But Macmaster had early made up his mind that life for him would be

safest if he could go about, not very much observed but still an

authority, in the midst of a body of men all labelled. He wanted to walk

down Pall Mall on the arm, precisely, of a largely-lettered Senior

Wrangler; to return eastward on the arm of the youngest Lord Chancellor

England had ever seen; to stroll down Whitehall in familiar converse

with a world-famous novelist, saluting on the way a majority of My Lords

Commissioners of the Treasury. And, after tea, for an hour at the club

all these, in a little group, should treat him with the courtesy of men

who respected him for his soundness. Then he would be safe.

And he had no doubt that Tietjens was the most brilliant man in England

of that day, so that nothing caused him more anguish than the thought

that Tietjens might not make a brilliant and rapid career towards some

illustrious position in the public services. He would very willingly--he

desired, indeed, nothing better!--have seen Tietjens pass over his own

head! It did not seem to him a condemnation of the public services that

this appeared to be unlikely.

Yet Macmaster was still not without hope. He was quite aware that there

are other techniques of careers than that which he had prescribed for

himself. He could not imagine himself, even in the most deferential way,

correcting a superior; yet he could see that, though Tietjens treated

almost every hierarch as if he were a born fool, no one very much

resented it. Of course Tietjens was a Tietjens of Groby; but was that

going to be enough to live on for ever? Times were changing, and

Macmaster imagined this to be a democratic age.

But Tietjens went on, with both hands as it were, throwing away

opportunity and committing outrage. . . .

That day Macmaster could only consider to be one of disaster. He got up

from his chair and filled himself another drink; he felt himself to be

distressed and to need it. Slouching amongst his cretonnes, Tietjens was

gazing in front of him. He said:

"Here!" without looking at Macmaster, and held out his long glass. Into

it Macmaster poured whisky with a hesitating hand. Tietjens said: "Go

on!"

Macmaster said:

"It's late; we're breakfasting at the Duchemin's at ten."

Tietjens answered:

"Don't worry, sonny. We'll be there for your pretty lady." He added:

"Wait another quarter of an hour. I want to talk to you."

Macmaster sat down again and deliberately began to review the day. It

had begun with disaster, and in disaster it had continued.

And, with something like a bitter irony, Macmaster remembered and

brought up now for digestion the parting words of General Campion to

himself. The General had limped with him to the hall door up at Mountby

and, standing patting him on the shoulder, tall, slightly bent and very

friendly, had said:

"Look here. Christopher Tietjens is a splendid fellow. But he needs a

good woman to look after him. Get him back to Sylvia as quick as you

can. Had a little tiff, haven't they? Nothing serious? Chrissie hasn't

been running after the skirts? No? I daresay a little. No? Well

then . . ."

Macmaster had stood like a gate-post, so appalled. He had stuttered:

"No! No!"

"We've known them both so long," the General went on. "Lady Claudine in

particular. And, believe me, Sylvia is a splendid girl. Straight as a

die; the soul of loyalty to her friends. And fearless.--She'd face the

devil in his rage. You should have seen her out with the Belvoir! Of

course you know her. . . . Well then!"

Macmaster had just managed to say that he knew Sylvia, of course.

"Well then . . ." the General had continued . . . "you'll agree with me

that if there _is_ anything wrong between them he's to blame. And it

will be resented. Very bitterly. He wouldn't set foot in this house

again. But he says he's going out to her and Mrs. Satterthwaite. . . ."

"I believe . . ." Macmaster had begun . . . "I believe he is . . ."

"Well then!" the General had said: "It's all right. . . . But

Christopher Tietjens needs a good woman's backing. . . . He's a splendid

fellow. There are few young fellows for whom I have more . . . I could

almost say respect. . . . But he needs that. To ballast him."

In the car, running down the hill from Mountby, Macmaster had exhausted

himself in the effort to restrain his execrations of the General. He

wanted to shout that he was a pig-headed old fool: a meddlesome ass. But

he was in the car with the two secretaries of the Cabinet Minister: the

Rt. Hon. Edward Fenwick Waterhouse, who, being himself an advanced

Liberal down for a week-end of golf, preferred not to dine at the house

of the Conservative member. At that date there was, in politics, a phase

of bitter social feud between the parties: a condition that had not till

lately been characteristic of English political life. The prohibition

had not extended itself to the two younger men.

Macmaster was not unpleasurably aware that these two fellows treated him

with a certain deference. They had seen Macmaster being talked to

familiarly by General Lord Edward Campion. Indeed, they and the car had

been kept waiting whilst the General patted their fellow guest on the

shoulder; held his upper arm and spoke in a low voice into his

ear. . . .

But that was the only pleasure that Macmaster got out of it.

Yes, the day had begun disastrously with Sylvia's letter; it ended--if

it was ended!--almost more disastrously with the General's eulogy of

that woman. During the day he had nerved himself to having an immensely

disagreeable scene with Tietjens. Tietjens _must_ divorce the woman; it

was necessary for the peace of mind of himself, of his friends, of his

family; for the sake of his career; in the very name of decency!

In the meantime Tietjens had rather forced his hand. It had been a most

disagreeable affair. They had arrived at Rye in time for lunch--at which

Tietjens had consumed the best part of a bottle of Burgundy. During

lunch Tietjens had given Macmaster Sylvia's letter to read, saying that,

as he should later consult his friend, his friend had better be made

acquainted with the document.

The letter had appeared extraordinary in its effrontery, for it said

nothing. Beyond the bare statement, "I am now ready to return to you,"

it occupied itself simply with the fact that Mrs. Tietjens wanted--could

no longer get on without--the services of her maid, whom she called

Hullo Central. If Tietjens wanted her, Mrs. Tietjens, to return to him

he was to see that Hullo Central was waiting on the doorstep for her,

and so on. She added the detail that there was _no one_ else,

underlined, she could bear round her while she was retiring for the

night. On reflection Macmaster could see that this was the best letter

the woman could have written if she wanted to be taken back; for, had

she extended herself into either excuses or explanations, it was ten

chances to one Tietjens would have taken the line that he couldn't go on

living with a woman capable of such a lapse in taste. But Macmaster had

never thought of Sylvia as wanting in _savoir faire_.

It had none the less hardened him in his determination to urge his

friend to divorce. He had intended to begin this campaign in the fly,

driving to pay his call on the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, who, in early life,

had been a personal disciple of Mr. Ruskin and a patron and acquaintance

of the poet-painter, the subject of Macmaster's monograph. On this drive

Tietjens preferred not to come. He said that he would loaf about the

town and meet Macmaster at the golf club towards four-thirty. He was not

in the mood for making new acquaintances. Macmaster, who knew the

pressure under which his friend must be suffering, thought this

reasonable enough, and drove off up Iden Hill by himself.

Few women had ever made so much impression on Macmaster as Mrs.

Duchemin. He knew himself to be in a mood to be impressed by almost any

woman, but he considered that that was not enough to account for the

very strong influence she at once exercised over him. There had been two

young girls in the drawing-room when he had been ushered in, but they

had disappeared almost simultaneously, and although he had noticed them

immediately afterwards riding past the window on bicycles, he was aware

that he would not have recognised them again. From her first words on

rising to greet him: "Not _the_ Mr. Macmaster!" he had had eyes for no

one else.

It was obvious that the Rev. Mr. Duchemin must be one of those clergymen

of considerable wealth and cultured taste who not infrequently adorn the

Church of England. The rectory itself, a great, warm-looking manor house

of very old red brick, was abutted on to by one of the largest tithe

barns that Macmaster had ever seen; the church itself, with a primitive

roof of oak shingles, nestled in the corner formed by the ends of

rectory and tithe barn, and was by so much the smallest of the three and

so undecorated that but for its little belfry it might have been a good

cow-byre. All three buildings stood on the very edge of the little row

of hills that looks down on the Romney Marsh; they were sheltered from

the north wind by a great symmetrical fan of elms and from the

south-west by a very tall hedge and shrubbery, all of remarkable yews.

It was, in short, an ideal cure of souls for a wealthy clergyman of

cultured tastes, for there was not so much as a peasant's cottage within

a mile of it.

To Macmaster, in short, this was the ideal English home. Of Mrs.

Duchemin's drawing-room itself, contrary to his habit, for he was

sensitive and observant in such things, he could afterwards remember

little except that it was perfectly sympathetic. Three long windows gave

on to a perfect lawn, on which, isolated and grouped, stood standard

rose trees, symmetrical half globes of green foliage picked out with

flowers like bits of carved pink marble. Beyond the lawn was a low stone

wall; beyond that the quiet expanse of the marsh shimmered in the

sunlight.

The furniture of the room was, as to its woodwork, brown, old, with the

rich softnesses of much polishing with beeswax. What pictures there were

Macmaster recognised at once as being by Simeon Solomon, one of the

weaker and more frail æsthetes--aureoled, palish heads of ladies

carrying lilies that were not very like lilies. They were in the

tradition--but not the best of the tradition. Macmaster understood--and

later Mrs. Duchemin confirmed him in the idea--that Mr. Duchemin kept

his more precious specimens of work in a sanctum, leaving to the

relatively public room, good-humouredly and with slight contempt, these

weaker specimens. That seemed to stamp Mr. Duchemin at once as being of

the elect.

Mr. Duchemin in person was, however, not present; and there seemed to be

a good deal of difficulty in arranging a meeting between the two men.

Mr. Duchemin, his wife said, was much occupied at the week-ends. She

added, with a faint and rather absent smile, the word, "Naturally."

Macmaster at once saw that it was natural for a clergyman to be much

occupied during the week-ends. With a little hesitation Mrs. Duchemin

suggested that Mr. Macmaster and his friend might come to lunch on the

next day--Saturday. But Macmaster had made an engagement to play the

foursome with General Campion--half the round from twelve till

one-thirty: half the round from three to half-past four. And, as their

then present arrangements stood, Macmaster and Tietjens were to take the

6.30 train to Hythe; that ruled out either tea or dinner next day.

With sufficient, but not too extravagant regret, Mrs. Duchemin raised

her voice to say:

"Oh dear! Oh dear! But you must see my husband and the pictures after

you have come so far."

A rather considerable volume of harsh sound was coming through the end

wall of the room--the barking of dogs, apparently the hurried removal of

pieces of furniture or perhaps of packing cases, guttural ejaculations.

Mrs. Duchemin said, with her far away air and deep voice:

"They are making a good deal of noise. Let us go into the garden and

look at my husband's roses, if you've a moment more to give us."

Macmaster quoted to himself:

"'I looked and saw your eyes in the shadow of your hair. . . .'"

There was no doubt that Mrs. Duchemin's eyes, which were of a dark,

pebble blue, were actually in the shadow of her blue-black, very

regularly waved hair. The hair came down on the square, low forehead. It

was a phenomenon that Macmaster had never before really seen, and, he

congratulated himself, this was one more confirmation--if confirmation

were needed!--of the powers of observation of the subject of his

monograph!

Mrs. Duchemin bore the sunlight! Her dark complexion was clear; there

was, over the cheekbones, a delicate suffusion of light carmine. Her

jawbone was singularly clear-cut, to the pointed chin--like an

alabaster, mediæval saint's.

She said:

"Of course you're Scotch. I'm from Auld Reekie myself."

Macmaster would have known it. He said he was from the Port of Leith. He

could not imagine hiding anything from Mrs. Duchemin. Mrs. Duchemin said

with renewed insistence:

"Oh, but of _course_ you must see my husband and the pictures. Let me

see. . . . We must think. . . . Would breakfast now? . . ."

Macmaster said that he and his friend were Government servants and up to

rising early. He had a great desire to breakfast in that house. She

said:

"At a quarter to ten, then, our car will be at the bottom of your

street. It's a matter of ten minutes only, so you won't go hungry long!"

She said, gradually gaining animation, that of course Macmaster would

bring his friend. He could tell Tietjens that he should meet a very

charming girl. She stopped and added suddenly: "Probably, at any rate."

She said the name which Macmaster caught as "Wanstead." And possibly

another girl. And Mr. Horsted, or something like it, her husband's

junior curate. She said reflectively:

"Yes, we might try quite a party . . ." and added, "quite noisy and gay.

I hope your friend's talkative!"

Macmaster said something about trouble.

"Oh, it can't be too much trouble," she said. "Besides, it might do my

husband good." She went on: "Mr. Duchemin is apt to brood. It's perhaps

too lonely here." And added the rather astonishing words: "After all."

And, driving back in the fly, Macmaster said to himself that you

couldn't call Mrs. Duchemin ordinary, at least. Yet meeting her was like

going into a room that you had long left and never ceased to love. It

felt good. It was perhaps partly her Edinburgh-ness. Macmaster allowed

himself to coin that word. There was in Edinburgh a society--he himself

had never been privileged to move in it, but its annals are part of the

literature of Scotland!--where the ladies are all great ladies in tall

drawing-rooms; circumspect yet shrewd: still yet with a sense of the

comic: frugal yet warmly hospitable. It was perhaps just Edinburgh-ness

that was wanting in the drawing-rooms of his friends in London. Mrs.

Cressy, the Hon. Mrs. Limoux and Mrs. Delawnay were all almost

perfection in manner, in speech, in composure. But, then, they were not

young, they weren't Edinburgh--and they weren't strikingly elegant!

Mrs. Duchemin was all three! Her assured, tranquil manner she would

retain to any age: it betokened the enigmatic soul of her sex, but,

physically, she couldn't be more than thirty. That was unimportant, for

she would never want to do anything in which physical youth counted. She

would never, for instance, have occasion to run: she would always just

"move"--floatingly! He tried to remember the details of her dress.

It had certainly been dark blue--and certainly of silk: that rather

coarsely-woven, exquisite material that has on its folds as of a silvery

shimmer with minute knots. But very dark blue. And it contrived to be at

once artistic--absolutely in the tradition! And yet well cut! Very large

sleeves, of course, but still with a certain fit. She had worn an

immense necklace of yellow polished amber: on the dark blue! And Mrs.

Duchemin had said, over her husband's roses, that the blossoms always

reminded her of little mouldings of pink cloud come down for the cooling

of the earth. . . . A charming thought!

Suddenly he said to himself:

"What a mate for Tietjens!" And his mind added: "Why should she not

become an Influence!"

A vista opened before him, in time! He imagined Tietjens, in some way

proprietarily responsible for Mrs. Duchemin: quite _pour le bon_,

tranquilly passionate and accepted, _motif_; and "immensely improved" by

the association. And himself, in a year or two, bringing the at last

found Lady of his Delight to sit at the feet of Mrs. Duchemin--the Lady

of his Delight whilst circumspect would be also young and

impressionable!--to learn the mysterious assuredness of manner, the gift

of dressing, the knack of wearing amber and bending over standard

roses--and the Edinburgh-ness!

Macmaster was thus not a little excited, and finding Tietjens at tea

amid the green-stained furnishings and illustrated papers of the large,

corrugated iron golf-house, he could not help exclaiming:

"I've accepted the invitation to breakfast with the Duchemins to-morrow

for us both. I hope you won't mind," although Tietjens was sitting at a

little table with General Campion and his brother-in-law, the Hon. Paul

Sandbach, Conservative member for the division and husband of Lady

Claudine. The General said pleasantly to Tietjens:

"Breakfast! With Duchemin! You go, my boy! You'll get the best breakfast

you ever had in your life."

He added to his brother-in-law: "Not the eternal mock kedgeree Claudine

gives us every morning."

Sandbach grunted:

"It's not for want of trying to steal their cook. Claudine has a shy at

it every time we come down here."

The General said pleasantly to Macmaster--he spoke always pleasantly,

with a half smile and a slight sibilance:

"My brother-in-law isn't serious, you understand. My sister wouldn't

think of stealing a cook. Let alone from Duchemin. She'd be frightened

to."

Sandbach grunted:

"Who wouldn't?"

Both these gentlemen were very lame: Mr. Sandbach from birth and the

General as the result of a slight but neglected motor accident. He had

practically only one vanity, the belief that he was qualified to act as

his own chauffeur, and since he was both inexpert and very careless, he

met with frequent accidents. Mr. Sandbach had a dark, round, bull-dog

face and a violent manner. He had twice been suspended from his

Parliamentary duties for applying to the then Chancellor of the

Exchequer the epithet "lying attorney," and he was at that moment still

suspended.

Macmaster then became unpleasantly perturbed. With his sensitiveness he

was perfectly aware of an unpleasant chill in the air. There was also a

stiffness about Tietjens' eyes. He was looking straight before him;

there was a silence too. Behind Tietjens' back were two men with bright

green coats, red knitted waistcoats and florid faces. One was bald and

blonde, the other had black hair, remarkably oiled and shiny; both were

forty-fivish. They were regarding the occupants of the Tietjens' table

with both their mouths slightly open. They were undisguisedly listening.

In front of each were three empty sloe-gin glasses and one half-filled

tumbler of brandy and soda. Macmaster understood why the General had

explained that his sister had not tried to steal Mrs. Duchemin's cook.

Tietjens said:

"Drink up your tea quickly and let's get started." He was drawing from

his pocket a number of telegraph forms which he began arranging. The

General said:

"Don't burn your mouth. We can't start off before all . . . all these

other gentlemen. We're too slow."

"No; we're beastly well stuck," Sandbach said.

Tietjens handed the telegraph forms over to Macmaster.

"You'd better take a look at these," he said. "I mayn't see you again

to-day after the match. You're dining up at Mountby. The General will

run you up. Lady Claude will excuse me. I've got work to do."

This was already matter for dismay for Macmaster. He was aware that

Tietjens would have disliked dining up at Mountby with the Sandbachs,

who would have a crowd, extremely smart but more than usually

unintelligent. Tietjens called this crowd, indeed, the plague-spot of

the party--meaning of Toryism. But Macmaster couldn't help thinking that

a disagreeable dinner would be better for his friend than brooding in

solitude in the black shadows of the huddled town. Then Tietjens said:

"I'm going to have a word with that swine!" He pointed his square chin

rather rigidly before him, and looking past the two brandy drinkers,

Macmaster saw one of those faces that frequent caricature made familiar

and yet strange. Macmaster couldn't, at the moment, put a name to it. It

must be a politician, probably a Minister. But which? His mind was

already in a dreadful state. In the glimpse he had caught of the

telegraph form now in his hand he had perceived that it was addressed to

Sylvia Tietjens and began with the word "agreed." He said swiftly:

"Has that been sent or is it only a draft?"

Tietjens said:

"That fellow is the Rt. Hon. Stephen Fenwick Waterhouse. He's chairman

of the Funded Debt Commission. He's the swine who made us fake that

return in the office."

That moment was the worst Macmaster had ever known. A worse came.

Tietjens said:

"I'm going to have a word with him. That's why I'm not dining at

Mountby. It's a duty to the country."

Macmaster's mind simply stopped. He was in a space, all windows. There

was sunlight outside. And clouds. Pink and white. Woolly! Some ships.

And two men: one dark and oily, the other rather blotchy on a blonde

baldness. They were talking, but their words made no impression on

Macmaster. The dark, oily man said that he was not going to take Gertie

to Budapest. Not half! He winked like a nightmare. Beyond were two young

men and a preposterous face. . . . It was all so like a nightmare that

the Cabinet Minister's features were distorted for Macmaster. Like an

enormous mask of pantomime: shiny, with an immense nose and elongated,

Chinese eyes.

Yet not unpleasant! Macmaster was a Whig by conviction, by nation, by

temperament. He thought that public servants should abstain from

political activity. Nevertheless, he couldn't be expected to think a

Liberal Cabinet Minister ugly. On the contrary, Mr. Waterhouse appeared

to have a frank, humorous, kindly expression. He listened deferentially

to one of his secretaries, resting his hand on the young man's shoulder,

smiling a little, rather sleepily. No doubt he was overworked. And then,

letting himself go in a side-shaking laugh. Putting on flesh!

What a pity! What a _pity_! Macmaster was reading a string of

incomprehensible words in Tietjens' heavily scored writing. _Not

entertain_ . . . _flat not house_ . . . _child remain at sister._ . . .

His eyes went backwards and forwards over the phrases. He could not

connect the words without stops. The man with the oily hair said in a

sickly voice that Gertie was hot stuff, but not the one for Budapest

with all the Gitana girls you were telling me of! Why, he'd kept Gertie

for five years now. More like the real thing! His friend's voice was

like a result of indigestion. Tietjens, Sandbach and the General were

stiff, like pokers.

What a pity! Macmaster thought.

He ought to have been sitting . . . It would have been pleasant and

right to be sitting with the pleasant Minister. In the ordinary course

he, Macmaster, would have been. The best golfer in the place was usually

set to play with distinguished visitors, and there was next to no one in

the south of England who ordinarily could beat him. He had begun at

four, playing with a miniature cleek and a found shilling ball over the

municipal links. Going to the poor school every morning and back to

dinner; and back to school and back to bed! Over the cold, rushy, sandy

links, beside the grey sea. Both shoes full of sand. The found shilling

ball had lasted him three years. . . .

Macmaster exclaimed: "Good God!" He had just gathered from the telegram

that Tietjens meant to go to Germany on Tuesday. As if at Macmaster's

ejaculation Tietjens said:

"Yes. It _is_ unbearable. If you don't stop those swine, General, I

shall."

The General sibilated low, between his teeth:

"Wait a minute. . . . Wait a minute. . . . Perhaps that other fellow

will."

The man with the black oily hair said:

"If Budapest's the place for the girls you say it is, old pal, with the

Turkish baths and all, we'll paint the old town red all right, next

month," and he winked at Tietjens. His friend, with his head down,

seemed to make internal rumblings, looking apprehensively beneath his

blotched forehead at the General.

"Not," the other continued argumentatively, "that I don't love my old

woman. She's all right. And then there's Gertie. 'Ot stuff, but the real

thing. But I say a man wants . . ." He ejaculated, "Oh!"

The General, his hands in his pockets, very tall, thin, red-cheeked, his

white hair combed forward in a fringe, sauntered towards the other

table. It was not two yards, but it seemed a long saunter. He stood

right over them, they looking up, open-eyed, like schoolboys at a

balloon. He said:

"I'm glad you're enjoying our links, gentlemen."

The bald man said: "We are! We are! First-class. A treat!"

"But," the General said, "it isn't wise to discuss one's . . . eh . . .

domestic circumstances . . . at . . . at mess, you know, or in a golf

house. People might hear."

The gentleman with the oily hair half rose and exclaimed:

"Oo, the . . ." The other man mumbled: "Shut up, Briggs."

The General said:

"I'm the president of the club, you know. It's my duty to see that the

_majority_ of the club and its visitors are pleased. I hope you don't

mind."

The General came back to his seat. He was trembling with vexation.

"It makes one as beastly a bounder as themselves," he said. "But what

the devil else was one to do?" The two city men had ambled hastily into

the dressing-rooms; the dire silence fell. Macmaster realised that, for

these Tories at least, this was really the end of the world. The last of

England! He returned, with panic in his heart, to Tietjens'

telegram. . . . Tietjens was going to Germany on Tuesday. He offered to

throw over the department. . . . These were unthinkable things. You

couldn't imagine them!

He began to read the telegram all over again. A shadow fell upon the

flimsy sheets. The Rt. Hon. Mr. Waterhouse was between the head of the

table and the windows. He said:

"We're much obliged, General. It was impossible to hear ourselves speak

for those obscene fellows' smut. It's fellows like that that make our

friends the suffragettes! That warrants them. . . ." He added: "Hullo!

Sandbach! Enjoying your rest?"

The General said:

"I was hoping you'd take on the job of telling these fellows off."

Mr. Sandbach, his bull-dog jaw sticking out, the short black hair on his

scalp appearing to rise, barked:

"Hullo, Waterslop! Enjoying your plunder?"

Mr. Waterhouse, tall, slouching and untidy-haired, lifted the flaps of

his coat. It was so ragged that it appeared as if straws stuck out of

the elbows.

"All that the suffragettes have left of me," he said, laughingly. "Isn't

one of you fellows a genius called Tietjens?" He was looking at

Macmaster. The General said:

"Tietjens . . . Macmaster . . ." The Minister went on very friendly:

"Oh, it's you? . . . I just wanted to take the opportunity of thanking

you."

Tietjens said:

"Good God! What for?"

"_You_ know!" the Minister said, "we couldn't have got the Bill before

the House till next session without your figures. . . ." He said slily:

"Could we, Sandbach?" and added to Tietjens: "Ingleby told me. . . ."

Tietjens was chalk-white and stiffened. He stuttered:

"I can't take any credit. . . . I consider . . ."

Macmaster exclaimed:

"Tietjens . . . you . . ." he didn't know what he was going to say.

"Oh, you're too modest," Mr. Waterhouse overwhelmed Tietjens. "We know

whom we've to thank . . ." His eyes drifted to Sandbach a little

absently. Then his face lit up.

"Oh! Look here, Sandbach," he said. . . . "Come here, will you?" He

walked a pace or two away, calling to one of his young men: "Oh,

Sanderson, give the bobbie a drink. A good stiff one." Sandbach jerked

himself awkwardly out of his chair and limped to the Minister.

Tietjens burst out:

"Me too modest! _Me_! . . . The swine. . . . The unspeakable swine!"

The General said:

"What's it all about, Chrissie? You probably are too modest."

Tietjens said:

"Damn it. It's a serious matter. It's driving me out of the unspeakable

office I'm in."

Macmaster said:

"No! No! You're wrong. It's a wrong view you take." And with a good deal

of real passion he began to explain to the General. It was an affair

that had already given him a great deal of pain. The Government had

asked the statistical department for figures illuminating a number of

schedules that they desired to use in presenting their new Bill to the

Commons. Mr. Waterhouse was to present it.

Mr. Waterhouse at the moment was slapping Mr. Sandbach on the back,

tossing the hair out of his eyes and laughing like a hysterical

schoolgirl. He looked suddenly tired. A police constable, his buttons

shining, appeared, drinking from a pewter-pot outside the glazed door.

The two city men ran across the angle from the dressing-room to the same

door, buttoning their clothes. The Minister said loudly:

"Make it guineas!"

It seemed to Macmaster painfully wrong that Tietjens should call anyone

so genial and unaffected an unspeakable swine. It was unjust. He went on

with his explanation to the General.

The Government had wanted a set of figures based on a calculation called

B 7. Tietjens, who had been working on one called H 19--for his own

instruction--had persuaded himself that H 19 was the lowest figure that

was actuarially sound.

The General said pleasantly: "All this is Greek to me."

"Oh no, it needn't be," Macmaster heard himself say. "It amounts to

this. Chrissie was asked by the Government--by Sir Reginald Ingleby--to

work out what 3 x 3 comes to: it was that sort of thing in principle. He

said that the only figure that would not ruin the country was nine times

nine. . . ."

"The Government wanted to shovel money into the working man's pockets,

in fact," the General said. "Money for nothing. . . . or votes, I

suppose."

"But that isn't the point, sir," Macmaster ventured to say. "All that

Chrissie was asked to do was to say what 3 x 3 was."

"Well, he appears to have done it and earned no end of kudos," the

General said. "That's all right. We've all, always, believed in

Chrissie's ability. But he's a strong-tempered beggar."

"He was extraordinarily rude to Sir Reginald over it," Macmaster went

on.

The General said:

"Oh dear! Oh dear!" He shook his head at Tietjens and assumed with care

the blank, slightly disappointing air of the regular officer. "I don't

like to hear of rudeness to a superior. In _any_ service."

"I don't think," Tietjens said with extreme mildness, "that Macmaster is

quite fair to me. Of course he's a right to his opinion as to what the

discipline of a service demands. I certainly told Ingleby that I'd

rather resign than do that beastly job. . . ."

"You shouldn't have," the General said. "What would become of the

services if everyone did as you did?"

Sandbach came back laughing and dropped painfully into his low

arm-chair.

"That fellow . . ." he began.

The General slightly raised his hand.

"A minute!" he said. "I was about to tell Chrissie, here, that if I am

offered the job--of course it's an order really--of suppressing the

Ulster Volunteers . . . I'd rather cut my throat than do it. . . ."

Sandbach said:

"Of course you would, old chap. They're our brothers. You'd see the

beastly, lying Government damned first."

"I was going to say that I should accept," the General said, "I

shouldn't resign my commission."

Sandbach said:

"Good _God_!"

Tietjens said:

"Well, I didn't."

Sandbach exclaimed:

"General! You! After all Claudine and I have said. . . ."

Tietjens interrupted:

"Excuse me, Sandbach. I'm receiving this reprimand for the moment. I

wasn't, then, rude to Ingleby. If I'd expressed contempt for what he

said or for himself, that would have been rude. I didn't. He wasn't in

the least offended. He looked like a cockatoo, but he wasn't offended.

And I let him over-persuade me. He was right, really. He pointed out

that, if I didn't do the job, those swine would put on one of our little

competition wallah head clerks and get all the schedules faked, as well

as starting off with false premises!"

"That's the view I take," the General said, "if I don't take the Ulster

job the Government will put on a fellow who'll bum all the farm-houses

and rape all the women in the three counties. They've got him up their

sleeve. He only asks for the Connaught Rangers to go through the north

with. And you know what _that_ means. All the same . . ." He looked at

Tietjens: "One should not be rude to one's superiors."

"I tell you I wasn't rude," Tietjens exclaimed. "Damn your nice,

paternal old eyes. Get that into your mind!"

The General shook his head:

"You brilliant fellows!" he said. "The country, or the army, or

anything, could not be run by you. It takes stupid fools like me and

Sandbach, along with sound, moderate heads like our friend here." He

indicated Macmaster and, rising, went on: "Come along. You're playing

me, Macmaster. They say you're hot stuff. Chrissie's no good. He can

take Sandbach on."

He walked off with Macmaster towards the dressing-room.

Sandbach, wriggling awkwardly out of his chair, shouted:

"Save the country. . . . Damn it. . . ." He stood on his feet. "I and

Campion . . . Look at what the country's come to. . . . What with swine

like these two in our club houses! And policemen to go round the links

with Ministers to protect them from the wild women. . . . By God! I'd

like to have the flaying of the skin off some of their backs. I would.

By God I would."

He added:

"That fellow Waterslops is a bit of a sportsman. I haven't been able to

tell you about our bet, you've been making such a noise. . . . Is your

friend really plus one at North Berwick? What are you like?"

"Macmaster is a good plus two anywhere when he's in practice."

Sandbach said:

"Good Lord. . . . A stout fellow. . . ."

"As for me," Tietjens said, "I loathe the beastly game."

"So do I," Sandbach answered. "We'll just lollop along behind them."

IV

They came out into the bright open where all the distances under the

tall sky showed with distinct prismatic outlines. They made a little

group of seven--for Tietjens would not have a caddy--waiting on the

flat, first teeing ground. Macmaster walked up to Tietjens and said

under his voice:

"You've really _sent_ that wire? . . ."

Tietjens said:

"It'll be in Germany by now!"

Mr. Sandbach hobbled from one to the other explaining the terms of his

wager with Mr. Waterhouse. Mr. Waterhouse had backed one of the young

men playing with him to drive into and hit twice in the eighteen holes

the two city men who would be playing ahead of them. As the Minister had

taken rather short odds Mr. Sandbach considered him a good sport.

A long way down the first hole Mr. Waterhouse and his two companions

were approaching the first green. They had high sandhills to the right

and, to their left, a road that was fringed with rushes and a narrow

dyke. Ahead of the Cabinet Minister the two city men and their two

caddies stood on the edge of the dyke or poked downwards into the

rushes. Two girls appeared and disappeared on the tops of the sandhills.

The policeman was strolling along the road, level with Mr. Waterhouse.

The General said:

"I think we could go now."

Sandbach said:

"Waterslops will get a hit at them from the next tee. They're in the

dyke."

The General drove a straight, goodish ball. Just as Macmaster was in his

swing Sandbach shouted:

"By God! He nearly did it. See that fellow jump!"

Macmaster looked round over his shoulder and hissed with vexation

between his teeth:

"Don't you know that you don't shout while a man is driving? Or haven't

you played golf?" He hurried fussily after his ball.

Sandbach said to Tietjens:

"Golly! That chap's got a temper!"

Tietjens said:

"Only over this game. You deserved what you got."

Sandbach said:

"I did. . . . But I didn't spoil his shot. He's outdriven the General

twenty yards."

Tietjens said:

"It would have been sixty but for you."

They loitered about on the tee waiting for the others to get their

distance. Sandbach said:

"By Jove, your friend is on with his second . . . You wouldn't believe

it of such a _little_ beggar!" He added: "He's not much class, is he?"

Tietjens looked down his nose.

"Oh, about _our_ class!" he said. "He wouldn't take a bet about driving

into the couple ahead."

Sandbach hated Tietjens for being a Tietjens of Groby: Tietjens was

enraged by the existence of Sandbach, who was the son of an ennobled

mayor of Middlebrough, seven miles or so from Groby. The feuds between

the Cleveland landowners and the Cleveland plutocrats are very bitter.

Sandbach said:

"Ah, I suppose he gets you out of scrapes with girls and the Treasury,

and you take him about in return. It's a practical combination."

"Like Pottle Mills and Stanton," Tietjens said. The financial operations

connected with the amalgamating of these two steelworks had earned

Sandbach's father a good deal of odium in the Cleveland district. . . .

Sandbach said:

"Look here, Tietjens. . . ." But he changed his mind and said:

"We'd better go now." He drove off with an awkward action but not

without skill. He certainly outplayed Tietjens.

Playing very slowly, for both were desultory and Sandbach very lame,

they lost sight of the others behind some coastguard cottages and dunes

before they had left the third tee. Because of his game leg Sandbach

sliced a good deal. On this occasion he sliced right into the gardens of

the cottages and went with his boy to look for his ball among

potato-haulms, beyond a low wall. Tietjens patted his own ball lazily up

the fairway and, dragging his bag behind him by the strap, he sauntered

on.

Although Tietjens hated golf as he hated any occupation that was of a

competitive nature he could engross himself in the mathematics of

trajectories when he accompanied Macmaster in one of his expeditions for

practice. He accompanied Macmaster because he liked there to be one

pursuit at which his friend undisputably excelled himself, for it was a

bore always brow-beating the fellow. But he stipulated that they should

visit three different and, if possible, unknown courses every week-end

when they golfed. He interested himself then in the way the courses were

laid out, acquiring thus an extraordinary connoisseurship in golf

architecture, and he made abstruse calculations as to the flight of

balls off sloped club-faces, as to the foot-poundals of energy exercised

by one muscle or the other, and as to theories of spin. As often as not

he palmed Macmaster off as a fair, average player on some other

unfortunate fair, average stranger. Then he passed the afternoon in the

club-house studying the pedigrees and forms of racehorses, for every

club-house contained a copy of Ruff's guide. In the spring he would hunt

for and examine the nests of soft-billed birds, for he was interested in

the domestic affairs of the cuckoo, though he hated natural history and

field botany.

On this occasion he had just examined some notes of other mashie shots,

had put the notebook back in his pocket, and had addressed his ball with

a niblick that had an unusually roughened face and a head like a

hatchet. Meticulously, when he had taken his grip he removed his little

and third fingers from the leather of the shaft. He was thanking heaven

that Sandbach seemed to be accounted for for ten minutes at least, for

Sandbach was miserly over lost balls and, very slowly, he was raising

his mashie to half cock for a sighting shot.

He was aware that someone, breathing a little heavily from small lungs,

was standing close to him and watching him: he could indeed, beneath his

cap-rim, perceive the tips of a pair of boy's white sand-shoes. It in no

way perturbed him to be watched since he was avid of no personal glory

when making his shots. A voice said:

"I say . . ." He continued to look at his ball.

"Sorry to spoil your shot," the voice said. "But . . ."

Tietjens dropped his club altogether and straightened his back. A fair

young woman with a fixed scowl was looking at him intently. She had a

short skirt and was panting a little.

"I say," she said, "go and see they don't hurt Gertie. I've lost

her . . ." She pointed back to the sandhills. "There looked to be some

beasts among them."

She seemed a perfectly negligible girl except for the frown: her eyes

blue, her hair no doubt fair under a white canvas hat. She had a striped

cotton blouse, but her fawn tweed skirt was well hung.

Tietjens said:

"You've been demonstrating."

She said:

"Of course we have, and of course you object on principle. But you won't

let a girl be man-handled. Don't wait to tell me I know it . . . ."

Noises existed. Sandbach, from beyond the low garden wall fifty yards

away, was yelping, just like a dog: "Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!" and gesticulating.

His little caddy, entangled in his golf-bag, was trying to scramble over

the wall. On top of a high sandhill stood the policeman: he waved his

arms like a windmill and shouted. Beside him and behind, slowly rising,

were the heads of the General, Macmaster and their two boys. Further

along, in completion were appearing the figures of Mr. Waterhouse, his

two companions and _their_ three boys. The Minister was waving his

driver and shouting. They all shouted.

"A regular rat-hunt," the girl said; she was counting. "Eleven and two

more caddies!" She exhibited satisfaction. "I headed them all off except

two beasts. They couldn't run. But neither can Gertie . . ."

She said urgently:

"Come along! You aren't going to leave Gertie to those beasts! They're

drunk. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Cut away then. I'll look after Gertie." He picked up his bag.

"No, I'll come with you," the girl said.

Tietjens answered: "Oh, you don't want to go to gaol. Clear out!"

She said:

"Nonsense. I've put up with worse than that. Nine months as a

slavey. . . . Come _along_!"

Tietjens started to run--rather like a rhinoceros seeing purple. He had

been violently spurred, for he had been pierced by a shrill, faint

scream. The girl ran beside him.

"You . . . can . . . run!" she panted, "put on a spurt."

Screams protesting against physical violence were at that date rare

things in England. Tietjens had never heard the like. It upset him

frightfully, though he was aware only of an expanse of open country. The

policeman, whose buttons made him noteworthy, was descending his conical

sandhill, diagonally, with caution. There is something grotesque about a

town policeman, silvered helmet and all, in the open country. It was so

clear and still in the air; Tietjens felt as if he were in a light

museum looking at specimens. . . .

A little young woman, engrossed, like a hunted rat, came round the

corner of a green mound. "This is an assaulted female!" the mind of

Tietjens said to him. She had a black skirt covered with sand, for she

had just rolled down the sandhill; she had a striped grey and black silk

blouse, one shoulder torn completely off, so that a white camisole

showed. Over the shoulder of the sandhill came the two city men, flushed

with triumph and panting; their red knitted waistcoats moved like

bellows. The black-haired one, his eyes lurid and obscene, brandished

aloft a fragment of black and grey stuff. He shouted hilariously:

"Strip the bitch naked! . . . Ugh . . . Strip the bitch stark naked!"

and jumped down the little hill. He cannoned into Tietjens, who roared

at the top of his voice:

"You infernal swine. I'll knock your head off if you move!"

Behind Tietjens' back the girl said:

"Come along, Gertie. . . . It's only to there . . ."

A voice panted in answer:

"I . . . can't. . . . My heart . . ."

Tietjens kept his eye upon the city man. His jaw had fallen down, his

eyes stared! It was as if the bottom of his assured world, where all men

desire in their hearts to bash women, had fallen out. He panted:

"Ergle! Ergle!"

Another scream, a little further than the last voices from behind his

back, caused in Tietjens a feeling of intense weariness. What did

beastly women want to scream for? He swung round, bag and all. The

policeman, his face scarlet like a lobster just boiled, was lumbering

unenthusiastically towards the two girls who were trotting towards the

dyke. One of his hands, scarlet also, was extended. He was not a yard

from Tietjens.

Tietjens was exhausted, beyond thinking or shouting. He slipped his

clubs off his shoulder and, as if he were pitching his kit-bag into a

luggage van, threw the whole lot between the policeman's running legs.

The man, who had no impetus to speak of, pitched forward on to his hands

and knees. His helmet over his eyes, he seemed to reflect for a moment;

then he removed his helmet and with great deliberation rolled round and

sat on the turf. His face was completely without emotion, long,

sandy-moustached and rather shrewd. He mopped his brow with a carmine

handkerchief that had white spots.

Tietjens walked up to him.

"Clumsy of me!" he said. "I hope you're not hurt." He drew from his

breast pocket a curved silver flask. The policeman said nothing. His

world, too, contained uncertainties and he was profoundly glad to be

able to sit still without discredit. He muttered:

"Shaken. A bit! Anybody would be!"

That let him out and he fell to examining with attention the bayonet

catch of the flask top. Tietjens opened it for him. The two girls,

advancing at a fatigued trot, were near the dyke side. The fair girl, as

they trotted, was trying to adjust her companion's hat; attached by pins

to the back of her hair it flapped on her shoulder.

All the rest of the posse were advancing at a very slow walk, in a

converging semi-circle. Two little caddies were running, but Tietjens

saw them check, hesitate and stop. And there floated to Tietjens' ears

the words:

"Stop, you little devils. She'll knock your heads off."

Rt. Hon. Mr. Waterhouse must have found an admirable voice trainer

somewhere. The drab girl was balancing tremulously over a plank on the

dyke; the other took it at a jump: up in the air--down on her feet;

perfectly business-like. And, as soon as the other girl was off the

plank, she was down on her knees before it, pulling it towards her, the

other girl trotting away over the vast marsh field.

The girl dropped the plank on the grass. Then she looked up and faced

the men and boys who stood in a row on the road. She called in a shrill,

high voice, like a young cockerel's:

"Seventeen to two! The usual male odds! You'll _have_ to go round by

Camber railway bridge, and we'll be in Folkestone by then. We've got

bicycles!" She was half going when she checked and, searching out

Tietjens to address, exclaimed: "I'm sorry I said that. Because some of

you didn't want to catch us. But some of you _did_. And you _were_

seventeen to two." She addressed Mr. Waterhouse:

"Why _don't_ you give women the vote?" she said. "You'll find it will

interfere a good deal with your indispensable golf if you don't. Then

what becomes of the nation's health?"

Mr. Waterhouse said:

"If you'll come and discuss it quietly . . ."

She said:

"Oh, tell that to the marines," and turned away, the men in a row

watching her figure disappear into the distance of the flat land. Not

one of them was inclined to risk that jump: there was nine foot of mud

in the bottom of the dyke. It was quite true that, the plank being

removed, to go after the women they would have had to go several miles

round. It had been a well thought out raid. Mr. Waterhouse said that

girl was a ripping girl: the others found her just ordinary. Mr.

Sandbach, who had only lately ceased to shout: "Hi!" wanted to know what

they were going to do about catching the women, but Mr. Waterhouse said:

"Oh, chuck it, Sandy," and went off.

Mr. Sandbach refused to continue his match with Tietjens. He said that

Tietjens was the sort of fellow who was the ruin of England. He said he

had a good mind to issue a warrant for the arrest of Tietjens--for

obstructing the course of justice. Tietjens pointed out that Sandbach

wasn't a borough magistrate and so couldn't. And Sandbach went off, dot

and carry one, and began a furious row with the two city men who had

retreated to a distance. He said they were the sort of men who were the

ruin of England. They bleated like rams. . . .

Tietjens wandered slowly up the course, found his ball, made his shot

with care and found that the ball deviated several feet less to the

right of a straight line than he had expected. He tried the shot again,

obtained the same result and tabulated his observations in his notebook.

He sauntered slowly back towards the club-house. He was content.

He felt himself to be content for the first time in four months. His

pulse beat calmly; the heat of the sun all over him appeared to be a

beneficent flood. On the flanks of the older and larger sandhills he

observed the minute herbage, mixed with little purple aromatic plants.

To these the constant nibbling of sheep had imparted a protective

tininess. He wandered, content, round the sandhills to the small, silted

harbour mouth. After reflecting for some time on the wave-curves in the

sloping mud of the water sides he had a long conversation, mostly in

signs, with a Finn who hung over the side of a tarred, stump-masted,

battered vessel that had a gaping, splintered hole where the anchor

should have hung. She came from Archangel; was of several hundred tons

burthen, was knocked together anyhow, of soft wood, for about ninety

pounds, and launched, sink or swim, in the timber trade. Beside her,

taut, glistening with brass work, was a new fishing boat, just built

there for the Lowestoft fleet. Ascertaining her price from a man who was

finishing her painting, Tietjens reckoned that you could have built

three of the Archangel timber ships for the cost of that boat, and that

the Archangel vessel would earn about twice as much per hour per

ton. . . .

It was in that way his mind worked when he was fit: it picked up little

pieces of definite, workmanlike information. When it had enough it

classified them: not for any purpose, but because to know things was

agreeable and gave a feeling of strength, of having in reserve something

that the other fellow would not suspect. . . . He passed a long, quiet,

abstracted afternoon.

In the dressing-room he found the General, among lockers, old coats, and

stoneware, washing basins set in scrubbed wood. The General leaned back

against a row of these things.

"You are the ruddy _limit_!" he exclaimed.

Tietjens said:

"Where's Macmaster?"

The General said he had sent Macmaster off with Sandbach in the

two-seater. Macmaster had to dress before going up to Mountby. He added:

"The _ruddy_ limit!" again.

"Because I knocked the bobbie over?" Tietjens asked. "He liked it."

The General said:

"Knocked the bobbie over . . . I didn't see that."

"He didn't want to catch the girls," Tietjens said, "you could see

him--oh, yearning not to."

"I don't want to know anything about that," the General said. "I shall

hear enough about it from Paul Sandbach. Give the bobbie a quid and

let's hear no more of it. I'm a magistrate."

"Then what have I done?" Tietjens said. "I helped those girls to get

off. _You_ didn't want to catch them; Waterhouse didn't, the policeman

didn't. No one did except the swine. Then what's the matter?"

"Damn it all!" the General said, "don't you remember that you're a young

married man?"

With the respect for the General's superior age and achievements,

Tietjens stopped himself laughing.

"If you're really serious, sir," he said, "I always remember it very

carefully. I don't suppose you're suggesting that I've ever shown want

of respect for Sylvia."

The General shook his head.

"I don't know," he said. "And damn it all I'm worried. I'm . . . Hang

it, I'm your father's oldest friend." The General looked indeed worn and

saddened in the light of the sand-drifted, ground glass windows. He

said: "Was that skirt a . . . a friend of yours? Had you arranged it

with her?"

Tietjens said:

"Wouldn't it be better, Sir, if you said what you had on your

mind? . . ."

The old General blushed a little.

"I don't like to," he said straightforwardly. "You brilliant

fellows. . . . I only want, my dear boy, to hint that. . ."

Tietjens said, a little more stiffly:

"I'd prefer you to get it out, sir. . . . I acknowledge your right as my

father's oldest friend."

"Then," the General burst out, "who was the skirt you were lolloping up

Pall Mall with? On the last day they trooped the colours? . . . I didn't

see her myself. . . . Was it this same one? Paul said she looked like a

cook maid."

Tietjens made himself a little more rigid.

"She was, as a matter of fact, a bookmaker's secretary," Tietjens said.

"I imagine I have the right to walk where I like, with whom I like. And

no one has the right to question it. . . . I don't mean you, sir. But no

one else."

The General said puzzledly:

"It's you _brilliant_ fellows. . . . They all say you're

brilliant. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"You might let your rooted distrust of intelligence . . . It's natural

of course; but you might let it allow you to be just to me. I assure you

there was nothing discreditable."

The General interrupted:

"If you were a stupid young subaltern and told me you were showing your

mother's new cook the way to the Piccadilly tube I'd believe you. . . .

But, then, no young subaltern would do such a damn, blasted, tomfool

thing! Paul said you walked beside her like the king in his glory!

Through the crush outside the Haymarket, of all places in the world!"

"I'm obliged to Sandbach for his commendation. . . ." Tietjens said. He

thought a moment. Then he said:

"I was trying to get that young woman. . . . I was taking her out to

lunch from her office at the bottom of the Haymarket. . . . To get her

off a friend's back. That is, of course, between ourselves."

He said this with great reluctance because he didn't want to cast

reflection on Macmaster's taste, for the young lady had been by no means

one to be seen walking with a really circumspect public official. But he

had said nothing to indicate Macmaster, and he had other friends.

The General choked.

"Upon my soul," he said, "what do you take me for?" He repeated the

words as if he were amazed. "If," he said, "my G.S.O. II.--who's the

stupidest ass I know--told me such a damn-fool lie as that I'd have him

broke to-morrow." He went on expostulatorily: "Damn it all, it's the

first duty of a soldier--it's the first duty of all Englishmen--to be

able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge. But a lie like

that . . ."

He broke off breathless, then he began again:

"Hang it all, I told that lie to my grandmother and my grandfather told

it to _his_ grandfather. And they call you brilliant! . . ." He paused

and then asked reproachfully:

"Or do you think I'm in a state of senile decay?"

Tietjens said:

"I know you, sir, to be the smartest general of division in the British

Army. I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why I said what I

did. . . ." He had told the exact truth, but he was not sorry to be

disbelieved.

The General said:

"Then I'll take it that you tell me a lie meaning me to know that it's a

lie. That's quite proper. I take it you mean to keep the woman

officially out of it. But look here, Chrissie"--his tone took a deeper

seriousness--"if the woman that's come between you and Sylvia--that's

broken up your home, damn it, for that's what it is!--is little Miss

Wannop . . ."

"Her name was Julia Mandelstein," Tietjens said.

The General said:

"Yes! Yes! Of course! . . . But if it _is_ the little Wannop girl and

it's not gone too far . . . Put her back . . . Put her back, as you used

to be a good boy! It would be too hard on the mother. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"General! I give you my word . . ."

The General said:

"I'm not asking any questions, my boy; I'm talking now. You've told me

the story you want told and it's the story I'll tell for you! But that

little piece is . . . she used to be! . . . as straight as a die. I

daresay you know better than I. Of course when they get among the wild

women there's no knowing what happens to them. They say they're all

whores. . . . I beg your pardon, if you like the girl . . ."

"Is Miss Wannop," Tietjens asked, "the girl who demonstrates?"

"Sandbach said," the General went on, "that he couldn't see from where

he was whether that girl was the same as the one in the Haymarket. But

he thought it was . . . He was pretty certain."

"As he's married your sister," Tietjens said, "one can't impugn his

taste in women."

"I say again, I'm not asking," the General said. "But I do say again

too: put her back. Her father was a great friend of your father's: or

your father was a great admirer of his. They say he was the most

brilliant brain of the party."

"Of course I know who Professor Wannop was," Tietjens said. "There's

nothing you could tell me about him."

"I daresay not," the General said drily. "Then you know that he didn't

leave a farthing when he died and the rotten Liberal Government wouldn't

put his wife and children on the Civil List because he'd sometimes

written for a Tory paper. And you know that the mother has had a deuced

hard row to hoe and has only just turned the corner. If she can be said

to have turned it. I know Claudine takes them all the peaches she can

cadge out of Paul's gardener."

Tietjens was about to say that Mrs. Wannop, the mother, had written the

only novel worth reading since the eighteenth century. . . . But the

General went on:

"Listen to me, my boy. . . . If you can't get on without women . . . I

should have thought Sylvia was good enough. But I know what we men are.

. . . I don't set up to be a saint. I heard a woman in the promenade of

the Empire say once that it was the likes of them that saved the lives

and figures of all the virtuous women of the country. And I daresay it's

true. . . . But choose a girl that you can set up in a tobacco shop and

do your courting in the back parlour. Not in the Haymarket. . . . Heaven

knows if you can afford it. That's your affair. You appear to have been

sold up. And from what Sylvia's let drop to Claudine . . ."

"I don't believe," Tietjens said, "that Sylvia's said anything to Lady

Claudine . . . She's too straight."

"I didn't say 'said,'" the General exclaimed, "I particularly said 'let

drop.' And perhaps I oughtn't to have said as much as that, but you know

what devils for ferreting out women are. And Claudine's worse than any

woman I ever knew. . . ."

"And, of course, she's had Sandbach to help," Tietjens said.

"Oh, that fellow's worse than any woman," the General exclaimed.

"Then what does the whole indictment amount to?" Tietjens asked.

"Oh, hang it," the General brought out, "I'm not a beastly detective, I

only want a plausible story to tell Claudine. Or not even plausible. An

obvious lie as long as it shows you're not flying in the face of

society--as walking up the Haymarket with the little Wannop when your

wife's left you because of her would be."

"What does it amount to?" Tietjens said patiently: "What Sylvia 'let

drop'?"

"Only," the General answered, "that you are--that your views

are--immoral. Of course they often puzzle me. And, of course, if you

have views that aren't the same as other people's, and don't keep them

to yourself, other people will suspect you of immorality. That's what

put Paul Sandbach on your track! . . . and that you're extravagant. . . .

Oh, hang it. . . . Eternal hansoms, and taxis and telegrams. . . . You

know, my boy, times aren't what they were when your father and I

married. We used to say you could do it on five hundred a year as a

younger son. . . . And then this girl too. . . ." His voice took on a

more agitated note of shyness--pain. . . . "It probably hadn't occurred

to you. . . . But, of course, Sylvia has an income of her own. . . .

And, don't you see . . . if you outrun the constable and . . . In short,

you're spending Sylvia's money on the other girl, and that's what people

can't stand." He added quickly: "I'm bound to say that Mrs.

Satterthwaite backs you through thick and thin. Thick and thin! Claudine

wrote to her. But you know what women are with a handsome son-in-law

that's always polite to them. But I may tell you that but for your

mother-in-law, Claudine would have cut you out of her visiting list

months ago. And you'd have been cut out of some others too. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Thanks. I think that's enough to go on with. . . . Give me a couple of

minutes to reflect on what you've said . . ."

"I'll wash my hands and change my coat," the General said with intense

relief.

At the end of two minutes Tietjens said:

"No; I don't see that there is anything I want to say."

The General exclaimed with enthusiasm:

"That's my good lad! Open confession is next to reform. . . . And . . .

and try to be more respectful to your superiors. . . . Damn it; they say

you're brilliant. But I thank heaven I haven't got you in my

command. . . . Though I believe you're a good lad. But you're the sort of

fellow to set a whole division by the ears. . . . A regular . . . what's

'is name? A regular Dreyfus!"

"Did you think Dreyfus was guilty?" Tietjens asked.

"Hang it," the General said, "he was worse than guilty--the sort of

fellow you couldn't believe in and yet couldn't prove anything against.

The curse of the world. . . ."

Tietjens said:

"Ah."

"Well, they are," the General said: "fellows like that _unsettle_

society. You don't know where you are. You can't judge. They make you

uncomfortable. . . . A brilliant fellow too! I believe he's a

brigadier-general by now. . . ." He put his arm round Tietjens'

shoulders.

"There, there, my dear boy," he said, "come and have a sloe gin. That's

the real answer to all beastly problems."

It was some time before Tietjens could get to think of his own problems.

The fly that took them back went with the slow pomp of a procession over

the winding marsh road in front of the absurdly picturesque red pyramid

of the very old town. Tietjens had to listen to the General suggesting

that it would be better if he didn't come to the golf-club till Monday.

He would get Macmaster some good games. A good, sound fellow that

Macmaster now. It was a pity Tietjens hadn't some of his soundness!

The two city men had approached the General on the course and had used

some violent invectives against Tietjens: they had objected to being

called ruddy swine to their faces: they were going to the police. The

General said that he had told them himself, slowly and distinctly, that

they _were_ ruddy swine and that they would never get another ticket at

that club after Monday. But till Monday, apparently, they had the right

to be there and the club wouldn't want scenes. Sandbach, too, was

infuriated about Tietjens.

Tietjens said that the fault lay with the times that permitted the

introduction into gentlemen's company of such social swipes as Sandbach.

One acted perfectly correctly and then a dirty little beggar like that

put dirty little constructions on it and ran about and bleated. He added

that he knew Sandbach was the General's brother-in-law, but he couldn't

help it. That was the truth. . . . The General said: "I know, my boy: I

know. . . ." But one had to take society as one found it. Claudine had

to be provided for and Sandbach made a very good husband, careful,

sober, and on the right side in politics. A bit of a rip; but they

couldn't ask for everything! And Claudine was using all the influence

she had with the other side--which was not a little, women were so

wonderful!--to get him a diplomatic job in Turkey, so as to get him out

of the way of Mrs. Crundall! Mrs. Crundall was the leading

Anti-Suffragette of the little town. That was what made Sandbach so

bitter against Tietjens. He told Tietjens so that Tietjens might

understand.

Tietjens had hitherto flattered himself that he could examine a subject

swiftly and put it away in his mind. To the General he hardly listened.

The allegations against himself were beastly; but he could usually

ignore allegations against himself and he imagined that if he said no

more about them he would himself hear no more. If there were, in clubs

and places where men talk, unpleasant rumours as to himself he preferred

it to be thought that he was the rip, not his wife the strumpet. That

was normal, male vanity: the preference of the English gentleman! Had it

been a matter of Sylvia spotless and himself as spotless as he was--for

in all these things he knew himself to be spotless!--he would certainly

have defended himself, at least, to the General. But he had acted

practically in not defending himself more vigorously. For he imagined

that, had he really tried, he could have made the General believe him.

But he had behaved rightly! It was not mere vanity. There was the child

up at his sister Effie's. It was better for a boy to have a rip of a

father than a whore for mother!

The General was expatiating on the solidity of a squat castle, like a

pile of draughts, away to the left, in the sun, on the flatness. He was

saying that we didn't build like that nowadays.

Tietjens said:

"You're perfectly wrong, General. All the castles that Henry VIII. built

in 1543 along this coast are mere monuments of jerry-building. . . .

'_In 1543 jactat castra Delis, Sandgatto, Reia, Hastingas Henricus

Rex_' . . . That means he chucked them down . . ."

The General laughed:

"You are an incorrigible fellow. . . . If ever there's any known,

certain fact . . ."

"But go and _look_ at the beastly things," Tietjens said. "You'll see

they've got just a facing of Caen stone that they tide-floated here, and

the fillings-up are just rubble, any rubbish. . . . Look here! It's a

known certain fact, isn't it, that your eighteen-pounders are better

than the French seventy-fives. They tell us so in the House, on the

hustings, in the papers: the public believes it. . . . But would you put

one of your tin-pot things firing--what is it?--four shells a

minute?--with the little bent pins in their tails to stop the

recoil--against their seventy-fives with the compressed-air

cylinders. . . ."

The General sat stiffly upon his cushions:

"That's different," he said. "How the devil do you get to know these

things?"

"It isn't different," Tietjens said, "it's the same muddle-headed frame

of mind that sees good building in Henry VIII. as lets us into wars with

hopelessly antiquated field guns and rottenly inferior ammunition. You'd

fire any fellow on your staff who said we could stand up for a minute

against the French."

"Well, anyhow," the General said, "I thank heaven you're not on my staff

for you'd talk my hind leg off in a week. It's perfectly true that the

public . . ."

But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural

for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betray the solidarity that should

exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady

Claudine Sandbach with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband to

believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women!

The General was saying:

"Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun?"

Tietjens said:

"From you. Three weeks ago!"

And all the other society women with unfaithful husbands. . . . They

must do their best to down and out a man. They would cut him off their

visiting lists! Let them. The barren harlots mated to faithless eunuchs!

. . . Suddenly he thought that he didn't know for certain that he was

the father of his child and he groaned.

"Well, what have I said wrong now?" the General asked. "Surely you don't

maintain that pheasants do eat mangolds. . . ."

Tietjens proved his reputation for sanity with:

"No! I was just groaning at the thought of the Chancellor! That's sound

enough for you, isn't it?" But it gave him a nasty turn. He hadn't been

able to pigeonhole and padlock his disagreeable reflections. He had been

as good as talking to himself. . . .

In the bow-window of another hostelry than his own he caught the eye of

Mr. Waterhouse, who was looking at the view over the marshes. The great

man beckoned to him and he went in. Mr. Waterhouse was anxious that

Tietjens--whom he assumed to be a man of sense--should get any pursuit

of the two girls stopped off. He couldn't move in the matter himself,

but a five pound note and possibly a police promotion or so might be

handed round if no advertisement were given to the mad women on account

of their raid of that afternoon.

It was not a very difficult matter: for where the great man was to be

found in the club lounge, there, in the bar, the mayor, the town clerk,

the local head of the police, the doctors and solicitors would be found

drinking together. And after it was arranged the great man himself came

into the bar, had a drink and pleased them all immensely by his

affability. . . .

Tietjens himself, dining alone with the Minister to whom he wanted to

talk about his Labour Finance Act, didn't find him a disagreeable

fellow: not really foolish, not sly except in his humour, tired

obviously, but livening up after a couple of whiskies, and certainly not

as yet plutocratic; with tastes for apple-pie and cream of a

fourteen-year-old boy. And, even as regards his famous Act, which was

then shaking the country to its political foundations, once you accepted

its fundamental unsuitedness to the temperament and needs of the English

working-class, you could see that Mr. Waterhouse didn't want to be

dishonest. He accepted with gratitude several of Tietjens' emendations

in the actuarial schedules. . . . And over their port they agreed on two

fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of

four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay

less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as

it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left. . . .

And Tietjens, who hated no man, in face of this simple-minded and

agreeable schoolboy type of fellow, fell to wondering why it was that

humanity that was next to always agreeable in its units was, as a mass,

a phenomenon so hideous. You look at a dozen men, each of them not by

any means detestable and not uninteresting: for each of them would have

technical details of their affairs to impart: you formed them into a

Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies,

gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the

combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human

society. And he remembered the words of some Russian: "Cats and monkeys.

Monkeys and cats. All humanity is there."

Tietjens and Mr. Waterhouse spent the rest of the evening together.

Whilst Tietjens was interviewing the policeman, the Minister sat on the

front steps of the cottage and smoked cheap cigarettes, and when

Tietjens went to bed Mr. Waterhouse insisted on sending by him kindly

messages to Miss Wannop, asking her to come and discuss female suffrage

any afternoon she liked in his private room at the House of Commons. Mr.

Waterhouse flatly refused to believe that Tietjens hadn't arranged the

raid with Miss Wannop. He said it had been too neatly planned for any

woman, and he said Tietjens was a lucky fellow, for she was a ripping

girl.

Back in his room under the rafters, Tietjens fell, nevertheless, at once

a prey to real agitation. For a long time he pounded from wall to wall

and, since he could not shake off the train of thought, he got out at

last his patience cards, and devoted himself seriously to thinking out

the conditions of his life with Sylvia. He wanted to stop scandal if he

could; he wanted them to live within his income, he wanted to subtract

that child from the influence of its mother. These were all definite but

difficult things. . . . Then one half of his mind lost itself in the

re-arrangement of schedules, and on his brilliant table his hands set

queens on kings and checked their recurrences.

In that way the sudden entrance of Macmaster gave him a really terrible

physical shock. He nearly vomited: his brain reeled and the room fell

about. He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster's

goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn't talk, and he dropped into

his bed faintly aware of his friend's efforts to loosen his clothes. He

had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind

so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the

time, paralysed both his body and his mind.

V

"It doesn't seem quite fair, Valentine," Mrs. Duchemin said. She was

rearranging in a glass bowl some minute flowers that floated on water.

They made there, on the breakfast-table, a patch, as it were, of mosaic

amongst silver chafing dishes, silver épergnes piled with peaches in

pyramids, and great silver rose-bowls filled with roses, that drooped to

the damask cloth. A congeries of silver largenesses made as if a

fortification for the head of the table; two huge silver urns, a great

silver kettle on a tripod and a couple of silver vases filled with the

extremely tall blue spikes of delphiniums that, spreading out, made as

if a fan. The eighteenth century room was very tall and long; panelled

in darkish wood. In the centre of each of four of the panels, facing the

light, hung pictures, a mellowed orange in tone, representing mists and

the cordage of ships in mists at sunrise. On the bottom of each large

gold frame was a tablet bearing the ascription: "J. M. W. Turner." The

chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had

the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden

mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a

brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an

épergne, a large meat-pie with a varnished crust, another épergne that

supported the large pale globes of grape-fruit; a galantine, a cube of

inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly.

"Oh, women have to back each other up in these days," Valentine Wannop

said. "I couldn't let you go through this alone after breakfasting with

you every Saturday since I don't know when."

"I do feel," Mrs. Duchemin said, "immensely grateful to you for your

moral support. I ought not, perhaps, to have risked this morning. But

I've told Parry to keep him out till 10.15."

"It's, at any rate, tremendously sporting of you," the girl said. "I

think it was worth trying."

Mrs. Duchemin, wavering round the table, slightly changed the position

of the delphiniums.

"I think they make a good screen," Mrs. Duchemin said.

"Oh, nobody will be able to see him," the girl answered reassuringly.

She added with a sudden resolution, "Look here, Edie. Stop worrying

about my mind. If you think that anything I hear at your table after

nine months as an ash-cat at Ealing, with three men in the house, an

invalid wife and a drunken cook, can corrupt my mind, you're simply

mistaken. You can let your conscience be at rest, and let's say no more

about it."

Mrs. Duchemin said, "Oh, Valentine! How could your mother let you?"

"She didn't know," the girl said. "She was out of her mind for grief.

She sat for most of the whole nine months with her hands folded before

her in a board and lodging house at twenty-five shillings a week, and it

took the five shillings a week that I earned to make up the money." She

added, "Gilbert had to be kept at school of course. And in the holidays,

too."

"I don't understand!" Mrs. Duchemin said. "I simply don't understand."

"Of course you wouldn't," the girl answered. "You're like the kindly

people who subscribed at the sale to buy my father's library back and

present it to my mother. That cost us five shillings a week for

warehousing, and at Ealing they were always nagging at me for the state

of my print dresses. . . ."

She broke off and said:

"Let's not talk about it any more if you don't mind. You have me in your

house, so I suppose you've a right to references, as the mistresses call

them. But you've been very good to me and never asked. Still, it's come

up; do you know I told a man on the links yesterday that I'd been a

slavey for nine months. I was trying to explain why I was a suffragette;

and, as I was asking him a favour, I suppose I felt I needed to give

_him_ references too."

Mrs. Duchemin, beginning to advance towards the girl impulsively,

exclaimed:

"You darling!"

Miss Wannop said:

"Wait a minute. I haven't finished. I want to say this: I never talk

about that stage of my career because I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed of

it because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I

did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would

probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent

people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if

we've inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we've inherited the Wannop pride.

And I _couldn't_ do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we

were going into the country after the sale. I'm not educated at all, as

you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had

ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athletic, not a classical

don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don't know why he

had that tic . . . But I'd like you to understand two things. One I've

said already: what I hear in this house won't ever shock or corrupt me;

that it's said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin

almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and

Gilbert as soon as we talked at all. . . . And, oh yes: I'm a

suffragette because I've been a slavey. But I'd like you to understand

that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette--you're an

old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two

things--then I'd like you to understand that in spite of it all I'm

pure! Chaste, you know. . . . Perfectly virtuous."

Mrs. Duchemin said:

"Oh, Valentine! Did you wear a cap and apron? You! In a cap and apron."

Miss Wannop replied:

"Yes! I wore a cap and apron and sniffled, 'M'm!' to the mistress; and

slept under the stairs too. Because I would not sleep with the beast of

a cook."

Mrs. Duchemin now ran forward and catching Miss Wannop by both hands

kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek.

"Oh, Valentine," she said, "you're a heroine. And you only

twenty-two! . . . Isn't that the motor coming?"

But it wasn't the motor coming and Miss Wannop said:

"Oh, no! I'm not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister

yesterday, I just couldn't. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I

just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: 'V . . . V . . .

Votes for W . . . W . . . W . . . omen!' . . . If I'd been decently

brave I shouldn't have been too shy to speak to a strange man. . . . For

that was what it really came to."

"But that surely," Mrs. Duchemin said--she continued to hold both the

girl's hands--"makes you all the braver. . . . It's the person who does

the thing he's afraid of who's the real hero, isn't it?"

"Oh, we used to argue that old thing over with father when we were ten.

You can't tell. You've got to define the term brave. I was just abject.

. . . I could harangue the whole crowd when I got them together. But

speak to one man in cold blood I couldn't. . . . Of course I _did_ speak

to a fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes, to get him to save Gertie. But

that was different."

Mrs. Duchemin moved both the girl's hands up and down in her own.

"As you know, Valentine," she said, "I'm an old-fashioned woman. I

believe that woman's true place is at her husband's side. At the same

time . . ."

Miss Wannop moved away.

"Now, don't, Edie, don't!" she said. "If you believe that, you're an

anti. Don't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It's your defect

really. . . . I tell you I'm _not_ a heroine. I _dread_ prison: I _hate_

rows. I'm thankful to goodness that it's my duty to stop and

housemaid-typewrite for mother, so that I can't really _do_ things. . . .

Look at that miserable, adenoidy little, Gertie, hiding upstairs in

our garret. She was crying all last night--but that's just nerves. Yet

she's been in prison five times, stomach-pumped and all. Not a moment of

funk about her! . . . But as for me, a girl as hard as a rock that

prison wouldn't touch. . . . Why, I'm all of a jump now. That's why I'm

talking nonsense like a pert schoolgirl. I just dread that every sound

may be the police coming for me."

Mrs. Duchemin stroked the girl's fair hair and tucked a loose strand

behind her ear.

"I wish you'd let me show you how to do your hair," she said. "The right

man might come along at any moment."

"Oh, the right man!" Miss Wannop said. "Thanks for tactfully changing

the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a

married man. That's the Wannop luck!"

Mrs. Duchemin said, with deep concern:

"Don't talk like that. . . . Why should you regard yourself as being

less lucky than other people? Surely your mother's done well. She has a

position; she makes money. . . ."

"Ah, but mother isn't a Wannop," the girl said, "only by marriage. The

real Wannops . . . they've been executed, and attaindered, and falsely

accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died

penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then,

mother's got her mascot . . ."

"Oh, what's that?" Mrs. Duchemin asked, almost with animation, "a

relic . . ."

"Don't you know mother's mascot?" the girl asked. "She tells everybody.

. . . Don't you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother

was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting room and there came

in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and

asks us to remember him as such in our prayers. . . . He was a man who'd

been at a German university with father years before and loved him very

dearly, but not kept touch with him. And he'd been out of England for

nine months when father died and round about it. And he said: 'Now Mrs.

Wannop, what's this?' And she told him. And he said, 'What you want is

champagne!' And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of

Veuve Cliquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the

mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood

over her while she drank half the bottle out of her tooth-glass. And he

took her out to lunch . . . o . . . o . . . oh, it's cold! . . . And

lectured her . . . And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had

shares in . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin said:

"You're shivering!"

"I know I am," the girl said. She went on very fast. "And of course,

mother always _wrote_ father's articles for him. He found the ideas, but

couldn't write, and she's a splendid style. . . . And, since then,

he--the mascot--Tea-tray--has always turned up when she's been in tight

places. When the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss her for

inaccuracies! She's frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a table

of things every leader writer must know, such as that 'A. Ebor' is the

Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he

turned up and said: 'Why don't you write a novel on that story you told

me?' And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we're in now to be

quiet and write in . . . Oh, I can't go on!"

Miss Wannop burst into tears.

"It's thinking of those beastly days," she said. "And that beastly,

_beastly_ yesterday!" She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely

into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs. Duchemin's handkerchief and

embraces. She said almost contemptuously:

"A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over

you! Do you suppose I don't appreciate all your silent heroism of the

home, while we're marching about with flags and shouting? But it's just

to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week out,

that we . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had

her handkerchief hiding her face.

"Why women in your position don't take lovers . . ." the girl said,

hotly. "Or that women in your position _do_ take lovers . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air

of serious dignity:

"Oh, _no_, Valentine," she said, using her deeper tones. "There's

something beautiful, there's something _thrilling_ about chastity. I'm

not narrow-minded. Censorious! I don't _condemn_! But to preserve in

word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity. . . . It's no mean

achievement. . . ."

"You mean like an egg and spoon race," Miss Wannop said.

"It isn't," Mrs. Duchemin replied gently, "the way I should have put it.

Isn't the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for

the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the

beautiful old legend. . . ."

"I don't know," Miss Wannop said, "when I read what Ruskin says about it

in the _Crown of Wild Olive_. Or no! It's the _Queen of the Air_. That's

his Greek rubbish, isn't it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in

which the young woman didn't keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it

comes to the same thing."

Mrs. Duchemin said:

"My _dear_! Not a word against John Ruskin in _this_ house."

Miss Wannop screamed.

An immense voice had shouted:

"This way! This way! . . . The ladies will be here!"

Of Mr. Duchemin's curates--he had three of them, for he had three

marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very

rich clergyman could have held them--it was observed that they were all

very large men with the physiques rather of prize-fighters than of

clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr. Duchemin, who himself

was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along

a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to

encounter went pit-a-pat.

Mr. Horsley--the number two--had in addition an enormous voice. He

shouted four or five words, interjected tee-hee, shouted four or five

words more and again interjected "tee-hee." He had enormous wrist-bones

that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam's apple, a

large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with very

sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible to

stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form

of interruption.

This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the

breakfast-room Messrs. Tietjens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the

steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The

introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success. . . .

"A STATE OF SIEGE, LADIES! Tee-hee!" he alternately roared and giggled.

"We're living in a regular state of siege. . . . What with . . ." It

appeared that the night before, after dinner, Mr. Sandbach and rather

more than half-a-dozen of the young bloods who had dined at Mountby, had

gone scouring the country lanes, mounted on motor bicycles and armed

with loaded canes . . . for Suffragettes! Every woman they had come

across in the darkness they had stopped, abused, threatened with their

loaded canes and subjected to cross-examination. The countryside was up

in arms.

As a story this took, with the appropriate reflections and repetitions,

a long time in telling, and afforded Tietjens and Miss Wannop the

opportunity of gazing at each other. Miss Wannop was frankly afraid that

this large, clumsy, unusual-looking man, now that he had found her

again, might hand her over to the police whom she imagined to be

searching for herself and her friend Gertie, Miss Wilson, at that moment

in bed, under the care, as she also imagined, of Mrs. Wannop. On the

links he had seemed to her natural and in place; here, with his loosely

hung clothes and immense hands, the white patch on the side of his

rather cropped head and his masked, rather shapeless features, he

affected her queerly as being both in and out of place. He seemed to go

with the ham, the meat-pie, the galantine and even at a pinch with the

roses; but the Turner pictures, the æsthetic curtain and Mrs.

Duchemin's flowing robes, amber and rose in the hair did not go with him

at all. Even the Chippendale chairs hardly did. And she felt herself

thinking oddly, beneath her perturbations, of a criminal and the voice

of the Rev. Horsley that _his_ Harris tweeds went all right with her

skirt, and she was glad that she had on a clean, cream-coloured silk

blouse, not a striped pink cotton.

She was right as to that.

In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one

checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect

corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little,

before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in

their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them.

The night before, Tietjens shad given several thoughts to this young

woman. General Campion had assigned her to him as _maîtresse en

tître_. He was said to have ruined himself, broken up his home and

spent his wife's money on her. Those were lies. On the other hand they

were not inherent impossibilities. Upon occasion and given the right

woman, quite sound men have done such things. He might, heaven knows,

himself be so caught. But that he should have ruined himself over an

unnoticeable young female who had announced herself as having been a

domestic servant, and wore a pink cotton blouse . . . that had seemed to

go beyond the bounds of even the unreason of club gossip!

That was the strong, first impression! It was all very well for his

surface mind to say that the girl was not by birth a tweeny maid; she

was the daughter of Professor Wannop and she could jump! For Tietjens

held very strongly the theory that what finally separated the classes

was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common

people couldn't. . . . But the strong impression remained. Miss Wannop

was a tweeny maid. Say a lady's help, by nature. She was of good family,

for the Wannops were first heard of at Birdlip in Gloucestershire in the

year 1417--no doubt enriched after Agincourt. But even brilliant men of

good family will now and then throw daughters who are lady helps by

nature. That was one of the queernesses of heredity. . . . And, though

Tietjens had even got as far as to realise that Miss Wannop must be a

heroine who had sacrificed her young years to her mother's gifts, and no

doubt to a brother at school--for he had guessed as far as that--even

then Tietjens couldn't make her out as more than a lady help. Heroines

are all very well; admirable, they may even be saints; but if they let

themselves get careworn in face and go shabby. . . . Well, they must

wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven. On this

earth you could hardly accept them as wives for men of your own set.

Certainly you wouldn't spend your own wife's money on them. That was

what it really came to.

But, brightened up as he now suddenly saw her, with silk for the pink

cotton, shining coiled hair for the white canvas hat, a charming young

neck, good shoes beneath neat ankles, a healthy flush taking the place

of yesterday's pallor of fear for her comrade; an obvious equal in the

surroundings of quite good people; small, but well-shaped and healthy;

immense blue eyes fixed without embarrassment on his own. . . .

"By Jove . . ." he said to himself: "It's true! What a jolly little

mistress she'd make!"

He blamed Campion, Sandbach and the club gossips for the form the

thought had taken. For the cruel, bitter and stupid pressure of the

world has yet about it something selective; if it couples male and

female in its inexorable rings of talk it will be because there is

something harmonious in the union. And there exists then the pressure of

suggestion!

He took a look at Mrs. Duchemin and considered her infinitely

commonplace and probably a bore. He disliked her large-shouldered,

many-yarded style of blue dress and considered that no woman should wear

clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of

cigarette holders for bounders. He looked back at Miss Wannop, and

considered that she would make a good wife for Macmaster; Macmaster

liked bouncing girls and this girl was quite lady enough.

He heard Miss Wannop shout against the gale to Mrs. Duchemin:

"Do I sit beside the head of the table and pour out?"

Mrs. Duchemin answered:

"No! I've asked Miss Fox to pour out. She's nearly stone deaf." Miss Fox

was the penniless sister of a curate deceased. "You're to amuse Mr.

Tietjens."

Tietjens noticed that Mrs. Duchemin had an agreeable throat-voice; it

penetrated the noises of Mr. Horsley as the missel-thrush's note

penetrates a gale. It was rather agreeable. He noticed that Miss Wannop

made a little grimace.

Mr. Horsley, like a megaphone addressing a crowd, was turning from side

to side, addressing his hearers by rotation. At the moment he was

bawling at Macmaster; it would be Tietjens' turn again in a moment to

hear a description of the heart attacks of old Mrs. Haglen at Nobeys.

But Tietjens' turn did not come. . . .

A high-complexioned, round-cheeked, forty-fivish lady, with agreeable

eyes, dressed rather well in the black of the not-very-lately widowed,

entered the room with precipitation. She patted Mr. Horsley on his

declamatory right arm and, since he went on talking, she caught him by

the hand and shook it. She exclaimed in high, commanding tones:

"Which is Mr. Macmaster, the critic?" and then, in the dead lull to

Tietjens: "Are you Mr. Macmaster, the critic? No! . . . Then _you_ must

be."

Her turning to Macmaster and the extinction of her interest in himself

had been one of the rudest things Tietjens had ever experienced, but it

was an affair so strictly business-like that he took it without any

offence. She was remarking to Macmaster:

"Oh, Mr. Macmaster, my new book will be out on Thursday week," and she

had begun to lead him towards a window at the other end of the room.

Miss Wannop said:

"What have you done with Gertie?"

"Gertie!" Mrs. Wannop exclaimed with the surprise of one coming out of a

dream. "Oh yes! She's fast asleep. She'll sleep till four. I told Hannah

to give a look at her now and then."

Miss Wannop's hands fell open at her side.

"Oh, _mother_!" forced itself from her.

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Wannop said, "we'd agreed to tell old Hannah we didn't

want her to-day. So we had!" She said to Macmaster: "Old Hannah is our

charwoman," wavered a little and then went on brightly: "Of course it

will be of use to you to hear about my new book. To you journalists a

little bit of previous explanation . . ." and she dragged off

Macmaster. . . .

That had come about because just as she had got into the dog-cart to be

driven to the rectory--for she herself could not drive a horse--Miss

Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men at breakfast, one

whose name she didn't know; the other, a Mr. Macmaster, a celebrated

critic. Mrs. Wannop had called up to her:

"A critic? Of what?" her whole sleepy being electrified.

"I don't know," her daughter had answered. "Books, I daresay. . . ."

A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn't

stand, had made twenty yards at several bounds, the handy man who drove

had said:

"Yer mother's 'owlin' after yer." But Miss Wannop had answered that it

didn't matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything.

She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional

look at Gertie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be

told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that

Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep

in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did, the news would be

all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on

them.

But Mrs. Wannop was a woman of business. If she heard of a reviewer

within driving distance she called on him with eggs as a present. The

moment the daily help had arrived, she had set out and walked to the

rectory. No consideration of danger from the police would have stopped

her; besides, she had forgotten all about the police.

Her arrival worried Mrs. Duchemin a good deal, because she wished all

her guests to be seated and the breakfast well begun before the entrance

of her husband. And this was not easy. Mrs. Wannop, who was uninvited,

refused to be separated from Mr. Macmaster. Mr. Macmaster had told her

that he never wrote reviews in the daily papers, only articles for the

heavy quarterlies, and it had occurred to Mrs. Wannop that an article on

her new book in one of the quarterlies was just what was needed. She

was, therefore, engaged in telling Mr. Macmaster how to write about

herself, and twice after Mrs. Duchemin had succeeded in shepherding Mr.

Macmaster nearly to his seat, Mrs. Wannop had conducted him back to the

embrasure of the window. It was only by sitting herself firmly in her

chair next to Macmaster that Mrs. Duchemin was able to retain for

herself this all-essential, strategic position. And it was only by

calling out:

"Mr. Horsley, _do_ take Mrs. Wannop to the seat beside you and feed

her," that Mrs. Duchemin got Mrs. Wannop out of Mr. Duchemin's own seat

at the head of the table, for Mrs. Wannop, having perceived this seat to

be vacant and next to Mr. Macmaster, had pulled out the Chippendale

arm-chair and had prepared to sit down in it. This could only have spelt

disaster, for it would have meant turning Mrs. Duchemin's husband loose

amongst the other guests.

Mr. Horsley, however, accomplished his duty of leading away this lady

with such firmness that Mrs. Wannop conceived of him as a very

disagreeable and awkward person. Mr. Horsley's seat was next to Miss

Fox, a grey spinster, who sat, as it were, within the fortification of

silver urns and deftly occupied herself with the ivory taps of these

machines. This seat, too, Mrs. Wannop tried to occupy, imagining that,

by moving the silver vases that upheld the tall delphiniums, she would

be able to get a diagonal view of Macmaster and so to shout to him. She

found, however, that she couldn't, and so resigned herself to taking the

chair that had been reserved for Miss Gertie Wilson, who was to have

been the eighth guest. Once there she sat in distracted gloom,

occasionally saying to her daughter:

"I think it's very bad management. I think this party's very badly

arranged." Mr. Horsley she hardly thanked for the sole that he placed

before her; Tietjens she did not even look at.

Sitting beside Macmaster, her eyes fixed on a small door in the corner

of a panelled wall, Mrs. Duchemin became a prey to a sudden and

overwhelming fit of apprehension. It forced her to say to her guest,

though she had resolved to chance it and say nothing:

"It wasn't perhaps fair to ask you to come all this way. You may get

nothing out of my husband. He's apt . . . especially on Saturdays. . . ."

She trailed off into indecision. It was possible that nothing might

occur. On two Saturdays out of seven nothing _did_ occur. Then an

admission would be wasted; this sympathetic being would go out of her

life with a knowledge that he needn't have had--to be a slur on her

memory in his mind. . . . But then, overwhelmingly, there came over her

the feeling that, if he knew of her sufferings, he might feel impelled

to remain and comfort her. She cast about for words with which to finish

her sentence. But Macmaster said:

"Oh, dear lady!" (And it seemed to her to be charming to be addressed

thus!) "One understands . . . One is surely trained and adapted to

understand . . . that these great scholars, these abstracted

cognoscenti . . ."

Mrs. Duchemin breathed a great "Ah!" of relief. Macmaster had used the

exactly right words.

"And," Macmaster was going on, "merely to spend a short hour; a swallow

flight . . . 'As when the swallow gliding from lofty portal to lofty

portal' . . . You know the lines . . . in these, your perfect

surroundings . . ."

Blissful waves seemed to pass from him to her. It was in this way that

men should speak; in that way--steel-blue tie, true-looking gold ring,

steel-blue eyes beneath black brows!--that men should look. She was

half-conscious of warmth; this suggested the bliss of falling asleep,

truly, in perfect surroundings. The roses on the table were lovely;

their scent came to her.

A voice came to her:

"You _do_ do the thing in style, I must say."

The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating

man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice.

He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a

little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sèvres, pinkish,

delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to

him: "Oh . . . a little caviare! A peach!" a long time before, with the

vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her

person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.

She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with

large, fishish eyes at the caviare before her.

"How do you get _that_, for instance?" he asked.

"Oh!" she answered: "If it wasn't my husband's doing it would look like

ostentation. I'd find it ostentatious for myself." She found a smile,

radiant, yet muted. "He's trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a

telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at

dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice

too. It's such pretty stuff . . . and then by seven the car goes to

Ashford Junction. . . . All the same, it's difficult to give a breakfast

before ten."

She didn't want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she

couldn't, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly

running phrases--as if out of books she had read!--of the smaller man.

"Ah, but it isn't," Tietjens said, "ostentation. It's the great

Tradition. You mustn't ever forget that your husband's Breakfast

Duchemin of Magdalen."

He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he

meant to be agreeable.

"Sometimes I wish I could," she said. "He doesn't get anything out of it

himself. He's ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at

all. It makes me quite anxious . . . for Saturdays."

Tietjens said:

"I know."

She exclaimed--and almost with sharpness:

"You _know_!"

He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:

"Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!" he said. "He was

one of Ruskin's road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of

them all!"

Mrs. Duchemin cried out: "Oh!" Fragments of the worst stories that in

his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went

through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate

life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned

sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, with undefined

outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external!

She felt herself say to herself: "I will do you an injury, if ever----"

For already she had felt herself swaying the preferences, the thoughts

and the future of the man on her other side. He was the male, tender,

in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the meat for consumption,

like the sweet pulp of figs. . . . It was inevitable; it was essential

to the nature of her relationship with her husband that Mrs. Duchemin

should have these feelings. . . .

She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from

behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones:

"_Post coitum tristis_! Ha! Ha! That's what it is?" The voice repeated

the words and added sardonically: "You know what _that_ means?" But the

problem of her husband had become secondary; the real problem was: "What

was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of her to his friend,

when, for long hours, they were away?"

He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low:

"I wouldn't look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to

dealing with the situation."

His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother's. And at once Mrs.

Duchemin knew--that _he_ knew that already close ties were developing

between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks in

emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of

those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right

intuitions. . . .

Tietjens said: "You heard!"

To the gloating, cruel tones that had asked:

"You know what that means?" Macmaster had answered clearly, but with the

snappy intonation of a reproving Don:

"Of course I know what it means. It's no discovery!" That was exactly

the right note. Tietjens--and Mrs. Duchemin too--could hear Mr.

Duchemin, invisible behind his rampart of blue spikes and silver, give

the answering snuffle of a reproved schoolboy. A hard-faced, small man,

in grey tweed that buttoned, collar-like, tight round his throat,

standing behind the invisible chair, gazed straight forward into

infinity.

Tietjens said to himself:

"By God! Parry! the Bermondsey light middle-weight! He's there to carry

Duchemin off if he becomes violent!"

During the quick look that Tietjens took round the table Mrs. Duchemin

gave, sinking lower in her chair, a short gasp of utter relief. Whatever

Macmaster was going to think of her, he thought now. He knew the worst!

It was settled, for good or ill. In a minute she would look round at

him.

Tietjens said:

"It's all right, Macmaster will be splendid. We had a friend up at

Cambridge with your husband's tendencies, and Macmaster could get him

through _any_ social occasion. . . . Besides, we're all gentlefolk

here!"

He had seen the Rev. Horsley and Mrs. Wannop both interested in their

plates. Of Miss Wannop he was not so certain. He had caught, bent

obviously on himself, from large, blue eyes, an appealing glance. He

said to himself: "She must be in the secret. She's appealing to me not

to show emotion and upset the apple-cart! It is a shame that she should

be here: a girl!" and into his answering glance he threw the message:

"It's all right as far as this end of the table is concerned."

But Mrs. Duchemin had felt come into herself a little stiffening of

morale. Macmaster by now knew the worst; Duchemin was quoting snuffingly

to him the hot licentiousness of the _Trimalchion_ of Petronius;

snuffing into Macmaster's ear. She caught the phrase: _Festinans, puer

calide_. . . . Duchemin, holding her wrist with the painful force of the

maniac, had translated it to her over and over again. . . . No doubt,

that too, this hateful man beside her would have guessed!

She said: "Of course we should be all gentlefolk here. One naturally

arranges that. . . ."

Tietjens began to say:

"Ah! But it isn't so easy to arrange nowadays. All sorts of bounders get

into all sorts of holies of holies!"

Mrs. Duchemin turned her back on him right in the middle of his

sentence. She devoured Macmaster's face with her eyes, in an infinite

sense of calm.

Macmaster four minutes before had been the only one to see the entrance,

from a small panelled door that had behind it another of green baize, of

the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, and following him a man whom Macmaster, too,

recognised at once as Parry, the ex-prize-fighter. It flashed through

his mind at once that this was an extraordinary conjunction. It flashed

through his mind, too, that it was extraordinary that anyone so

ecstatically handsome as Mrs. Duchemin's husband should not have earned

high preferment in a church always hungry for male beauty. Mr. Duchemin

was extremely tall, with a slight stoop of the proper clerical type. His

face was of alabaster; his grey hair, parted in the middle, fell

brilliantly on his high brows; his glance was quick, penetrating,

austere; his nose very hooked and chiselled. He was the exact man to

adorn a lofty and gorgeous fane, as Mrs. Duchemin was the exact woman to

consecrate an episcopal drawing-room. With his great wealth, scholarship

and tradition. . . . "Why then?" went through Macmaster's mind in a

swift pinprick of suspicion, "isn't he at least a dean?"