satisfied too. After the first surprise of Leni’s presence he regarded it with sudden simplicity. It was his mission far more to mend what was wrong than to question what was right, and her position in his household soon appeared to him as unarguably right as a flower or the morning mail delivery. For just as he had a childlike inquisitiveness on the surface, so he was apt to seem incurious when he knew people better, not from any lack of interest, but because of his complete acceptance of them as they were. And if someone had suggested that there was anything odd in a German ex-stage dancer becoming his son’s governess, he would first of all have had to recollect that she was a German ex-stage dancer, and then have answered, with complete sincerity, that it was no odder than anything else. He wasn’t bothered, for instance, by any mystery there might be about her name and past; it did not seem to matter to him since he called her Leni and liked her. He called everyone by their first names.

Gradually her wrist became stronger and one afternoon, when Jessica was out, David heard her playing the piano. It was more from the surgical than the musical angle that he viewed this experiment; he wished to see how far the fracture had impaired her finger movements. To his considerable surprise she began to play rather well, and things he had never heard before; they weren’t his kind of music, anyway. Then he put in front of her a Mozart Sonata, thinking he might give himself the pleasure of hearing it; but she shook her head. “I can’t read it,” she told him.

“What? You can’t read music?”

“Only very slowly.”

“Then how do you learn all these things?”

“Mostly from ear.”

“You mean you’ve never been taught music?”

She shook her head a third time.

“Well, it’s very remarkable. You certainly ought to have training.”

“May I practise while I am here?”

“Why, certainly. You’ll find a lot of classical stuff in the cabinet—my own tastes.”

“You play the piano?”

“The violin—but not much. What time does a doctor have?”

And he went away to his daily duties, vaguely wondering whether he should introduce her to Jaggers, the Cathedral organist, or to Yule, the Cathedral choirmaster, and let them share his discovery. Perhaps they might even give her lessons. And perhaps at the musical party he usually gave once a year he might ask her to play something. That wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

After that, and mostly during the afternoons when Jessica was out, Leni played the piano in the drawing-room. He didn’t realize what she was doing until one day, by accident, he came in and heard her playing the piano part of the Kreutzer Sonata. He stood outside the drawing-room door and listened till she had finished. Then he entered.“But you learned that from music?”

“It was very slow and difficult for me to pick out the notes, but when I had done that, then I knew it from memory. I’ve been practising a lot lately.”

“Fine. But I still think you ought to have some proper training.”

Smilingly he walked away, again registering an intention of talking to Jaggers or Yule about her. But at the back of his mind in such a matter there was always the thought of Jessica; she might not approve—one could never prophesy her attitude. After fifteen years of married life he had acquired an intense reluctance to make decisions of any kind outside his own immediate professional territory; only by such reluctance was he insulated against the kind of conflict in which, because it would so intensely bore him, he could not fight to any advantage.

So he did not actually mention Leni to Jaggers or Yule or, indeed, to anyone; but he went on thinking he ought to do, and must do, and perhaps would do so, one of those days.

But one of those days, a July day, David returned to Calderbury after his weekly visit to Sandmouth. There had been showers during the afternoon, but by evening the sky had totally cleared, and as he walked from the railway station the towers of the Cathedral seemed to exude a memory of both sunshine and rain. It was very beautiful at such a time, especially the view over the town, the mist rising above roofs, a hint of human cosiness in all that huddle of buildings. As David crossed the Close a lamplighter stopped near by, his face upturned to the glow he made.

“Good night, doctor.”

“Good night, Ben.”

Suddenly, walking on towards Shawgate, he met Leni. “Why—” he began, as if he had not seen her for years. She stopped, smiling but silent. “Taking a walk?” he said.

“Just for a while.”

There came into the air a murmur that might have been anything or nothing till one realized what it was.

“Choir practice,” she said, answering his thought. “I have heard it before.”

“Do you often take a turn round here, then?”

“Take a turn? What is that?”

He put it into German for her, and then a curious line of her mouth, lit by the merging of twilight and lamplight, gave him an impression of mishap that made him add: “Is anything the matter?”

She answered, in German also: “Mrs. Newcome has told .me I must go.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“Must go? But where?”

“Away.”

“But why—why on earth—should she say that?”

“She said she can’t afford to have me.”

“But that’s absurd. We can afford it perfectly well.”

“She said not.”

A silence fell on them both, and into it, making an interruption, came the voice of a passer-by: “G’night, doctor.”

“Good night,” answered David, not knowing, never knowing indeed, who the other was. Then he turned to Leni. “I really don’t understand it. I must see what Jessica has to say.”

Without the suggestion made or accepted they walked together down Shawgate, saying little else. Leni walked so quietly at his side, asking no questions that he could not answer, not bothering him, not making any fuss. Absurd to say one couldn’t afford such rare and priceless negations. Lamplight caught her face as she glanced sideways to cross streets, and he noticed, till it began to preoccupy him, the look of calmness that matched perfectly with her silence. Even her despair had held that same calmness. And suddenly he remembered the dressing room where she had tried to end her life, the Pier where they had walked that night, the already mounting total of their experience. Absurd that now, after so much, she should go. He must talk to Jessica as soon as he had the chance, though he realized, even in making that decision, how little he cared to ask Jessica anything. It wasn’t that he was really afraid of her, or that there was truth in Calderbury’s popular notion that she ruled him with a rod of iron. He wasn’t; she couldn’t. It was rather that his own will to do what he liked in his own house had been worn into a shrug of the shoulders that yielded, by nonchalance, all that could never have been claimed by force. Furthermore, Jessica was so efficient that it was easy to let her encroach to the very rampart of self-preservation; and that rampart, for David, was the door of the surgery.

Jessica was writing invitations when he found her later in the drawing-room. The engraved cards, filled in with handwritten names, lay spread out on the writing desk beside her—“Dr. and Mrs. Newcome request the pleasure of…”

“Jessie,” he began, breathlessly and without preamble. “What’s all this about getting rid of Leni?”

Jessica faced him with her thin, well-chiseled face, faced him also with her no-nonsense personality at full strength.

“Yes, it’s quite true. I told her she couldn’t stay.”

“But why?”

“I had my reasons, I assure you.”

“But it’s absurd to say we can’t afford her wage! She’s well worth it—Gerald likes her enormously—”

“That was only the reason I gave her. It wasn’t the real reason.”

“What was that?”

“Do you really need me to tell you?” Her voice sharpened to the pitch in which, at meetings of this or that, she usually called some errant speaker to order. “Has it ever occurred to you that people aren’t always what they seem? I was far too trusting to take that girl without the usual inquiries, but I was relying—foolishly, no doubt—on your own assurance. I might have guessed how little you really knew of her. And I must say, too, that I didn’t take to her, even from the first.”

Jessica was like that. She had a way of finding that she didn’t like people and then of saying that she never had liked them—thus imputing clairvoyance to herself and vaguely sinister attributes to her victims.

“I don’t quite know, Jessie, what you’re driving at.”

“Oh, you don’t? I’m glad you admit it. You don’t know, I suppose, that this girl was on the stage a few months back, doing a dance turn in fifth-rate shows? And you don’t know that she was dismissed because she tried to commit suicide!”

“Oh yes,” said David, simply, “I knew all that.”

Quite unconscious of having spoiled Jessica’s moment, his only thought was a reassuring one—that if that was all the trouble, what could the fuss be about?

Jessica’s voice keyed up another half-tone. “So you knew? And you never told me?”

“I never like to gossip about a patient’s private affairs.”

“How very considerate to your patients! But hardly to your family! Did you really think a suicidal stage dancer—and a foreigner, at that—was the kind of person to have in a respectable household and look after a nervous child?”

David blinked a little, thinking of Leni and of how silly it was to try to pin down the truth about people in words, because the words could all be true and yet have no truth in them. “She’s all right, my dear,” he said quietly.

“You call her all right?…I’ve no patience with you, David. Apart from the risk of heaven knows what, don’t you think there’s enough scandal all over the town now that this story’s got about? Do you know she once appeared on the stage at the theatre here?”

“Yes, that was where she broke her wrist last December, I attended her.”

“Well, really! You knew all that and didn’t say a thing!”

David was silent, and Jessica too. After a long pause she commented: “A queer business. Right from the first moment I was certain there was something queer about it.”

“But there isn’t.”

“There must be, if she’s the sort that tries to commit suicide.”

“Oh, no, Jessie. It isn’t queer people who do that—it’s people just like everyone else—like you or me—if ever we were driven to it.” .

“Well, I don’t want to argue. She’s got to go, that’s all.”

“But Gerald—”

“He must learn to manage without her. I’m sure she’s doing him no real good.”

Then David, planting himself firmly on a small fragment of endangered territory, took a stand which was all the more obstinate for being minute. He was not really a good fighter. He hated squabbles and it was never easy for him to grasp such issues as could be involved in them. “She can’t go before the end of the month,” he said, as if pronouncing a moral dictum or an immutable law.

“She can if I pay her.”

“It isn’t a matter of paying. You can’t act suddenly like this and make her find new work and new lodgings at a moment’s notice.”

“I don’t see that her future plans have anything to do with us.”

“Maybe not, but I think we ought to treat her as a human being. We can’t just give her a few shillings and put her out in the street.”

“You say we can’t?”

“I say we mustn’t.”

“Very well, if that’s your attitude she shall stay till her month is finished—which means another fortnight of her company. But don’t expect me to leave Gerald with her. You can look after the girl’s interests; I prefer to look after my own child’s…And now tell me about these invitations to the musical party—do you want the Cowens to come this year or not?”

David shook his head bewilderedly and walked to the door. When he got there he said “Ask them if you like,” and passed into the corridor. He moved absently for a few paces, then his feet led him down the three familiar steps and through the green-baize-covered double doors into the surgery. There, entrenched in his own domain, he felt a little but not greatly eased. Of course it was quite true that in a cathedral town there was a lot of gossip, and Jessica, nearer to it in her daily contacts, was probably surer in reckoning its importance. And also, of course, so long as Leni could get another job as good or better, it didn’t really matter to her. He would write her a testimonial if she wasn’t fit for a theatre job, and perhaps, with her knowledge of German, she might find work as a teacher or in some firm. And though he would personally miss her, and he knew Gerald would too, her absence could only put back everything as it had been before, even for the boy. He smoked for a while and tried in vain to put the whole confusing issue out of his mind; till at last, far after midnight, his thoughts grew weary, pacifying him into a sense of communion with all other souls awake at that hour, with every striving puzzling soul beneath the roofs of Calderbury.

When he saw Leni in the morning as he left for his round of visits he behaved as if nothing particular had happened. He was aware of a directly personal relationship between them, aware of it as never before; it touched something in him which was as solitary as itself. When he returned about noon Leni told him that Jessica had taken Gerald away and that the boy had made a scene.

“When he said good-bye to you?”

“He wasn’t allowed to say good-bye to me.”

“Do you know where Jessie took him?”

“To Mr. Simpson.”

“Oh yes, my wife’s brother. He’s Vicar of St. Peter’s. Nice fellow—he’s looked after Gerald before.”

“Do you think he’ll be happy?”

“Gerald? I don’t know.” He leaned against the edge of the desk and began tapping it with his fingernail. “I’m sorry it’s all happened like this. I really am. But what can I do about it? I’m not one of those people who like to make trouble. Sometimes—sometimes I wish I were.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. He knew her sympathy, yet felt it as a spell he must break at all costs.

“Has Jessie come back ?” he asked.

“No, not yet. She said she’d be out for lunch.”

“Then…I won’t have any lunch. Just a cup of coffee and a sandwich here. Will you tell Susan ?”

“I told Susan. I knew you always had that when Mrs. Newcome’s away.”

“See that you get something yourself.”

“I’m not hungry either.’

Over the murmur of Calderbury activities there came the twang of the street piano that always moved along Shawgate on Thursday market days, pushed by an old wooden-legged character named Joe Moore. Presently Susan entered with a plate of sandwiches and coffee. “You must have some,” David said to Leni, thinking she might as well eat and drink in the surgery as anywhere else. He smiled and then had to add: “I talked to Jessie, by the way, last night—and I’m sorry—personally I’m very sorry indeed—”

“You mean I have to go?”

“Not for a fortnight.”

“But now that Gerald’s gone—”

“I know, but I made Jessie agree to the fortnight.”

The fortnight was offered between them as a symbol of the extent to which he had argued with Jessica and opposed her; as a gesture indicating action which, had he been inclined for any, he would have taken; as, finally, a gift which could not be refused.

“Because, you see, during that fortnight we’ll have time to find you another job.”

She nodded.

“Or else, if we can’t, then I’ll pay your fare back to Germany.”

Something in her change of expression served then as a reminder, so that he went on, hastily: “Oh, but I forgot—you said you didn’t want to go back, didn’t you?”

“I can’t go back.”

He accepted the statement as if it were only just beginning to occur to him how little he knew about her, as well as how remarkably little he had ever bothered to know.

“…Because I ran away,” she added suddenly.

“From home?”

“No—from school…It was very strict and I hated it. The Russian frontier was quite close, so I ran away one night and went to St. Petersburg, to the dance school there, but the police found out about me, so I had to run away again. I hid myself on a ship in the docks and came to London. So you see I must stay in England now—I cannot go back to Germany. They would arrest me there—because of the forgery.”

“Forgery? Why, what was that?”

“On the passport when I went to Russia. You have to have a passport. I altered all the writing on the certificate—about my name and age. I just made up a name.”

He began to smile. “But it wasn’t done with any criminal intent. I don’t suppose you’d find the authorities very hard on you. They wouldn’t send you to prison.”

“Not to the prison, maybe, but back to the school.”

He laughed. “Oh really, no—they couldn’t do that. At your age you’ve a perfect right—”

“No, no, that’s just it—because on the passport I said I was twenty-five.”

“And aren’t you?”

“I’m nineteen.”

David looked at her. He had never really wondered about her age, but now he realized that he. was astonished. Nineteen! It didn’t, of course, make any difference to the way he would treat her. He never condescended to youth, never behaved as if seniority gave him superiority. There was a sense in which he treated grown-ups as if they were children; but in the same sense he also treated children as if they were grown-ups. And there was this same childlike gravity in the readiness with which he believed people, because he knew he knew so little about the nature of truth, except that it could be very strange indeed.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you? Not even the police—if they come to ask about me?”

He touched her reddish hair, thinking it now a child’s. “I wouldn’t worry at all if I were you.”

“No, I do not worry now. Because you do not worry, either. You never ask me about anything and that was why I have told you everything.”

In the lives of most Calderbury citizens there was little that one might count the days to, either in fear or in anticipation. Months flowed by in a stream of busy uneventfulness, varied by occasions that arrived almost before one realized they were due: Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, the summer holidays; market day, Sunday, the monthly diocesan gazette, quarterly payments, the annual fair. From the bishop’s to the butcher’s, Calderbury lives were signposted thus, and years drove past without a gear change. Only the schoolboy crossing off dates to the end of term, or the old-age pensioner in fear of next winter’s chills, could taste the cruel beauty that time offers to those who are bound to count its fragments.

Something of that cruel beauty entered the doctor’s house in Shawgate, touching him every morning as he rose and every evening when he had said good-night to his last surgery caller and there was nothing left but to smoke and go to bed. He preferred those final moments of the day alone, for he was, beyond outward fellowship and impersonal altruism, a solitary, aware of communion with life itself rather than with individual lives.

But now, meeting Leni from time to time during the diminishing fortnight, a little of that calmness was dislodged. He saw her sometimes during the afternoons, when she played the piano in the drawing-room; once he got out his violin and began a sonata with her, but in the middle of it he heard Jessica entering the house and talking to Susan, so he made an excuse to discontinue the performance. He knew Jessica disliked music, and he had never found it possible to enjoy playing when she was at home. He said, putting his violin back in the case: “We must finish that sometime. And I must see about lessons for you—you really ought to have them, you know.” He kept saying that, but he never did anything about it.

He knew, though she did not tell him, how little she wished to leave, yet how hard it was to stay, even those few more days. For Jessica, by pricks of word and action, was always indicating the obvious—that there was nothing to stay for, no work to do, no reason why she should not take her money and quit. The days passed slowly, braked by a curious brooding uncomfortableness; David, busy with his work, saw neither Jessica nor Leni for any length of time; yet whenever he entered the house he felt their presence in distant separate rooms. Perhaps it had been a mistake to insist on that fortnight; he thought so when, taking meals with Jessica, he measured her cold, controlled civility against the thoughts that might lie behind it. But when, at other times, he met Leni in the hall, or in the corridor outside the surgery, her smile made him feel that the fortnight was beautiful, with a beauty sharpened by all that made it unwise.

He fretted, too, about Gerald and how he was faring, and once, after his day’s work, the news in the evening paper gave him a vision of human mischief larger, but no more wanton, than that which had invaded his own affairs. Seeking escape from an intolerable perception, he went out, took the path by the river, and climbed the Knoll. The vast unreason of the world assailed him, as well as a sense of his own unfitness for battle; and suddenly, with rueful self-scrutiny, he saw himself as he must seem to others, perhaps even to Leni—a weak-willed middle-aged husband who dared not say no to his wife. Yet it wasn’t really that he dared not. It was a profounder reluctance, an inertia of the spirit that fell on him whenever he faced a conflict outside the territory in which he could struggle with joy. To fight the blood flow as it streamed into the cavity of an operation, to fight the weakening of lungs and heartbeat, to fight death and the fear of death—these were his battles and he had no strength or will for others.

He walked on, as far as the little wooden hut on the hill, and during a pause to light his pipe someone (he could not see who at first) came up to him and said something.

“Leni!” he exclaimed, and then found himself speechless with surprise.

“Yes, I often come here in the evenings. Have you any news of Gerald?”

David flinched at the question. “Yes, I call and see him every day.”

“How is he?”

“Not very happy, I’m afraid.”

“It is so silly that I cannot still look after him.”

They walked on silently, and in a little gap of moonlight between the trees he began to study the outline of her face, the long slender nose, the forehead straight and ample. All at once he knew that he had her in memory forever, could trace that profile with closed eyes, every curve and line in precious ease to his imagination;.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“You and what is to happen to you.”

“I shall get a job.”

“Yes, and next time you oughtn’t to go in for these second-rate things—Pierrots at the seaside and the kind of show you were in when you first came here. I think you ought to try some really good theatre—in London.”

She smiled, knowing the absurdity of it all. Their worlds were different, their ages were different, their lives and languages were different; yet all those differences became themselves absurd when measured against the flash of recognition that sprang between them at every nearness. She said, touching his arm as she walked: “Ah…du kleine doktor…I am not so good as that…You have never seen me dance, have you?”

He shook his head. “What sort of dancing do you do?”

“Some day I would like to show you. But I am not very good. Maybe if I could have stayed in Petersburg and worked hard for years at the school there—”

He said, quite seriously: “Yes, I’m afraid we haven’t any good dancing school in Calderbury. It’s a pity your career had to be interrupted.”

“But I have been so happy here,” she answered.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT HAD BEEN DAVID’S habit for many years to give a party during the latter half of July, a sort of garden party with music, to which all the notables of Calderbury society were invited. If the weather was warm and fine the French windows were thrown open to the walled garden, and the guests sat about in or out of doors as they chose. No other function in Calderbury’s year offered quite the same features, but it was generally considered that the doctor had established a right to be original and that his party was among the events of the social season. In truth, the originality had arisen merely from the fact that Jessica had wanted a garden party in summer while the doctor preferred a musical evening in winter, and neither wanted both. David had, indeed, a quiet liking for music that led him to join the Calderbury Philharmonic Society and play the violin in string quartets.

It was during the second week of Leni’s last fortnight that the party was to take place. All day the sun had shone so warmly that one of Shawgate’s pavements had been deserted and the other crowded with shade-seeking shoppers. Jessica, always insistent on getting precisely what she wanted and at the most economical price, was among them; the tradesmen respected her for the qualities that made her visits a trial. Besides, they knew the doctor’s party was to be in the evening and that somebody would say, “Do tell me, Mrs. Newcome, where you got these delicious preserves?”

While she was shopping, Sam Bates, the electrician, was running a few colored lights under the cedar tree in the doctor’s garden, and Johnny Johnson, the odd-job gardener, was erecting trestle tables, arranging chairs on the lawn, and generally making himself useful. The doctor was visiting; Susan was baking pies for the evening; Leni was doing simply nothing.

By special arrangement there was to be no surgery session, and David, as soon as he got home, took a tepid bath and changed into a different suit of clothes that looked exactly the same. The invitations were for eight o’clock, by which time the heat of the day had drained into walls and pavements, leaving the air cool. The sky was clear, and a half-moon rose over the cedar tree.

About fifty people gathered and grouped in the drawing-room and garden—the Dean and the Archdeacon, the Precentor, Jaggers the organist, Yule the choirmaster, various vicars of parishes, doctors, a solicitor, a retired admiral, the headmaster of the local grammar school, the editor of the Calderbury Gazette. But there the edge was reached of that social territory beyond which Mrs. Newcome would not venture; and it was tacitly understood that Fred Garton, son of the town’s leading grocer and invited because of his fine baritone, was not really a guest in the same sense as the others.

Greetings, gossip, a piano solo by the choirmaster, who did not play very well, and for whom the doctor’s piano would not have been good enough if he had; then a Grieg violin solo by the wife of the grammar-school head. In the midst of this, Susan entered with a message which made David tiptoe from the room, followed by glances of vague commiseration. “It’s always like that for a doctor, isn’t it?” people said to Jessica afterwards, and she admitted that it was. Actually she didn’t feel that David’s absence mattered very much, since he was no help in running any but a children’s party.

He cycled to a cottage in Colohan Street, off Briargate; a workman, his wife, and six children lived there in four small rooms. One of the six lay gasping and coughing in bed. “Bronchial, doctor,” the father kept saying, with the pathetic trustfulness of the man who knows a word. David soon found that it was double pneumonia. There was little chance for the boy, who was about the same age as Gerald; it was a case that should have been under skilled treatment days before. David did what he could, left instructions with the plaintively glum parents, and promised to send a nurse immediately and call again about midnight. Said the man timorously: “Will a nurse cost much, doctor?”—and David answered, as on so many other occasions, “Oh no, no, very little—I’ll arrange it.” Downstairs, as the woman edged him along the narrow lobby past a perambulator, she said: “You know, we used to have Dr. Thompson, but Mrs. Nickle who’s just come to live next door put in a word for you.” “God bless my soul,” thought David momentarily, “she thinks she’s doing me a favor calling me in to attend a neglected pneumonia that I’ll never get paid for and that I’ll probably be blamed for not being able to save!” But he said, touched by sympathy that lay deeper: “Yes, indeed, I remember Mrs. Nickle…”

But back on his bicycle he forgot Mrs. Nickle and only thought of the fluid spreading and thickening in strained lungs, the word “bronchial” that had killed just as another word might have saved, the chatter of women over garden fences, recommending doctors as they might tip horses…Stupid, pathetic, suffering world.

By the time he returned to the house the party had had the refreshment interval and were on with music again. He let himself in by the surgery entrance. Passing through the waiting room, he caught the sound of strings; then, as he opened the surgery door, the sound swelled into sudden harmony, and also, at the same moment, he saw Leni in the leather armchair.

She looked so still and calm, so much a part of all that he sought beyond the fret of existence, that he caught his breath at both the sight and the sound; and all at once he realized something that he had long been experiencing without notice—an unclenching of every nerve whenever he came into her presence, a secret renewal of strength to take up every stress when he was left alone.

“Was it anything serious, David?”

“Not only serious but hopeless, I’m sorry to say.”

(A way they often had, and a way that no one else had ever had with him, to begin talking without preliminaries, as if speech were suddenly switched on to a conversation that had been taking place for a long time, but silently.)

“I am sorry too.”

He put down his hat and bag and sat in the swivel desk chair and was soon absorbed. Something in music rarely failed to lure him with a promise. He was no facile optimist, and nothing of his secret belief could be expressed in any outward allegiance to party or creed; he had no wild faith in progress, even in his own craft. But the patience and patterning of a string quartet offered him the strongest hint of destiny in man—and destiny without deans. It was not that he was irreligious—merely that a whiff of anticlerical-ism flavored his musings when he had a house full of Cathedral dignitaries. He was really happier by himself in the surgery, and “by himself” did not conflict with the presence of Leni. So why join the crowd just yet?

“I ought to have been playing in that quartet,” he said, when it was over. “But listen—” Fred Garton was beginning to sing. He had a good voice and a musicianly intelligence. “I don’t think I ever heard that song before.”

“It is a song by Schubert called ‘Die Krähe.’ From the Winterreise.”

“Krähe? What’s that?”

“I don’t know what you call it. A bird—black—disastrous—I can’t think of the word.”

“Never mind… Leni, I’m sorry you’re going.”

“Six…more…days…”

“And four of them I’m away at a conference. It’s too bad. I shall miss you.”

“I shall miss you too…Oh, that word—‘Die Krähe’—I can remember now—it means a bird that Poe wrote a poem about.”

“The raven ?”

They looked up and saw Jessica standing outside the door, opening it slowly.

Fred Garton’s song drew an encore, and it was during this that Jessica returned to the drawing-room with David. It was noticed that he looked pale and weary, from which observers were ready to deduce an arduous errand.

But Jessica gave him no peace. It was not that she was deliberately uncivil, or that any actual thing she said could have been objected to, but rather that she put him in positions where he was constantly at a disadvantage. “David, Mr. Campbell can’t see his music—switch on the light over the piano, will you, please.” As most of the lights had been put out for the music, David had a choice of a dozen switches; and it was a little comic when he kept pressing the wrong ones. “I thought you knew,” said Jessica coolly, when he had at last succeeded. And then later: “David will turn over the pages for you, Mrs. Shapkey.” There was no reason at all why David should; he wasn’t good at reading piano music, and at nearly every turn he was so late that the pianist had to give him an agitated signal. Afterwards he apologized, but Jessica cut in with: “Don’t believe him, Mrs. Shapkey—it isn’t that he can’t read, it’s just that he doesn’t pay attention.” She laughed as she spoke, making it sound harmless, but the laugh itself was unyielding.

Finally she bothered him at the doorway with the hats. That was Susan’s job, not David’s, but of course he had to respond when she said: “David, have you seen Mr. Driveway’s hat? Do look for it.” He couldn’t refuse to join the search: on the other hand, what use was it to pick up hats at random when Mr. Driveway was so much more likely to discover his own?

Just little things like that.

And presently the guests departed; all grew quiet in the doctor’s house. At midnight he bicycled to the cottage where the boy lay dying of pneumonia but still alive. David stayed till four; then, with eyes hardly open, bicycled back through the dawn-lit streets. He did not go to bed, but slumped into the surgery chair and wakened at half-past seven, made himself a cup of tea, and cycled to the local infirmary. It was a small institution on the edge of the town, fairly well equipped, and efficiently managed. David as a rule looked forward to his visits there, preferring the orderliness of the wards to the cramped sickrooms of private houses; but that morning as he half dozed along the roads he could only think of the extraordinary fret and muddle that had encompassed him—he did not see what he could do about it, it all seemed so preposterous. He left the bicycle in the shed and walked in through the main doors of the hospital so slowly and vagrantly that a couple of nurses, watching from a window, commented upon his air of preoccupation. In the anteroom where he put on his surgeon’s uniform he was still oppressed with the revelation of a wantonly misbehaving world. Trevor, his young assistant, and Jones, the anaesthetist, had already arrived.

“Going to be a warm one to-day, doctor.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Feeling the heat? You look tired.”

“Oh, just a bit sleepy, that’s all. How’s the case?”

“All ready for you.” And Jones added, rather nervously: “Difficult, do you think?”

Then, as at a signal, David’s manner changed. No longer was he the tired man harassed by the chafings of events, but a reserve power that could be tapped immediately by anyone who craved it. Young Jones was new and not yet very expert; he had bungled once or twice before and had blamed himself into a state of nervousness. David took him by the arm, sensing and combating his anxieties. “Oh, I wouldn’t call it difficult, Fred. Just watch the pulse and be ready for transfusions.”

They passed into the theatre together, and there, even if nowhere else, the little doctor was in his kingdom.

At that time patients were usually anaesthetized on the table with all the apparatus of surgery to add panic to their trepidation. But David, always aware of fear as a poison in the blood, would never allow the more suggestive items to be exposed to that last frightened consciousness—instruments, clamps, sponges, and so on. Trays containing these were covered over till ether or nitrus oxide had begun its work; and this, among the hospital staff, was regarded as just one of the little doctor’s fads. He had several others.

The patient lay outstretched, with pain-sharpened eyes swerving restlessly amidst his new environment. He was an old man, night watchman at a factory, grey-haired and thin-featured, the thinness accentuated by disease. His hands, loosely taped to the cross rests, were white and wasted, but emaciation could not hide the seams and scars of a hardworking lifetime. The hipbones, almost fleshless, lifted the covering sheet into ridges.

“Nothing to worry about, Charlie,” David said, smiling as he touched the pulse for a moment. He always called his patients by their names when they were on the table, because he believed it primed a man with some personal dignity when he lay pinioned and anxious under the glare.

David nodded to Jones and the stream of stupefying gas began to pour into nostrils and lungs, while the battery of arcs, now switched full on, shone down on a shrouded human body, shrouded except for a stained rectangle of flesh that rose and sagged irregularly. The little doctor stood by, like an actor waiting for his cue; presently he uncovered a tray of instruments and arranged them, giving instructions to the nurses in a low muttering. “More clamps here, sister…smaller ones…Too much iodine—wash a little off with alcohol…Sponges …smaller ones…no, never cut a sponge…the man’s very thin, that’s a help…How’s he going, Jones?”

Sometimes, waiting at such moments, he felt that his words were like an incantation, and the thought came to him that if, twenty thousand years ago, human eye could have looked ahead to glimpse the supine victim, the tray of instruments, the white-gowned and masked officiants, it could only have deduced some scene of ritual torture.

Jones signaled and David began, calmly confident, at home with the familiar feel of the knife ploughing through skin and flesh, so swiftly that the first reddening crept into the slope of the cavity almost like a blush. Deeper…then the click of the clamps as the nurses handed them…“There…another one…lay them outside the gauze…now a retractor…” Precision hypnotized the room and its occupants; the minutes passed as in a dream which only the hands of the clock could certify. “He was a fine surgeon,” Trevor said, long afterwards. “You watched his hands and had an impression at first that they were behaving automatically—then you realized a perfect coordination between brain and muscle, a quiet fearless exactness that was almost boring after a time, like championship billiards. After all, it’s the mistakes that make drama—and God knows there were doctors in Calderbury who made drama enough of that kind—fellows who had the whole hospital staff in a state of nerves if they were only going to lance an abscess…But the little doctor, as we called him, made everyone as calm as himself. And he had a curious way—a sort of mystic way, if you let yourself be fanciful about it—of looking up and blinking while his fingers told him things. He’d put his hand inside an abdomen as far as the wrist and feel around and just mutter to himself and to youngsters like me who were looking on: ‘No, there’s no pelvic inflammation…rather a small spleen…oh, dear, that’s too bad—C.A. just here…’ He made us always say ‘C.A.’ even amongst ourselves, lest otherwise the fatal word might slip out in front of patients; but of course some of ’em were cute enough to suspect what the initials meant, and then he’d tell the most fantastic lies about them. Often he’d made up a disease with a flower name like Calceolaria or Caprifoliaceas, and when once we reminded him that the patient might, after all, know something about gardening, he said: ‘Well, that’s all right—it’s a nice association of ideas—can’t do any harm. And diseases are like flowers—they seed and grow and spread…’ God, he had some crazy ideas—yet there was something great about him, too—something that made you want to worship him at times.”

And Jones, who afterward conquered his nervousness and became an anaesthetist in a big city hospital, commented when he was prosperous and successful: “Yes, I used to work under Newcome at Calderbury. He was damn nice to me, say what you like about him. He’d have had a career, that man, if he hadn’t stuck in Calderbury—well, maybe he wouldn’t—he wasn’t the kind to use his chances properly. Funny little chap, rather like a wise child, but not wise enough for municipal politics. Didn’t know which side his bread was buttered on.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, well, Mrs. Newcome was all in with the Cathedral crowd—great opening for Newcome in a place like Calderbury if he’d played his cards properly. As it was…well, there was one incident: Newcome was going round the wards—he’d been operating—and Archdeacon Rogers was going round too, doing his stuff—you remember what a pompous fellow he was? If you knew Calderbury, I’m sure you do remember. Anyhow, in the corridor after the grand tour he kept Newcome and me talking, wasting our time, in point of fact, and one of the things he said was that a surgeon in the course of his job was bound to acquire respect for the mind of God in creating such a wonderful thing as the human body. Of course when parsons talk like that one doesn’t usually say anything—bad form, you know, as well as pretty useless. But Newcome answers in that mild soft-toned voice he had: ‘I’ve just been operating on an enlarged prostate, and, believe me, any intelligent plumber could invent a better drainage system than you and I possess, Archdeacon!’ Of course old Rogers was terribly shocked—I believe that was why he used his influence to prevent Newcome being offered the medical officership.”

David had begun the operation on Charlie at eight o’clock in the morning; the final stage was not complete until after ten. It had been an awkward case, largely inoperable, and complicated by a weak heart. Twice the man had almost died on the table. But at last, still breathing faintly, and with bandages like a great white bundle tied in front of him, he was wheeled away to hours of lingering unconsciousness, days of pain, a few months of half-life, pain again, and death.

David pulled off the stained gloves and washed his hands and face in the lavatory adjoining the theatre. As always after an operation he felt the sudden deflation of personal ascendancy; he had given himself, and was now utterly spent. Rallying himself a little, he visited a few of his patients in the wards; then he rode away for his usual morning round of house calls. One of them was the pneumonia he had been called to the night before; to his surprise and gratification the boy was a little better.

He was late home for lunch and was neither startled nor disconcerted when Susan greeted him with: “Mrs. Newcome wouldn’t wait, sir.”

“Oh, I don’t mind—all I want is some coffee.”

“She asked if you would go in and see her.”

“Eh? Where? Why? What does she want?”

“I don’t know, sir. She’s in the dining room.”

“Oh, all right, I’ll go.”

Because he was used to obeying in these small outward things, he went. Jessica had finished lunch and was toying with biscuits and cheese.

“Really, David, I couldn’t wait for you—I really do think you might try to be punctual for at least one occasion of the day.”

“It’s all right. I’m glad you didn’t wait.”

“I suppose you’ve got the usual excuse of having had an exceptionally busy morning.”

“Well yes, I have been rather busy.”

“I’m sorry you preferred to stay in the surgery rather than join your guests last night.”

He said nothing.

“Did you invite that girl into the surgery?”

He said nothing.

“What business had she in there?”

He said nothing.

“A good job she’s leaving in a few days, anyhow.”

He said nothing.

“Are you too tired to answer me?”

Suddenly his nerves chafed to a raw edge he could barely endure. He said: “Yes, I’m rather tired. I’m sorry for the boy’s sake, that’s all.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just don’t see any point in sending her away or in sending him away.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I’m talking about Leni.”

“Oh, you are? I understand that, of course. It’s quite obvious why you want her to stay here.”

“What on earth are you driving at?”

Then, with even his indignation tired, he shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the room. It was true; they did not know what either of them meant; they had no points of contact, not even enough for an intelligible quarrel.

He drank his coffee in the surgery, and afterwards, as he went out for a few afternoon visits, the cloud of doubt and desperation suddenly lifted when he passed Leni in the hall. In her smile he saw something that made him exclaim, eagerly: “Leni, the boy I told you about last night—that case I said was hopeless—do you remember?”

“Yes?”

“Well, it isn’t—quite.”

“Nothing’s hopeless, is it?”

He thought seriously for a moment: was it really true that nothing was hopeless? Then he offered the result of his self-questioning. “A few things, probably, but we don’t know what they are, thank heaven.”

David had earned the reputation of being absent-minded—something in his glance, perhaps, in the casual way he would begin and end a chance conversation in the street, in the way he walked and dressed, with the knot of his tie always working looser and looser as the day advanced; most of all, perhaps, in the Legend of the Umbrella. This legend dated from 1902, from the service held in the Cathedral to celebrate the end of the South African War. David and Jessica had walked up Shawgate, David smoking a pipe and Jessica carrying an umbrella; and just outside the Cathedral porch, recollecting that he was about to enter a sacred building, David had pressed down the glowing tobacco and slipped the pipe, as he thought, into his pocket. But no; in the midst of the service the umbrella, left in the stand outside the pew, had begun to emit clouds of smoke and, before anyone could attend to it, burst into flame. No harm was done, nothing but a mild diversion caused, but the discovery of the doctor’s pipe in the wreckage had amused Calderbury more than it had amused Jessica.

After that we called the doctor absent-minded and made jokes about the likelihood of his sewing up sponges in a patient’s body after an operation. To anyone who ever saw him operate, there could seem no risk of that. But he did, occasionally, forget appointments, and outside his professional work there lay a misty territory in which he could not be relied upon except for good intentions. This business of helping Leni to find a job was in just such territory. His promises had been sincere enough, but he had had no idea of the practical difficulties that might lie ahead. The uncomfortable thing (to him) was that she had to leave at all; not till the second week of the fortnight did he suddenly realize that within a few days she might find herself with nowhere else to go. Her arm was still unfit for the strain of regular stage dancing, even if any theatrical work had been on offer; and he had innocently imagined that in the last resort a knowledge of German would easily secure her a post in some school. He was surprised to find that so many other qualifications were required.

When, however, he returned to the house at midday on the morning after the musical party, Leni had news. A private school near Manchester was actually advertising for a part-time teacher of German—“no diplomas necessary, only a guaranteed ability to speak and teach the language.” David, perceiving no freakishness in this, but simply common sense, was delighted; clearly it was just the thing. He even exclaimed: “Why, I go to Manchester now and again—I shall be able to look you up!”

All afternoon a warm feeling enveloped him which was really a childish dream that this business of Leni, himself, and Jessica might be settled with good will all round and to everyone’s satisfaction: Leni in this new job, he himself seeing her from time to time, and Jessica—well, changing a little. It wasn’t that he wanted anything more of her—merely an absence of that silent hostility, that cold brooding of which he had lately become aware. So much of his life was beyond anything that she could touch; yet the part that wasn’t, though small, could fret the larger part, and did.

Leni wrote an application for the job, and David composed a testimonial for her to enclose with it. Then he went out to visit two or three cases. It was a hot day, glooming over with an approaching storm, and when he returned about four o’clock he went into the drawing-room because he saw it was cool with drawn blinds and also empty. Jessica’s recent presence showed in a pile of letters on the bureau, addressed in her writing and waiting for the post. He might not have noticed them had not his sleeve, in passing, swept them over. Picking them up, he saw that one was addressed to the school near Manchester. Then Jessica entered, followed by Susan with the tea things, and he had the swift feeling that Jessica knew all about his having seen the address on that letter. He felt uneasy—partly, no doubt, his usual physical reaction to a storm. It was certainly coming. All day the heat wave had been lifting to a climax; the sky had grown opaque, like soiled muslin through which sunlight could barely strain. Then blackness began in a little patch and spread over half the sky. The storm broke while Jessica was pouring tea, and she said immediately: “David, please put the window up—we shall have all the tops of the curtains drenched.”

He knew, or thought he knew, that she had asked him to do this because he disliked going near the window. It was not that he had any bodily fear; it was from the look of doom in the sky and from the sound of doom in the thunderclaps that he shrank as from the symbols of discord. He stood on the window seat and braced himself for an eruption that seemed due at any moment. It did not come, but the tension held him miserably.

“I think you ought to know, David, I’ve just been writing letter…”

He swung around. “You have? To that school? About Leni?”

“You evidently have it on your mind…More tea?”

“N—no…But why on earth should you have written?”

“Well, you wrote, didn’t you?”

“Only a testimonial.”

“Don’t you realize what that means?”

“Well, surely—”

“Do you realize that if she’s put in a position of trust and betrays it you might be held responsible for concealing the truth?”

“What truth? I only vouched for her character and knowledge of German.”

“Character? Did you state that you met her first a few months ago, and that you didn’t know a thing about her past life except that she’d been on the stage and had tried to kill herself?”

“But—why—surely—”

“Well, I put it all in my letter in case you’d forgotten.”

“But—she may not get the job if you’ve said all that.”

“Isn’t that her business? Why not try minding ours for a change?”

“Yes! Why not? That’s just it! Can’t you leave the girl alone?”

“Can’t you?”

Suddenly he realized that the letter was still there, unposted on the bureau. Striding over, he sought it hastily amidst the pile and tore it across. He was aware that the act was melodramatic, but all his nerves were craving for some if even the stupidest release in action.

“That just gives me the trouble of writing another. Really, David, you do the most childish things.”

The room lit up with the tremendous flashing and roaring outburst that he had been expecting, yet was not and never could be prepared for. He saw Jessica’s eyes gleaming at him across the hearthrug.

“And one more thing, David. I believe she sometimes comes in here to play the piano?”

“Yes, I said she could. After all, what harm does it do? She’s really quite good at it—she ought to take it up seriously—”

“I don’t wish her to play my piano in future, that’s all.”

“But there isn’t any future! Good God, don’t you realize that? In five days—”

“David, I think you’d better calm yourself.”

“Yes, yes, I know—it’s the storm, I think—I must get away—”

He rushed from the room and down the three steps, through the double doors into the surgery. It was far more dangerous there in a storm, for if a chimney stack were struck by lightning the debris would crash through the glass roof as through paper. But all he craved was the personal citadel where he could rest and be alone; and to be alone with Leni was still, in this deep sense, to be alone. There she was, arranging his papers, her upward glance a warm and welcoming thing.

“Please…is anything the matter?”

“I hate storms, Leni, that’s all.”

“It is nearly over now.”

“Yes, I hope so…I’m sorry to have to tell you…about that job…”

He told her all that had happened, ending with: “I tore it up, but I daresay she’s written it again and posted it by now.”

Suddenly it occurred to him that they were both children, acting and talking like children, with the same terrible intentness upon the hostile behavior of a grown-up.

“It means I won’t get the job?”

“Probably not. But don’t worry. I’ll look in at the Burrowsford Library to-morrow—there may be some advertisements in scholastic papers. The trouble is, as we’ve already found, most of those posts go to people who have degrees.”

“Degrees?”

“What do you call them? I forget. Diploma? Baccalaureate? Doctorate?”

“Oh yes, I know.”

An idea came to him, an offshoot, of an already favorite idea. “Of course there’s one thing you really ought to do, especially if you can’t get a job.”

“What’s that?”

“Take up the piano seriously. There must be a school somewhere you could join. Yes, I’ll look it up to-morrow in Burrowsford. There’s a conference there—I’ve got to attend. I hate things like that, but I’m on the board of the County Hospital and it lets me in for them now and again. Of course I could lend you the money for the fees and you could pay me back when you get a job again…Yes, that certainly is an idea. I’ll find all the details for you to-morrow. You see, there’s an excellent reference library in Burrowsford—much better than here… Perhaps the Academy of Music or something like that—in London, it might be. Maybe they offer scholarships and you could win one. I’ll find out everything for you.”

“But I’m not really a pianist, you know. I’m a dancer.”

“Ah yes, of course. I was forgetting. Well, perhaps you could do that as well.”

“Did you ever see the Russian Ballet?”

“I’m afraid not. In Calderbury, we hardly ever—”

“When I was in Petersburg—before I had to escape—I once saw Nijinsky.”

It was plain that he had never heard of Nijinsky. He said, “Oh yes?”

“Would you like me to dance for you?”

He answered, with a touch of shyness: “Well, that would be very nice. I should certainly like it. But I don’t quite see how—”

“Yet sometime, perhaps?”

“Yes, of course. Meanwhile I’ll look up those advertisements for you. I still feel that it would be worth your while to take up the piano seriously—” And his mind ran easily on, as pleasantly unimpeded by practical knowledge as it usually was outside his own immediate world. And the following morning he went to the Burrowsford conference, which was just what he had expected it to be. Four days of listening to reports and speeches, of being chaffed by colleagues, of eating hotel meals—it was not the kind of life for which he had any social or temperamental aptitude. During his first day he found time to visit the library and spend an hour searching in a desultory way through year books and almanacs. He was one of those people who dislike asking expert advice, and, of course, as a professional dispenser of such advice, he was wholly inconsistent in this. He would have blamed a mother for not calling him in till too late, but he would not ask a library assistant how to look up details about entry into colleges of music. After much random searching he was fortunate enough to hit on the information he wanted; then he sat at one of the library desks and wrote as follows:—

DEAR LENI: I have looked into the matter we talked about. Of course I will give you full information when I return, but this is just to say that the idea of your taking up music at college seems quite possible, and you can count on me for any help that is needed. Not a word to Jessie, though, or she might try to interfere—we must be careful not to make the same mistake as last time…

When he had written as far as that, it occurred to him, in one of those spasms of caution that sometimes come to people who are not naturally cautious, that Jessica might even intercept the letter and read it; and to such a peril the only safeguard seemed to be transcription into deliberately vague terms. So he rewrote as follows:—

DEAR LENI: I have looked into the matter we were discussing yesterday, and I think the solution we thought of is the best, in the circumstances. Of course I will help you in it. All the information and details when I return. Not a word to J.—we must be careful not to make the same mistake as last time—you know what I mean? So destroy this as soon as you have read it…

When he had sealed and posted the letter he felt a sort of childish glee in having done something clever—he almost hoped that Jessica would intercept his message, since precious little she would learn from it, and that, in a way, would serve her right. He felt rather like a schoolboy who has invented some baffling stratagem against a strict but respected teacher.

Leni did not destroy the letter. It was the first she had ever received from him—the first time she had ever seen the words “Dear Leni” in his handwriting; and she kept it.

Three days later David reached Calderbury during the afternoon and walked from the station. There had been heavy rain and the Close was full of mixture scents, pebbles and bars of sand washed out of the gravel, pavements still steaming in the after-sun. And suddenly, as he walked past the Cathedral, the thought invaded him, as never before, of Leni. She would be there when he reached the house in Shawgate, but after that day and the next she would never be there again. He did not, because he could not somehow, think of the future without her, but all the sad urgency of the moment flowed back into the past, forcing him to remember the times they had met and talked, and how many more there could have been had he but known how soon they were all to end. “I have grown fond of that girl,” he admitted to himself; and then, with a flash of self-blame, “Good heavens, four days at that confounded conference and now there’s only one other day before she goes…”

When he reached the house the interior seemed dark after the bright sunshine. It was Susan’s half day off; Leni met him and said that Jessica was out also. “Would you like some tea?”

“That’s just what I should like more than anything, Leni.”

“Will you have it in the surgery?”

“That would be nice, too.”

“All right. You look pale. Have you been very busy?”

“No, not busy—just bored. What have you been up to?”

“Up to? What does that mean?”

“What have you been doing?”

“Packing.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

And there, facing him again, was the imminence of her departure. He pondered on it as he sat alone and listened to the clatter of cups in the kitchen. Presently she reentered, carrying a loaded tray.

“Seen the papers these last few days?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Looks bad, but I don’t think it’ll come to anything over here.”

“Come to anything?”

“Anything bad, I mean. But it’s bad enough for those who are in it. Good thing you’re not in your own country, perhaps. By the way, did you get my letter?”

“Yes, it was so good of you to write.”

“Well, I thought you’d be relieved to know. About the music, I mean. It’s a good idea … which reminds me, we can try over something this afternoon if you like—there’s no one in—”

“But Mrs. Newcome said—”

“She’ll never know.”

“The people in the street will hear. Somebody will tell her.”

“Then we’ll close all the windows!” He added, boyishly: “Are you afraid?”

“Only for you, David.”

“For me? Why, God bless my soul, what harm can come to me?”

She answered, in German: “You have to stay here after I have gone.”

“I know. I’m trying to realize it. It’s curious—I can’t quite grasp the fact that you really are going and that this is your last day here…I’ll miss you. And really, I don’t see why Jessie should forbid such a harmless thing.”

So after the tea they went in the drawing-room and David stood on the window seat to close the windows. But one of them was stiff, and as he reached upwards to push, he lost balance and had to clutch a picture to save himself from falling. The picture came down on his head, showering him with dust; and of course he began to laugh, because he had a very simple and artless sense of humor. Then she went to the piano and he took out his violin and they began to play Mozart. The music streamed into the room, enclosing a world in which they were free as air, shutting out hatreds and jealousies and despondencies, giving their eyes a look of union with something rare and distant. David did not play very well—indeed, a good deal of the Mozart was much too difficult for him; but there was a simplicity that gave calmness to his effort, absorbing rather than interpreting the music. And he thought, as he played, that it was a strange thing, at forty-six, to know the sweetness and terror of existence as if one had never known them before, to look back mystically on the incredible chance of human contact, to feel some finger of destiny marking the streets of Calderbury where he had walked and talked with a girl.

When the last chord had been struck he began mumbling something about her playing being full of promise, and that she really ought to join some academy or conservatoire.

“You are so kind,” she said.

“Kind? Why do you always say that?”

“Because you always say things like that, and you just say them because you are kind, that is all.”

“But I mean them.”

“I know. But you don’t mean them to mean anything.”

“Now you’ve puzzled me!” He smiled.

“Dear, I know why it is. You can’t help it. And I love you—I can’t help that!”

But he was already bustling about saying, “Now I must put up that picture before anybody comes.”

“You didn’t hear me?”

“I’m sorry…what was it?”

She said, smiling: “I know. There is just one thing more. I will dance for you.”

“Dance for me? Here? Now?”

“Yes. You know the prelude of Chopin that goes like this—” she hummed a few bars of it. “You play that on your violin—I will dance to it.”

“But—”

“Yes? You are afraid if anybody comes ? You are afraid if anyone sees through the window? Pull over the curtains. Take up the rugs…Please do that until I come back…”

She ran out of the room and was away a few minutes. During this interval David waited indecisively at first, then, with a sudden clinching of intention, did as she had asked.

First the curtains, then the rugs. The room filled with a warm twilight; he did not switch on any lights because the sunshine out of doors came through the fabric of the curtains in a luminous glow. Then he took his violin and tried over, very softly, the prelude she had mentioned.

Presently she came into the room, dressed in a ballet costume that bore, if he had noticed it, the creases of repeated packings and unpackings. Had he noticed, too, he would have seen that it was a little shabby, and had never been anything remarkable even when new. But in the twilight he saw nothing but a strange vision of the mind, something he had never expected to see in this life, an embodiment of light and air, on tiptoe with a dream. He took up his violin and began to play, watching her all the time. She was magic to him. There was something between them pouring always in invisible streams, the awareness of beauty in peril.

So on an August afternoon, behind drawn curtains in a Calderbury drawing-room, a girl danced for the little doctor. The room filled with the emptiness of all the world except themselves, and this emptiness soared in their hearts until, just on the edge of flight, the spell was broken by the ringing of the telephone.

David put down his violin. Leni stopped still. “A call for me probably,” he said, beginning to walk away. Leni more slowly followed. A moment later he was finding his bag and hat in the surgery.

“That boy, you know—the pneumonia case—I have to go at once.”

“And I must change and finish packing. I’ll tidy the room up too.”

“Thanks…Maybe I’ll be back soon.” And he added, gently: “It was very beautiful.”

Ten minutes later he was in the familiar strangeness of rooms and stairs. There could be no doubt about the case this time.

He sat by the bedside, taking a small hand in his own, and the boy, half conscious as he fought for breath, looked up and smiled. Suddenly—almost immediately—death came. Weeks afterwards the boy’s father, in the fourale bar of the “Greyhound,” described the incident. “He killed our Johnny, too. Pewmonia, Johnny had, double pewmonia, and Newcome had bin to see him several times but never done the boy no good. And it was that night—that night, mind you. Maybe he was thinkin’ about it all the time he was with our Johnny. Because what d’you think he did when he got to the boy? Why, nothing. Just sat there and let the poor kid die without so much as raising a finger! The dirty swine!”

We do not know what to-night, much less to-night’s newspaper, will bring. Some secret intersection of seconds and inches may mean an end to us, our age, the world. In Calderbury on that evening of August fourth, the train brought in later editions from Marsland, catching the sunset on its windows so that a flash of crimson streaked the watermeadows. In the streets of the town the newspapers were scrambled for, and one of them by the little doctor, who stood reading it as he held his bicycle at the curb. “Looks bad, doctor,” someone said.

“Yes, indeed. Good God, I never thought they’d actually come to it!”

“Soon over, you bet. Wait till the Navy—”

Half listening, he read paragraphs about mobilizations, troops rushed to frontiers, bombardments, opened on fortifications, refugees streaming from ravaged lands, the plight of travelers and aliens. Abruptly then he moved off along Briargate, pedaling faster than usual, till he was hot and breathless. He entered the house through the surgery, leaving the bicycle against the wall in the outside alley. Mechanically he unlocked a cupboard to replace some drugs he had carried with him in his bag. He could feel his heart pounding with excitement as he climbed the stairs to the attic room where he guessed Leni would be waiting. He was that strange creature, a quiet man resolved upon an act. The trouble was that life with Jessica had given him this curious reluctance, outside his own world, to make decisions; she had made so many for him, and her intolerance of most that he dared to contemplate himself had blanketed him with at least a vagueness and at most an obstinacy. Only in his own world was there freedom of mind and hand; and in that world he had been eager to imprison himself for such freedom. He had never bothered much about exterior events. He had found contentment within the circle of a few things he cared for, and outside it he walked as a child.

But now, having suddenly made up his mind, he was in a tremendous hurry. He must act. He must even oppose Jessica, if need be—must use decision, cunning, worldly wisdom, a host of qualities strange to him. “Leni, my dear—you can’t wait till to-morrow—you’ve got to get away now—to-night!”

She was kneeling on the floor of the attic room, packing clothes into a bag.

“But—why?”

“It’s in the paper. England and Germany may be at war by midnight. That means you must get away. You must go back—to Germany—at once—before anything can happen—”

“But I can’t—I—”

“I tell you you must get out of England—somewhere—anywhere. Don’t you realize what it’ll be like if you stay? Already they’re arresting and imprisoning people. Hurry now and finish packing—we have to leave at once.”

“We?”

“Of course. I’m going to help you. We’ve missed the last train, but there’s one from Marsland that goes at ten to twelve—we can get there somehow—”

“We?”

“Yes, yes—I’m going to take you to a seaport and arrange for you to get away in time—so hurry, please hurry…” And so he talked on. She didn’t want to go and finally she was hysterical. He calmed her and after about an hour they went downstairs and through the surgery into the narrow path flanked by the white sea shells. There the sight of his bicycle leaning against the wall gave him both confidence and a new access of caution. “You mustn’t be seen leaving the town, especially with me, so this is what we must do…Now let me think—it’s almost dusk—you take the path to the Knoll and wait for me by the wooden hut—you remember it? We’ll meet there and go on—I’ll take the long way round by the lane—”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded. As soon as she had gone, the path between the high walls seemed an empty canyon, and in his own heart an equal emptiness gave answer. He must help her out of the country. He must act. He must be forceful and yet remain calm. So he waited to light his pipe, waited after that for a whole minute by his watch, and then, wheeling the bicycle, emerged into the street.

Through the quiet streets off Briargate and into Lissington Lane the little doctor hastened, full of the strange sensation of having decided to do something at last. He thought he was clever to have arranged to meet Leni at the wooden hut, because it was dark there, and no one would see their faces. And it was clever of him also, he thought, to have arranged separate journeys to the rendezvous, for while no one would think much of seeing either of them alone, the pair of them might be (indeed, in the past, had been) gossiped about. So he cycled along, slowly because of the steepness, making a short cut to the edge of the town, where, a little way along the lane, a field path led to the Knoll. He would have to wheel his bicycle there, along the zigzag path over the quarry, and so to the wooden hut in the dark part of the woods.

Even in Calderbury streets he hoped that no one would notice him, and he pulled his hat well down over his eyes with some vague idea of disguising himself. But after almost colliding with another cyclist he gave this up as impracticable; besides, a few people saw him, anyway, calling to him out of windows and doorways as he went by: “Good night, doctor…Heard the news, I suppose?”—to which, because he could not think of anything else and also because he was incapable of not returning cordiality, he answered in a strained voice: “Good night, Jim…yes…Good night, Dick…Good night, Mrs. Hargreaves.” Once, at a street corner, he overheard a man telling a small group of people: “There’s a big battle going on in the North Sea—our Tom heard it from the telephone exchange. The German fleet is sinking…”

Presently he came to the field path. It was a lovely night, warm from the earth; and he felt, as he always did when he had seen recent death, a mystic communion with all things living and dead, as well as a perception of their own communion; so that, through such a prism of consciousness, he could sense life in a dead stone and death in a living tree. As he came to the edge of the disused quarry he happened to kick a pebble and heard it fall a hundred feet to the rocks and undergrowth at the base of the cliff. Perhaps the universe had been made as chancily as that.

Soon, through the trees, he saw the shape of the wooden hut, and beside it, waiting for him, Leni. He could not see her clearly, but as he approached she came to him, and they stood for a moment, searching each other’s eyes till light was born in them, and it seemed to him then that the universe might even more probably have been made like that.

“Have you been waiting long?”

“About ten minutes. I didn’t mind.”

“We must move on. Did anyone see you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, once we’ve got away.”

They descended the Knoll by a path that led them to the other side of it, whence, at the foot, the water meadows stretched to the Marsland Road. The night was pale over those meadows, and only the sudden lighting of cigarettes marked pairs of lovers couched in the long grasses; there was no sound but secret voices under the mist and the hum of the bicycle as David pushed it. He was hoisting it over the last stile when the Cathedral chimed the three quarters. “Now we’re all right,” he said, stooping to light the lamp when they reached the highway. Warm dust-scented air lingered over the graveled road. “Have you ever ridden on the back of a bicycle? You’ll find it quite easy. Put your left foot on the axle step and your right knee on the mudguard—you’ll manage.”

So they began the journey from Calderbury, with the lamplight flickering and swerving as David pedaled along. The road lay slightly uphill, and it was hard work; but there was no traffic as there would be to-day, no speeding cars, no young men with motorcycles racing between the hedges, no huge omnibuses linking the villages at forty miles an hour; only an old man plodding home, who called “Good night” without knowing, without even trying to see, who passed him. And presently the moon rose and the twin towers of the Cathedral stiffened against the blue-black sky, calling eleven as David topped the hill and prepared to freewheel down. The hill heaped behind, with the dark shape of the Knoll farther still behind, the gradient spinning them into shadows of cold air under trees, and then into the bright glassy moonlight of the level. And after miles of this, keeping a good rate, David began to whistle in pure enjoyment. He often did so as he went about the countryside at night, and if people heard a whistling cyclist they sometimes said: “Bet you that’s the little doctor.” So now he went on whistling till the beginning of Croombury Hill made him save his breath, and a few yards higher forced him off his machine altogether. He dismounted with the usual acrobatic flourish for which Leni was hardly prepared and which would have capsized her into the ditch had she not been agile.

“This is a steep one,” he said, affectionately, to the earth and sky, and then paused in the middle of the road, feeling in his pocket for pipe and tobacco and matches. “But we’re doing fine—we’ll easily catch the ten to twelve. Are you tired?”

“No, but it hurts my knee a little.”

“It’s not far now—just through Lissington village and over the next hill. I know all the country round here. Every village and lane and path. I know the people in the cottages, and in the churchyards too. This is a good country, England. I’ve been round about here for fifteen years. You must have been a baby when I first put up my plate. Hundreds of miles away in some German village I’ve never heard of, and you grew up—all unknown to me, all those years—to fall over one night and break your wrist in Calderbury. If you hadn’t come here and done that I’d never have known you at all. That’s a funny thing. And it’s funnier still to think that I shouldn’t have missed knowing you…Some German village, wasn’t it? Tell me about it.”

“It was a city, really—Königsberg. My parents both died when I was young and I was sent to a school—the school I ran away from.”

“We’re at the top of the hill now. Better jump on again. We can go on talking.”

He kept his cherry-wood pipe in his mouth and the smoke and sometimes the flakes of hot tobacco flew back in her face as they gathered speed. “Plenty of time,” he muttered, wobbling dangerously as he pointed to the horizon. “There are the Junction lights—see them? That reddish glow yonder!”

But at the foot of the hill there was a bad patch in the road and crossing it too fast and with the added weight the back tire suddenly deflated. David braked with a vehemence that nearly threw Leni forward over his head. “Oh dear, that’s really a nuisance,” he said, contemplatively, coming to a standstill and viewing the rear wheel. “We’ll just have to push on and walk. Plenty of time if we hurry a bit.” He wheeled the machine for a little way, then it occurred to him that it was no help and that they would gain time by leaving it. He took it through a gate into a field and partly hid it in a hedgerow.

They went on again, but Leni was limping from her right knee; she could not walk very fast, and the Junction lights seemed far away. He put his arm round her so that she might lean some of her weight on him. A little wood came slowly towards them on the left, snuffing out the roadway and changing the sound of their footsteps. From the distance came the clank of wagons in the shunting yard, and an owl mournfully replied from the little wood near by. They both laughed at that. But when they entered the moonlight again the horizon glow looked no nearer. “Just a matter of stepping out,” he said, but they could not easily increase their pace. And when, still a long way off, they heard the train they had aimed for puffing out of the station, it was almost a relief to slacken, to sit on a stile while David smoked a pipe, to talk intermittently and catch the tiny friendly sounds of a twig snapping or a dog barking distinctly.

An early morning train left Marsland at six-five, and David thought it would probably connect with other trains so that they could reach the coast by afternoon. They had six hours to wait—no big hardship on a summer night. Half a mile further on he knew that the side of the road heaped into a dry bed of bracken; sometimes, cycling around, he had paused there for a few minutes’ rest. It was a place called Potts Corner, though why and who Potts was nobody knew. But there was a big elm growing there, and a signpost marking a field path to Stamford Magna.

So when they were tired of talking they walked to the Corner and lay down on the turf and bracken. There are some moments that are hung in memory like a lamp; they shine and swing gently and one can look back on them when all else has faded into distance and darkness. Often afterwards David remembered that roadside corner and the hours he spent there; and sometimes he thought of things he would like to have said and done while there was yet a chance; but actually he said and did very little, because he was tired, and with tiredness had come an old familiar inability to make up his mind. Presently, with his arms round her, she fell asleep. A little wind stirred in the elm overhead; the air grew chilly as the night advanced. He began to wish he had brought an overcoat. For that matter he wished he had brought food, and far more money than was in his pockets; and then he reflected how bad he really was at planning these things, and how much more efficient Jessica would have been. And also he remembered Leni’s own carelessness of detail when she had tried to take her life at Sandmouth; strange that he should be showing such similar lack of forethought in his efforts to save it. And then he began to feel sleepy himself.

Dawn came—the dawn of that first day of war. He got up, leaving her still sleeping, and walked a few yards to the signpost. “Stamford Magna, 2 miles.” To peace, how many days, months, years? He lit a pipe and watched the dawn turn to sunrise. The spire of Lissington Church pricked over the lightening horizon; day came rolling over the little hills, filling the sunken roadways, glistening on the wheat fields, wakening the birds. A harness jingled in some far stable. In a little while it would be time to walk to the Junction; where he had remembered there were chocolate slot machines. Then later, when they reached some bigger place, they could have a real breakfast.

He roused her and they passed on together, facing the early morning sunlight. Soon the road entered the long level stretch at the end of which could be seen the station buildings and a signal tower. It was ten to, six when they approached the entrance to the ticket office and David had another of those precautionary ideas that only occur to people who are not really good at precautions—it suddenly occurred to him that at the station everybody knew him well and that it would be safer to slip on to the platform through the shunting yard and board the train without taking tickets. This he did, easily enough, for the train was already drawn up at the platform and there was ample choice of unoccupied compartments. He knew that the train would take them as far as Charlham, where they could buy the tickets and pick up an express to London.

Feeling rather pleased with this excellent strategy, he smoked contentedly while Leni settled into the cushions and went to sleep again. He was still thinking how cleverly he had escaped being recognized by the station staff when he recollected the chocolate in the slot machines; and he was just wondering whether he could risk a last-minute dash across the platform when, at the same last minute, the door of the compartment opened and a man, paunchy, middle-aged, and breathless, jumped in and flung himself down in the corner seat opposite David. “Why,” he began, “if it isn’t Dr. Newcome—well—well?…Remember the last time we traveled on this line, doc? Too warm for gloves this weather, eh?” He began to laugh and chuckle, and David smiled ruefully and couldn’t help saying, as he might have done in the surgery: “You shouldn’t run for trains, Barney, at your age. It’s the worst heart strain you can think of, because it’s excitement as well as physical effort?”

Later, some time later, months later in fact, Barney Tinsley confessed that he had not at first realized that the girl in the other corner was traveling with the doctor. She had been asleep, and he was surprised when she suddenly woke up and said something in a foreign language. Well, more than surprised—regular flabbergasted.

The gloves allusion was explained to a different audience as follows. “Did I ever tell you, gents, about that time I was in the train with him going to Sandmouth? Y’know, it’s funny, the way you remember things…Well, thanks, sir, that’s very kind of you. Well, I was sort of dozing off, y’know, the same as you do in trains, when suddenly the doc stumbled over my feet, waking me up sudden, and I see him deliberately throw one of his gloves out of the window. ‘Goodness, is the fellow crazy?’ I sez to myself, for it was a good glove, by the look of it, real kid. Course I asked him what the idea was, and I’ll take a bet none of you fellers can’t guess the answer…I thought it would stump you—stumped me at the time. I’ll tell you what he sez to me—‘Barney,’ he sez,—he always called me Barney,—I just dropped a glove accidental on the line as I was opening the window, and I thought I might as well throw the other one after it, so as maybe the same person would find ’em both. After all, an odd glove’s not much use to anybody, is it?’ Must ’ave had a queer mind to think of things as quick as that…”

“Queer is the word,” somebody responded.

They arrived at Charlham at nine-thirty and had breakfast in the Railway Arms. The morning papers had just come, and everyone in the coffee room was talking and prophesying—the waiter, a few commercial travelers, and a man in a green baize apron who was cleaning the fireplace. The bacon was cold and the toast burnt. David had looked up the timetable and found an express to London at eleven; the station was just across the road, so there was plenty of time. He left Leni in the hotel lounge while he found a barber’s shop and had a shave.

Most of the way to London she slept again, but this time the train was crowded and she leaned her head against his shoulder while he talked with the other people in the compartment. That always happened wherever he went; people always began talking to him, telling him all their lives if there were time enough, because he had a way of listening gently. But this time, as he talked and listened, he sometimes stole a glance at the head so limp against his arm; it had been a long way to the Junction for her—poor child, let her sleep. But once she half-awakened, roused by the crash of the train into a tunnel, and in the sudden soft glow of the electric light her eyes melted to his glance. “Du kleine doctor…” she murmured, dreamily. “Where are we going to? Where are you taking me?” Then she remembered something he had told her—that she must not speak during the journey in case anyone should hear her foreign accent.

They reached London in the middle of the afternoon and as they walked with the crowd on the platform by the side of the train two men sprang forward and gripped each of them by the arm.

CHAPTER SIX

THE LITTLE DOCTOR WATCHED the autumn sunlight move over the floor, and when the last yellow bar disappeared he knew it was late afternoon and that another day was nearly over. Presently he heard the Cathedral chiming five, and a warder entered with tea and bread and butter for himself and for the other two warders who had to stay all the time. According to prison rules he was never left alone, day or night; but the warders were kindly fellows and tried to efface themselves as much as possible. They played cards or read newspapers or yarned together for hours, not worrying the doctor by their presence, though they were affable enough if he chose to join them for a game or a chat. Of course he already knew and called them by their first names. “It’s a queer thing, George,” he said (and this was the thing George quoted oftenest afterwards), “I can’t seem to get used to wearing boots without bootlaces. You’d think it would be more comfortable, really, but somehow it isn’t.” They would not let him wear bootlaces, or braces, or anything he might possibly hang himself with; because, of course, they intended to hang him themselves.

But in other ways he was treated with consideration; indeed, as he told the Governor whenever the latter visited him, “I’m quite comfortable, thank you.” He could smoke, read books and newspapers, and have any kind of food he fancied. And as Calderbury Prison was mostly disused, the part he occupied was not in the original cell block at all, but consisted of a couple of ordinary rooms with nothing unusual about them except steel locks on the doors and bars to the windows. Only a little less comfortable than the rooms he occupied in his own house in Shawgate, for he had never had luxurious tastes. In some ways he was almost freer than he had been at home; for he could get up and go to bed when he liked and he had ample leisure to read. Everyone in Calderbury Prison was sorry for the little doctor and rather embarrassed because in three weeks’ time he was to die. After the dismissal of the appeal the Governor was almost apologetic when he brought the news. “’Fraid I’ve nothing good to tell you, Newcome—still, I know you hadn’t been counting on it…And remember, anything I can do now…you mustn’t mind telling me.”

“There’s only one thing—you remember I asked you before.”

“Oh, that? Well…I can only say again I wish I could, but it’s dead against all the regulations. Just the one thing I can’t do for you. I’m sorry.”

The request that David had made, more than once, was to see Leni. She was lodged in the jail at Midchester, twenty miles away, where there was more up-to-date provision for women prisoners. He had not seen her since the trial a month before, and when he tried to remember that last glance he had he could only see the courtroom, dark at the close of an autumn afternoon, grey figures moving restlessly and meaninglessly as reeds in a stream, and somewhere, lost amongst them, her strange eager face seeking his in a bewildered stare. What had it all been about? And he didn’t know—the whole proceedings of arrest, police questioning, grand jury, prison, trial…all were shadows of a shapeless fate. They let him read newspaper reports of the trial, and to these he now gave a half-incredulous scrutiny. He could not really understand. Then he turned to the current papers and read news that was dark with huger fantasy—Mons, the Marne, the Aisne…

He found it tolerable at first to watch the days crawl by. He was not afraid of death; he knew that death could be prophesied for all men; he had often prophesied it himself. Even to look ahead and know that a month hence he would lie in a prison grave was no worse than to diagnose, as many a doctor must, the first budding in his own flesh that will bring death as its flower. And the routine of prison helped to a certain tranquility; in the mornings when he took exercise in the graveled yard he smiled at the sky and let the wind blow lovingly through his hair. It had gone grey during recent months, but they had not made him clip it short.

In the afternoons he read or rested or played a game of cards with the two men on guard over him, and soon after tea, because there was nothing else to do, he went to bed. It was nighttime that was the worst. He could not sleep well between midnight and dawn; and then, in those guardless hours (for the warders, against rules, usually dozed off themselves), he thought of Leni. Love is a strange thing; we may not notice the moment it comes, yet there is a moment when we know it is there—sudden wakefulness, as to pleasure or pain after sleep, a sudden color, as of a painting after an etching. So it had been for the little doctor; he remembered a moment in the courtroom, during the judge’s summing up; he had been tired after a long day in that stuffy atmosphere, and the judge’s words had droned on more and more slowly, as if they were being pushed into sound by means of an ever greater effort. A little way off in the prisoner’s dock Leni was sitting, and she too looked tired, had lapsed into a remoteness that seemed, by its very detachment from environment, an almost physical absence. The judge was going over the points of the case, one by one; and presently he said:—

“…With evidence of motive, gentlemen, we are not primarily concerned when there is so much suggestive evidence as to fact…but…you will probably conjecture the purpose for which he brought her from Sandmouth to Calderbury, and you will form your own opinion as to the validity of the pretext of engaging her as his young son’s governess. It may well be that you will feel that no more unsuitable person could have been chosen to look after a nine-year-old child—and a very nervous and highly strung child, we have been told—than a young woman whose temperament was such that she had only recently attempted suicide, who had had no kind of previous experience as a child’s governess, and who, in addition, could barely make herself understood in the child’s language…You will have to ask yourselves, plainly and straightforwardly, what lay behind this extraordinary incident—doubtless it can be made to look attractive if you think of it in terms of rescue and benevolence, but if you will bear in mind the culmination to which it led, and which is the sole cause of our being here to-day to pass judgment, then you will form your own opinion why the prisoner chose to install this young woman in the very centre of his house-hold, where he could see her every day and as often and for as long periods as he liked, and where, under the same roof as his wife and son…Gentlemen, it is, of course, for you to decide and interpret these matters so far as you feel justified in doing so—I only desire to caution you against the pseudo or false romanticism of which plays and novels are such frequent exponents—the kind, I mean, that deal with what I believe is called the ‘eternal triangle.’ Such fair words are, in a measure, hypocritical; they may lull us for an evening’s entertainment, but in a court of law it is our duty to remember—and it is my duty to point out—the plainer and less agreeable facts…lust .. . infatuation…the lowest and basest physicality, uncontrolled, dominating…all of which, gentlemen, is apt, in our modern world, as you know, to be loosely summed up under the word ‘love.’ You may call it ‘love’ if you like, provided you realize…”

And at that the whole mumbling greyness seemed to be lit by a stabbing trumpeting light; and the little doctor said in his heart, almost as if he were taking advantage of permission just given him: “Yes, I call it love.” …It was so wrong, absurd, preposterous, all that the judge had said; and yet, just round the corner from the nonsense, there was this imperishable pearl of truth. “I call it love. Oh God, yes. I call it love.”

Looking back as he tried to sleep during those last nights in Calderbury Jail, the little doctor sighed only because that moment had happened so late. And thence, inevitably, he turned to thinking of love that had always been in his heart, and in the hearts of so many: love of mankind that had sheltered long in the monk’s cell and the artist’s studio and the doctor’s laboratory; love that had made men quietly build and sacrifice and die; love that might have conquered the world had not its moment arrived too late.

Chimes of the Cathedral marked the quarters, marked the slow tragedy of that lateness, while the little doctor dreamed, remembering the millions crouched in their trenches…hate, murder, agony…the lowest and basest, uncontrolled, dominating…all of which, gentlemen, is apt, in our modern world, to be loosely summed up under the word “love.” You may call it love if you like, provided you realize …and then he fell asleep for a few troubled moments; waking again, and half-sleeping again, until the dawn outlined the bars across the window. They call it love, I call it love, but we do not mean the same thing.

To his dying day (which was, in fact, the day after) the little doctor never knew why it was that the prison authorities allowed him to see Leni. The reason is disclosed in a book published only a few years ago by Major Sir George Millman under the somewhat catchpenny title My Forty Years in Jail. There is a paragraph of interesting reminiscence about the Calderbury case:—

Newcome was under my charge both before and after sentence; he was a quiet fellow on the whole, and gave very little trouble. The only request he persistently made was to see his co-prisoner, Fraulein Leni Krafft, who had shared his conviction and sentence and was imprisoned a few miles away. Of course, as I told him, this was altogether contrary to regulations, but I happened to mention his request to Sir William Clintock, who was in charge of the wartime secret service, and he took it up from another angle. It seemed that very little was known about the German girl, apart from the Calderbury case; but a forged passport was discovered amongst her possessions after her arrest, and the espionage department suspected that she was a German spy who had earlier been working in Russia. Of course all this was kept out of the court evidence, and it did not affect the question of her guilt in the Calderbury charge. Sir William, however, believed that a last-minute interview with Newcome might reveal some hint as to her real identity and perhaps afford clues that would assist the Department in countering the machinations of enemy espionage; so after consultation with the Home Office permission was duly given and the two condemned prisoners talked for half an hour in a room in Calderbury Jail which they had been encouraged to think was private. Actually several persons, including one who knew German perfectly, were listening and taking notes all the time, through holes that had been made secretly in the paneling of the room. The idea was undoubtedly worth trying out, but in point of fact the two prisoners exchanged no remarks that were of any help to the Department.

When David heard on Thursday morning that his one request had been granted and that Leni was to be brought to see him that same afternoon, his heart overflowed with anticipation and he pressed the Governor’s hand with more emotion than he had yet shown since his arrival at the jail. The Governor was a little embarrassed. “Not at all…not at all, Newcome…don’t thank me—thank the authorities. Still, I’m jolly glad for your sake. Anything else I can do, y’know…”

“How long can we talk for?”

“Oh well…no exact time limit, y’know…pretty well as long as you like within reason. Say half an hour. Plenty of time for anything you want to say to each other. We shan’t bother you.”

“You mean there’ll be nobody listening?”

“Maybe we’ll stretch a point and call the warders off…I daresay you’d like it better in private. Oh, and by the way…”

“Yes?”

“You remember at the trial—right at the end—you told the judge that the girl was really only nineteen—”

“Yes. But he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“I know. I’m interested, all the same, in what you said. Did you only just say it to try to get her off?”

“No, it was true.”

“But how did you know it was true? What reason had you for thinking her so young?”

“She told me.”

“Oh, I see…You hadn’t any evidence except just that?’?

“I believed her.”

“Yes, of course…Ah well, you’ll see her this afternoon.”

And a few minutes later, recovering from his embarrassment, Millman telephoned to the Governor of Midchester Prison. “Yes, I told him it would be private. Did you tell her the same? Good…rather an awkward business, really…Oh Lord, no, he was so damn pleased about it—thought I’d fixed it as a special favor, y’know. Rather pathetic, in a way…made me feel a bit of a…oh yes, I asked him about the girl’s age, but he knew nothing definite—only that she’d told him she was only nineteen. Seems to have believed everything she told him, poor devil…Yes, all right—three o’clock. We’ve fixed the room and the men will be ready…”

At five to three the little doctor was taken along corridors to a room he had never seen before, a small match-boarded room in which were a table and two chairs. He sat down on one of the chairs and a warder took the other. Then at a few minutes after the hour another warder made some signal from the door, at which the first warder got up and left the room. For a few seconds David was alone; then the door opened, and Leni, also alone, entered.

They had let her come in ordinary clothes, the same that she had worn whilst balancing on the back of David’s bicycle along the Marsland Road. But her face was different from then; she had the little crushed smile that he had seen first of all when he had bandaged her wrist after the accident at the Theatre Royal. She came forward, stumbling a little, leaning at last into his arms as he stood. “Du kleine doktor…Oh, du kleine doktor…” She began to cry, and all at once it seemed to him that the whole world was crying, crying for lost, impossible love.

Her first words were: “David, whatever you did, I love you, David. I told you that once before, but you took no notice.”

“When did you tell me?”

“That day I danced for you.”

“Yes, I remember that. I try to remember everything—I try and I try—but I can’t think what really happened. Perhaps nobody knows what happened.” And then suddenly he said: “Leni—did you—you didn’t—you didn’t—do anything—did you?”

She looked at him gravely for a moment and then answered: “No. Did you?”

“I didn’t either. Did you think I did?”

“I wondered.”

“I wondered too.” Then he smiled. “Forgive me. How could such a suspicion—”

“But if it’s really true that neither of us—”

“Yes?”

“Then who?”

“Yes, that’s the trouble. That’s why they won’t believe us. They have to find some answer. They have to blame somebody. And it’s so easy to prove things by evidence.”

She put up her hand and touched his face as a blind person memorizes. “They are going to kill us, David, though we haven’t done any wrong at all.”

“I know.” And he added, seeing beyond her, hundreds of miles beyond her: “We are not alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“These things are always happening. Don’t be afraid of death. It isn’t the worst we have to face—only the last.”

“But that is why it is the worst.”

“No, no, we should fear birth far more if we could look ahead to it.” And then, half-impishly, he began to improvise on the theme, to play with the idea for her comfort and his own. “Oh, much more, I assure you. I’ve often thought that. Suppose, just for argument, that everything did happen the other way round. Suppose people gathered in a churchyard and hauled you from a hole in the ground in a wooden box and took you back to a house, and after a day or so the box was opened and you were laid on a bed, and a few days later people gathered at the bedside and all at once the breath of life came into you, bringing agony first of all, then less and less till you could actually stir and creep about, walking with a stick perhaps and being for a time a bit deaf and blind and crazy…”

“Horrible!”

“But not nearly as horrible as when you come to the other end. For think of the day you’d leave school and begin to stay at home in the nursery. Think of the first time you’d really believe in Santa Claus and hang up your stocking on Christmas Eve! Think of people patting you on the head as you grew younger every day, as you gradually lost speech and height and weight and personality! That last stumbling walk across the hearthrug before you settled down to pram life! How unutterably tragic—far more so than growing old and dying!”

“But—never—never—to see you again!”

“Maybe you will. If there’s a next world I’ll try to find you in it as I found you in this. There will be other worlds, surely, or maybe this world over again…worlds in which the things we have won’t be wasted like this…I’ll find you…do you remember that first night I did find you? Very windy—later on it rained. First of all I went to the theatre, and you’d gone. But I found you in the end.”

“—I saw you through the mirror as you came into the room, and I knew you must be the little doctor because you looked so…you looked so…Oh, David—David!…Why does it have to happen like this?”

Afterwards, while Leni was hastening back to Midchester in a car with drawn blinds, the listeners in the next room compared notes. It was generally admitted that the interview had been a failure.

“Of course it was pretty obvious he smelt a rat. Didn’t you hear him whisper ‘We’re not alone’? That was a hint to her to be careful what she said…It’s my belief Millman gave the game away talking to him beforehand. Not too subtle, the Major, compared with the old doc—he’s got his head screwed on all right—”

“Till to-morrow morning,” somebody answered with a nervous smile, for hanging is really no joke.

Twilight ushered in the evening, and David watched the slow glooming of the sky with full awareness that it was tor the last time. He was not unhappy. He was not afraid. He was quite calm when the Governor and the Chaplain paid the formal visits that were part of enjoined routine.

The Chaplain came first, a jolly-looking redfaced parson chosen for the job of ministering to the spiritual needs of prisoners because it was supposed that he knew how to deal with men, could meet them on their own level, and so on. His sermons were always full of pat-you-on-the-back optimism, and he said “damn” just to prove his good fellowship. He had known Jessica, through her connection with the Cathedral clergy, and she had always regarded him as “just the kind of parson the modern world needs.” All of which might have made him embarrassed to meet David, had he not been the kind of man who is rarely embarrassed. He sat on the edge of the bed and beamed with man-to-mannishness. “Comfortable, eh, Newcome? Having all you want?”

“Yes, thank you,” said David, who always filled in gaps of emotional response by being polite.

“Thought you might care for a little chat, y’know. How’re you feeling? All right? Pretty cheerful? Read the papers, I suppose? Damned awful thing if the boys aren’t home by Christmas, eh? Still, it can’t be long after—we’ve certainly got the enemy by the short hairs—”

Suddenly David realized who this man was. “Why, you knew Jessie, didn’t you?” he interrupted.

Even the Chaplain’s nerve was somewhat unprepared for the shock of such a reference. “You mean—you mean—Mrs.—the late Mrs. Newcome? Why, yes, I did know her—yes, of course I did.” (As he said to Millman afterwards: “You could have knocked me down with a feather when he mentioned her—so damn casual, you wouldn’t believe it possible…”)

Then David began to talk quite normally—that is to say, from the Chaplain’s point of view, quite abnormally. “I’m glad to speak to someone who knew her, because you’ll understand about Gerald—that’s my boy. Jessie had sent him away to her brother-in-law—Simpson, you know, he’s the Vicar of St. Peter’s. I’m sure he’s being looked after all right, but I do hope they haven’t told him—very much—you know what I mean—you see he’s so nervous—”

My dear Newcome, you needn’t worry on that score. I happen to know that your boy’s been told nothing—absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact he’s at present away at the seaside—much the best idea, don’t you think? I suppose some day…but for the present—well, he just thinks his mother and father have gone away somewhere for a time…Of course if you’d put in an application I’ve no doubt they’d have allowed you to see him—but all the same—”

“Oh, I never thought of it—oh, dear no. I wouldn’t like him to come here at all—he’d be frightened—he was always scared of policemen. I think that was because Jessie always used to say, ‘I’ll fetch a policeman to you,’ whenever he misbehaved—a mistake to say things like that to a nervous child. And that’s what I want to talk to you about…You know Jessie meant well, but she didn’t really understand the boy. She and I had different ways with him, and I think—I really do think—mine was better. I wish you’d tell the Simpsons that if you get the chance. Tell them not to worry the boy, just let him grow up and conquer things for himself …and then some day, maybe, he can know the truth about me—about—to-morrow, I mean…”

“Well, Newcome, I must say I think that’s very sensible of you. You can rest assured I’ll do my damnedest for the youngster. Keep an eye on him myself, I give you my word. As ’matter of fact, if I had my way I’d tell him a complete lie about you—I’d say you’d joined up and made the—er—the supreme sacrifice—give the little chap something to be proud of…Why not—eh, why not?”

And then the Governor, Major Millman, entered the room and smiled nervously. The Chaplain included him in the conversation by a jovial nod. “Well, here we are, Millman—discussing the War and what not—I’d just been struck with an idea—”

Millman sat on the edge of the table and fidgeted. He was always apt to be upset by this last interview with a condemned prisoner, for he knew from experience how unpleasantly it could sometimes turn out. He felt almost grateful to Newcome for not being the kind of person who would make a hysterical scene. “Don’t go,” he muttered to the Chaplain.

The latter turned to David. “Well, don’t you think it’s what we ought to tell the youngster?”

David made a mild gesture of protest with his hands. “Oh no—don’t tell him that—never tell him anything like that—please don’t—”

“But why not? Isn’t it something that might have happened but for—”

“Oh no, no—”

“But why not, man?”

David said quietly: “You see, I don’t think I could ever kill anybody.”

“But I’m talking about the War.”

“I know. That’s what I mean. War is killing.” Suddenly the little doctor’s voice rose slightly. “How could I spend so many years fighting for life and then fight against it? Why do you expect me to undo everything I have ever done? How can you live and sleep while this is all happening? How can you? Governor—preacher—we’ve put such a lot of trust in you two—why have you let things come to this? Why can’t you save us from these crazy miseries? Why should we put up with you if you can’t? What use are you? People only ask to live in peace and do their work—you can have all the noise and nonsense to yourselves! We don’t ask miracles. But in God’s name, haven’t you learned anything in two thousand years ? We’re not afraid of death, but we’ll need to be afraid of life itself unless you fix things better in the future!”

David sank down in the chair with his head in his hands. He was exhausted. He so rarely talked to people like that—it was an effort that left him entirely spent. When he looked up he saw that both the Governor and the Chaplain had gone, and that a familiar face was across the table top. “Hello, George,” he said, smiling.

“Good afternoon, sir. Duty again.”

“You sound hoarse—or is it my ears?”

“Not your ears, sir—my throat. I’ve a bit of a cold.”

“Well…it won’t matter much if I catch it from you, will it?”

“Ha, ha…that’s a good one…glad you’re feeling cheerful. When I first come in, sir, and saw you sittin’ with your head down, I thought you was takin’ on.”

“Taking on?”

“Worritin’, sir. They do, you know, most of ’em, when it gets as near as this. But as I’ve said to all my mates, sir, I do believe the little doctor won’t bat an eyelid.”

“Do they call me the little doctor?”

“Yes, sir—some of ’em bein’ Calderbury men for years, same as yourself. They like you, sir.”

“Do they? Well, I like them, too. I love them.”

“Well sir, no harm in that, I’m sure. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Thanks, George…Oh—and George—about to-morrow morning—it’s all over pretty quickly, I imagine?”

“Oh, bless you, yes, sir—nothing to worry about. Won’t take more than a minute from the time you step out of here. No waitin’.”

Crossing the graveled yard, the Governor and the Chaplain paced with many undertones and shoulder shruggings.

“Quite startled me, the way he suddenly launched out. What had he got against us, anyway?”

“Damned if I know, Millman. I suppose it’s as I’ve said all along—the fellow’s pretty well off his head.”

“Well, well, I’ll be glad when it’s over—I hate these affairs…”

In the morning a light drizzle was falling, and David, after a night no more troubled than many previous nights, rose before dawn and watched a simple greyness invade the sky. Through the barred window he could soon see the prison wall, a long horizon of granite, with but two interruptions, the towers of the Cathedral, ghostly through the rain. Over the roofs there came the steady chimes, by long association more a part than a breaking of the silence; the first real sound began at seven, when the early morning train arrived from Marsland with the newspapers. David heard it steaming and clanking into the station. Only a whisper from afar; but it was the voice of Calderbury each morning, and David heard it as a friend’s.

We live in a town for years and all its voices come to us so casually and with such small effort that we hardly know them till we are about to leave, and then, into our regret comes some little thing, the rattle of a cart over cobblestones, an old cracked bell in a church tower, the shout of a boy selling newspapers; and we can answer with nothing but our love. David was leaving Calderbury that morning. He knew it, and his heart was full of love for the little town and for its people. And he remembered, as often happens on the last, the first day he had seen it—Jessie pointing across the water meadows from the train window—“There you are, David—that’s Calderbury. See the Cathedral? No, no, not there, stupid—that’s the electricity works. There!” And he remembered, smiling to himself, that habit Jessie had always had—of seeing something herself and expecting other people to see it instantly, on a mere nod. That was one of the things he had had to put up with; but he had always respected her, and people didn’t realize how shocked, as well as puzzled, he had been when…But it was all such a long time ago now, nearly three months. Questions—answers—“Now, doctor, would you mind telling us…I put it to you, Dr. Newcome…But surely, doctor…Come now, doctor, you really must explain…Don’t lie to us, Newcome…”

“I don’t lie, my friends, I can’t help it if the truth doesn’t sound true. Perhaps the truth is always strange. They say my boy Gerald never tells the truth—but he does, sometimes, often, only people don’t believe him. Truth is what is believed—a lie is what is disbelieved—how’s that for a pair of definitions? I don’t much care for them, but the world does. Let me tell the truth just once before I die. I call it love…”

The two warders got up (they had not undressed) when they saw him standing by the window, and George bade him good-morning.

“Good morning, George. Don’t bother. It’s still very early. I’m all right.”

“What would you like, sir? Coffee? Tea?”

“It matters so much, doesn’t it? Let’s say tea.”

So the tea was made, and David drank two cups. He did not eat anything, but he smoked his pipe for a while. He felt—well, not exactly nervous, but a little excited, as when, during student days, he had made his first knife cut into living flesh.

Presently a stranger entered the room and pinioned his arms with a leather strap; he submitted to this without word or murmur. Then he saw the Governor and the Chaplain standing by. “Good morning,” he said, and smiled at them.

Across the graveled yard there was a small building whose use he had not realized before, but it was not far to walk to it, through the rain and in the chilly morning air. Then, obeying the gestures of the stranger, he stood on a little platform with his head under a wooden beam. A white hood was put over his head. Just at that moment he heard George cough, and then (they were his last words) he said, in a voice that came muffled through the hood: “That cold of yours isn’t any better, George.” The noose slipped over his head and he suddenly remembered Leni, and her little crushed smile, and that she too, at the same moment in Midchester…Come with me, go with me, I don’t know where, but there are a few of us, we make a good company already, we carry love in our hearts, we are not alone…

The lever moved, and the little doctor’s body fell into the pit, from which, later in the day, it was retrieved for burial inside the prison precincts.

EPILOGUE

I WAS IN CALDERBURY a few weeks ago and as I passed the corner of Shawgate I noticed that workmen were pulling down the old house. One of the inside walls was exposed to view, and on it hung what seemed, at a distance, to be a picture that no one had bothered about. Even while I watched, it was taken down by a workman, and later I saw it handed over to someone in the little crowd which, in days of unemployment, and especially in a place like Calderbury, always collects round any scene of activity.

He was a young man of perhaps thirty, slim and hot at all robust-looking, attractive in an eager, ascetic way, and rather shy in manner as he took the picture, wrapped it in a newspaper he carried, and tried to slip away unobserved. But the crowd turned their slow curious eyes on him and someone called out: “Let’s have a look, mister.” At that he almost bolted, crossing the road at a tangent, and colliding with me on the opposite curb. The picture fell with a tinkle, and I made some apologetic remark, though it was really his own fault. He answered: “Oh, it doesn’t matter—the glass was smashed already.”

With a tidy gesture which I liked in him he began to kick the glass fragments into the gutter, away from danger to passing traffic. I joined him in this usefulness, and while we were both busy I said: “I don’t know what sort of treasure you’ve got, but I suppose you know who used to live in that house they’re pulling down.”

“Oh, yes,” he answered. “The little doctor. Did you know him?”

“Fairly well. I liked him. He cured me of asthma.”

He laughed. “Well, that’s certainly a good reason for liking him. I wonder if mine is as good. He brought me into the world.”

We walked along some way in silence, wondering perhaps whether each was inclined for the other’s company. Presently he said: “I suppose you remember the case?”

“You mean the—the Calderbury case?”

“Is that what you call it? I didn’t realize it was quite so famous. I’ve been abroad a long time.”

“But you’re a native of Calderbury?”

“I left when I was nine. America—journalism—various things. I write poems—occasionally.”

He said that in a nervous and rather truculent way.

“It’s a pleasant diversion,” I replied, “apart from any value in the poems.”

He laughed enough for me to realize that I had said the right thing. “Come into my hotel and have a drink,” he invited.

We went in and stood by the counter in the cool bar of the “Greyhound.” There was no one about except Brierley, the landlord. He served our drinks and disappeared behind the glass screen. “Now that’s the fellow,” I said, “who really could tell you something about the Calderbury case. He was foreman of the jury.”

“Don’t ask him, please. I’ve read all the newspaper reports—I’m not specially interested in the police-court angle. I suppose it was a fair trial as trials go.”

“Maybe,” I answered. “There was a lot of circumstantial evidence, and I daresay many men have been hanged on less. And then, of course, there was a certain amount of political feeling about the girl,—German, you remember,—and it was the first autumn of the War. We all believed she was a spy. That didn’t come up at the trial,—naturally,—but people like Brierley couldn’t help but be affected by it. The judge, I thought, was a shade too severe in his summing up—maybe he was affected too. War fever is an insidious disease.”

“You take an interest in the case?”

“I suppose I do—though only in a non-technical way. I gather that you’re interested too?”

He smiled. “Didn’t I tell you he brought me into the world?”

“He did that to a good many young people you can see around the streets of Calderbury.”

“Yes, of course. But I didn’t mean it in quite that sense. You see…I’m his son.”

I looked at him then, incredulous for the moment, then in sudden silence as I remembered Gerald. The little boy who cried and screamed and told lies and had nervous fits and whom nobody could control. He seemed embarrassed at having had to explain his identity and went on:—

“I suppose you feel now you can’t discuss the case any more with me?”

“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s more a question of whether you’ll want to discuss it with me when you know who I am.” I told him then my name, adding: “I think we met—years ago. At children’s parties.”

He nodded with a heightening of what seemed a purely abstract interest. “Yes, I remember. And after that you were the star witness for the prosecution.”

“Don’t hold that against me. I was too young to know what it was all about.”

“Do you mean you no longer believe he was guilty?”

He shot the question at me so abruptly that its awkwardness came as a challenge.

“Will you take my word if I answer that I really don’t know?”

He smiled. “Why, surely…What about another drink?”

“I think it’s my turn,” I said, calling for Brierley.

When we were left alone again I went on: “The evidence I gave was true enough, as far as it went.”

“Yes, of course. I never doubted it. You saw my mother going into the house at a certain time, and you saw the other two leaving the house at a certain time. Ample opportunity. And a surgery full of poison. Logic. What more could you ask? Especially after the letter he’d written to the girl.”

“Yes, it all pointed one way.”

“And it all pointed wrong.”

“Really?” (What else could one say? Well, there was one thing I could repeat.) “I must admit that if I’d known what use was going to be made of my evidence I’d have kept it to myself.”

“But why?”

“Because I always liked the little doctor.”

“Yet you don’t feel certain that he wasn’t guilty?”

“I don’t feel certain of anything. How can I? Something mysterious and terrible happened over twenty years ago when I was a boy—why expect me to fix blame? Maybe the court was right, maybe not. The thing looked possible—more than that—even probable. After all, we do know that murder is something that men will commit for love.”

“So you think he was infatuated?”

“Call it that if you like the word.”

“I don’t, particularly. ‘Love’ is better.”

“That’s the word I used.”

“Maybe they mean the same.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you think you understood my father?”

“Well, hardly—how could I? I was only a boy.”

“There was something boyish in him. Childlike, almost. I once wrote a poem about him—perhaps I can remember it.” He paused a moment and then recited, rather well:

“Both youth and age were his

With no more change of scene

Than from the blue of mountains

Down to the level green.

“And in that blue-green land

Where English sons were bred,

He knew the dead were living

And saw the living dead!”

I said: “I rather like that. And I think I understand what you’re driving at.”

“The thing I’m driving at is that he wasn’t guilty.”

“Maybe not.”

“She wasn’t, either.”

“You think not?”

“My God, I’m not telling you what I think—I’m giving you facts.”

It seemed to me that I couldn’t go on arguing with him. I said nothing, leaving him, if he chose, to continue. After an interval he said: “You see…I was in the house myself that night.”

“Really?”(Again, what else could one say?) “How was that?”

“Simple enough. I’d been quartered with an aunt and uncle who lived at the other end of the town. I was lonely and miserable with them—or rather, I should say, I was lonely and miserable without my father. Just a prisoner in an enormous shabby vicarage. That evening—you remember it was the evening war was declared—everyone was so excited by the news that I had my first chance to escape. I took it. I ran across the town, aiming for home. I climbed over the garden wall from the side footpath. Nobody saw me or would have cared much if they had. I thought the house was empty. I went to the surgery. It was always fun there, but that afternoon more than usual, because—well, because a cupboard usually kept locked was half open.”

“Ah yes, I remember the evidence about that.”

“So I had a nice game with some bottles, taking the corks out and sniffing. Damn lucky I didn’t poison myself—or perhaps damned unlucky, when you come to think about it. Suddenly I heard footsteps in the hall. I was scared. I shut the cupboard as quick as I could and pushed away the bottles on a shelf where there were other bottles. I didn’t want her to know I’d been touching anything.”

“You knew who it was?”

“Oh yes, her walk was quite unmistakable…Presently she came in and found me. She was very hot—it was a very hot day and she’d been out in the sun. ‘You here?’ she began, but she didn’t grumble as much as I’d expected. I think she was tired. ‘Where’s your father?’ she asked. I said I didn’t know. ‘He’s never here when he’s wanted,’ she said. Then she went to the shelf and took some pills out of a bottle. ‘I’ve got a bad head,’ she said, ‘and I want to lie down. Fetch a glass of water to my bedroom.’ So I did, and that was how it happened…All quite by accident, you see.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“May I say again—I don’t really know…At any rate, why didn’t you tell all this to the court?”

“I never had a chance. I was only too glad to get away…I’d always been blamed for everything and I thought I should be again…So I ran back to my uncle’s house. They thought I was ill—one of my ‘attacks’ they called them—I used to have bad nerves when I was a child.”

“And you didn’t tell anybody what had happened?”

“Well, they didn’t tell me anything, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“They never told me anything was wrong. It was weeks afterwards they said my parents had both gone away and I couldn’t see them. Years later I found out what had really happened. It came—” he hesitated for the understatement—“as a considerable shock to me.”

There was another long pause, during which I recollected as much as I could of Gerald’s reputation as a child. In the little town there had gathered quite a sizable legend of his precocious unreliability. He “romanced,” or, if you cared to use the less flattering word, he told the most astounding lies. He would (in the days when I had met him once or twice at children’s parties) assure people that he had seen an elephant in Shawgate, or a collision between two steam rollers going at full speed, or a man with three noses. And once, I remember, he told a few of us very solemnly that his father had bought a deathbed. How he had picked up the word we could only guess, but it was clear that in his mind a deathbed was a particular kind of bed that one went to a furniture shop to buy; so that was what he told us, as calmly as you please. We thought it amusing that his own childish ignorance should so completely prove him a liar.

Thinking of all this, I said: “Well, it’s a pity you didn’t tell the story when it might have done some good.”

“Yes, but I shouldn’t have been believed. At least, I very much doubt it. Nobody ever believed me. Why, you don’t even believe me now. Do you? Honestly?”

“May I say—for the third time—I simply don’t know what to believe.”

“I don’t blame you. We none of us know much about what really happens. Or has happened. The real truth is often hidden—perhaps because it’s a dark truth…It seems to me that we’re all children of the dead—the dead who shouldn’t have died—the dead who were put to death. …And they wait with us all the time, hoping we’ll understand and learn something, but we don’t, and we can’t do anything about it…Is all that too mystical for you?”

“I don’t quite know what you mean.”

He laughed as he answered: “Why should you? To hell with you, anyway. That’s how you make me feel.”

I smiled, liking him a little. After a short silence I said: “I’m interested in the girl—the German girl.”

“Why?”

“I liked the look of her, I think I saw her once—before I saw her in the court. There used to be a motor bus that made journeys between the foot of Shawgate and Lissington Hill—the seats faced each other and one day I sat opposite someone I couldn’t help staring at. Afterwards, when I described her to others, they said she must have been ‘the foreign girl who works at the little doctor’s.’ So maybe she was. She wore a brown coat and a black fur hat like a fez…But you knew her well, of course. Tell me. what she was like.”

His face lit with the beginnings of excitement. “She was…oh, I can’t tell you. It’s the nearest thing to heaven in my mind,—the only meaning heaven has,—that memory I have of her and of him. The little doctor—my little father. I used to watch them smile at each other. I used to go to sleep after they had touched me. They were real—and that’s what’s so hard to believe—that they were ever real…Do you mind if we take a walk?”

“Good idea.”

We went out into the streets of Galderbury, where it was growing dusk and lights were blinking from shops and houses; and far ahead, at the top of Shawgate, the towers of the Cathedral lifted insubstantially into the darkening east. Calderbury had survived, though how narrowly none could say. We passed the house where the little doctor had lived, and then, along Briargate, we passed the jail where the little doctor had died. That was being pulled down also—it was far too big and the site had grown valuable. I was still a little bothered by not knowing how much to believe of all that Gerald had told me, but I felt there must be a sort of truth in it, somewhere. “Well,” I said, “you’re probably right and there isn’t a lot any of us can do.”

“But there ought to be,” he answered, so desperately that I was startled. “And, oh God, if only there were…”

THE END

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

So Well Remembered copyright © 1945 by James Hilton

Random Harvest copyright © 1941 by James Hilton

We Are Not Alone copyright © 1938 by James Hilton

Cover design by Morgan Alan

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