CHAPTER I

CHILDREN OF NO MAN’S LAND

CHILDREN

OF NO MAN’S LAND

BY

G. B. STERN

AUTHOR OF

‘PANTOMIME,’ ‘SEE-SAW,’ ‘TWOS AND THREES,’

‘GRAND CHAIN,’ ‘A MARRYING MAN’

[Illustration: DESORMAIS]

LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO

3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

_All Rights Reserved_

_First published 1919_

_Printed in Great Britain

by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_

TO GEOFFREY HOLDSWORTH

“What is love of one’s land?...

I don’t know very well.

It is something that sleeps for a year, for a day,

For a month, something that keeps

Very hidden and quiet and still,

And then takes

The quiet heart like a wave,

The quiet brain like a spell,

The quiet will

Like a tornado, and that shakes

The whole being and soul ...

Aye, the whole of the soul.”

FORD MADOX HUEFFER

CHILDREN OF NO MAN’S LAND

PART I

CHAPTER I

I

“Let her go,” said Ferdinand Marcus. “I want my daughter to have a good

time.”

Aunt Stella assented. “Why shouldn’t she go? Anything for a change, when

one is twenty-three. Anything for excitement. And she can come to no

harm. Besides, Richard is invited too.”

“No harm,” chirruped her brother. “Liberty for the young! We have missed

enough, Stella, you and I, through old-fashioned prejudices.”

Old Hermann Marcus did not join in the conversation. He sat heavy and

immovable; his faded blue eyes, under their fierce ridges, travelling

contemptuously from his son to his daughter. Weaklings! short-sighted

weaklings, with their foolish chatter of “liberty for the young.” Was

this the way to bring up one’s children, with authority trailing like a

slack rope along the floor? What was to become of the old, if the young

were allowed to live for their own pleasure? Where would he be now,

he, Hermann Marcus, crippled with rheumatism, financially insolvent,

approaching his eightieth birthday, if Ferdinand and Stella had not been

trained, very carefully trained, to unquestioning obedience and duty?

He was impotent where Ferdinand’s children were concerned. His day of

authority was over. But—“a good time,” he muttered. “They will see....”

He called loudly to Stella to bring him at once the English papers, which

would not arrive at the Swiss hotel for fully an hour yet. Hermann Marcus

was perfectly aware of this.

II

“But everyone knows for a positive fact that Shakespeare is the greatest

writer of all. Why, who has ever heard of your Goethe, outside Germany?”

“And who has ever read your Shakespeare, inside England?” Lothar

retorted, with the horrid glee of a person who has made a remark with

an unpleasant amount of truth in it. His spectacles gleamed, two round,

triumphant dazzles in the sunset which streamed through the closed

windows of his study.

Richard repeated stubbornly, but without conviction: “Everyone knows

Shakespeare is the greatest writer.” His defence of Shakespeare was

strictly impersonal; he had no vehement sentiments on the subject; the

whole argument bored him. But on principle, when a German boy asserts

that Goethe is greater than Shakespeare, the English boy can have no

option but to make reply that Shakespeare is greater than Goethe.

“It shall be decided one day,” Lothar grimaced ominously.

And Richard had an inspiration. “Shakespeare has been translated into

German, because you jolly well couldn’t get on without him. I’ve never

seen Goethe properly put into English. That about proves I’m right.”

“There was no Englander great enough to translate a man so great. I do

not say,” Lothar explained conscientiously, “that I have not of the works

of your Shakespeare also with much benefit an exhaustive study made. Let

us converse on them. Do you then prefer Macbess or Otello?”

“Macbeth,” Richard muttered at a venture, and walked restlessly to the

window; fidgeted with the beaded blind-cord, to signify that he expected

better entertainment from his host than this irritating controversy. He

wished his sister had not been so quick to accept Mrs Koch’s invitation

to visit her at Dorzheim. To be dragged away in the middle of the extra

July of summer holiday which an epidemic of scarlet fever at school had

procured him; dragged away from a jolly hotel in Switzerland, to this

stupid, little, dead-and-alive German town; finally, to be expected to

chum up with Lothar von Relling, merely because they were “of the same

age”—it was a bit thick!

Deb could quite well have come alone, if this was her idea of enjoyment.

He wondered why Lothar was crossing and uncrossing his legs in their

bright striped stockings, and breathing heavily as though about to

unburden himself of a confidence.

“Have you a heart’s dearest, you?”

Richard Marcus was fifteen. A normal boy, muscular, pugnacious, taciturn.

The question drew from him a shout of laughter.

“What should I do with one, if I had it?”

“You English boys are babies all,” Lothar said, unexpectedly scornful.

“You play always your stupid games, rather than write verses to the

loved one. Ach, but she ...” he whirled his hearer along an incoherent

tide of description: “a wonder, a dream, a night of scented dusk,” that

mysterious goddess who seemed but recently to have emerged from the

nebulous glamour which encircles all womanhood for the Teuton yet in his

teens.

“Are you engaged to her?” yawned Richard, who by the merest fraction

preferred these confidences to the Goethe-Shakespeare debate.

“Betrothed? But not possible. I am already betrothed to Frieda-Marie.

Our peoples betrothed us a great many years ago. It is wearisome, but——”

Lothar shrugged his plump shoulders—“it is suitable. We are of one faith.

Her father, the Herr Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe, will withdraw his sanction if

he outfinds anything of my faithlessness.”

Richard swung round and surveyed with disfavour Lothar’s vague features

under their bush of upstanding tow. “Do you mean there’s really anything

for him to find out about you and the other girl, or are you swanking?”

“Only that I schwärm—I swarm with love for her. I watch in the streets,

and once I drop at her feet a fair rose costing fifty pfennig. She knows

nothing of my passion. But what goes me that on? It is more beautiful,

more ideal, so.” Suddenly he slid from lofty altitudes. “One has also

one’s emotions away from these. One is flesh. One is not altogether

air....” He spattered a few inky hints regarding the demands of his

adolescence. From a pink, chubby face his spectacles glittered knowingly,

inviting his companion to betrayal of like perplexities. But Richard

preserved that admirable stolidity for which his looks were so well

adapted: powerful jaw, big nose, dark head well thrust forward from

the short neck and broad shoulders; and, rather obscured by all these

pugnacities, a pair of pleasant, humorous light-grey eyes, from which

now, however, he had chased all expression save of blank idiocy. Not

likely he would give himself away to Master Lothar! Richard wondered if

there were a German boy good form enough to know that Lothar was bad

form, and to ostracize him as such. Unlikely; the fellow would hardly be

as cocksure if he had once been put in his place. All this blither about

Goethe and girls.... “Do you mean to marry this person?” interrupting

the other’s critical appraisement of a lady professionally well-known in

Dorzheim, appraisement to which Lothar had essayed to impart the personal

note.

“I have explained,” patiently, “I am plighted to Frieda-Marie. She is

a good Christian maiden. She learns cooking. She has a respectable

gift-along. Why do you smile?”

“Your English is so funny.”

“I have not yet had the pleasure of hearing your German,” politely

sarcastic. For Richard had felt in honour bound not to reveal to Dorzheim

that his knowledge of their tongue, though faulty, was fluent enough, as

was natural in a grandson of Hermann Marcus of Munich.

“I will take me a wife when I am twenty-seven. First must I be through

with my examinations. Then do I perform my military service. You also?

No?”

“Oh, we don’t have to fag with that sort of thing in England.”

“It is for the Fatherland. Also one is attractive in uniform. One dashes.

One lives. Me, I must betray a several of maidens before I can afford one

to keep.”

Richard scowled discouragement. “You’re not sixteen yet, are you?”

“At sixteen one is no longer a child. One cannot go mad....” To Richard’s

horror, Lothar suddenly buried has head in his arms, shuddering

violently.... “That I were dead! that I were dead!” he moaned.

The English boy stared at him. These outbursts of confidence, alternately

sentimental and morbid, seemed to emphasize his growing sense of having

been brought into a world completely alien. He sent a swift thought

to his chum, Greville Dunne, now on board a training-ship; wished old

Greville were here. Foreign kids were unbalanced, hysterical; they read

too much; brooded too much; talked too much.... Lothar had no right to

unburden himself to a stranger, of different nationality and hostile

outlook. Richard began to be afraid he had given an impression of too

ready sympathy.

Lothar raised his head and announced solemnly: “Swine-hound that I am,

believe that I preserve a reverence supreme for my Loved One!” His eyes

were swamped in facile tears. “I have no father,” he added, after an

uncomfortable pause; “and you, you have no mother, I hear.”

“Oh, that’s all right, thanks,” Richard’s shoulders were expressive of

sullen embarrassment. “Got a stamp collection?”

“I will show you my botany-box.” And Lothar littered the blue and red

check table-cloth with his specimens of pressed leaves and flowers,

neatly labelled. Presently he reverted to the subject of Frieda-Marie.

It appeared as though he were trying unsuccessfully to tell Richard

something....

“Pity that she should be so blonde. The Ideal One is a brunette. She is a

witch; a black velvet pansy. Hark, I will describe her to you.”

A full five minutes elapsed, however, before Richard awoke to the fact

that the concrete sum of Lothar’s lyrical ecstasies made up a personality

closely resembling that of his sister.

“Good Lord! Deb!”

“But at last! Since an hour have I tried to reach your understanding.”

“Couldn’t you say straight out that you meant Deb, instead of making an

inventory of her?”

This was too great a strain on Lothar’s English. “She was mine from the

first moment I saw her feet on the pavement my window outside press,” he

breathed.

“Look here—do you want to marry Deb?”

“You come me always with that!” peevishly. “I tell you I am betrothed to

Frieda-Marie. I cannot marry your sister. She is only a Jewess.”

“I like your cheek! Then what’s the good of you?”

“I can worship her.”

“Umph!”

“You also, you admire her?”

“She’s not so dusty.”

Again Lothar had to confess himself vanquished. He lugged down an

English-German dictionary from the shelf, and conscientiously looked up

‘dusty.’

“Nicht so staubig—ach!... Hark, there is Mama who calls us. Doubtless you

are fetched to go home.”

They ran down the polished stairs, Richard grinning at the notion of

being “fetched.”

In the drawing-room Felix Koch was apologizing profusely for his wife’s

absence, while Frau von Relling plied him with coffee and cream cakes and

_delicatessen_ sandwiches.

“You will be welcome whenever you come again to play with my Lothar,”

she condescended to Richard. Then sighed heavily: “My big boy!” and

took Lothar’s hand and fondled it. Lothar received the caress with an

expression which was decorously demure. “Smug little humbug!” reflected

Richard.

“Indeed, Herr Koch, it is well that the dear Marianna did not call

to-day, as it is possible that your honoured Frau Mama might be drinking

coffee with me presently.”

“So?” Koch nodded gloomily. His wife and his mother were not on speaking

terms; and all the town knew why. He had committed an unprecedented folly

in marrying the pretty daughter of a shopkeeper in Bingen.

Frau von Relling continued: “Doubtless the dear Marianna is busy with

the entertainment of the little English Miss.” Then eagerly: “Has she

received any offers yet?”

“She has only been with us three days,” Koch replied. And added with

a mysterious inflection, “But Salzmann has sent to Frankfurt for his

brother.”

“And how many bouquets?”

“Eleven. And two chocolate-boxes.”

“Has Herr Sigismund Koch shown her a little attention?”

The man bent upon his questioner a look of displeasure. “Sigismund knows

well he has no concern with any young Miss who is my guest!”

For, though partners in the same bank, he and his younger brother were

not on speaking terms. They had quarrelled violently a little while

before the death of their father, Emil Koch, founder of the bank, who,

with more sense of humour than can usually be accredited to his nation,

had left it to them as a joint and firmly-knit inheritance.

Frau von Relling hastened to cover up her intentional piece of malice.

“Of course not, of course not. And the dear Marianna will be arranging a

Klatsch to introduce the beautiful Miss to Dorzheim?”

“Next Thursday; you will honour us——?”

“Will Wanda be present?” Frau von Relling played nervously with her son’s

fingers, which she still retained.

“I believe your Fräulein sister-in-law has been invited, but——”

“In that case——” Frau von Relling rose with dignity. She was not on

speaking terms with her sister-in-law: a question of a funeral-wreath....

Amid such complications did the society of Dorzheim walk precariously.

Felix gave a murmur which placed his sympathies definitely on the side of

Frau von Relling, and at the same time deplored these needless feuds in

an otherwise attached family. Then with Richard he took formal leave.

“We are the only Jews in Dorzheim with whom the von Rellings have

traffic,” he remarked, as they walked home through the little

manufacturing town. “But you will count now how many hats are raised to

me. The Kochs have ever been deeply respected even among the Christians

who bank with us.” He beamed with naïve pleasure at each salutation; and

looked sharply at Richard to see if the latter were indeed taking note.

Twilight in the streets; and the sky was a dark, thick blue. Crowds

of men were already jostling out of the workshops where the cutting,

polishing and setting of precious stones formed the principal industry

of Dorzheim. Swarthy giants from some legend of forest and charcoal and

red-glowing cavern, they did not immediately disperse, but stood about

muttering on the pavements, with a scowl for the passer-by who brushed

their group too closely. Somewhere a great brazen bell was clanging. It

was all rather unreal....

“We shall shortly have trouble with these fellows,” remarked the banker

to Richard. “Those infernal socialists with their talk——”

Richard was again attacked by a melancholy sense of complete isolation

from his surroundings. What was he doing here? He, Marcus, of the

Winborough fifth—in this gabled, German burgher town, grotesque to him as

an old steel-engraving in a musty folio. Ring of sombre fir-shaggy hills

tipped against the sky; ornamental bridges like toys across the river,

which ran alongside the one broad street; warm aroma of coffee from the

shops, blending with a mournful resinous fragrance that drifted down

with the wind from the woods; clusters of people round the small iron

tables dotted outside the restaurants; and behind the large open windows

of these, dim groups sprawling through a dense smoke-heavy atmosphere;

chatter and bellow and screech; gibberish which was yet disconcertingly

comprehensive to Richard. He revolted against his very understanding of

their language. They were not his people; Lothar, with his flaxen hair

and his botany-box and his repellant morbidity; this trotting little

man, counting the hats that were raised—ah, there was another! ... and

another! ... like clockwork, up went the hand to the brim.... Three

elongated boys in capes, whistling “Die Wacht am Rhein”—

“Lieb Vaterland, kannst ruhig sein,

Still steht und treu—”

No, these were not his people; this was not his land. Richard stiffened

himself against any insidious process of adaptation to circumstances.

Daisybanks, Lansdowne Terrace, London, England—that was his address, when

he was not at Winborough. Good enough for him. Switzerland was all right,

of course ... the hotel was under English management, and one just went

about with one’s own set, and behaved much as usual, except that there

were mountains. His spirit approved of a Continent moulded on sternly

British lines.

And then Deb had dragged him into—this!

A question stirred in his mind! Nationality—was it a fact of any

importance, then, to make so much difference when put to the test?...

He shoved the question away again. Why fuss? This sort of misery—for it

was misery—would not pursue him further than across the map of Germany.

Let him get back to his own folk; he was homesick, that was all. England

became above all desirable as a place where you were jolly and ordinary;

took things for granted; no need to think;—there was a quality of

purposeful concentration about these German people that oppressed Richard

uneasily; why were they so absorbed and ponderous over the minutest

detail?

Again Herr Koch jerked off his hat. “Did you see who saluted me? No other

than Sanitäts-Rath Maximilian Hauffe. He could quite well have pretended

not to see me; there was no lamp where he passed us. But I tell you the

Kochs are esteemed in Dorzheim. That was his daughter Frieda-Marie along

with him.”

Richard looked back, interested to catch a glimpse of Lothar’s betrothed.

She looked back at the same time.... A plump rosy face; swing and dangle

of two golden plaits.

Outside the door of their house they were joined by Mrs Koch and Deborah.

Felix inserted his latchkey and preceded them into the hall.

“Na, was Frau Ladenberg amiable? Did you like her?” he inquired of Deb.

“Not—not very much.”

“Not? But she is English; she is your countrywoman.”

With infinite pains and pride had this sole Englishwoman in Dorzheim

been excavated for the girl’s benefit. Deb felt acutely the reproach in

his tones. The meeting ought to have been at least as momentous as that

of Stanley and Livingstone in the desert. Deb herself, after only three

days spent in thickly Teutonic company, had been quite excited at the

prospect of drinking coffee with Herr Ladenberg’s wife from Manchester.

She recognized now how unreasonable she had been to have expected instant

affinity merely on the negative grounds that neither she nor Elly

Ladenberg happened to be German.

At the same moment, Marianna was enquiring of Richard: “Well, and have

you made a great friendship with Lothar von Relling?”

“No,” said Richard, who invariably curtailed speech to its utmost brevity.

“No? But you are almost of the same age!”

Richard grunted, and escaped to his room to dress for that meal which,

neither dinner, tea, nor supper, mingled the richness and biliousness of

all three.

Felix went into the sitting-room and flung himself on the sofa. Deb and

his wife followed him in. The girl went straight to the window, and

with some difficulty succeeded in opening it; the decent German window

protesting loudly, as it had every right to do. She leant out, cooling

her hot cheeks. She had behaved disgracefully that afternoon....

Marianna Koch glanced at her. Then at Felix. An elusive meanness

flickered from her narrow light-brown eyes; at the comers of her pretty,

fretful mouth. She was very unlike the accepted Saxon type of large

blonde beauty. There had been a scandalous babble of tongues in Dorzheim

when Felix Koch had first brought her back from a brief holiday he had

spent in Bingen. Little worldling that she was, she had yet contrived to

trap him in manner incongruously reminiscent of a Grimm’s fairy-tale. The

broad window above the ironmonger’s shop; the wistful maiden, youngest

of three sisters, who daily stationed herself there, hairbrush held in

her hand, a light-brown, feathery cloud surrounding her pale face.... He

was cured of his infatuation now, after two years’ subjection, but could

still recall it with painful vividness at a thought flung backwards to

that window and the magic it had framed for him. Marianna! ... but she

was common and petty, and snobbish and quarrelsome; she had married him

solely because he was a banker, a fine gentleman. He had a suspicion

lately that she would like to be rid of him; yes, now, when he had

barely placated a bitterly offended mother; when, with his reputation

for sobriety and prudence, he had made a fool of himself in sight of all

Dorzheim. If it had been Sigismund!... It was a constant smart to the

vanity of Felix that Sigismund was still highly eligible, whereas he——

He was not even sure that his wife was not deceiving him.

In which case Sigismund would laugh. And Herr Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe would

perhaps omit to raise his hat as punctiliously.

Koch’s eyes wandered to Deb, in her bluish lilac crêpe dress; harem

skirt that clung as though in well-cut adoration ... the nape of her

neck showed astoundingly bare; in Dorzheim it was considered smart to

wear something called a jabot, and to prop the chin and ears with a

high erection of lace and whalebone; in Dorzheim the dressmakers were

commissioned to destroy line, not create it—as in the case of a harem

skirt. She was obviously not quite “good class” this girl; probably

some sort of an artist, though he had gathered her people were wealthy.

“These English!”—one could account for everything by that contemptuous

phrase.... And Deb had immensely gratified him that morning at breakfast

by remarking: “One might easily mistake you for an Englishman, Herr

Koch!”... Yes, he liked the girl; was quite glad that Marianna had taken

a fancy to her recently in Switzerland, and had insisted on bringing her

back for a visit. It relieved the tension of their constant bickering;

and it gave him a hearer on whom to impress his status in Dorzheim. Then,

too, one acquired importance in the little town, when one had guests

from England. Relations from Frankfurt, yes—but guests from England were

almost unheard of.

And nobody need know that Marianna had practically run away from him to

Montreux. She was anæmic, needed a holiday; that sufficed for public

explanation. He had recalled her with a promise of a fur coat. He had not

yet given her the fur coat.

“I can smell Rindbraten,” remarked Felix appreciatively, from the sofa.

“Do we have it for evening-eating? Stuffed? There was some left over from

mid-day, was there not? I trust, Marianchen, that you made it clear to

Emma it was not for her?”

He was smitten with gloom at the thought of the servant browsing over

_his_ Rindbraten. His wife reassured him. And she added, with slow

emphasis: “I tried on some sable coats at Elly Ladenberg’s. Her husband

had sent for sample styles from Köln. There was one—four thousand marks.

It hung well on me. The Ladenberg has already chosen another with a fox

collar. Mine has a brocade lining.”

“Yours?” Felix chaffed her. “Ei, ei, how quickly we go. It is now summer.”

“That is the time for a good bargain in fur.”

“Four thousand marks is too much.”

“Not for the best.”

“My mother says——”

“Your mother hates me. She would like to see me wear cotton in a

snowstorm. She would die of spite if she saw the Frau Sanitäts-Rath

Maximilian Hauffe envying me my beautiful sables.”

She paused to see if her last artful thrust at his besetting weakness had

at all moved her husband. He thundered, to hide his uneasiness: “I tell

you, four thousand marks is too much. You are beggaring me. _You!_”

The woman’s eyes grew larger and brighter. She smiled at Deb, who was

trying to slip from the room unperceived. “But where are you going?

Felix, the child is running away because she thinks we are quarrelling.”

Felix laughed uproariously at the notion.

“I was going to lie down before supper,” Deb explained quickly. “I’m

rather tired.”

“There is no couch in your room. Here, you had better to rest beside

my husband. Make room for her then, clumsy bear!” She laughed a sharp

little trill. “How shocked she is! Heavens, what have I asked her to do?

Surely with a respectable old married man.... Come, Felix, be a little

gallant. Our English Miss is afraid of you. Na, she was bold enough this

afternoon, having a fine flirt with Meester von Sittart.”

“She thinks you are another jealous Huldah von Sittart, Marianna. Did

that old woman make ugly grimaces at you, Fräulein Deb? We must be

careful where there are handsome husbands from America. But with old

Felix Koch—Come, I will be asleep, that will put you at your ease.” He

rolled over with his face to the wall, and affected to snore loudly.

Marianna applauded the performance. Her teasing eyes informed Deb that

she was a stiff little fool, putting a wholly idiotic construction on

what was mere playful friendliness on the part of her host and hostess.

So Deb lay down beside Felix.... It struck her suddenly that the wife

has the supreme advantage over the girl in almost any conjunction of

circumstances.

Frau Koch moved to the door. “Sleep well, dear children!” It was uttered

in the mock-solemn spirit of a benison. But Deb was aware of malice in

the woman’s stealthy little smile; more than malice—enmity. To her or

to Felix?—She would have sprung upright again, save for the feeling

that in lying down she had committed herself ... to what, she did not

know. But she did know very definitely, as the door closed gently behind

Marianna, that she had made a mistake, and that it was useless to try

and repair it. Deb was to suffer all her life from an illusion that one

step backward would not avail her after one step forward had already been

taken.

... Felix had his back still turned to her. But he had abandoned the

farcical pretence of snoring. They could not lie much longer in this

absurd silence, back to back, solemn, motionless.... Deb began to laugh

softly. It was really rather ridiculous, except—except that Marianna’s

face had frightened her.

Should she jump up now—and run? No, that would give alarming point to the

situation. Probably Felix had no intentions——

He turned sharply, pulled her round towards him, kissed her and kissed

her. And he was thinking: “If this was what Marianna wanted, then there

and there—and there——” The girl did not matter. She was not like a

German Mädchen who has been nicely brought up and carefully guarded for

matrimony. Her people had let her come here, to complete strangers.

And she wore collarless blouses and had flirted conspicuously with von

Sittart.

... Her throat—how long and thick and dusky white ... what a firm column

for that three-cornered, weary little face.

Marianna was, he felt sure, just outside the closed door. What was her

motive in all this? That when it came to it, when he found her out,

she should also have an accusing finger to point?—“Can you wonder,

my friends? First he does not give me a fur coat, and then he makes

shameless love to the guest under my roof....”

Felix Koch was pale with anger and humiliation. While he had joined

his wife in chaffing Deb, he had been inclined to shout aloud: “Who

is the man? Who is he? What do you think I am made of, forcing this

upon me?—After you have been six weeks in Switzerland away from me—and

yesterday you were tired after the journey—too tired! ... and I—and I....

Now, this insult!”

He had controlled himself, curious to see what she would do next. He was

not going to control himself any more. Let Marianna, if indeed she stood

poised on tiptoe, just outside, her light eyes flickering spitefully, let

Marianna realize how little he cared for her rebuffs, last night, and

the night before.... Fur coats? Wives did not get fur coats unless they

earned them better.

Deb did not try to break away from the cramping pressure of his arms. She

recognized that she had been to blame; had been—careless, somewhere, she

was not quite sure where. But she too had now a dim sense of Marianna’s

object in inviting her, of Marianna’s pinched smile outside the door.

... This man was rather handsome, viewed from the close range which

usually brings distortion of features. She tried to laugh under his

stinging kisses, to pick up the spirit of burlesque where they had

dropped it.... “Pretty child,” he muttered; “pretty neck—no wonder she

leaves it always unclothed.”

“Herr Koch—you promised—I said I wanted to rest——”

“Felix, then.”

“I want to rest, Felix——” She took advantage of a momentary relaxation of

his arms, to snuggle down into the cushions, as a baby might; to close

her eyes with a semblance of trustful drowsiness ... her lips were half

parted, her breathing regular; one curled-up fist pushed against her

cheek. At any moment she might just drop off to sleep....

Would he leave her alone now? Was she safe under this guise of silly,

innocent confidence? Any sophisticated recognition of his attempt to

start a surreptitious affair with her, would have been fatal.

Felix Koch, like all South Germans, was a sentimentalist. Church spires

by moonlight, or a slumbering infant, were unfailing bell-pulls to his

softer nature. Gently he touched her hair with his fingers. “Sleep then,

pretty child, there is nothing to fear,” he murmured, profoundly moved

by this self-evidence of the rake’s reverence for purity. It was all the

easier to assume, since he did not really care for Deb.

Deb thought: “And so one must love a man, to like being kissed by him?...

Or is it only because he is married that I can’t like it?”

She had been in love, of course; not the conventional once and once only,

but twice. A glamorous episode with a young Territorial Captain, Con

Rothenburg, eldest son of her father’s partner. And later on, a man whose

age doubled hers: the doctor who had taken over the practice while the

Marcus’ old family practitioner went round the world for his health. This

was a less complete attachment than with Con, for Doctor Steele was not

even aware of her tremulous passion; nor with what conscientious honesty

she prevented herself from deliberately seeking to contract the ailments

which would have ensured his attendance. It had occurred to her, while

his hand was on her racing pulse: “How easy it would be for him just to

bend down and kiss me. So easy that it doesn’t seem fair he shouldn’t.

So easy—he could forget it at once; and I should always remember....”

But Doctor Steele had relinquished his locum tenency, and disappeared,

leaving Deb with no such memory.

There had been other—minor adventures. A great many. So irresistibly

did she attract them, that one might fancy her reincarnated from some

famous harlot of old history. And besides, she involuntarily invited them

because she was so plainly on the look-out. Yet she was on the look-out

not for minor adventures, but for the big thing; the thing to engross her

existence; to dwarf its lesser trickiness; to drench her quick nervous

soul with peace; provide employment for her restless, life-bitten brain.

If Deb had been an artist, the big thing had been easier to find. She was

an artist, but in appreciation only; non-creative. Or if Deb had been

religious.... Religion attacked her imagination as little as the winged

Victory, rushing like wind down the steps of the Louvre. She knew that

the masterpiece was there; she had not seen it herself; others had seen

it; she hoped one day to see it. Meanwhile—she could do without it, and

not feel the loss.

So, a pilgrim without a staff, she had roamed....

* * * * *

But this special incident ought not to have occurred. Instinct told her

there was a certain type of girl to whom it could not have occurred.

She had always hoped she was this girl; sheathed in a sort of hard,

transparent whiteness from which anything that was not the one big

thing would infallibly slide off, without giving the occupant of this

convenient armour the slightest trouble.

Of late, however, she had been growing suspicious of her powers to ward

off an accumulation of petty experiences.

Experiences?—but she wanted experience.

She tried to trace back the initial carelessness—yes, carelessness was

the only word for it—which had led to her present plight. She ought to

have gone to her room to lie down, in spite of Marianna’s sneers. Yet

that would have seemed a ridiculous affectation of prudery, especially

as that very afternoon.... Ah, here the fault, then!... But she had not

really flirted with Ralph von Sittart; the ladies of Dorzheim had misread

that spurt of revolt which had suddenly lit her to flame; revolt from

their disapproval of her; revolt from the stiff chairs on which each one

stiffly sat, with her stiff neck upheld in whalebone.... Rather than

make one of them, she had preferred to squat upon the bearskin in front

of the tall, white, frozen stove; bend down her unfettered neck to rub

her cheek caressingly against the animal’s beautiful head—Oh, it had

been an exhibition of bad manners, certainly; even cheap bad manners

... bearskins and tigerskins were a bohemianism which London had long

discarded; but these German women could be shocked by nothing more subtle

than the effronteries of five seasons ago. And Deb had to shock them,

in the impish mood which possessed her, for which Elly Ladenberg (_née_

Harrison) was perhaps primarily responsible. “You haven’t brought your

needle-work?” “I haven’t got any,” laughed Deb. “Then you have finished

your present for Frau Koch?” in a discreet undertone. Deb learnt that it

was the sacred custom here for any young girl staying with a married

lady, to stitch a most elaborate piece of embroidery as a thank-offering

for her hostess.

The information depressed her. She enquired if it would not be possible

to obtain the same effect of overpowering gratitude, by sending to an

expensive shop in London.

“You can see for yourself that it would not do. The sentiment would not

be the same.”

“Curse the sentiment,” murmured Deb mournfully, disappointed of an ally.

... The word was passed round that the English girl was, to say the least

of it, eccentric. Anything sensational might be expected of her.

Deb responded flauntingly to their expectations. Impossible anyway to

efface herself from the conspicuous position she occupied as “Frau Koch’s

visitor.” Guests were rare in Dorzheim; no jolly, casual happening, but

a solemn event which exacted a whole code of ceremonial. And even then

the visitors were usually somebody’s relations. But all of a sudden a

strange girl—from that mad country—even Frau Koch confessing to a minimum

of previous acquaintance.... “The poor Marianna tells me she had no idea

that the father would permit it.” “Odd, very odd. Has she money, do you

know?” “Oh, surely; her dresses are of the best material, even though

they are fashioned in a style ... dearest Frau Bergmann—_that skirt_!”

And then Ralph von Sittart had strolled into the party; handsome,

middle-aged German-American, who propped up his indolence by an elderly

wife’s income. And it had been a well-nigh hysterical relief for Deb to

hear English spoken.... Frau von Sittart’s face ... the whispers ... and

all the knitting-needles clacking....

She had behaved outrageously. But only under the goad of alert protest to

her entire personality, to her slightest act. She was in a false position

from the start. She should not have come. She had only come because of

John Thorpe’s mother and the ear-trumpet....

III

At this stage of her attempts to track consequences to their motive

lair, Deb became aware that her feet were being plagued by pins and

needles, and that she most desperately desired to wriggle. She judged

that it would be safe now to awake from slumber ... it must be a full

half-hour that she and Felix Koch were lying motionless side by side. She

opened her eyes, raised herself on one elbow, sighed deeply, as one who

yields up a pleasant dreamland. Then only did she perceive that all this

pantomime was unnecessary; her companion was quite peacefully asleep.

Deb slithered off the couch, tip-toed to the door, closed it soundlessly

behind her. No one was in the hall. She ran upstairs, and knocked at the

door of her brother’s room.

Richard, in his shirt-sleeves, was standing in front of the

looking-glass; and with a brush ferociously brandished in either hand,

was frustrating his hair’s racial inclination to curl.

“Are you dressing for supper? The others don’t, you know.”

“No reason for me to be a barbarian, if they are, is it?”

“When in Rome——”

“Do as the Romans _don’t_—if they’re Germans!”

“Richard—we had awful trouble at home sometimes to get you to dress in

the evenings.”

He grinned. “Had you? I shouldn’t be surprised if you had it again.”

After a pause, he enquired: “How long d’you want to stop here, Deb?”

“In Dorzheim? Don’t you like it?”

He considered a moment. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Lots of reasons. Can’t be bothered to think ’em all out.”

“We ought to stay a fortnight, now they’ve invited us, and we’ve come.”

“All right.”

Deb sat down on the bed. Immediately the great inflated pillow that acted

as eiderdown almost submerged her in its rising billows. She struck them

down passionately—

“Richard.”

“Um?”

“Don’t leave me alone with Felix Koch, if you can manage it....”

She was prepared for a brotherly outburst: “D’you mean to say the fellow

dared——” But Richard laid down his brushes, and took up his collar, with a

total absence of all emotion. “Oh, all right.”

CHAPTER II

I

A few days later, Felix Koch came back at an unwonted hour, between

dinner and supper, and beckoned his wife to a private conference.

Her luminous eyes, as she went, testified to a hope that the mystery

enveloped a fur cloak.

Presently Richard was summoned.

“Row about Lothar von Relling,” he explained nonchalantly to Deb

afterwards.

“Lothar?”

“Gloomy little beggar with the astonished hair who came here once to tea.

_You_ ought to know, Deb. The whole shindy concerns you. What have you

been up to?”

She reflected a moment before confession. Prudence prompted the query:

“What do they say I’ve been up to?”

Richard chuckled—then became instantly solemn. “This morning, Herr

Sanitäts-Rath Oberunterammergau von und zu hellofarau Maximilian Hauffe

called upon the honest and respected banker, Felix Koch, to complain

that his daughter Frieda-Marie had been slighted and insulted by said

daughter’s plighted husband-to-be, Lothar von Relling, who was seen two

evenings ago in the darkest portion of the Grünewald—need I go on?”

“N-no,” said Deb, “you needn’t go on with that part of it. Tell me what

the Kochs are saying?”

Richard dropped into a creditable imitation of Felix Koch:

“So I say with dignity to Herr Hauffe: ‘Herr Hauffe, tell me only this:

is your anger at what has occurred, is it because my guest is a Jewess?

because I myself am a Jew? If so, I regret, but I will not move in the

matter.’ And he replied, taking off his hat: ‘Herr Koch, let me now

assure you that there is no one in this town for whom I have a respect

more profound than for yourself; I am a broad-minded man, and had your

guest been a Christian lady, which she is not, I should have still

been obliged my present course in defence of my daughter’s honour to

pursue.’ At this I started up, and put on my hat, and gave him my hand in

friendship, and together we went to Frau von Relling. Ei, but Dorzheim

stared to see us arm-in-arm; twenty-seven Catholics alone took off their

hats to us——”

“Is there lots more about hats, Richard?”

“No, the rest is mostly about Lothar and you. The whole town is simply

ramping. You’re a goose, Deb. ’Tisn’t worth it. Why, he’s only six months

older than I am—and a German!”

“Do you suppose _I_ got any fun out of it?” she flared.

But it was niggardly to grudge something that lay within her power to

give. Or wasn’t it?... Chastity—the girl in white armour.... To give

so easily, though—she remembered Doctor Steele. And the gloomy little

boy had thirsted for that one kiss; too inarticulate to ask for it; too

comic, in his owl’s spectacles and low collar and vertical crest of

hair, to make a silently romantic plea, he just sat on the pile of logs

looking up at her in dazed sickly reverie, as she came towards him along

the misty blue road that meandered among the fir trees behind the town.

She understood that by lightly dropping her lips on to his, there, in

that scene, at that hour, she could give him an exquisite moment to carry

through the sentimental years into manhood. Why not, then? The girl who

withholds such chance gifts in her power, for the sake of what was called

her bloom, what was she, after all, but a miser?

Deb’s kiss was just an impulse of almsgiving. She did not shatter the

boy’s ecstasy by speech. Hardly pausing in her walk, she bent ... he had

a vision of her serious mouth and warmly glowing eyes ... and she went

swiftly on.

Frau Huldah von Sittart, who witnessed the idyll and reported on it,

could not have been expected to interpret its psychology correctly. But

to Richard, Deb tried to explain.... It was intolerable that he should

suppose she enjoyed kissing scrubby little schoolboys.

He listened, brows knitted severely: “But, my dear kid, that sort of

philanthropy is rather dangerous, isn’t it, where men in general are

concerned?”

“It’s just whether one is to be generous or stingy—oh, don’t you see? ...

to give what matters so little to me, and so tremendously much to them——”

“Make a habit of it, you’ll end by giving what means so much to you and

so precious little to them.”

Richard’s wisdom was a mere accident of repartee; and Deb did not smile;

she very rarely smiled; but her voice at all times held a certain clear

joyousness that was in startling contrast to her tired little face; her

voice was a child, years younger than her lips or her eyes. So that

Richard could only dimly suspect her of hidden laughter as she said: “I

esteem your judgment, but—you’re rather precocious, aren’t you?”

“Good Lord, no!” he shouted, appalled. “I’m sensible. You can’t walk

about dropping kisses.”

“Dropping magic,” she corrected him gravely. “And if I’m not the poorer,

and am quite sure they will be the richer....” She tilted her head

defiantly: “Richard, I’d rather be royal than—good!”

Richard pondered a moment over this. His sister watched him with eyes

that were half sorrowful, half impudent. Most people would have been

astonished that she could confide such feminine subtleties in a brother

eight years her junior. But she had never yet been disappointed by a

rebuff from Richard that was sheer scoffing schoolboy and no more. He

possessed certain qualities she lacked, of uncompromising fairness and

sanity. Also, he was shock-proof; an imperturbable Mahomet to whom all

mountains came, and were received in a take-it-for-granted spirit.

Sometimes Deb wondered just where, in all this mass of solidity, lay

buried that mysterious streak of understanding—kinship, perhaps—on which

she relied.

Now he said: “Well, I wouldn’t practise your theory of magic-dropping in

Dorzheim, if I were you. ’Tisn’t the right place for it. Too many Germans

about. Germans take things seriously.”

Richard was right. Dorzheim did take this act of Deb’s with great and

exceeding seriousness. They had primarily consulted Richard, and begged

him to reprimand his sister, in the Teuton spirit that the male, in all

emergencies, takes precedence.

The pastor and the schoolmaster and Frau von Relling and Herr

Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe and Huldah van Sittart and Felix Koch paid one

another a succession of formal calls. Then suddenly Frau von Relling

called no more upon the Kochs ... and small wonder, since Frieda-Marie

Hauffe had been promised an exceptionally large dowry, and it was sheer

madness for Lothar to have imperilled this. True, Wanda von Relling still

came to Marianna’s At Home day; but this was merely an act of defiance

towards old Frau Koch (not on speaking terms with Marianna) who had

condoled with Frau von Relling (not on speaking terms with Wanda) on her

affliction for which the younger Koch household was responsible. And

anyhow, all Dorzheim knew that Wanda had tried to get Sigismund Koch and

had failed; so naturally and out of spite, she would choose to continue

visiting at the house of Felix (not on speaking terms with Sigismund)....

But all this led back to ancient history; and Dorzheim, flushed and

garrulous, was not to be diverted from the delicious new scandal of the

daughter of Herr Sanitäts-Rath Hauffe insulted through the medium of the

English girl staying with the Felix Kochs. Well, and had she not flirted

with Ralph van Sittart as well? Half Dorzheim had seen her do it. The

other half of Dorzheim had noticed her drinking coffee with Sigismund

Koch; yes, actually setting her cap at him, the buck of the town, the

famous rake—Ach! and did Felix know?... “And what was she doing walking

alone in the woods at that hour of evening?” demanded Frau Huldah with

relish: “Do modest maidens walk without escort? Though to be sure I have

heard her say she is already twenty-three; doubtless she is in fear she

will be left sitting.” “And Lothar von Relling is a Protestant; has been

confirmed only half a year ago, with my Karl; that comes of it, then,

when one permits oneself to be intimate with a Jewish family; I could

have told Frau von Relling....”

The scandal threatened to broaden into religious controversy.

And Frieda-Marie, poor wormling, was, ach, inconsolable! Hitherto in

Dorzheim a betrothal was sacred. Others of our sons may follow Lothar

von Relling’s example of insubordination. To prevent which calamity,

Lothar was first expelled from the Gymnasium; then locked into his

bedroom; visited alternately by the pastor and the schoolmaster; finally,

banished to an aunt and uncle in Dresden. Lothar went, darkly uplifted

in his martyrdom; thrilling to a certain deathless memory; but wishing,

nevertheless, that before going he might have had a word or two with

Frieda-Marie, of whom he was very fond, and who was after all his

betrothed....

Still without a smile, Dorzheim settled down to see what Deb would do.

Deb did quite a lot. She was heady with her first draught of conspicuous

unpopularity. Vivid and defiant and a little frightened too. Never before

had she found herself so the centre of animated disapproval. And as none

of those who disapproved were of the people who mattered to her, she was

not hurt, nor cast down, but merely possessed by the mischievous wish to

do her worst on the propriety of Dorzheim; to avenge their harsh dealings

with inoffensive little Lothar von Relling; to yield them more and more

material for spiteful gossip. In brief, to earn their condemnation—these

folk, who would not, could not, laugh.

She had plenty of social opportunity for exploiting her histrionic

demon. For whatever Dorzheim’s private opinion of Deb, etiquette

decreed that Frau Koch’s guest should be shown “attention,” should

be feted and entertained. Dorzheim did its duty by Deb, and so

considered itself free to censure her. She was invited to attend

numerous afternoon coffee-parties, and one big dinner-party at which

lawyers and doctors and their wives formed the majority, and Felix

Koch was the only banker, as he gleefully informed Deb. She learnt

then for the first time the exact ladder of snobbery, of which the

apex is the nobility; thence on a descending scale to the military—the

professionals—bankers—merchants—clergy and schoolmasters—everybody

heedful of their head among the feet on the rung above; everybody

ignoring the humbler position of their own feet. Jews had their own

parallel ladder of snobbery; and actors and artists were not properly

considered on any ladder at all.

The great event of her stay was a Masonic entertainment, where she was

conspicuous in her dead-black crêpe-de-chine evening-dress. “An unmarried

girl in black—Gott in Himmel! And brunette too; had she been a blonde,

one might have forgiven her, though even then——” Most of the other ladies

wore afternoon toilet; and a few were in tartan blouses with the neck

ripped out, and dark skirts. At this party Deb made the acquaintance of

the owner of the largest jewel factory in Dorzheim; who the next day

formally conducted her over the premises; into the cavernous underground

workshops; dimness speckled by small shaded red lights; at each separate

table a man in tinted blinkers intent on a heap of precious stones that

he would sift carelessly through his huge hairy fingers, before selecting

one for his mysterious tools. None of these men looked up as their

employer and his party passed among them. Deb felt the sunless air choked

up with hatred and menace; the whirring of the thousand little machines

oppressed her; it was an evil place—and she remembered Koch’s allusion to

the Socialist influence and possible trouble....

Home-life did not exist for the Kochs; every evening, when no set form

of entertainment was offered, Felix and Marianna, Deb and Richard, sat

in the big restaurant in Lindenstrasse; sat there for two or three

hours, drinking coffee or syrups, eating sweet cloying cakes; while the

men roared their politics or slammed the domino-cubes on the table,

and slowly obliterated their womenfolk in clouds of foul smoke. The

group about the Kochs was always a large one, and included the younger

brothers who had been hastily sent for from neighbouring towns on rumour

of Deb’s enormous dowry. Deb was herself responsible for this rumour.

It was one of her first acts of devilry. Actually it procured her three

proposals ... her excited fancy multiplied these to a grotesque figure

out of all proportion to the truth. The trio of smug-correct young men,

overwhelming her with staccato bows and wired nosegays and compliments

which an intelligent child of ten might have disdained, made their

offers of marriage almost simultaneously, and were all three accepted,

with meek surprise that they should care for a _portionless_ damsel ...

at which they melted to the limpness of three candles left in a strong

sun, and melted out of Deb’s sight, and melted away from Dorzheim. And

two of them, because they had begun to love her, kept silence as to the

reason for their withdrawal. But Ludo Salzmann wrote vindictively to the

sister-in-law who had summoned him. And Deb, compelled in self-respect

to commit one villainy the more, accepted Sigismund Koch’s invitation to

drink tea with him in his rooms ... “English fashion—yes, I have dwelt

some time in England.”

He had been accidentally introduced to her at the Lodge entertainment.

And afterwards Felix remarked wrathfully, and hardly in the spirit of

Masonic or natural brotherhood: “You are not to speak to that fine

fellow. You understand? Not with my consent. Hundert-tausendteufel!—and

what did you think of him?”

“He’s very handsome,” demurely.

“Ach, he is a scoundrel! And do you know what they call him in the town,

with his brown curly beard and pale face? They call him Jesus Christus.

That’s a joke, you see.” Felix laughed uproariously, and Richard asked:

“Why is it a joke, sir?” “But can’t you see? He, my brother, is a _Jew_

... and they call him Jesus Christus!” “But Jesus Christ _was_ a Jew,”

argued Richard stolidly. Koch stared at him. The English had no sense of

humour. He turned the conversation from wit to politics: “What in your

opinion are the present aims of Mister Usskeess?” But Richard was unable

to fit the name to any English statesman of his knowledge, so did not

take up the challenge.

With all his reputation of a fascinating rake, Sigismund behaved at his

tea-party with exemplary decorum. Moreover, he had invited his mother

to be present. Deb liked him better than any one she had met since her

arrival in Germany.

“What are you doing in Dorzheim, for goodness’ sake, child?” This query

he put when he was escorting her home.

Deb laughed. “I wish I knew. I ran away from a scrape——”

“To find yourself in worse scrapes here?”

“You’ve ... heard something about me?”

His eyes twinkled. “Tongues wag in Dorzheim.”

“May—may I come to you about it ... if things get bad?” For in spite

of bravado, she was becoming apprehensive of the sly malice ever more

apparent in Marianna’s conversation; of the enmity piling up against her;

and of a vague, more impersonal enmity which, strangely, seemed to loom

behind.

“Heaven protect me—and you too!” exclaimed Sigismund in mock horror. “And

you suppose Dorzheim would regard me, me of all people, as a suitable

confessor for your sins?”

It was evident that Sigismund prided himself on his reputation as a

“dangerous man.”

“Where have you been this afternoon?” demanded Felix.

“To your brother’s flat. It’s—it’s—a very pretty flat, isn’t it?”

The banker grew livid. “I tell you, Fräulein Deb, he is trying to marry

you for your money.”

“He did not try anything of the sort!” indignantly. “And I have no money.

And your Frau Mama was there.”

“That was an arranged insult to me,” Marianna declared.

Marianna was enraged because her well-planned intentions with regard to

her husband and Deb had miscarried. Yet more enraged, because they had

not quite miscarried. Moreover, Sigismund happened to be the unknown

rival whom Felix suspected in the background. If this does not accord

with his care in providing an adequate chaperone for the little English

rebel who so indiscreetly accepted an invitation to his rooms, let it

be remembered that there is no element with whom the true rake deals

more circumspectly than with girlhood ... until he reaches the age when

chastity becomes desirable instead of formidable.

Marianna was further enraged because Felix had said he could not afford

visitors _and_ fur cloaks. The von Rellings had ceased to call. And now

Deb was drinking tea with her mother-in-law—and not even bothering to lie

about it.

And yet, when Richard proposed abruptly, at supper, that they ought to

be thinking of departure, both his host and hostess were unable to stem

themselves in mechanical utterance of their habitual code of protest and

renewed hospitality: “But certainly you must not dream of leaving us

yet—we shall not allow it—you have been with us so little time—it is such

a pleasure. No, no, indeed you must not go....”

II

The next day, most of the workmen in the factories went on strike. Those

who refused were attacked as blacklegs. The quaint, sunshiny streets were

hideous with brawling. And Deb could no longer with safety be allowed to

take her solitary walks, which were the only relief from the strain of

Marianna’s perpetual smiling hatred.

By degrees, her feverish mood of excitement evaporated entirely. She

began to dread stumbling over the traces of her own joyous misdemeanour.

Was there no careless youth in this tight, compressed little city of

envious wranglings and complicated feuds and bitter snobbery? It struck

her with a shock that Dorzheim seemed to contain no element between

subdued childhood and ambitious or self-satisfied matrimony.

Something ominous was afoot; she was no longer the centre of interest;

men came and went on short journeys; men held whispered conferences,

excluding their womenfolk. Deb felt ever more urgently the need for

departure. But she was waiting for a letter from her family to say when

they intended leaving Switzerland; and if she and Richard were to rejoin

them at Montreux, or at home in England. The letter was delayed; morning

after morning she expected it, and it did not come. It ought to have

contained money for the journey....

Dorzheim was no longer a funny little German town, inhabited mainly by

caricatures. It was a place of horror.... She was wakeful at nights; and

musing at her window, she saw, or thought she saw, long phantom trains

glide without shriek or rumble over the railway-lines some half-mile

distant. Black shapes of trains, no single window lit ... all night they

were creeping past in the darkness ... and the next night ... and the

next ... every time she rose from her bed to look again....

III

“Deb, you know Austria declared war on Servia the other day?”

“Yes. Well?”

“Seen the papers lately?”

“German papers!” scornfully; good enough for Germans, of course, but——

“Russia has joined Servia, and Germany has declared war on Russia,

and—we’re _in_ Germany. They say that France will have to join up with

Russia, and perhaps England with France. Then there’s Holland and Belgium

... doubtful if they can keep out....”

With a sound like the rush of bursting waters, Deb’s nightmare ceased

to be her private affair.... Bursting waters ... yes, a piece of

music—Ravel, was it? She had heard it before she left London—the

Sorcerer’s ignorant apprentice left alone with the magic broom ...

trickle of water that he summoned up ... torrents of water ...

multiplying devouring water ... it swamped the room and the corners of

the room and the street outside and the world beyond ... gleeful swirls

of water, unrelenting, irresistible, that pursued and flooded every inch

of dry ... every inch of dry ... the music roared deafeningly in her

head, drowning coherent thought.... Somebody had touched the broom....

She told Richard about the fantastic procession of trains.

“Troops, of course. Being hurried to the frontier. They must have

quenched all the lights. Didn’t want us to know they were prepared.”

“Us? You and me?”

“England, you ass!” Richard grinned at the idea of a nation plunged in

darkness for the benefit of himself and Deb. Deb—umph! he hunched his

shoulders, and stared at her moodily. He was responsible for Deb’s safety.

“You wouldn’t care to marry somebody here and settle down, I suppose? It

might come cheaper than hauling you along to England. It would be sport

getting through if I were alone....”

“I’m sorry. No, I’d rather not settle in Dorzheim for good. But we could

go home by two separate routes.”

“Job enough to find one route, I should say. Stop ragging, Deb; this

isn’t a joke.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured again, all womanhood abject before the gruff

commonsense of all manhood.

“That idiot Koch ought to have warned us. He must have known something.

We should have left here a week ago, when I suggested it.... If it’s

going to be a general flare-up, then one jolly well wants to be in one’s

own country, and not in somebody else’s!”

CHAPTER III

I

Patriotism, even more than bunting-deep, is largely a matter of habit.

Before August, nineteen-fourteen, Richard had rather taken his country

for granted. Now he awoke to an England that in return for years of

security and a lazy pleasure at the sight of so many red patches on the

school-map, suddenly exacted service—fighting service. Richard cursed

his age; welcomed any indication in the trend of things “out there” that

seemed to prophesy a minimum of three years’ activities. “If only the war

holds out till I can get to it!” He suffered from disturbing premonitions

of a peace signed and ratified just one day before his eighteenth

birthday.

War, as a pastime, a profession, an emotional outlet, fulfilled every

unspoken need of his temperament. He was a born pugilist; he did not mind

bodily discomfort; he was endowed with splendid physique; he kept cool in

emergencies; he had an infinite preference for male society; he was under

a firm impression that he was devoid of that cumbersome burden called

imagination; he lacked graceful accomplishments. What did the future hold

for a boy of such capacities and disqualifications? Nineteen-fourteen

came like an answer to an obstinate riddle.

And—confound it!—he was not yet sixteen.

Winborough had its Cadet Corps, which was a slight compensation for the

utter meaningless absurdity of Latin and Greek—dead studies in a time

of live history. At least, one was preparing for a later share in the

conflict. The ethics of war and peace did not bother him. War suited him,

as a definite opportunity for concerted action; whereas peace appeared

a condition infinitely more difficult, more scattered and involved and

hesitant. Richard approved of the indubitable simplicity of a nation at

war: every mind thinking alike; every effort directed towards the same

end; loyalty accepted as a predominant emotion, without need to fuss

over lesser problems of one’s personal age. He was animated as yet by

no special rancour towards the Germans.... Poor old Grandfather was a

German; rotten for him, these days! Pater was naturalized, so he was all

right (the yellow press was not circulated at Winborough).... The natural

conditions of war demanded an enemy, and the Germans would do as well as

anyone else; better, in fact; for they were powerful and well-prepared,

so that there was an excellent chance that hostilities would last till

Richard was eighteen——

He always came back to that.

The Dunnes were both in the navy; Greville, just about to join the Grand

Fleet on H.M.S. “Canada”; young Frank, still at Osborne. Richard spent

this Christmas of Greville’s final leave at Mrs Dunne’s jolly, crowded

cottage in Essex, on the outskirts of a little country town that was just

about the same size as Dorzheim.... He amused the Dunnes exceedingly by

his accounts of that place, and of his headlong scramble home with Deb.

It was something of an exploit to have been caught in enemy territory on

the eve of war: “If we had started for home two days later, we shouldn’t

have started at all; they’d have kept us there for weeks, probably,

and then goose-stepped us over the frontier under strict official

supervision.”

“Deb, not you,” Greville corrected. “I knew a chap of our age who was at

Dresden at the time, and they’ve interned him over there.”

“Lord, not really! That would have been a swizzle, missing all the fun,

tucked away with a lot of rotten Germans——”

“They’d be English, you ass, in a German internment camp.”

“M’yes, so they would. Still, one would be horribly out of it all; not

that Winborough’s much better”—reverting to the old grievance—“I wish I’d

plumped for the navy when you did.”

Mrs Dunne smiled rather wistfully. “I wonder if your father shares that

wish of yours, Richard.”

“Dunno. Shan’t see him till Easter, I expect. I was glad to be away these

hols. out of all the fuss of moving. We’ve let our house, you know.”

“You must have cheered when you got your hoof in England again,” Greville

remarked, reverting to the journey from Dorzheim.

But instead of the “You bet!” one might have expected, Richard was

silent.... He was still shy of remembering the rush of sentiment which

had attacked him on arrival at Folkestone that second of August, after

three chaotic days and nights through a continent that was screaming mad

with war.... God bless these stolid English porters—these English engines

that knew reliably whither they were bearing the train—this decent Sunday

evening quiet everywhere.... Richard dug his hands in his pockets and

snapped his lips firmly as he strode up the gangway of the boat; he was

neither lunatic nor poet, to shout aloud the pæan: “England, my England!”

that was tightening his throat and thrumming in his heart ... but he had

vowed, nevertheless, as he stepped on shore, that he would prove to the

utmost stretch of his powers a good citizen, a loyal patriot. He was

definitely grateful to his country at this moment for its mere existence.

The emotion had died to a vague shame at having made an exhibition of

himself, even with himself as the only witness. Yet now, as he bent

forward to turn the chestnuts roasting over the fire, and tossed a

burnt one on to the lap of Molly Dunne, Greville’s flapper cousin, he

experienced the kind of satisfaction with his surroundings which can best

be translated into a heartfelt grunt. They were the conventionally right

sort of people: Mrs Dunne, frail and pleasant; the two boys in their

blue and gold uniforms; Molly, tanned brown as her own tangle of hair—an

ugly kid, but good sport. A rough little terrier lay on the hearthrug;

everybody’s skates, caked from recent use, sprawled all over the shabby

chintz furniture; and the big holly-twined portrait of the late Commander

Dunne domineered the room from above the mantelpiece. Jolly things strewn

about, too; the model of a Chinese junk; bits of queer distorted coral

and stone and shell; fantastic weapons slung on the walls; photographs

of battleships and their crews—all these evidences of a sailor family,

and far lands, without in the least influencing the typically English

atmosphere of the room. If the Dunnes had settled in Japan or Bulawayo,

their apartments would still have been as—Dunne-ish. These curios—they

were just curios, neither more nor less; and as such, were given their

proper place.

Queer, reflected Richard, that before the spasm of homesick misery which

had thrust at him on a certain evening in the streets of Dorzheim, he had

never been consciously aware, as at present, of a state of well-being.

He supposed the contrast had for good or for evil awakened him; and

questioned glumly whether it were altogether convenient to be at the

mercy of perceptions as sharpened and sensitive.

If this were Dorzheim, then the chestnuts would be gingerbread; Greville

and Molly would be “betrothed” by arrangement of their elders; and

Richard would be proudly noting the fact that he was the one Jew with

whom the Dunnes had “traffic....”

Thank goodness, in England you could be a Jew, and hardly even know it....

II

Jews ... but the Marcus children were yearly allowed to hunt for hidden

Easter eggs in their garden. Dorothea, Ferdinand’s wife, had been the

mildest of Protestants, as he was the most tolerant of Israelites; and

there were times when bacon and matsas had appeared simultaneously upon

their table, not from any unadjusted clash of orthodoxy, but merely

that Ferdinand insisted on the British national breakfast, and Dorothea

had an eccentric liking for unleavened bread when it was “in season.”

Richard and Deb never learnt any Hebrew, till the approach of the boy’s

“Barmitzfa” rendered necessary in his case a certain knowledge of the

language, easily forgotten. The occasion itself struck him as mainly

remarkable for the amount of presents he received. Deb considered it

distinctly unfair that boys should be able to put in such a profitable

extra birthday; she tried to get quits in hard value, by accepting

as often as offered the post of bridesmaid, whether in church or in

synagogue. Both religious ceremonies made an equally profound impression

upon her—for an hour. The Marcuses did not keep up the Jewish feast-days

and holidays, and consequently the younger generation were rather hazy as

to their origin and significance. Ferdinand made a half-hearted effort to

keep them reminded of the most important of these, so that they should

not give offence to such of their friends and relatives as were strict

in observance, by a blank stare of ignorance on receiving salutation:

“Muzzeltoff!” They wished each other a Happy New Year quite impartially

in the autumn and on the first of January; and Christmas was a jovial

mingling of whatever customs were pleasantest of diverse creeds and

countries.

Dorothea and Ferdinand had agreed that whatever children might be born to

them, should make their own choice of religion, or no religion, when they

were old enough. Themselves had endured much from despotic parents, and

were eagerly and insistently broad-minded in their educational intentions.

Old Hermann Marcus had sent his son to England on business when the

lad was barely twenty—a shy, plump, sweet-faced little fellow, with

bright brown eyes round with admiration for England and England’s ways.

Peremptorily recalled to Bavaria after two years of Paradise, he summoned

all his courage, and—from a safe distance—defied the tyrant ... somewhat

tempering the grand effect of his rebellion by a diplomatic postscript

pointing out that in London he could be of more service to the firm than

in Munich; was rapidly gathering custom; and hoped in a few years to be

able to marry. His father replied tersely that he was a thickhead, had

always been a thickhead, would always be a thickhead, and was therefore

admirably adapted by nature to settle down in a nation of thickheads—“but

in that case, you will at once sever connection with my business.”

Ferdinand dutifully trotted back to Germany; spent several wretched

months in vain longings for his adopted country; and finally, not being

of that stuff of which heroes are made, sneaked back to his Hampstead

boarding-house, his tennis, his Sunday river-parties, and mysterious

November fogs, leaving his sister Stella to break the news to old Marcus.

The latter promptly cut his son out of his will. Ferdinand perseveringly

worked himself up to a sufficiently good position on the Stock Exchange

to be able, at the age of twenty-seven, to rescue Dorothea Ladislov from

an uncongenial home, and marry her romantically at the registrar’s. The

pretty, black-haired girl was the daughter of an aristocratic Czech

family, which had settled in England before she was born. She and

Ferdinand had fallen in love over their compared experiences of early

years heavy and burdensome with must-nots. Deb, directly she appeared

on the scene, flitted like a will-o’-the-wisp through dream-acres of

sunshiny freedom planned for her by her parents, entirely from contrast

with their own rigidly enclosed childhood. Not all the present bliss in

the world could quite compensate for those best lost years. Deb should

live carelessly radiant from the very beginning—“Not spoilt, Ferdie;

that’s different and hateful. She must learn reasonable manners and

control; obedience even. Only there needn’t be so very much to obey. And

as soon as she can think for herself——”

“She shall dance to her own melodies. Ja, ja, it will be pleasant to have

a happy little daughter, not checked, not afraid. And we must learn not

to be shocked at her, as we grow older. She shall know that we trust her.

Indeed, yes, it will be all right. When one is happy, one is also good.

Our parents never understood that.”

“It will be all right,” echoed Dorothea, her dark eyes tender and

luminous. “And we won’t grumble, or ask questions, will we? Papa was

always grumbling, and Mama asked so many questions.... Ferdie, it would

be terrible if we should forget, and wake up one morning to find we were

only ordinary parents.”

She gave a little gasp of horror. Her husband took her face between his

hands and kissed it....

They made quite a pretty hobby out of extraordinary parenthood.

Then, as if to remind them that the other species still existed, when

Deb was a wilful little creature of seven, came an imperious summons

from Ferdinand’s father, who most inopportunely had decided to forgive

them. The old thraldom held; they had no option but meekly to submit

to forgiveness. This necessitated a journey to Bavaria—a long stay in

Munich. Stella was so glad of them, so glad of this young, laughing

sister-in-law in the house. But Marcus defied all tradition of stern

grandfathers by refusing to succumb instantly to the pretty fearless ways

of his first grandchild; in fact, he disapproved so completely of Deb,

her looks, her English education, her unrebuked chatter, her clothes,

her nurse, her loose shower of black hair, of everything that was Deb’s,

that she was kept as much as possible out of his way. Sweet-natured and

subservient in all else, Ferdinand was implacable on the one point:

the old autocrat should not interfere with the happiness of one more

girl-child. Already he had doomed Stella to spinsterhood; he forbade

young men inside the house, and forbade Stella outside the house. One

conventional marriage arrangement he had made for her with the parents

of a sufficiently wealthy suitor, who, however, turned from Stella to a

larger dowry. No father could be expected to do more in the way of duty.

An arrangement which Stella had the temerity to make for herself, he

countered by the simple Teutonic method of locking her up, and shouting

at her till she was tired....

For Ferdinand, he had gained a slight respect. The boy had at least

managed to win some sort of commercial foothold. “What do you reckon to

make per annum, wass?” “About six hundred to a thousand.” Marcus was

distinctly impressed: “Ach! as little as that?” Ferdinand enquired after

the old firm. “The profits are excellent, sir; increasing yearly. Bah,

did you think we should go to pieces because you left us?” sarcastically.

The arrogant old merchant was lying. At Dorothea’s death he was thankful

for an excuse to let Stella go to England and take over the charge of

her brother’s household; thankful for an excuse to cut down expenses

... the business was rapidly running downhill. He warded off bankruptcy

for another eleven years—then came the irrevocable crash. Ferdinand,

who could not rid himself of the filial habit, immediately wrote and

offered his father a home with them. So Hermann Marcus, at the age of

seventy-seven, came to England, to “Daisybanks,” in Lansdowne Terrace. He

found himself instantly relegated to a very comfortable back-seat among

his children and grandchildren. Ferdie, though still timid in actual

converse with his father, yet proved stubbornly master in his own house;

and Stella had developed a brisk liveliness which was a true source of

grief to her father. The two now treated his attempts to bully them, with

a semi-humorous tolerance which the puzzled despot could only ascribe

to his loss of income—“Of course, if I were swollen with money,”—with

grim common-sense he resigned himself to dependence and rheumatism; it

comforted him to suppose his loss of authority was due to material and

not to moral causes.

As for the third generation, he continued to disapprove of Deb, but

liked Richard infinitely better. “You’ve no eyes for anyone but the

girl,” he would growl at Ferdinand. “To my two children I dispensed

equal affection.” Ferdinand smiled.... When he smiled he more than

ever resembled a cheerful little troll, his small ripe face a web of

intersecting spidery wrinkles. It was true that Deb was his darling

who could do no wrong; it was for Deb that he and Dorothea had built

up so many defiant immature plans—beautiful plans. Dorothea had died

for Richard’s life ... she would have loved the boy best, if she had

lived; Ferdie guessed it, and conscientiously tried to supply a double

quantity of favouritism. But Richard was undemonstrative; had started the

schoolboy attitude even while his nurse was hopefully striving against

odds to turn him into a pretty dear, a Fauntleroy. At three years old,

his voice was gruff, his knees scraped, his manner properly off-hand, his

tastes independent; he called ladies and gentlemen by their surnames,

without prefix, when they bent to caress “dear little Dickie.” It was

disconcerting to Ferdie’s kindly-disposed partners, misled by the white

suit and deep lace collar, to find heavy brows bent upon them, while they

were boomingly hailed as “Nash” and “Rothenburg.” Aunt Stella, wisely

accepting the inevitable, bought her nephew a couple of rough navy-blue

jerseys, a pair of sturdy boots, and a Newmarket overcoat; Nurse lamented

that this latter article was not in white bunny-fur—“Master Dickie looks

such a darling in white.” “He looks something between a burglar and a

prize-fighter in anything; for the future, Nurse, he had better be known

only as Richard.” “Oh, Madam, he’s but a baby yet!” Richard overheard,

and: “I’m but a baby yet,” he pleaded with dignity the next time his

father attempted to administer mild but well-deserved chastisement. From

sheer astonishment, Ferdie let him off.

And after that, he seemed to be always at school, or “knocking round

with other chaps.” He fell into frequent scrapes, and usually managed to

fall out of them again without extraneous assistance. He stolidly kept

a place in class a little above half-way, without spurts or lapses. His

philosophy was eminently suited to practical needs; he kept his ugliness

well brushed and tubbed and free from eccentricity, and his slow white

grin had a bewildering fascination.

“Our young Richard, my dear,” commented Aunt Stella to Deb, “reminds me

of the best quality of almond rock; you take it home, and prepare for a

treat, and then you find the sweetshop girl has forgotten to break it up

for you.” She spoke English perfectly, but with foreign vivacity and a

strong foreign accent. “Richard has never been broken up; he is unwieldy;

he cannot be put in the mouth.”

“But he _is_ of the best quality,” Deb quickly defended him; and was

silent for a moment, thinking about Richard. She adored the boy; was

content to know that she came first with him, though he rarely saw

her, and still more rarely spoke to her except in the ordinary way of

younger-brother teasing.

“Aunt Stella, Richard isn’t so stodgy as he likes to think he is,” she

said suddenly. “Do you know, twice I’ve seen him nearly hysterical.”

“My child, you’re dreaming.”

“I’m not. Once was because a wasp was circling over his plate, and

wouldn’t go away. And the other time was over a book.”

“Dear me, what book?”

But Deb was sorry now she had spoken so impulsively. Stella Marcus had a

disconcerting way of making every subject seem as a hollow ball with a

tinkle inside, to be lightly tossed, twice, thrice, and then let fall ...

to roll away.

“What book?”

“‘A Tale of Two Cities.’”

“Oh, every little boy cries over that.”

Deb had lied. It was not “The Tale of Two Cities,” but an account of the

Dreyfus case.

This first war Christmas of nineteen-fourteen, the Marcuses moved out

of their house in Lansdowne Terrace. The Stock Exchange was one of the

definite places where a man of German extraction could be made to feel

uncomfortable; very uncomfortable. Ferdinand Marcus did not complain of

the cold-shouldering he received. “It’s natural, Stella; every time I

open my mouth they are bound to be reminded.” But then some arbitrary

stockbroker accused him publicly of being a spy and a traitor ... and

Marcus quickly resigned his partnership in the firm of Nash, Rothenburg

and Marcus; and withdrew to live as best he might on his income. The

little man was hurt and sorrowful; he loved England passionately—he had

renounced Germany and chosen England from motives of pure love. Not all

the sons of Germany are as violently attached to the Fatherland as the

Fatherland would like to make out. Some among them have resented the

prison-wall system, the prevalent aggressive despotism that crushes

out their human ways and wishes. So they had come to England, and had

found a difference, and had stayed.... “Especially we Jews find the

difference,” Ferdinand explained to his sister, when he told her what

had occurred on the Exchange. “They don’t realize, over here, how the

Jews are still treated in Germany. And so they won’t believe that our

loyalty to a country adopted is not hypocrisy, and that we can be truly

glad if England wins the war. Stella, I wish they would believe it; I

wish they would.” His lips trembled with the pathos of a child who has

received an unmerited snubbing. “What ho! who cares?” he cried jerkily.

Ferdie took pride in his collection of English slang; a pride which dated

back to his enforced return to Germany, thirty-two years ago, with a few

typical samples of the period. Stella remembered how he had kept up his

forlorn spirits by use of such defiant oddments as “By Jingo,” “Here we

are again,” “It’s all my eye and Betty Martin,”—“What’s that?” thundered

his father, overhearing. Ferdie, blushing crimson, tried to explain that

Betty Martin was the name of a lady—and—and the rest was idiom. “You will

hold your mouth,” came the irritable edict....

Now—“What ho! who cares?” But he was miserable at the necessity for

leaving his home. He was at that ripe pippin stage of the late forties

when comfort, sentiment, and beaming good-humour make a happy blend of

man. His voice had loudened to a hearty geniality. When he sat in a

chair, he expanded and filled it out. On the anniversaries of Dorothea’s

death and of their wedding-day, he did not go to business, but put white

flowers under her portrait, and sobbed tenderly and unashamedly over the

memories aroused. He liked standing with his carving-knife at the head

of his own table, with a well-roasted joint in front of him. He liked

Christmas carols, and happy faces, and giving presents to his family,

and surprises, and Deb’s arms round his neck while she pleaded for some

special treat; and songs with a bloom of mellow sadness over them; and

a tame landscape with a sort of chubby frolic to it—cottage-children or

lambs in the sunshine; and well-worn slippers, and moonlight. If he had

continued to live in South Germany, he would no doubt have liked Schumann

and beer, and the Lorelei and charcoal-burners and Grimms’ Fairy-tales.

Perhaps these tastes still lingered on, unsuspected, in his system,

subservient to a solemn love for the river Thames; he had given his heart

to the Thames while he was still a stripling, and no Rhine-memories

could alter the preference. Richard certainly should go to Oxford;

Ferdie looked forward to visiting him there; to some mysterious festivity

entitled Commem.

Above all, perhaps, he loved the sight of lovers. Lovers such as he and

Dorothea had been: compounded of joy without ecstasy; sadness without

anguish; youthful, blushing lovers who held hands, and could be teased

and blessed.... And later—“the bride was given away by her father.”...

And later still: “—of a girl” ... who would soon learn to blow on his

watch and crow when it flew open.

For of course he was thinking of Deb.

No parental coercion in her case; no prudent selection by her elders. To

that he was pledged; had not he and Dorothea planned that Deb should seek

out her own true mate in her own good time, and bring him home?

And bring him home.... But home was “Daisybanks,” Lansdowne Terrace.

Ferdie’s pleasures were not of the scattered order, but had associated

themselves very closely with just that click to the gate, announcing

his home-coming every evening; just that virginia creeper, matting one

side of the house in red; and just that half-acre of garden at the back,

where the sweet-william and the canterbury bells repaid so gratefully his

careful watering every summer evening, though the hose still leaked at

that one faulty portion of rubber tubing.

“We shall have to tell them about that leak, Stella,” was all he found

courage to say, when his sister informed him that she had already found a

tenant to take over their expiring lease, and to buy the furniture.

Stella was the practical person of the family. Stella had beautiful

white teeth, and a shrill excitable voice. Because she rattled on

incessantly, she was regarded by her contemporaries as a wit; and her

popular entrance into a room was usually hailed uproariously, as though

the assembled company had been awaiting its jester. Her secret horror

was to be regarded as the traditional narrow-minded and intolerant old

maid; and to avert this she harped facetiously on the topic. She owned

a unique collection of the sort of cayenne “good tale” which can always

be relied upon to raise at least one blush and one protest; and so by

repartee and impromptu, she managed to achieve an _enfant terrible_

reputation, of which she was as vain as younger girls of their conquests.

Men called her “a sport,” and would often drop into a chair by her side,

with the latest chuckle from _Town Topics_ or the _Pink ’Un_—“Nothing

shocks Stella Marcus, you know!” ... and certainly, as far as anything

verbal was concerned, Stella fancied herself well in the van of the

New Movement. But she did not realize that lip-service was no longer

vassal to emancipation; and that: “Do shocking things, not say them all

day long,” was the up-to-date rendering of Kingsley’s advice; did not

realize, in fact, that for all her breathless determination, she was not

quite able to catch up with Deb’s generation.

Deb! ... of necessity she could not stand for a cipher in Stella’s

emotions; was bound to arouse love or hatred ... perhaps the conflict

was not yet finally decided. For Deb was not only the daughter she might

have borne—if Hermann Marcus had not interposed his bulky will between

Stella and Stella’s destiny, but also the girl she might have been—again

if Hermann had taken the same views of fatherhood as Ferdie. Out of the

non-fulfilment of Stella’s existence had arisen Deb’s present Paradise

of liberty; Stella herself perceived that: herself the ashes and Deb the

gaily-plumaged phœnix. Ferdie, as a father, needed the tragic example

afforded him by his elder sister unmarried—for marriage, when it is

obviously a vocation squandered, is as true tragedy as the squandering of

some great gift. Stella by nature had been just such a girl as Deb was

now.... And she did not hate Deb, nor use her authority to baulk the girl

where herself had been baulked. To her credit, she took instead a fierce,

yet half-amused pride in flaunting Deb’s emancipation from control,

before the grimly disapproving glare of Deb’s grandfather; it was revenge

by proxy.... “You prevented me from acting thus—and thus—and thus—You

have no power here. Look—and look again: this is what I should have been,

this is what I should have done. But all the spilt joy has been gathered

into another cup—and yours are no more the fingers at the handle!”...

So Stella’s long-shaped greenish eyes danced their wordless triumph at

her father; while Deb, innocent of interplay, was frankly and chummily

telling Ferdie about some successful impertinence of girlhood.

She did not hate Deb. She did not love her either—at least, not in any

tender lullaby ways. If she exulted in Deb’s happiness, promoted it

wherever possible, defended her against aggressive comment, nevertheless

she was curiously aware all the time that the relations between herself

and Deb had not reached completion; were hovering on the verge of

something fundamental and savage of either love or hatred—she did not

know. Meanwhile Deb, in her lordly childishness, was heartily fond of

Aunt Stel; and people remarked how nice it was that Miss Marcus and her

niece were almost like sisters together!

It was Stella who arranged that they should temporarily move into a

boarding-house till Mr Marcus was able to ascertain more exactly what

his very reduced income was likely to be. Some of his money was invested

abroad, and nobody knew how long the war would last.... It was best not

to enter upon a definite mode of living just now; and she did not care

about house-keeping in apartments; their own house, or nothing.

Montagu Hall in South Kensington would do very well; she and Deb were

each to have a small single room; Ferdinand shared a double bedroom with

his father, who required a certain amount of attention and nursing.

Richard was going to spend Christmas with the Dunnes, and therefore need

not be considered till the Easter holidays; and perhaps by then....

Stella Marcus, for all her caustic, jesting shrewdness, was not aware

that those who once acquire the boarding-house habit will continue to

say from season to season, from anniversary to anniversary, from year to

year: “Perhaps by then ...;” will never own that they have settled down

to unsettlement.

They drew up with all their baggage at about five o’clock on the second

of January. As the front door was opened to them, a voice from the hall

rasped out into the foggy air:

“—I like a dog to _be_ a dog, not—Shut that door, can’t you?... Oh, I

see——”

Three men were standing about in the hall, smoking. The owner of the rasp

also possessed a long domed head, crude pink where the hair had worn away

on top, and a face of the same nursery pink, ploughed by implacable lines

of opinion and ill-humour. He stopped his complaint, and stared with

curiosity at the newcomers passing through the hall.

CHAPTER IV

I

Deb knelt in front of the squat sturdy oil-stove with “CORA”

gold-lettered across its front, and began carefully to trickle a supply

of kerosene into the tank. Cora was essential to the evening’s enjoyment

of her three votaries; their friendship grouped itself round her

personality, and Aunt Stella, whose wit ran fatally in the direction of

punning, had even dared to nickname their union the Chorus.

Deb knelt, perplexed, musing, a vestal before the altar....

Cora was six weeks old, and was just losing her first fragrance when

Deb bought her.... “Does anyone want an oil-stove cheap?” she demanded,

rushing like tragedy upon the assembled company in the lounge of Montagu

Hall Hotel. “With saucepan, feeder, gallon-can, and all my illusions,

complete for five-and-tenpence?”

“My dear child!” cried Stella, “Cora has been yours for exactly half a

day.”

Deb sank down despairingly on the fender-seat. “Five-and-eightpence,”

she amended. Then, darkly: “To be bested by a rotten little piece of

ironmongery one foot by two——!”

“Does she smell?” Jenny Carew exclaimed impulsively; “oh, then something

must be wrong with her.” (They commented afterwards how queer it was that

never for an instant had Cora been “it” to any of them; always “her.”)

“Do let me take her to pieces for you, and put her together again. Do let

me, Miss Marcus. I haven’t had a thrill for ages. And if I fail I’ll buy

the fragments for Bobby to play with. Dolph, who did we last lend our

screw-driver to?”

Her husband, morose and bearded, was not interested in Cora. “Somebody

who hasn’t given it back.”

“All right, Mrs Carew; and you can have the bits for Bobby anyway, when

you’ve thrilled long enough. _I_ don’t want the little brute, whole or

in pieces; I would have thrown her out of the window, but just at that

moment she threw me out at the door. She certainly has character, and a

perfumed soul, and—and I was so happy, carrying her home in my arms this

morning.”

Someone spoke indolently from the deepest armchair at the best

corner of the fire. “Miss Marcus, I’ll buy your disillusion for

five-and-eightpence.”

“Will you? Will you really? Do you _want_ her?” Deb looked across at

him shyly. The soldier had not been long at Montagu Hall; rarely spoke,

except, lately, to Jenny; and generally did not give an impression that

he could be stimulated from a state of sunken lethargy for anybody on

earth.

“Not for myself. Heaven forbid! But my men are always shouting for more

stoves. Doubt if even Cora could throw half a hundred lusty fusiliers out

of their recreation room. I’ll have a look at her, if I may.”

He and Jenny and Deb went up to the second floor to inspect Cora.

“There she is already ...” mourned Deb, on the first floor landing.

Presently the three of them were standing with gaze fixed in fascinated

silence upon the object for purchase. There was no other illumination in

the room; Cora cast her spells in hard blocks of white light and black

shadow....

A boarding-house—an oil-stove—the soldier—Jenny Carew—it struck Deb from

what a bizarre rag-bag romance drew its patchwork pieces. She stole a

look at Burton Ames; he was old; possibly about forty-six; and had an

air of being neglected—neglectful: his khaki slouched over his chunky

shoulders; his hair, grizzled fawn, was disordered and ragged; the

corners of his eyes gathered into wrinkles. Not young, not successful,

not handsome, and married ... she had heard him mention a wife somewhere

in the West Country.... Preposterous that even for five swift seconds she

should have received an impression that the big thing might be hidden

here for her—

And then she saw that Jenny’s charming little gamin face was alive, and

warm, and flickering as firelight; roguery achase round her lips; tears

on her brown, blunt lashes; promise and mutiny and tenderness ... what

was the matter with Jenny? Slowly the soldier’s hand came out and closed

tightly round her arm, just above the elbow.... Deb, still watching,

almost winced at sight of the grip....

And then Ames let go; and flung himself down in the armchair close

at hand; and said, with the content of a man who unexpectedly finds

sanctuary: “Let’s stop up here. We don’t want other people. I’m sick of

the trail of other people littering the house. I like it up here.”

Yes—but where was the place for Deb, in Deb’s room?

She had no need of married people; took it for granted that the married

man cannot lead by splendid sun-beaten ways to finality; that a married

woman has ever the advantage over a maid, by won tranquillity of

experience. She had no need of these two. Then why did they leave it

lying about under her notice ... whatever it was they had found? The

atmosphere was neither amorous nor exotic; but Deb had an impression as

though the eternal man and woman had just come home; and that at any

moment he might commit some little commonplace act—slip off his coat and

hand it to Jenny to be mended, to make significant the fact that they

were man and woman come home—

—In her room. Petulantly she turned away from sight of Jenny’s face ...

could she reach the door and get out before Jenny’s lidded emotions

brimmed over into action?—Too late! ... Jenny’s arms were strangling Deb,

Jenny’s scorching lips were on Deb’s cheek and neck, Jenny’s half-sobbing

half-laughing runs and murmurings of incoherence were thrown upon the

unnatural silence ... “You darling—darling—darling! I’ve wanted to hug

you like this since the first night you crept into the lounge. You’re

such a beautiful little thing ... isn’t she? Isn’t she? Oh, I’m so happy

you’re here—do let’s all three be pals—I hate everyone else in this

beastly place ... little funny, sorrowful, creamy kid, I like you—I like

you——”

And all the while her eyes were on the soldier. And all this boundless

slippery exuberance was for the soldier—_at_ the soldier—it did not

matter upon what pretext it vented itself. Warmth and excitement to spare

for Deb too ... Deb felt this, or she would have torn herself away from

the embrace ... but Jenny was wholly unconscious that she was making

love to a man with a girl as the intermediary; she was no self-analyst.

But the soldier and Deb, in one look exchanged, established that mental

kinship which exists between those who see things alike introspectively

and from the outside view; with meaning duplicated and tripled; made

grotesque by circumstance or contrast; backwards from the future, and

twisted this way and that by imps of irony; kinship of those who can see

with the chill impersonality of gods on Olympus, and also with pointed

application to their own tiny scheme of things; restless subtle kinship

of those who dream and those who question.

And even as they silently hailed each other, he smiling a little under

his fair drawn eyebrows, and she very serious; hailed each other through

the froth and tumble of Jenny’s excited talk, the white light which

rayed the ceilings and walls of the room, was sucked into soft inky

chokiness....

“Little beast has gone out,” commented the soldier, in disrespectful

reference to Cora. “Light her again, and let’s sit round and be

comfortable.”

II

Of course Deb did not sell Cora.

Round Cora they hacked a sort of intimate privacy, with privileges for

their trio alone. Cora was their excuse, the ostentatious cause of their

withdrawal from the rest of the boarding-house: they were going to smoke

a cigarette with Cora; they were going to fry potatoes on Cora; Cora was

depressed, and needed the instalment of a fresh wick. Perhaps they rather

overdid Cora; but the intangible need binding them together needed to

solve itself into tangible expression. Cora, whether as an exaggerated

joke or a temperamental goddess, was ... convenient. “Are you coming home

to Cora to-night?” or “I saw Cora was lit, so I walked in!” Deb was High

Priestess of the Oil-can; Jenny, principal engineer and mechanic; and the

soldier serenely enjoyed results, as was typical of him.

And then Stella Marcus crystallized their dependence on the Cora

legend into a pun. They took up the nickname—“The Chorus meets

to-night!”—schoolgirlish methods of allusion ... but Jenny and the

soldier had been battered by realities, and welcomed the silliness of

their present relapse. And Deb, her soul a responsive barometer, sank

alternately to the soldier’s semi-humorous apathy of nothing-worth-while,

and leapt again to Jenny’s soaring irresponsibility.

The soldier had been thus labelled by Deb in the spirit of irony, when

he told her that he had been twenty-three years in the army, and was

not, as she had at first imagined, one of that gallant mushroom crop

raised by the call of war. He had been in India and South Africa, Aden,

Singapore, Malta and Gibraltar. It was difficult to conceive of anyone

less of the accepted military type: an individualist of the let-me-alone

order; an atheist; a keen but destructive logician; a hopelessly romantic

pessimist; he could not understand ready-made standards of conduct, of

honour, of conviviality; would not conform to the prevalent disposition

to flock together, pray together, stand or fall together. A soldier, even

a good soldier, without _esprit de corps_, was a deplorable spectacle;

hardly likely to prove an acquisition to the mess. His fellow-officers,

after a perplexed interval of acquaintance, were wont to pronounce him a

rum beast. To which, very occasionally, was made the resentful addition:

“Tries to be funny”—when Burton Ames unleashed his weary but mordant

form of humour. He was more popular with his men, who appreciated the

eccentric interest he was prone to waste on them singly and as persons,

however much he depreciated them collectively.

Fitly, he should have been apprenticed to some trade or profession which

combined the essentials of a sailor, an explorer, a landed proprietor,

a hermit and a carpenter. The career of Robinson Crusoe answered all

requisites to perfection....

Out of Deb’s little crowded room, made vivid by her own books and

pictures, he created for himself a sort of amateur desert island, away

from the gregarious herd in the smoking-room and lounge and drawing-room

downstairs. His own room was bare and uncomfortable, as only a soldier’s

can be who has many times shifted camp, and without a woman to look

after him. And Jenny’s larger room was liable to intrusions from Dolph

and Bobby. But in Deb’s room he hung curtains, and fiddled with Cora,

and altered furniture, and smoked his pipe, and examined books, and

listened to Deb’s wicked imitations of their fellow-boarders, and cooked

potatoes by his own home-made method of so many heart-beats to the

moment and so many moments to the boil, and confided in Deb and Jenny

his love of complete solitude, with ever-deepening tranquillity of mood.

Sometimes they all went out together on some impromptu ramble leading

to Hampstead Heath or a cinema or a coffee-stall. But usually they were

to be found in a careless group round Cora; Burton Ames lumbering in

the only armchair; one figure a-sprawl on the bed; the other flopped on

the floor; accommodation of the soldier’s huge inert limbs reducing to

nil the already limited space. A clammy February and bleak March urged a

desire to huddle, morally and actually. It was scarcely possible for one

of them to make a movement without brushing against one of the others....

Sometimes Dolph would meander into the room in funereal quest of his

wife; and sometimes Aunt Stella left her rubber of bridge to exchange a

few jokes with Major Ames. But for the most part they were tacitly left

alone, or unjustly alluded to as a “noisy gang” by Mr Gryce, whose room

was below theirs.

Ferdie Marcus was far too glad that Deb was occupied and amused to

question the propriety of this bedroom intimacy. If all had gone well, if

there had been no war, the poor child would have continued in possession

of her own sitting-room in “Daisybanks,” where she had formerly

received her friends—“ragged” with her friends was the mysterious term

applied—Ferdie had, of course, appropriated it to his own use: “Na, my

darling, did you have a good rag this evening?”... He gathered she was

having a “rag” now; it was natural to her age; but everything that Deb

did, he whittled to fit this assumption of nature—only natural that the

child should want to be out—only natural that the child should want to be

at home—“Leave them alone, Stella; Jenny Carew is always present; it is

only natural that Deb likes the company of young folk. Forty-six, is he?

All the better, then; a harmless fogey, almost as old as I am; it livens

him up to be with Deb and the pretty little Carew—tells them tales of war

... ho! ho! the new Othello. Only, Stella ... Papa need not know what is

going on—wass? He would not understand.”

* * * * *

Harmless? Certainly Burton Ames intended to be harmless. He did not

believe himself in love with either Deb or Jenny. He valued them for

their companionship, for their interest in himself, for their distinct

and unique personalities. They were a stimulating find among the

heterogeneous nomads of boarding-houses. He thought he liked them as

two charming boys. With his scorn for platitudes and for platitudinous

happenings, he underrated the dangers of propinquity. If one were careful

... his careful attitude was his undoing; it goaded Jenny and Deb out

of shelter. They knew well enough that from their reliance on—well, on

Cora, was sure to arise this equation of danger; they courted it, hunted

it, even. Ames was such an insistently masculine factor in that room; a

girl’s room. The very rough feel of his sleeve—Jenny knew ... every time

she moved.... And she was a restless creature, forever thrilling her

wings.

Jenny was just an atom of life-force, twinkling wildly, all the time,

in every direction; jostling to be noticed, petted, admired; a gyrating

dizzy mote in the sunslant; a savage little brown bundle of sexual

impulses. That was primarily Jenny. Funnily opposed to this, some of her

instincts and education and ways of speech were those of the typical

suburban sparrow: she was suspicious of people who could correctly

pronounce foreign languages; scoffed at what she called “highbrow stuff.”

What else was Jenny than this? Most of all, perhaps, an insatiable

mother; wearing herself out in service to anyone sick or bothered; proud

of these calls on her reputation for quick practical efficiency. Cooking,

bandaging, scrubbing—she had five brains on each hand. Her notion of

spoiling a beloved person was by virtue of touch ... a smother of kisses

... chair and cushions and fire ... healing contact of warm flesh upon

flesh ... cosseting ways that were all the realities she knew or cared

about. “That sort of rubbish never did anyone a bit of good!” she would

interrupt with almost shrewish impatience, when Deb and the soldier

were astray in realms ethical or fantastic. Life was four walls and a

roof—babies within, and the smell of dinner, and sacrifice, and somebody

crying, and body’s pain.... A little fun to be squeezed in at the cracks;

fun that was substantial, and never ethereal; fun that was crowds and

a pretty dress, a waltz, chocolates, a bottle of wine, a ride in a

motor-car....

And love was just touch again—for Jenny.

Jenny had no reserves and no discrimination; she could hastily damn a

stranger to perdition without any attempt at sane reasoning—and a week

later one would find her impenitently ensconced at the other extreme of

judgment. She was not actually beautiful: a small, round head, and a

small round chin; brown sloe eyes tilted at the outer comers; round the

eyes and mouth a crinkling resemblance, mirthful, mournful, to a baby

monkey; Bobby, her young son, had inherited this. But her eyebrows were

delicate umber sickles on the low white forehead. And she could look all

things in a second’s space of time....

Jenny had been given sordid tragedy for her lot on earth: poverty of the

shoddiest kind; illness that had brought her three times gaspingly close

to death. And she had come out well in the test ... better, perhaps, than

a schooled philosopher. Loyal to Dolph, competent in the bread-struggle,

plucky in the very extremities of pain. To Deb and the soldier she was a

sort of Complete Home on tour. He, especially, seemed to rely on her for

the daily wants of an ordinary man adrift and ill. For he was already a

victim of the war; shell-shock and neurasthenia had left him incompetent

for any more strenuous job than his present light ordnance duties. Jenny

rejoiced in the very egoism which brought him to her at all times with

some slow ponderous helplessness to confide: “Look here—what am I to

do?”—She gave prodigally, without thought of barter. And as between

her husband and Ames existed that casual masculine friendship which

blooms mainly on the borrowing and lending of matches, she was able,

under cover of this, to cosset him to her heart’s content; run into his

room with soup and custards when he was laid up, ask for his clothes to

patch and darn—all the little real things ... advantages of a married

woman again.... Deb fretted against her own disabilities. It seemed that

Jenny, without cheapening herself in the soldier’s esteem, could softly

trail her fingers across his furrowed brows ... murmur: “Darling, how

hot your head is!” ... Deb’s modesty bled in scarlet on her cheeks and

neck. Jenny, how can you? how can you? ... and oh, if I could only do

the same! But she was still dream-crusted with the convention that a

man shall avow, and a girl deny or concede; could not force herself to

reverse the process, even though Jenny scored—scored all the time.... The

soldier’s head lay for an instant drawn back against Jenny’s shoulder.

Jenny, magically stilled by the contact, was crooning a song that the

sea might have composed to the beloved vessel at last in harbour. Deb,

wistful of the other’s frank facility in wooing, redly ashamed lest the

soldier should despise it, hating Jenny for giving him cause to despise

it, mutinous at her own instinctive adherence to girlhood’s creed,

Deb whispered to herself in promise for this empty moment: “When I am

married....”

III

“When I am married”—and marriage is found with love as surely as

the picture-coupon in the opened packet of cigarettes, inessential

but inevitable. Yet here she had fallen in love where no ultimate

together-being was possible; even no passionate response forthcoming.

Then was this love at all?—hitherto accepted as a divided flame burning

to some splendid fulfilment....

Deb knelt in front of Cora, perplexed, musing; a vestal before the altar.

What if she had envisioned the altar of romance as a mountain-peak in the

sunset? Here it was a mat before an oil-stove. An altar, nevertheless,

where she made painful sacrifice of illusion. For love was complete

in itself, without past or future. She might not put eager question,

before admitting love: is he young? is he free? does he care? does it

hold chance of the final happiness? But she must accept it, barren and

bitter and an unshared burden, a journey without ultimate lure of rest.

Love was the big thing—the conviction remained. Only she had thought it

conditional. And it was absolute.

... Slowly she lit a match, and applied it to the wick. From the mirrors

and walls of the many-cornered room, a dozen Debs rendered variation of

her dense black hair, her thick storm-grey eyes, and lustreless ivory

skin. For Deb’s looks were of that mutable type which inspired every

fourth-rate art faddist to paint her Holding a Melon; or in a Blue

Jacket; or with head flung back against their favourite bit of Chinese

drapery; or absorbed in the contents of a dust-bin (symbolic realism);

or as a figure on an Egyptian frieze; or as Mary Magdalene; or as a

Wood-nymph pursued by Silenus; or as a coster girl dancing to a barrel

organ by naphtha-lights; or merely as “Deborah, an Impression”—till the

sight of Deb herself was a repose from these fantastic and distorted

relics of pre-war art-phases.

Deb as Reverie of a Girl, was so absorbed that she let the match burn

down to her fingers before she was recalled to actualities. Quickly she

let it drop; and at the same moment Jenny rushed in:

“The Chorus is off for to-night, Deb; isn’t it a shame? Mad’m llorraine

is giving a squawking party in her room, and you and I have been

specially invited.”

This was catastrophe.

“Oh Jenny—_must_ we? Hasn’t she invited the soldier?”

“Out of compliment to us two, yes. But she can’t stick him,

really, because he doesn’t jump about opening doors like a foreign

monkey-on-a-stick.”

“I wish he _would_ open some doors—to-night. I know exactly what will

happen, Jenny: La llorraine will say: ‘Come, now we will be truly

cosy!’—and immediately block all forms of ventilation. And then she’ll

sing as if she were let loose again in the Paris opera-house, and I

shan’t know if it’s my head bursting, or the walls and ceiling, or her

voice. Old Gryce will object, and so will grandpapa, but they won’t take

any steps, because each one will be afraid of putting a stop to something

that is annoying the other more than himself——”

“Darling idiot, why did you ever say you wished you could hear her sing?”

Deb wailed: “I didn’t know that it meant a prima-donna’s powerful

mezzo-soprano in a bed-sittingroom already containing two suites of Louis

Quinze furniture, and forty-two cases of fur cloaks, and a permanent dog

with permanent asthma, and an anthracite stove fire, and a grand piano,

and complicated domestic arrangements for producing food at a moment’s

notice, and a clothes-line, and litter from their last year’s variety

entertainment, and My Child My Solace complete with curls——”

Jenny stopped laughing as the last item was catalogued. “Dolph’s potty

about her....”

“About Manon....” Deb nodded gravely. She and everybody else had noticed

what was so blatantly happening. She cuddled on the floor beside Jenny’s

knees, and leant her cheek against the other’s dangling hand; then she

slid her lips along the smooth warm arm the whole way up to the elbow....

One comforted Jenny by Jenny’s own methods.

For the coming of La llorraine and her daughter to the second floor of

Montagu Hall Hotel had made a difference to the Chorus. It was not so

tight-fitting. A rival cluster of intimacy had been established by the

newcomers, Stella Marcus, and Dolph Carew; and Jenny was perforce drawn

into it from time to time ... Dolph was insistent that she should be

kind to Manon, aged sixteen. And La llorraine, with her overpowering

conviviality, had sought to make an undivided bohemian settlement out of

the bedroom inhabitants of the second floor; all doors open at all times,

and a general pooling of minor difficulties.... “Now Stella, my dee-urr,

will you be kind and count me _that_ washing while Manon play with

Bobby Carew and I buy a _von_-derful cream cheese for the Countess who

dejeuners with me in my room to-day. Then need I say, my dee-urr, that

I expect you to com’ in and share.” And Stella, who took delight in La

llorraine, replied: “Chère Madame, you are as generous with your Countess

as with your cheese.”

La llorraine stood for the Continent, as the Continent ached in the

memory of those who had loved it before 1914. Not for any one country

or another, but for all the gay cities: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome,

St Petersburg ... irrespective of the distinctions of war. Actually,

she was born in some small town on the divisions of Russia and Poland.

Her present appellation, which covered stage and private use, could, in

its initial eccentricity only be explained by the admiration awakened

in her on first encounter with ffoulkes, ffolliott, and ffrench....

“My dee-urr, but what an advertisement! Bah—I know how to catch _that_

public by the ear. They are swine, I tell you ... but this will br-r-ring

them in millions. You will see!” So she became La llorraine. And as La

llorraine, she stood for every aspect of continental life; garret, and

hotel and court; grande dame, and then third-rate mummer; the popular

artiste, or the good thrifty woman who can cook succulent dishes for her

household. Physically, she was built on a magnificent scale, and always

wore plain and expensive black—save for breakfast, when she horrified

the boarding-house by appearing in a soiled dressing-gown, red-and-gold

Turkish slippers, and a knitted blue woollen shawl over the short dyed

yellow hair which formed such a crazy mop to her clear-cut aristocratic

face, long and pale, with kind eyes and delicate, sneering mouth. There

was no adventure of the demi-monde too lurid for imagination to cast

her as heroine; and against that she could whisper mysterious tales of

court intrigue, and call Grand-Dukes by their pet names, with an air that

betrayed her a careless participant of their intimate revels.

Fiercely she adored Manon, whose hair hung in streaked yellow curls

over her shoulders, and from whose red, greedy little wolf’s mouth

one could envisage the dart of a red pointed little tongue. Manon

fulfilled all expectations as the foreign _ingénue_: soft, lisping

voice, demure eyelids. In a frequent spasm of recollection, La llorraine

would dismiss her from the room when the conversation was too adult for

due preservation of a maiden’s bloom; but on those occasions that her

mother forgot to dismiss her, no doubt Manon picked up much valuable

information.... Certainly, whether from innocence or art, she managed

Dolph Carew exquisitely, never seeming aware of an infatuation so blatant

that it shrieked itself aloud at every moment; yielding not a dewdrop

of her freshness to his importunity; and at the same time contriving

to keep him attached and useful. “My dee-urr,” La llorraine declaimed

to Stella Marcus, “such a clown for my Manon?—not for anything in that

_world_. I have ... plans for her!” ... a queer impression stealing on

the heels of her remark, that Manon was designed to be mistress of a

third-rate illegitimate royalty of a fourth-rate kingdom.... A faded

Louis drawing-room in vieux-rose—an old _roué_ bowing his entrance ...

waxed moustache and imperial ... careful buttonhole.... “I have sent for

my little daughter!” regally from La llorraine.

* * * * *

Grumbling prophecies were afloat in Montagu Hall, that some catastrophe

was bound soon to happen among that second-floor crowd—the Carews, the

Marcuses, Burton Ames, and—with vindictive inflexion—those disreputable

mummers! It was really getting insupportable; and fancy Mrs Carew taking

no steps about her husband’s ridiculous behaviour with that nasty

little thing in ringlets, but to be instead forever running after Major

Ames, who isn’t _my_ idea of an officer—not at all well-set-up—and the

noise—and in and out of the bedrooms—how Mr Marcus can allow his daughter

... but it isn’t as if they were English, no, nor Dutch either, although

they never said they were. Did you know that they dressed up on Christmas

Eve, all the lot of them, and had a procession up and down the stairs,

and the—girl—wore—tights?——

Thus Deb mimicked with diabolical accuracy, the existing Drawing-room

Opinion.

“And very attractive you looked in ’em, darling!”

“Jenny, I believe when our gang was singled out for influenza last month,

they looked on it as an awful visitation of justice; a sort of plague of

Egypt.”

“Perhaps it was. Everyone in the house escaped it except our landing. Do

you remember the day I had bolted five aspirin, and the soldier sauntered

in, and looked at me, and thought I was dying, and gasped out: ‘Oh, I

w-won’t detain you.’ Ass!—but I think it saved my life, I laughed so. And

the night I was so awfully bad that Dolph specially got up out of bed to

make a cup of Bovril for Manong?”

“Don’t, Jenny! I ... I hated him, that time.”

“Ah, well, I’ve had some jolly enough razzles with old Dolph; he can’t

help it when he gets taken this way.” Into Jenny’s tones had crept

that note of possessive defence that one hears from the woman in the

police-court, shrewishly denying the black eye given her by her “man.”

“Poor old boy! he’s gloomier than ever; but then I married him because he

reminded me so of Martin Harvey. Dolph says that Manong makes him feel

pure again, which is out of my line as I forfeited my purity in his sight

by having married him. It sounds a bit mixed up, and I don’t quite see

where I come in—with the washing on Saturday morning, I s’pose. Only I’m

hanged if I don’t have my little fling too.”

“Does Dolph mind the soldier?”

“Lately he does; haven’t you noticed? yellow with jealousy; tries to keep

both eyes on his wife, and not lift them off Manong; wants to confide his

woes in me, and take the high moral stride as well. Can’t be done, my

lad! But it was quite a rag during the ’flue, Deb; we were all able to

take patterns of each other’s dressing-gowns, weren’t we? La llorraine in

ermine and her head tied up in a duster was a treat. She and your aunt

can tell some smoke-room stories when they get started—my word! Dolph was

shocked—afraid Manong would hear.”

“The soldier was bad that one week.”

“Wasn’t he? And wouldn’t let me do much for him either, worse luck. I

almost wondered if I should have wired for his wife, off my own bat. But

he’d have been so furious.”

“Why? doesn’t he like her?”

“Child—don’t you know? he’s crazy about her....”

“Oh....”

“_Didn’t_ you know? Why else do you suppose he’s so precious backward

with _us_? Hang it, Deb, we’re not exactly unattractive. The chances he’s

had.... Another man would have worn my throat away with his lips at it,

before now!” Jenny clenched her hands passionately. “Deb, haven’t you

noticed that he’s never kissed either of us?”

“Yes. I had noticed.”

“He told me the whole story, mooching about the streets in a fog one

night. He had fooled about with some chit, not caring for her a tuppenny

curse—as he might have fooled with us. Someone told his wife; and she

just gave him notice to quit—‘I’ll send for you when I can bear the sight

of you again!’ ... that was four years ago. God! she must be made of ice.

With a war on, too. Can’t she guess that the man wants looking after; and

that if her fingers don’t sew his buttons on, someone else will volunteer

for the job. Not that I’ve had much from him, except thanks, for trying

to buck him up and brush him up ... a more dejected-looking object I’ve

never seen than when he first slouched in here. Thanks? oh yes, he

thanked me then, in the fog, for having listened to his drivellings; as

if I could have helped myself, with his hand grabbing my elbow; I was

bored stiff. That was before you came in with us, kid.”

“I’ll drop out again.... You’re married, Jenny, and so is he, and you can

fit each other with what’s left over. But I want something whole——”

“Yes; you’ve got everything to give. But you and I might just as well go

on being pals, darling,—he doesn’t care a rap for either of us. And he’d

be terrified of me without you, Deb; or of you without me. I’ve never

struck such a Cautious Willy. When he’s left alone with one of us he goes

to fetch his pipe—till the other comes back. I tell you, it works up all

the devil in me....”

“And in me....”

“Deb, he’s a _real_ man, or I shouldn’t care like this. He’s been

perfectly sweet to me once or twice. Perfectly ... dear. He can be, when

he likes. Have you ever felt the muscles of his arm? ever bent it back?

like iron. Deb—I’m sure he’s sworn some gimcrack oath to himself, not to

ever let it reach a kiss—with us, I mean.”

“Because of her.”

“Why shouldn’t we set ourselves to break it down? After all, she must

be a beast. And she should have kept him while she had him. It’s our

innings. Deb, I bet you a gallon of oil for Cora that one or the other

of us gets a kiss from him to-night. I’m mad to-night—mad—game for

anything!... There! I forgot that blooming party next door. Mad’m’s got

a pal in to play her accompaniments; she won’t let us off; not just for a

Chorus meeting.”

A conspirator’s rap at the door; the soldier thrust his head stealthily

round the corner; ascertained with relief that both members of the Chorus

were present; and entered, pulling from his pocket a smoked haddock by

its tail.

“I’ve brought a present for Cora; two presents,” from the other pocket

he extracted a tin of asparagus. “Shall we revel up here to-night,

as a thanksgiving? I don’t know for what; but I’m in the mood.” His

brick-coloured face was impassive; his voice slow and toneless; his

entire personality redolent of beef decently roasted and eaten at the

proper time at a proper table. Anyone more obviously opposed to riotous

revels, or to moods of any kind, it would be hard to imagine.

“H’m ... I believe we shall have to divide the haddock before we cook

it,” Jenny speculated with a dubious eye on Cora’s limitations, while Deb

ruefully explained their evening’s engagement.

“Damn,” said the soldier gently. “Am I invited? I won’t go. I have to

sit at attention when I hear music, or else I don’t look as if I were

listening. And that’s so tiring. Look here, I can’t endure an evening

without you two; honestly I can’t. Why not pretend to be ill, one of

you?” Hastily he amended: “Both of you.”

“_I_ can; I’ve been feeling frightfully rotten on and off lately,

since the ’flue. My heart’s gone funny from too many operations, or

too many aspirin, or something. We could go in next door for about ten

minutes, and then I’ll pretend I’m taken suddenly bad, and slip out in a

I-hope-nobody-will-notice-or-make-a-fuss manner; and Deb will naturally

follow me out, looking—what’s the word, you high-brows? sol—? sol—?

something to do with lawyers.”

“Looking solicitous. Right then; I’ll skulk about on the landing till

I hear you. Say I’m out for the evening. That’s settled. We can always

throw Jenny on the bed, and me under it, if anybody knocks to enquire.

You’d better put the haddock in your wash-basin for the present, Deb.”

“And please, where am I to wash?”

Ames thought it over. He bestowed on every question, great or small,

exactly the same amount of stolid phlegm. “In Jenny’s room.”

“Not available. Dolph and Manong are spooning in there.”

“Alone?”

“Oh, you bet Mad’m or Miss Marcus or Bobby is with them. Our precious

flapper mayn’t go a second unchaperoned. It’s hard luck on Dolph.”

“Dear Jenny, your point of view as Dolph’s wife is rather a novel one.”

“Excuse me, but is Jenny here?” A very aggrieved Carew stood on the

threshold, glaring at his wife through an enmuffling tangle of beard

and eyebrow. He was incredibly like the popular notion of a bushranger.

Actually he had been traveller for a wholesale tobacco firm in the City.

And was now out of work.

“Jenny, you might think of a fellow sometimes, I must say. Bobby keeps on

running out of the room, and I’ve always got to haul him back. And you

know quite well what Mad’m is like about Manong. Why don’t you sit with

us and do some sewing till Bobby’s bed-time? You’re so selfish.”

Another ferocious glare—and Dolph was gone.

“Charming fellow, isn’t he?” remarked Jenny lightly. She shrugged her

shoulders, and followed him out.

The soldier looked at Deb expressively: “Bit thick, isn’t it?”

“I hate Dolph Carew!”

“He doesn’t count. But she—she’s the pluckiest little soul in England.

One can’t interfere, that’s the worst of it.”

“Why can’t one? Because one might compromise oneself?”

He smiled a little at her passionate scorn, accepting the implication

calmly. “Yes. Partly that.”

“Mostly that.”

“You admire rash impulse, and headlong defiance, and all those virtues

that make a muddle in the world, don’t you?”—From teasing Deb, he awoke

to awful realization that he was alone with her. “I say—I must be off!”

“Yes, hurry!—a whole half-minute.” Daringly she challenged his unspoken

thought.

“Ridiculous child. Remember to put the haddock in the basin.” He just

touched her shoulder ... all his warmer marks of affection were reserved

for the times when the Chorus was present in full membership ... and went

out.

IV

Deb crossed straight to the long mirror, and made the discovery that she

had not been looking beautiful enough to say what she had said. She

began to dress for the evening with a sort of revengeful deliberation.

The deliberation was necessary to ensure good result. No wise woman

can fly, with spirit aflame, into her clothes, and then hope to prove

seductive. The dash was in her spirit, nevertheless. She was angry

with the big thing for not proving the mellow, englamoured sanctuary

she had every right to expect. This evolution of a dream into fact was

futile; worse than that—destructive—to herself. A stupid, lop-sided

business! Deb was not glad of love now it had come. Only a troublesome

but intelligent honesty kept her from repudiating it altogether as the

big thing; returning to her former state of silver-misty anticipation....

“One can pretend, I suppose?”—pretend that the soldier was a mere wayside

incident. Only she knew too much about wayside incidents, to commit that

error.

—Well then, since she was so sure, were not the issues worth a forced

initiative on her part? Could she compete with Jenny’s boldness—if she

chose? For with Deb, as with Jenny, the soldier’s steady, profiting

self-control had become a nightmare which had to be exchanged at all

costs, even for his scorn, even for self-destruction, even for evil....

Her temper resolved itself into action. There was mischief in her

selection of the pure ivory taffeta dress, the golden shoes, and cobwebby

gold stockings that the supple fancy could continue on limbs straight and

slender inside the blown white cup of her skirts. Deb could wear white

and pearl and dove-tints without fear of looking miss-ish; by contrast

with her deep colours, they enhanced her vivid grace more than the

traditional purple or flame. Sufficient of purple in her sombre twilight

eyes; flame enough in her lips. Her hair she turned inwards, concealing

its masses so skilfully, that, sleek on top and bulging rhythmically into

a smooth pear-shape round the cheeks and the nape of the neck, it gave

her somewhat the appearance of the knave of clubs as pictured in a pack

of cards.

Then she went back to the mirror, and scrutinized her looks long

and earnestly, and—like all heroines in every crisis of each

love-affair—reflected how queer it was that just these curves and colours

should have been the haphazard outward accessories to—her soul? ... no,

souls were mawkish things!—to her essential Deb-ness.

CHAPTER V

I

The girl who was playing the accompaniments to La llorraine’s singing

glanced aside once or twice from Deb to Jenny, contrasting mystery and

mobility. Jenny attracted her the most; she made up her mind to speak

to Jenny directly the song was over.... And then she saw Jenny bite

her lip, clutch tightly at the arm of the chair ... after a minute or

two of apparent bodily agony, rise and grope an unsteady way through

the edges and corners of furniture, to the door. Antonia Verity went

on with the Aria from “Samson et Delilah.” She had seen a swift look

interchanged between Deb and Jenny, just before the spasm of pain which

drove the latter from the room. Also, in the instant’s silence before the

prima-donna had begun to let herself go in “Mon cœur s’ouvre a ta voix,”

Antonia fancied she had detected a scraping sound and heavy breathing

outside the door.

Stella had also remarked Jenny’s symptoms, and half rose to follow her

out without interrupting the singing; but Deb murmured: “All right,

Auntie, I’ll go” ... and slipped noiselessly in Jenny’s wake. Dolph was

wrapt up in Manon, who was wrapt up in her own indifference to Dolph.

And La llorraine was back in the Paris opera-house, eyes uplifted to

the imaginary tiers of packed faces, voice soaring resonantly to a

non-existent acoustic.... Antonia wondered if the drum of her left ear

were being shattered; she also wondered a little what was afoot outside

the door....

II

“Did you hear me sleuthing?” queried Ames, contentedly lopping the

haddock to fit Cora’s limitations.

“Is _that_ what you were doing? Of course we heard.” The three had

been recently present at a cinema film which portrayed a quantity of

flickering doors, set in a flickering corridor, down which a flickering

procession of waiters, detectives and gentlemen burglars—all impartially

in evening dress—portrayed the diverting art of sleuthing: they

skulked along close to the wall, one arm shielding their eyes to avoid

observation, and at every bedroom door they bent and applied an ear to

the keyhole—then started erect, confirmed in their worst suspicion, and

went to the next keyhole....

“I sleuthed all over the house, till I sleuthed outside Miss Lamb’s

door——” he stopped abruptly.

“And then?”

“Then I stopped sleuthing. It’s an ignoble pastime. Get me my

screw-driver; something’s wrong with Cora.” A minute later he was

completely happy, surrounded by Cora in eleven fragments; while Jenny,

very excitable and talkative, enacted to him exactly how she had been

“taken ill” during La llorraine’s song.

“—There. Now she’ll do.”

“There was nothing wrong with Cora; you wanted an excuse to pull her to

bits,” Deb accused him.

“A man is only a child; he must play.”

“Fiddling at things?”

“Tinkering with things. Pottering over things. That’s a mercy!” as

Dalila, on the other side of the wall, died to silence. “Our invalid had

better be hoisted on to the bed; they’ll be coming in to enquire.”

Just in time Jenny hurled herself among the pillows, and drew the quilt

up to her flushed cheeks. A knock at the door. The soldier eliminated

himself against the wall. Deb went softly to the threshold: “Is that

you, Manon?... Yes, she’s in here.... No, I wouldn’t come in; she ...”

Deb backed the unseen visitor onto the landing. The other two, listening

breathlessly, heard her low, capable, reassuring explanations: “... be

all right presently ... room too hot ... strain of the last few weeks ...

might do her good ... tell them not to worry....”

Jenny inserted a moan of corroboration.

“I’m so vairry sorry——” from Manon.

Deb returned to the room, closing the door. And Jenny cried:

“Little humbug! much she cares!”

“Well, nurse, shall we operate?” demanded Ames cheerily. He stood at

the bedside, assuming a professional manner, one finger on the patient’s

pulse. “Um. Um. This is excellent. We shall soon be all right. Up to-day

and down to-morrow and dead the next day. A great improvement here,

nurse. I should give her ...” he drew the pseudo-nurse aside to a little

distance, dropping his voice to a grave undertone. Jenny burst out

laughing at the foolery—then shuddered—and laughed again:

“Bravo! It’s the real thing. God—how often I’ve seen ’em do just that at

the hospitals and nursing-homes. I’ve been turned inside out and put on

the table so often, I wonder there’s any of me left kicking. Like poor

old Cora over there—the doctors had all the fun, tinkering and fiddling.”

“It _sounds_ fun, when you put it like that,” Ames said appreciatively.

And drew a clumsy penknife from his pocket. “Where will you have it?”

he demanded considerately, throwing off his coat and rolling up his

shirt-sleeves.

“Deb! Deb!” shrieked Jenny, in hysterical appeal.

Deb flung herself to the rescue. She and the soldier sleuthed each

other malevolently round the room, he with the penknife and she with

the screw-driver, till they ended up with a neat little burlesque of a

murder in the middle of the carpet; La llorraine, next door, supplying

unconscious atmosphere by the torture scene from “Tosca.”

“Die!” said Deb lightly.

“With my fingers buried in your raven tresses!”

“Miscreant!”

“Don’t call me names. I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m _not_!” he tried to hoist himself up by the coarse black ropes of

her loosened hair. Deb resisted fiercely. Jenny, tossing from one side

to another, called out petulantly that she was forgotten—it was _her_

party!—and was half off the bed, before another knock sent her flying

back to the shelter of the coverlid. The soldier lurched into his special

arm-chair and took up the screw-driver—“for a disguise,” he murmured.

And Deb, wildly dishevelled, clutched after her expression of calm but

anxious best friend to the invalid.

Antonia Verity entered, with a glass of tea and a slice of lemon.

“They thought this might do you good,” to Jenny, who extended a feeble

hand, took the glass, raised it shakily to her lips, spilt a few drops,

smiled bravely—then, with a sudden gesture of repugnance, handed it to

Deb. “Presently, dear ... not now.”

Deb was surprised that she did it so well. Usually Jenny was prone to

over-act.

After a single look bestowed upon the perplexing and unexplained presence

of a gentleman in shirt-sleeves cooking asparagus over an oil-stove,

Antonia’s eyes returned to Jenny:

“I thought you were shamming just now, in the next room. But I was wrong.

I’m sorry.”

She lingered a moment, seemingly in expectation. But the atmosphere was

feverish and hostile. “I’m sorry,” she repeated; and went.

“Jenny, you’re a genius! that bit of bye-play with the glass was

magnificent.”

“I am, I am, aren’t I?—‘I thought you were shamming, but I was wrong,’”

she mimicked triumphantly. “—Oh Hell!” and burrowed her face sharply into

the pillow.

“What is it?” alarmed, Deb sprang forward.

“You taken in too?” Jenny, without lifting her head, broke into shrill

peals of laughter which she seemed unable to repress. “Oh—oh—oh—I’ve

taken you in too!... Dearest—” this in response to the soldier’s fingers

roaming at the nape of her neck—“Don’t pull your hand away—don’t—it’s

heavenly—it soothes me.... What does it matter? we’re all playing the

fool; Dolph is playing the idiot in the other room; we’re all mixed up,

anyway. Deb, give me that tea—I’m crazy with thirst,” she snatched the

glass; gulped down the contents. “What about those asparagus?”

“They ought to be done enough now; you shall have some if you’re good.

What do you think, nurse? one or two? and the rest for us.”

Deb nodded professionally. But it struck her that Jenny was rather making

capital out of the privileges of her present rôle. Why had she not

thought to be herself the one who was ill? But Jenny was really ill so

often—it was less likely to cause suspicion.

The soldier removed the tin of asparagus from Cora; and seating himself

on the edge of the bed, began to curl them slowly, tantalizingly, into

Jenny’s mouth. “I’ve never seen you look quite so healthy; in case

any more of the neighbours drop in to enquire, we may as well cast a

dissembling shadow on that blooming cheek, those brilliant brown eyes.

Deb, put out the light.”

Deb obeyed. The asparagus were finished, one by one. A crash of

discordances, as though someone had suddenly sat on the keys of the

piano, sounded from the adjoining room; and La llorraine’s wild, deep

laughter. Jenny lay as though exhausted, nuzzling against Burton Ames’

shoulder.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“So miserable ... and I’m tired of going on.”

“I am, too. Never mind—it’s not so bad being miserable together.”

“You’re rather nice”—then lower still—“kiss me....”

He laid his cheek down against her’s—no more. But she seemed content ...

and Deb turned away; stood, forlornly enough, with her back to the bed,

looking down at Cora.... “I’m miserable too,” she whispered. But Jenny

heard:

“Deb!—Deb, come over here—come over to me at once. How dare you not come

... feeling like that? Deb!”

Deb crouched beside the bed, with Jenny’s arms tightly wound about her

shoulders. The soldier’s knee, hard as granite, pressed against her side.

They were all three very near together ... a magnetic sense of rest

was born in this close contact—Jenny’s hot skin, Deb’s tumble of hair,

harsh feel of the soldier’s frayed tweed coat.... There was no other

illumination in the room, and Cora cast her spells in hard blocks of

white light and black shadow.

“Good old Chorus,” breathed Jenny.

“You’re a really-and-truly person, Jenny, aren’t you?”

“Sweetheart, what do you mean?”

“I used to ask about people in stories: are they really-and-truly real?

Somehow I always know that you are; at least you, if nobody else.”

“Of course she is,” grunted Ames; “considering she’s a Christian, quite

remarkably real.”

“Hush!” quickly Jenny laid her fingers over his mouth; “you must leave me

that at least—my religion.”

“Child, child, religion is a man-made door, blocking all hope of vistas

beyond.”

“Faith is a crystal window,” whispered Jenny, her brown eyes steadfast.

“Maybe. Nothing so opaque as crystal.”

Deb said reproachfully: “What can you give her to hang on to, for what

you take away?”

“Herself. The courage and pride in her. It’s much more comforting really

than a vague hope that God will come to the rescue in extremes. You can

be definitely certain of the measure of your own powers; but God is at

best a gamble.”

Jenny’s eyes strayed fearfully ceilingward....

“Looking for the thunderbolt that will destroy the blasphemer?”

“I remember looking up in just that way, the first time I said damn,” Deb

murmured reminiscently.

“It’s what we learn at our mother’s knee. We’ve all got mother’s knees in

our system—Jenny here worst of all—and till we learn to see through it——”

“Your metaphor is in peril, as well as your soul.”

“S.O.S.,” he laughed.

But at this tendency of the conversation to become highbrow, Jenny’s

mood, as usual, flickered to restlessness. “I ought to go and see if

Bobby’s all right; I haven’t been in all the evening.”

“You forget that you’re in a highly critical condition, and mustn’t be

seen dancing about the corridors. I’ll go.”

And Deb wondered, as she closed the door behind her, if, in her absence,

Jenny would contrive to win the gallon of oil for Cora....

Bobby was soundly asleep in his cot; his round, monkey face, so comically

a replica of Jenny’s, snuggled half under the bed-clothes to meet his

huddled-up knees. Deb was compelled to bend and lightly kiss him, for the

sake of her private fondness for all small boys. A night-light floating

on the table beside him was suddenly quenched. Deb turned to grope her

way out of the room. She heard a groan behind her—and, for Bobby’s sake,

bit back a sharp scream of terror—

“It’s only me,” came Dolph’s despondent reassurance.

“You? But I thought you were with—with the others.”

“They don’t want me.”

She hung about uncomfortably, her hand on the door-knob.

“Jenny’s better,” she volunteered at last.

“Is she?” quite indifferent. Then he burst out: “Deb, d’you know that

I’ll be rich one day, when my uncle dies. Rich. People will treat me

differently then. I tell you, Deb, money does everything with some

people. Not with a young girl, of course—but with their mothers. I’m

nobody now. Anyone can insult me, give me the sack. I wish I was dead

and buried.... Bobby oughtn’t to be left the whole evening alone; tell

Jenny I said so. That’s why I’m in here; that’s why; the only reason,” he

mumbled. “Else why shouldn’t I be with the others?”

Apparently some shattering of the next-door alliance had occurred on this

evening of happenings.

“Send Jenny in to me. I won’t sit alone. Why should I? She’s always shut

away with you and Ames, when I want her.—Deb, I’m so wretched.”

“Yes ... but I don’t like you one bit,” reflected Deb. Aloud she said:

“I expect it’ll be all right to-morrow, Dolph; La llorraine has sudden

moods, like all artists.”

It was queer, this all-round tacit acceptance of unofficial affections,

on the second floor landing at Montagu Hall.

Carew merely groaned again; which Deb interpreted as welcome dismissal.

III

... Had Jenny won that kiss in her absence?—Deb slid open the door, in a

bewilderment of dread and curiosity. _Had_ Jenny——

Impossible to say. For La llorraine was sitting on the bed, eclipsing by

gesticulation and oratory, a helplessly recumbent invalid. The soldier

was calmly smoking and reading in the armchair at the farther end of the

room, his back to the bed, Cora among his feet. His presence in the room

seemed almost part of the general acceptance. How funny, Deb thought, if

they all suddenly started questioning and sorting and clearing up....

It appeared that Nadya llorraine, at least, was doing something of the

sort.

“My dee-urr, now listen to me. I tell you how to win back _that_ husband

of yours. I have said to me: it is enough now, it shall end! Jenny, see

how you lie here, wizout a manicure, your hair in a puzzle, a blouse that

has no seduction.... And he, that fool, that booby,—shall I tell you

vat vill happen? he falls into the hands of adventuresses! My dee-urr,

they snap him up from you....” Sincerity of pity for the abandoned wife

dominated any personal association with the said adventuresses. “They

snap him up—and spit him out!” La llorraine dignified the process by

accompanying pantomime, grotesquely mimicked by the enormous shadow

cast on the wall behind her. “I will tell you _that_ secret, Jenny,

my dee-urr, which I ’ave learn: you must be woman to him as well as

wife....” She grasped Jenny’s wrist, swooped forward, and lowered her

tones to a key of thrilling confidence. She breathed in Jenny’s face. She

took possession of Jenny.

Deb and the soldier were cut off to a complete isolation.

“What have you got?” she bent over his shoulder to see the title of the

book he held. “Oh, that’s not fair!” indignantly. For the Chorus had been

half-reading half-acting Shaw’s “Pygmalion” for their mutual amusement;

and he had anticipated that portion of the play to which Deb had been

secretly straining forward.

“You wanted to make sure of being Eliza in that bit where she throws the

slippers, of course. You’re a shocking savage, Deb. And anyway, the part

isn’t fit for any gentlewoman, and naturally falls to me. You can be

Higgins.”

“I won’t be Higgins. I’ll be Eliza. You—you tempt slippers.”

“M’yes—I daresay I do. Slippers are mild. I’ll lend you my trench boots.”

“Thanks.”

“Why do you hate me so, Deb?” lazily he threw back one hand to where she

was still leaning over his chair, and grasped some of her hanging hair.

She was exultant at having at last urged him to a personal reflection.

“Because you don’t take enough notice of me,” she replied, in a freakish

impulse of candour.

“Dear Eliza, isn’t my step bent straight for this room, when I enter the

house?”

“That’s because of—Cora. Because we make you comfortable.”

“I suppose it is. Funny hair you’ve got, Eliza; like a strong, stormy

black sea. I thought women’s hair was always fluffy and soft.”

“As one woman’s was? ...” flitted through Deb’s mind. But she did not say

it.

He still examined with minute interest the thick tress which lay across

the palm of his hand. “To a man of ingenuity and resource, it would be

useful for all sorts of things if one were wrecked on an island; Eliza,

I wish I could be stranded on a desert island with your hair.”

“With ... only my hair?” She was breaking through it now, that nameless

barrier which her nameless creed had set up; useless barrier, Jenny

had shown her.... Yes, but Jenny was different. Because she was

married?—well, because she was different. Because she let her passions

bubble over when and where and how she chose ... unruly, undisciplined

Jenny. But Deb had promised herself to compete with Jenny this time.... A

pulse ticked in each wrist—two frantic little clocks. On the other side

of the wall someone—Antonia probably—was playing Debussy ... mournful,

soul-flattening discordances ... La llorraine’s rush of inaudible speech

still expounded man and the ways of man:

“And I say to ’im, _that_ minute ago even, my dee-urr: ‘You should kneel

to your wife like a thief to a goddess, for you ’ave r-r-robbed ’er of

all ’er gifts!’ Ha! ’e did not like that, Jenny, I tell you. He sulks now

in his room, the booby——”

“Well, it _was_ rude, considering he was your guest,” from Jenny, in

shrill defence of her male property.

* * * * *

... “What should I do with the rest of you, Eliza?”

“Would another man ask that?”

Deb was on a false trail, her manner hectic and unnatural, her senses

over-stimulated. But, knowing all this, she dragged her reluctance to the

gap in the last barrier—plunged through—bent her mouth to his up-turned,

sleepy face——

And suddenly she remembered little Lothar von Relling ... and pleaded to

whatever Justice might be presiding somewhere, that she had been generous

then, had given ardently for a boy’s pleasure.... Would Justice please

choose this moment to reward her?

... His fingers slowly loosened grip of her hair; it dropped heavily

against his shoulders. And in swift reaction at seeing it there, Deb

flung back her head, stood upright, pale and ashamed, ... over his head

their eyes met in the mirror which topped the fireplace in front of them.

Reaction ... she had had enough of this cramped, stuffy room, and all

their cramped, stuffy passions; stupefaction of everyone’s moral sense;

a sort of frowsiness; smoke and shut windows, and unaired emotions....

She wanted, at once and instantly, a wind blown in with the running

tide; sanity and humour and keenness. Oh, anything but this room, at this

moment, and the necessity of meeting the mirrored gaze of a man to whom

she had just given herself away.

... The moment stretched, an interminable grey length. Then the music

next door trickled away to silence, and it seemed as though the

unsupported moment would have to trickle away with it....

“I’m only human!”—thus to himself the soldier stifled a protesting

loyalty. Heavily he shifted round in his chair towards the girl, standing

now so stiffly and primly erect behind him——

“Deb”....

A rap at the door. The evening had been punctuated by such staccato

interruptions. This time it was Aunt Stella.

“Is Major Ames here? Yes? You’re wanted on the ’phone; trunk call, the

page said. They came to look for you next door. Well, how’s the patient?”

as Jenny emerged wanly from the clutch of La llorraine’s overpowering

personality. “My dear child, surely you would be better inside your own

bed than outside someone else’s. Off with you! Make your husband attend

to the hot-water bottle ... fill it with his burning tears, if he likes.

Deb, being your prying spinster aunt, it is my duty to inform you that

this room has a horribly dissipated smell of fish and stove-oil and

smoke, and one doesn’t put one’s hair down for the evening till all the

visitors have left; I ought to fetch your grandpapa—only he’d have a

stroke. Madame, Miss Verity threatens to go already, and wants to say

good-bye.”

III

Burton Ames, as he lumbered downstairs, was angry with himself for being

angry at the interruption. It was much better; if he once budged from his

safe resolve, the Chorus would become quite impossible. And he would miss

it—would miss them—quite intensely. They had obviously set out to try

him pretty severely this evening. Why? Sheer mischief? Deb was the more

dangerous of the two. One could feel tenderly, an absurd, almost pathetic

tenderness, for Jenny out-of-bounds ... passionate, ill-used little

urchin. But Deb.... _Damn_ this ’phone call!

“Hello!”...

IV

Deb and Jenny were alone.

“Deb—I saw.”

“Saw what?” said Deb absently.

“When you bent his head back ... just now. And then Mad’m came between.

Deb—_did_ he?”

Deb did not answer. Sitting on the edge of the bed, hands clasped round

her knees, ears straining, straining for his returning tread, she

examined her behaviour of a moment ago, and decided that self-verdict

must wait on subsequent events. If only he made it worth while....

The room had grown unaccountably darker. Jenny shuddered; propped herself

up on one elbow:

“Deb, old girl, it’s a fool’s game to pretend one is ill when one isn’t,

because——”

“There he is!” burst from Deb’s lips, oblivious of Jenny.

Burton Ames swung into the room, rejuvenated.

“Jenny—Deb—I’m off to-night,”

His voice was still quiet and controlled; but the weary inflexion to

which they were accustomed from him had been replaced by tense virility;

his bent shoulders were squarely flung back; his eyes snapped and tingled

like bright blue fire under the grizzled jutting eyebrows.

“I’m off to-night.”

“She ... your wife ... she wants you again,” Jenny gasped.

“Yes. I spoke to her on the ’phone. She has taken a house in London;

Campden Hill; just moved in. I’m joining her at once; she has invited

me,” with a quick, whimsical smile. “I wish it hadn’t occurred to you to

be ‘taken ill’ just to-night, Jenny dear; you could have helped me pack.

Deb’s disqualified, of course; good little girls mayn’t pass the ogre’s

threshold, according to Mother’s-Knee. Never mind, I’ll send my orderly

down in the morning; can’t wait now. I say, look at Cora!”

Simultaneously the three turned and stared at the altar of their union;

the line of flame was slowly narrowing, and the walls and ceiling and

furniture, and the faces of the three grouped round and on the bed,

hitherto sharply defined in black and white, were already smudged to a

mere dimness.

“Cheap irony—oh, very inexpensive indeed!” scoffed Deb. And she was

grateful to Cora ... deeply grateful.

“On the contrary, a histrionic sense of the fitness of things. When did

you last fill the oil-tank, Deb?”

“Before dinner—no, though, I didn’t—I remember now, Jenny came in and

distracted me. That explains it.”

Nevertheless, the gradual ebbing of the light, coincident with the

silence succeeding the waves of noise and music next door, wrought eerily

upon the nerves of the two of the Chorus who had not received their call

of “all’s right with the world.”

Even Ames was touched to a cheery sentimentality: “I shall miss you both

tremendously; you’ve been so awfully good to me.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve been very welcome,” said Deb lightly. “You’re in a

hurry—don’t let these obsequies delay you. We bury Jenny the day after

to-morrow, at two o’clock, if you care to attend.”

“As I was responsible for her death-bed scene, I suppose I must. But it’s

been worth it, hasn’t it, Jenny beloved, to have had this last fling

together?”

Jenny played up. “Oh, it has! it has! I’ve lived my life down to the very

dregs! And now, as the light slowly fades——”

“And the music dies away——” supplemented Deb.

“And the asparagi have been trickled one by one down that dark and narrow

path that engorges all asparagi——”

“So that young life, too, throbbed to silence. Whistling, he went on his

way, and never knew till afterwards——”

“I can’t whistle,” the soldier interrupted Deb. “But I’ll do all the rest

of the stunts. Good-bye, Jenny, my darling; I’ve been a fearful rotter

...” his voice broke in mock pathos. Secretly he was rather glad of this

burlesque which covered any necessity for real pathos; because he was so

happy, he just could not pretend otherwise.

“I’m—not—in—pain!” gasped Jenny. “See—I’m smiling ... quite a beautiful

smile, isn’t it? Perhaps I shall be well ... to-morrow. No, I shan’t!”

she screamed. “No to-morrow for me. Soldier ... don’t—don’t go.... Wait

till ... I ...”

“Sweetheart, I can’t; you might be ever so long about it, and I really

must be off. Good-bye, Jenny; good-bye, Deb”; he lingered a moment still,

though it was evident that every nerve in him was chafing at the delay.

“You’ve both been so awfully decent to me,” he repeated, sincerely this

time. And he kissed first Jenny and then Deb, in boyish, spontaneous

gratitude.

So they gained, quite without effort, what they had set out to gain, that

evening.

“Good-bye!” the door slammed behind him in sheer exuberance of high

spirits. Then repetition of the same business with his bedroom door. Then

silence. And the room a black pall now, with just a last faint quaver of

light—suddenly quenched.

It was unnecessary, Deb reflected, that he should have shown himself to

them in this new splendour of recovered buoyancy.... It was bad enough

before.... Her fancy, feverishly active, followed his taxi along the

streets, followed him up the steps and past the front door of the house

in Campden Hill—into the room where a woman waited——

Fancy was jerked to a standstill here; he would utter her name; what was

it?—Cicely?—Irene?—Eleanor? ... Yes, she could hear his voice speaking

any of these ... very low and taut ... “Eleanor”....

Then of course he would kiss her. Well....

And for the girl who sat on the edge of the bed, the knowledge of having

made—rather an exhibition of herself. It did not help much that he seemed

to have forgotten the incident. The main thing was that she remembered

it. Would always remember it.

She thought she heard a little sigh from the bed. Jenny! ... quick and

warm came to Deb realisation of the blessed solace of a companion in

suffering. Jenny would just understand, as she never failed to understand

the simple everyday things such as hunger and pain and the loss of love.

Jenny would heal her with that wonderful touch of hand and cheek that was

like balm.... Deb felt shivery and childish and desolate.... She laid her

head down on Jenny’s breast, and lay for several moments quite still,

waiting for comfort to steal into her. She was glad that Jenny did not

attempt to talk about what had happened.

Suddenly Deb started away, wildly frightened. Why—Jenny’s heart was not

beating....

CHAPTER VI

I

Richard found his Easter holidays dull. Montagu Hall was not a

satisfactory substitute for Daisybanks, where he had owned his own

carpentering shed in the garden, in which he might rampage as he pleased.

Ferdie had been an understanding father in supplying Richard and Deb with

full facilities to rag and to rampage. Now Richard passed most of his

time reading books that dealt with the practical side of the war, and

keeping fit in preparation for when he was eighteen. Perhaps he could

squeeze himself in next year already by mis-stating his age ... there was

always the dreadful possibility that the war might suddenly come to an

end, and leave him what it had found him, a Winborough fifth form boy.

He was glad when the last week of the holidays came round; Deb was always

about with some girl—Antonia Verity; and most of his chums being older

than himself, were scattered about the country in training, or else in

the trenches. David Rothenburg, of course, was about the same age; but

Rothenburg was a moony sort of chap, especially lately. More from boredom

than affection, Richard spent an afternoon at Bertie Fraser’s home in the

south-west of London. The news of the torpedoing of the Lusitania had

come through a couple of days before; and the two boys vented some of

their hot indignation by experiments with a model submarine which should

“damn well teach the blackguards not to mess about with our passenger

liners!”

“I’ll put you on your way,” Fraser volunteered, when Richard had to go.

They turned from the quiet street of houses into a mews; then through

a slum displaying barrows with highly-coloured wares, gaudy with small

shops gustily illuminated, raucous with slatternly women calling from the

upper windows to their offspring in the gutters.

“Short cut to the trams,” explained Fraser. “Hullo, what’s the row?”

A woman was huddled on a doorstep, wailing loudly, openly, without any

pretence of hiding her stark grief. Her wisps of grey hair were blown

by the wind flat across her distorted face, which she neither burrowed

in her arms nor covered with a handkerchief. For she had just received

tidings that her daughter had gone down in the steerage of the Lusitania,

and she wanted God and man to know it.

A knot of sympathizers, neighbours and casual passers-by, stood dumbly

around her, listening to the saga of Ethel Ann’s childhood, and Ethel

Ann’s adolescence, and Ethel Ann envisioned powerfully but crudely as

a human livid face, struggling, gulping, pleading for help ... help

refused.... “They pushed ’em back into the water!” screamed the old

crone. “My little ’un. Curse the Germans!—Curse ’em! They watched ’er

drowning, and they laughed. A-a-aaah ...” articulation trailed away into

a long-drawn-out cry of rage and mourning and hate. She strained her

skinny arms in a tight line upward, as though in one gesture could be

uttered all that her tongue had failed to say.

Richard felt it was impossible just to stand still and look on at this.

He glowered about him in a spirit of desperate truculence. The others

of the group were in exactly the same case, their eyes roaming stupidly

up and down the narrow street, as though in search of some immediate

measures. A carter leaning against his dray drawn up to the kerb

opposite, spoke out fiercely:

“Ay. ’Uns. That’s the sort they are. Wish I ’ad one or two under my fist

now. I’d show ’em what for.”

“You _have_ got ’em under your fist now—plenty—if you know where to

look!” A lantern-jawed man with the hollow eyes of a fanatic, sprang onto

the tail-board of the dray. At once he formed a vortex for all the loose

and aimless emotions adrift in that street. Richard and Fraser found

themselves in a wedge of men and women, women predominating, swaying with

that sort of concerted drunken rhythm peculiar to all crowds. Even the

mother of the drowned girl stopped her wails, and stared fixedly at the

demagogue.

“Germans everywhere in this country—millions of ’em, laughing up

their sleeves because we’re such ruddy softs as not to chuck’em out.

Laughing now, I expect, over our women and children pushed back into

the icy water; _English_ women and children. Yes, it’s a good joke,

ain’t it? First-class!... I ’ad a pal on the Lusitania—well, never mind

that—there’s some ’ere as ’ad more than pals. Are we going to stand

it—that’s what I want to know? Are we going on trading with murderers

and cowards, living cheek by jowl with ’em, buying our very bread from

’em ... _poisoned_ bread! I tell you, there are Germans in the next

street, in this street, and in a thousand other streets in England, with

their dirty names over the shop-windows. Ask the Government!—ah! the

Government’ll do something about it, per’aps, by and by. Ask ’em—they’ll

say they’ve took the proper measures of precaution. We don’t want

precaution, thank yer all the same. We want revenge on the foul scum what

sank the Lusitania! We want revenge—not by and by, but _now_! We want

revenge—and by the dying agonies of our children, and for the sake of

those they’ve left, we’ll have it!”

His hearers had been like empty bottles offering no resistance to the

fiery liquid he poured into them. Yes—they wanted instant revenge; that

was what they had sought by their vacant stares. With a scattered howl,

from which the human element seemed long since to have been drained,

they swirled up the street. Richard was borne along by the impetus of

their fury. He had lost sight of Fraser, who, missing him, had probably

returned home; it did not matter; this was rather a lark—one of the

Lusitania riots; they had been breaking out all over London since

the news had come through. No—not exactly a lark ... it swelled into

something more formidable and animated by a spirit of deeper satisfaction

than warranted by the schoolboy description: this was action; this was

war; he was in direct contact with it at last. A gang of men in an ugly

temper, running in a set direction ... he could feel purpose behind the

lurching, staggering passage of the mob.... They were on their way to

punish the Germans—coarse hulking giants who could laugh at Ethel Ann’s

drenched face helpless in a green tumble of breakers.... Brutes! damned

brutes! we’ll show them!...

This was all the jerky elated comment his brain could register during the

headlong stampede up the cramped alley; that—and a confused impression of

the women’s faces here and there patching the rest: streaming hair, with

the iron pins still clumsily caught in it; mouths open and awry; damp

red skins. Mob-women—they were hideous....

The lantern-jawed man, still leader, halted abruptly in front of a small

baker’s shop. “What about that?” denunciatory forefinger thrown out

to indicate the name painted over the window: Gottlieb Schnabel. The

crowd replied by another exultant howl ... it was beginning to merge

its separate identities into the Demos-beast, at once frightful yet

silly; incapable alike of retreat or initiative; a beast that uttered

meaningless sounds; could be deflected hither and thither; a beast

without logic or coherence; but a beast that was out, very obstinately,

to maul somebody ... the Germans....

“What about that?”

Those in the van swerved so sharply into the little doorway of the shop,

that their comrades immediately behind them could not restrain themselves

from reeling past it by weight of impetus; then turned, and pressed

back, with a violent impact jamming the rearmost in the narrow aperture;

so that it seemed that dark menacing figures were springing out of the

shadows from all sides and directions, into the pallid flare of the

gas-jets singing forlornly over the counter.

The shop was deserted. Violent hands ripped down the curtains that

divided off the back-parlour, and about a dozen roughs hurled themselves

up the stairs, chanting: “Schnabel: Schnabel!” in hideous sing-song.

Their feet could be heard trampling the upper premises in search of the

owner: “Come aht of it, yer bloody funk! Wot abaht the Lusitania?”...

The shop-door swung backwards and forwards in the draughts of wind which

blew down the street; and at each oscillation, a little bell tinkled

the warning of customers—an innocent tinkle, like a distant sheep-bell

... inadequate tinkle that recurred thinly through all the chaos of

heavier sound: Crash of splintered glass, as the scales and weights

were sent flying through the front window of the shop. The majority of

avengers were working off their blood-lust by hullabaloo and wreckage;

tossing about the buns and cakes; swinging and smashing the rows of big

sweet-bottles; sending a hurricane of piled-up bread-baskets over the

floor. It had been a neat little interior, three minutes before...!

But Richard was impatient of all this mere monkey destruction; his

imagination was a-sweat to vent itself upon Germans, not upon rolls and

doughnuts. He raced up the back stairs—and down again; no Germans there;

and the rioters engaged in the same stupid business of destruction. But

the Germans ... pointed steel helmets, puffed-out cheeks, and thick

sensual lips—where had they contrived to stow themselves away? The notion

had got started that they were here ... somewhere ... the excited boy did

not stop to reason it out. He wanted to batter with his fists against a

fat resisting carcase. Here?—of course they were; somebody had said so.

Dodging the volley of loaves, he bolted out of the shop, and round the

corner to the tiny yard at the back, unheeding whether he were alone

or followed. The bakehouse!—must be one under the shop. Yes—beneath

this wooden flap. Guided by the hot good smell of bread in the oven, he

wrenched at the hinges; and rashly taking the ladder for granted, plunged

into the gaping black space. Fragments of tales relating to the Lusitania

horrors were flying loosely about in his mind, like the loaves in the

shop: sickening details gasped out by the dazed survivors, and written

up for the public in lurid journalese. Fighting—was that the Hun idea of

fighting?—swine! cheats! butchers!—his turn to show them now....

Richard bumped his feet on level ground; he blinked an instant in the red

dimness of his surroundings ... then, gradually, a face swam into his

consciousness—a face over there, by the barrels—a face smeared in flour,

and channelled by the drip of perspiration—a face that would have been

ludicrous, were it not for its expression of deadly shivering fear ...

_trapped_ fear....

With knowledge of utter helplessness in his fascinated gaze, he

confronted Richard. Beside him, a plump woman and two or three children

crouched in a shadowy lump.

No army of Germans here. Only the little baker, Gottlieb Schnabel, and

his family.

He stared at Richard. Richard stared back. And then his swollen illusion

was pricked and shrivelled. So this was the reality of what he had been

vengefully hounding down, he and the bawlers overhead? this one peaked,

unhappy little face, white with dabs of flour, white in the last dumb

extremity of panic.

Schnabel’s dry lips moved convulsively.... “Ach, bitte,” he babbled;

then, with an effort: “Can—I—help—for—it?”...

Richard just caught the words. He recoiled; turned and stumbled up the

ladder.... One must get away from that face.... Not so easy—some of the

crowd had followed him after all, were swarming round the entrance to

the bakehouse. “There’s no-one there,” muttered Richard; “no-one there”

... his voice was choked as though in a thick fog. “No-one there——” But

the main thing was to get out, into the street, before they began to do

things—no, that did not matter,—but before he could _hear_ them doing

things. They were pressing him back again, down again.... “There’s no one

there, I tell you!” Blindly he buffeted right and left the heads which

blocked his passage. Some of them, believing him, gave way ... melted

out of reach from his hard fists and powerful driving shoulders. Others

went shuffling and clattering past him, down the wooden rungs. “Schnabel!

Schnabel!”—and a sharp scream. One must get away, quickly....

A great surge of bodies in the yard. Thrusting forward, with his head

low down, through a rank smell of boots and corduroys and rusty skirts,

Richard got clear at last. Round the corner—into the street—a number of

people running in his direction—three or four policemen. “There’s no-one

there!”—half-sobbing, he dodged through a mews into a wider street; again

that loud trample of feet beating towards him—would they never let him

escape? he wanted to be free of mobs. What did this mob want? Schnabel?

... No, it was only a helter-skelter of gnome-like urchins, shrieking

hoarsely their late editions. He paused to draw breath; leant up against

an adjacent wall; his cap had gone long ago, and the wind blew in hard,

fresh gusts through his hair.

Presently he walked on again, slowly. Hysteria had evaporated, and was

replaced by the usual shame. Now he came to think over the matter coolly,

what had so upset him? The little rat of a baker had been in a funk,

certainly; probably justified; probably the rabble had handled him fairly

roughly. What of that? Ethel Ann, equally innocent, equally helpless, had

met with an infinitely worse fate.

Oh, he was not going to take part in the baiting himself. No sport in it.

The wisest course to pursue had been to depart from the scene, as he

had done. Had he “departed from the scene” or made an exit—rather less

dignified than that inferred? Well, he could hardly be expected to stay

and look on. Nor could he have protected Schnabel—hang it! the man _was_

a German. Not “the Germans”—but still a German. Richard, impatiently,

classified the whole experience as “quite a decent scrum”; and as

such, stuck it up on a shelf in his memory, like a book with several

pages safely gummed together. He proved to be in a completely strange

neighbourhood; and devoted all his present faculties in discovering the

whereabouts of Montagu Hall.

II

“Richard, is that you?”

“Yes, Pater; I’ve just come in.”

“I want to speak to you, my boy.”

“Right-o!” Richard turned on the stairs, interrogatively.

“Not here. In my room.”

Old Hermann Marcus looked up with a queer gleam in his eyes, as Richard

and Ferdie entered. Almost as though he were sorry for the boy—and yet

secretly and maliciously triumphant.

“How are you getting on at Winborough?” Ferdinand asked jerkily, after a

pause.

“Same as usual: excellent all-round ability, but no outstanding merit,

as old Skeffington says. I say, dad, would you have any objection if I

joined up next year already?” since his father had seemingly nothing of

any importance to impart, Richard thought he might as well use the formal

interview for his own purpose.

“Joined up what?”

“The army, of course. Royal Flying Corps, for choice; I’m fit enough to

stand the medical test. And lots of fellows are passing themselves off

as older than their age. Only I’m not very tall ...” his tone implied

reproach for his father’s lack of inches. There was silence for a moment;

he felt the two men were not attending to his request as they should;

so he went on in further explanation: “It’s so rotten to be just under

age for enlisting. Different if you’re a kid, and out of it altogether.

Rogers—you remember him? he was head boy at Winborough—Rogers is only

eighteen months older than I am, and he’s in the thick of it. And to-day

more than ever——” he stopped dead.

“Why to-day more than ever?” Ferdinand enquired, very gently.

Richard was not quite sure why: except that to-day he had expended a lot

of heat and energy on a cause which had repaid him neither in vigorous

defence nor in ultimate satisfaction; and he wanted an experience of

real, substantial war and real, substantial Germans to make up for the

futile civilian imitation. But he was unwilling to explain all this about

Germans in front of his grandfather, or even to his father, who might be

subject to occasional sensitive twinges on that score. So he swerved from

the direct question:

“Quite frankly, dad, I mean to enlist next year, with or without

permission. But I thought I’d like to hear if you have any special

objection; good of me, isn’t it?” laughing.

“Certainly I should be proud and glad if you could fight for England,

but——” Ferdie evidently found an increasing difficulty in going on.

He took up an evening paper from the table: “Have you seen the late

editions, Richard?”

“No. Any news? Not—not a defeat?”

“The Prime Minister has made certain promises ... there have been more

anti-German riots over this Lusitania business——”

“Conceited fools, who haven’t the brains to win a victory at the Front,

think themselves patriots if they break a few shop-windows,” growled

Marcus from his corner.

Richard flushed darkly, and his hands clenched in his pockets: “They’d

be doing the same, and much worse, to us in Germany, if we’d established

ourselves all over the place there, as they have here. And the sinking of

the Lusitania was a foul, cowardly affair; no wonder we’ve lost control

of our tempers, hearing about it.”

“_We?_” echoed the old Bavarian, with a sarcastic inflexion; “and you as

German as I, my boy! You won’t be allowed to forget it as easily, in the

future.”

“Rubbish!” said Richard shortly. He had no desire to quarrel with his

grandfather, who, as a lonely but unyielding unit in enemy country,

demanded a certain chivalry of treatment.—But no fellow was going to

stand being called a German, nowadays! “Have you done with me, dad? I’m

sorry about the fuss in the papers, but it will all blow off presently.

I don’t think they’ll do anything to the naturalized Germans, anyway;

not to those who have been settled in England as long as you.” He

sauntered towards the door; then halted to add in a sudden inspiration of

diplomacy: “The sooner I’m fighting, dad, the better for you, all of you.

A son in the army makes a huge difference to public feeling.”

“That depends on which army ...” threw in Hermann Marcus. And Ferdie

said, with a stupendous effort: “You can’t fight for England in this war,

Richard. I’m sorry, as you are so dead nuts on it,” carefully negotiating

the idiom. “But they will not take you. You are a German.”

Richard burst into a great shout of laughter. “What rot, dad! How can I

be a German? I’m as English as they make ’em.”

“You were born in Germany. And I was not naturalized at that date.”

“Born—in—Germany?”

“You see,” Ferdie apologized, miserably avoiding his son’s eyes, “your

grandfather invited us to pay him a long visit to Munich. I and Deb—and

your dear mother, of course. He had never seen little Deb ... she was

seven years old——”

“A quite abominable pest of a child!” from the depths of the armchair in

the corner.

“And so we all went over. And you were born there. Your poor mother died

of it ...” he cleared his throat, and blew his nose. “That, perhaps, is

why it was never mentioned to you.”

Ferdie was right. He had felt the loss of Dorothea so keenly that

sentiment demanded of the household that her death should never be

alluded to. Whence followed that Richard’s birth was likewise hushed

up, being intimately linked with the bereavement and all its tragic

circumstances. He had never bothered about the matter, taking it for

granted that, like Deb, he was born at Daisybanks.

“But, father, I can’t be a German. I—I don’t _like_ Germans. I can’t

stick them at any price.” His tone was sharp with the first agonized

belief that some truth might lurk in the altogether staggering accusation

that these two were bringing against him. “I don’t like Germans. And

we’re fighting them. I’m English—like other chaps. You can’t make a

fellow German by saying he is,” relieved commonsense asserting itself

over a frame of mind which was almost babyish in its reliance on the

repetition: “I don’t _like_ Germans!”

And then, a criminal before the sternest of judges, Ferdinand Marcus made

his confession:

“You see—when I was naturalized afterwards, you—you were not naturalized

at the same time. I wanted you to choose for yourself when you came of

age; to be free to make your own choice for one country or another—for

any country. I, as a boy, had never been consulted what were my private

wishes——” His father here gave utterance to a grunt pregnant with rich

opinions of the unimportance of Ferdie’s wishes, whatever they might have

been. “—It should be different for you, I said. Who knows if you would

want to find yourself a British subject, in twenty-one years? Time enough

then. So I left it till you should be old enough——”

“It didn’t strike you, I suppose, that a war might break out in the

meantime?”

“It did not strike a great many other people, Richard.”

“Doch! everyone but an idiot; an idiot and a bungler ... with your

prate of ‘my children’s rights,’ and ‘my children’s opinions’ and

‘my children’s liberty.’... A bungler with your children, like with

everything else, you are bringing one of them to an internment camp; we

will see to what fine end you bring the other.”

Richard faced round sharply: “Is that what it means for me?”

“We cannot tell for certain; I will make an appeal on your behalf——”

“Damn! I don’t want any appeals. It’s not a felony to be born in one

place instead of another. What’s the law?”

“By pre-war law, you took your father’s nationality while you were a

minor—but all that has been altered——” Ferdinand took up the paper:

“They’ve been lenient so far; but all this agitation—the Home Secretary

has had to make concessions to the public. They are rounding up enemy

aliens of military age; that does not concern you at present. You will

have to register under the Five-Mile Act until—until——”

“Until I’m old enough to have enlisted,” muttered the boy. “And Deb?”

“Deb is all right; she was born in England. At least—I must see: there is

still some confusion under these new conditions as to whether you are

what your father is, or where you were born. And they alter the law every

five minutes. But I think she is all right.”

“Good,” with a breath of relief. “And you, dad?”

“They are not persecuting the naturalized, so far. There is an outcry

from the extreme party, but——” Ferdie shrugged his shoulders, “I am a

British subject.”

“And grandfather? And Aunt Stella?”

“They are repatriating the old people and the women and children. But

exemptions are to be made in special cases; Stella has been a resident

here for so many years——”

“And I, being a cripple of nearly eighty, your English may have the

kindness to allow me to die under a flag which I have certainly no wish

to live under.”

“Cut all that!” his grandson silenced him roughly. “It’s rank pro-German——”

“German,” Hermann methodically corrected him. “_I_ at least know what I

am.”

“And Richard and I also know what we are, too,” Ferdie shouted warmly,

clapping his hand on Richard’s broad, and at that moment exceedingly

forbidding shoulder; “our sentiments for this country of ours are loyal

as any Britishers’; we cheer their victories. We continue to salute the

Union Jack with pride in our hearts——”

“Whatever such foolishness you may commit, liebe Ferdinand, you remain

only half an Englishman.”

Ferdie’s resolute bellow gained strength with every caustic interruption

from his parent. “We will cheerfully give help where we are permitted——”

Richard broke in: “—And cheerfully let ourselves be hoofed out where

we’re not? No, I’m not going to hang round the edges of patriotism like a

beggar. Why wasn’t I told of all this till now?”

It struck Ferdie that Richard was at times disconcertingly like his

grandfather. “Why should you have been made worried and uncomfortable at

school, while there was still no need? And before the war, what did it

matter where you were born?”

“And now, what else matters in all the world?” the first numbness of

shock had passed, and Richard’s innermost being was plunging in every

direction like a tortured bull caught inside the ring-fence. “You’ve

robbed me of my nationality—professing to be so keen on my happiness.

Born in Germany, and lugged over to England; educated in England, and

allowed to take it for granted I was English, and all the while a German

subject—in God’s name, where do I belong? what am I? who can claim me?

Oh yes, you’ve been jolly good to me, I don’t deny that; you’ve spoilt

me; you’ve given me everything—except a country. But to shove a fellow

in a position where an outbreak of war leaves him with his sentiments in

one place, and his birth-certificate in another, is rather overdoing the

freedom-of-choice stunt. You might have known all along I’d care to be

rooted somewhere. Citizenship doesn’t go for nothing, even in peace——”

“Nonsense, Richard; be honest; how much did you trouble your head about

citizenship, before nineteen-fourteen?”

“I thought I was English,” Richard said. And repeated, with a sort of

dazed pugnacious idiocy: “I thought I was English.” Then he flared out

again: “_You_ didn’t think at all. You were just careless. Why on earth

did you want to take me to Germany to be born?”

“I have told you; your grandfather sent for us.”

“It wouldn’t have hurt him to wait a year or two. Much he cared if he

never saw any of you again. You were all afraid to say no to him. I

thought myself so lucky to be born in these times. What’s the good of the

war now?”

His father could not forbear from a smile at the savage young egoism. The

boy saw it, and raged on: “It would have been better if I’d died when my

mother died——”

“Hush, hush, my son.”

... Richard crashed his weight on to a chair, head butted down on his

arms along the back rail. And the two men watched him in silence; one

of them thinking with a slow, grudging, resentment how good a moment

it might have been for him to have seen this youngster in an officer’s

light-blue uniform, come clanging and jangling into a certain house

in Munich, to bid good-bye before his departure to win glory for the

Vaterland. And the other was vainly groping round for what comfort he

could give his only son in trouble; Dorothea would have so known what

little tender thing to do or say ... his eyes filled with tears, and in

his over-anxious endeavour to play mother at this juncture, he blundered

dismally:

“Come, come, my boy—buck up! You who are usually so sensible. It isn’t

such a tragedy, even if it should end, at the worst, by internment. You

will be safe, and with friends——”

Richard slowly lifted his head. He looked rather old for sixteen, and his

voice dragged like tired footsteps on a heavy road:

“Sorry if I was rude, dad. Yes, of course I’ll be safe. Much safer than

in the Flying Corps. I didn’t think of that. I’m going to bed now.

Good-night.”

Half-way across the room, he came back for the evening paper. Then he

went out.

III

... Strange that his brain should have shot right away from the main

catastrophe on to this tangent question of reprisals! There, out in

mid-ocean, a liner sunk; here, in a London slum, a baker’s shop raided.

Where was the connection? A Gottlieb for an Ethel Ann.... “Yes, but is it

quite fair—revenge by proxy? it wasn’t Schnabel who drowned Ethel Ann;

it was another German; Schnabel was all the while harmlessly selling

loaves. Why should he have to pay?” Were they thinking of that, the mad

herd who had rushed up the street, brandishing their crowbars and axes

and pokers? “Was I thinking of it? To relieve one’s feelings ... biting

on the tooth—yes, but it’s got to be that especial nervous tooth—and

you should want to hit the _same_ German, not any old German, or the

next-best German. If Ethel Ann’s mother could have got in on one of the

torpedo crew ... I suppose one can’t expect a crowd to reason that way.

But I might have saved him.... Damn it, why should I? he’s a German!”

And so am I—and so am I—knocked the meaningless hammer refrain from the

walls and ceiling of his room, from every corner and cranny; in the wind

that fitfully rattled the blind; in the creak of the chair; and from the

rumble of traffic far below.... So am I—so am I—everywhere but inside his

brain, where the mere statement might have been quickened to torturing

realization—but it seemed unable to force an entrance, pushed out by

a fantastic jumble of oddments he had never thought out before, never

bothered to think out.

—Naturalized ... what exactly did that stand for? A paper which was

given in payment of some small sum, stating that you were no more of one

nationality, but of another.... But surely nationality was no surface

matter, to be dealt with in this arbitrary fashion? it went deeper: your

own country, your own soil. “‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead!’

how Fraser ranted that, last term when they were doing Scott. Beastly

showing-off!... What will they say at Winborough when I tell them?—No,

hang! that wasn’t it.... Nationality—the place where you were born——”

A dead halt in the onrush of thought. Richard stared blankly around

him.... Then it began again, mental machinery that whirled ever faster,

grinding, minutely grinding, at all that stray lumpy stuff....

“Nothing to do with where you were born. I can swear to that. That’s

accidental. And your father’s nationality—accidental too, as far as

you’re concerned; can’t be tacked on to it as a matter of course.

“What is it, then? The land that holds a meaning for you; it might be a

question of habitation, or tradition, or convenience—herd instinct with

the people you live among. Or—or imagination.

“No—it digs further down than that even.

“It ought to be the sum of where you were born, and where your father was

born as well, and his father; where you have always lived, and always

hope to live.”

But people move about. Cross over. Get mixed. You cannot actually fasten

down humanity as neatly as on a map; a line here, and a line there,

and this side is English, and this side German. During all these years

of peace, little separate individuals busily and happily intermarrying

and begetting children; becoming entangled in trade and in friendship;

by a million amenities of commerce and art and amusement and family,

semi-obliterating the sharp boundary outlines——

“People drift about. And then a war happens. Like a ripping of canvas.

No—like two lines of trenches.... A scramble apart to either trench—lucky

beggars who know quite distinctly where they belong. And No Man’s Land

between. And some stranded in No Man’s Land....

“To be officially of No Man’s Land—that’s one thing; can’t be helped;

penalty of carelessness beforehand. But is it possible, I wonder, to

_feel_ yourself not for one country nor another? neither mattering?

neither victory mattering?

“Socialism—international socialism. But then one must care principally

for all humanity—in a lump. And that’s patriotism too, on the largest

scale of all. Just like a man crazy only on his own duck-pond is a

patriot—a local patriot. All Man’s Land ... One Man’s Land....

“Not for me, thanks. If I had been twenty-one before all this shindy, I’d

have been naturalized English!”

Naturalized! Was that only an official cover again? And under the covers,

what were those people actually thinking? The Rothenburgs? thousands like

them—the half-and-half people....

“I like a German to _be_ a German!”... “Naturalized or unnaturalized,

it’s all the same to me!”... “Can a leopard change his spots?”...

Memory offered him these stray phrases perpetually uttered and repeated

in a penetrating rasp—where?... in the hall downstairs, and at—at

breakfast, surely? (memory struggled)—Oh yes! old Gryce. Behind the voice

a crude pink face materialized, with an ugly sag of line at the corners

of the mouth and a wisp of white beard wagging from the chin. Old Gryce

was always ejecting that type of remark.

“Intern them all!... We didn’t ask them to settle over here. We don’t

want them....”

The boy paced up and down the room, head bent, hands locked behind him,

brows heavily knit, thinking it out:

Naturalization was, after all, a promise—well, a bargain then; what was

a bargain but a mutual promise? A whole community had learnt to rely

securely on such a promise; had confidently forfeited the protection and

advantages of their native land, in favour of an adopted country. And now

if their security were repudiated on excuse of war——

“Is there any stipulating clause in the naturalization contract, making

it void in the event of war, I wonder? Because if not——

“But we can’t leave enemy blood loose about the country during war-time.

It isn’t safe. They might all be spies. Some of them _are_. And spying is

the worst thing of all—abuse of hospitality. No wonder the thought of it

drives people to a sort of madness——”

He took up the evening edition—flung it down again; too dark to read

anything but the headlines: “More Anti-German Riots”——

* * * * *

... Someone crouching low in the corner by the cupboard. A patch of

white. A face—mad-frightened.... “Ach, bitte——”... The little German

baker.—Or ... no—the face had changed—it was Richard himself, staring

panic-stricken, yet reproachfully, at that other Richard who was leading

against him a hostile mob:

“He’s a German!”

“And so am I—and so am I——”

It had stabbed through to the brain at last.

“I’m not a German. It’s a lie. I’m not. I _hate_ the Germans. They have

drowned Ethel Ann ... Ethel Ann....”

How had she looked? had she brown or fair hair?—but all hair is the same

in the water ... dank seaweed round a discoloured pulp....

“Swine! Swine!”—he was pacing again with rapid, demented step. “That’s

not the game as it should be played, as it was arranged to be played.

It’s a breach of the rules. Women and children and non-combatants

excluded, and every man with a chance of self-defence. The conventions of

war——”

And suddenly Richard stood still and began to laugh. And what chance of

defence had a man standing beside a bursting bomb thrown by an unseen

hand from fifty yards away? Little silly, fretful rules—with death and

destruction and decay streaming wide over one country after another;

whirring in the very air above God’s churches; throbbing in the sea under

the millionaire’s pleasure-ship; each individual helplessly involved with

their bodies or with their goods or with their hearts. Then, what the

devil is the use of some abstract gabble about the conventions of a game?

... All that was for five hundred years ago, when one soldier had it out

with another soldier according to the laws of chivalry. But in _this_

wholesale welter.... All that fuss about two or three isolated lives

sacrificed against the rules, as compared to the thousands according

to rule; agony outside the rules, and agony according to rule. When

it comes to it, what’s the difference? Ludicrous to reason in the old

way—the ravings of an idiot; we have ramped so far round in the circle of

civilization that we are miles behind again....

Richard did not attempt to turn his feverish, dishevelled reflections

into coherence; but he could not force his mind from fastening with

this queer new tenacity on aspects to which, until now, it had been

muffled to a remote indifference. The war and all its immense and tendril

complexities—how could he ever have viewed it just as a matter of dealing

blows?

“It’s because I was to have had an active part in it. I was going to join

up. The only way to avoid war-horror is to take part in it. What will it

look like from the internment camp?——”

Imagination pierced—and recoiled from the threatened nausea of

stagnation. Internment ... why, he and Deb had joked about it (“Yes,

Deb’s all right; I’m glad Deb’s all right!”)—Concentration camps; potted

Germans—“Did you know, Richard, Gustav Fürth was potted yesterday?” ...

Jokes!—What were they like, these camps? the prisoners were well-treated,

he had heard; but what did you _do_? ... Vision of two fattish young

Teutons sleepy over their game of dominoes. This for him, while out

there, out there, was the scrum and the sacrifice. This for Richard, who

was a fighter ... “Oh God! let the war be over before I’m eighteen!”

PART II

CHAPTER I

“It was your pal I wanted really—not you,” Antonia Verity informed Deb,

when their friendship was sturdy enough to withstand such frankness, “I

didn’t like you.”

“Jenny?—Yes, she was worth fifty of me.”

“And yet you’re not really humble,” the other laughed. “Ring for tea,

Deb. I’m tired of seeing you brooding like a sphinx. The pleasure grows

monotonous. I suppose you can’t brood while you eat macaroons?”

“Easily; they’re quite dry and manageable.”

“Tea, please, and a poached egg for Miss Marcus,” Antonia commanded of

the servant. “I can’t help it if you don’t want it, Deb—you must be cured

of that inscrutable habit. I just can’t bear it. How many men have called

you Sphinx in your exotic career?”

“All, except one or two. It’s very popular. So is Serpent of the Nile

and Cleopatra and little Princess of Egypt. When I am moved to cry ‘Yah,

chestnut!’ to these endearments, they offer to strangle me in my own

hair.”

“Which usually hangs down in readiness. You’re the only person I’ve met

outside fiction whose hair naturally gravitates towards your heels. Even

on the night we first met——”

“Yes. The soldier and I had been fooling.... Antonia, you guessed, didn’t

you, that time—about Jenny?”

“I saw that she was really ill when I came into your room. And I was

puzzled, because I had been quite sure before, that you and she were in

some plot to escape from La llorraine. But I doubt if she knew herself,

in that semi-hysterical condition, when sham ended and the real began.

What did she actually die of?”

“Heart failure. She was weakened by a lot of ’flu, and aspirin, and

operations, and nursing other people. I ought to have known the

difference. But she was always wildly emotional, and almost as often in

pain, and then that evening’s excitement——” Deb broke off. It was four

months now since the night when Cora had lowered her flame in sympathy

with the break-up of the Chorus. Four months—and Jenny dead was so _very_

dead.... Her memory did not abide as lingeringly as in the case of a

more spiritual or more intellectual personality. A warm quick reality of

everyday little touches and eager practical services ... these things

die with the flesh. Deb just knew that neither Cora nor the room nor

the soldier nor her own family had stood for home-always-on-the-tap

on the second floor landing, as Jenny did. And the little group of

people surrounding Jenny seemed mechanically to flop away in different

directions, after that evening. Dolph took Bobby away to his people. La

llorraine and Manon left Montagu Hall in a whirlwind of rage, because Mr

Gryce had complained of Madame’s breakfast costume; the Turkish slippers

seemed particularly to offend him. Of the Soldier no more had been heard.

And even Deb’s room in which it had all happened, was abandoned. “D’you

mind if we share a double-room, Deb?” Aunt Stella had asked rather

anxiously, about a month later. “Now that Richard is coming back for the

Easter holidays and will want a den of his own, I suggested it might be a

saving for your father if we don’t scatter quite so much. But he says you

must be asked first if you’ll consent to sleep with a soured old maid,”

with that tinkling laugh that never sounded quite as mirthful as the

spirit it accompanied.

Deb was quite glad of the change. The associations of her old bed were

rather poignant. Stella could not bear the smell of Cora, who was

henceforth packed away in a boxroom. And Deb began to wonder if all her

life would be a succession of disjointed episodes, each with its full

complement of cast and scenery, and each when it was over to be slipped

as easily as a bead off a string. Daisybanks, in the careless life

before the war: what was known as the “Portman Rooms set” of wealthy

semi-artistic young Israelites—dances—the river—frequent companionship

of Hedvig and Lenchen Rothenburg. That bead slipped. Dorzheim, and

its marionette figures: Felix and Marianna Koch, Sigismund who looked

like Jesus Christ, Ralph and Huldah van Sittart, Elly Ladenberg from

Manchester, clearest of all, perhaps, the upturned face of Lothar von

Relling.... They existed now and performed their parts, hidden away

behind a thick black curtain ... what matter if it were never raised

again. Then the Chorus....

What next?

After a pause, Antonia Verity answered that question. Antonia, following

up a whim, came to Montagu Hall to see Jenny. Not finding Jenny, she

knocked at the door of Deb’s former bedroom. Deb was just moving—that is

to say she was sitting dreamily on an overturned drawer, in the midst of

a scrum of her possessions, reading a mid-Victorian novel entitled “Anna

Lee, Maiden, Wife and Mother.”

“Come and listen to this,” she bade Antonia without further greeting.

They became intimate over “Anna Lee.”

In Antonia Verity, Deb recognized with mixed feelings the temperament

she had always most coveted, most desired to find in herself. The

natural Artemis, Artemis from no simpering prudery nor actual coldness

of disposition—but that Artemis who instinctively runs from the pursuer;

Artemis in love with her own chastity. Her eyes, changing from hazel to

green, deepset in shadow and drooping at the corners, were at perpetual

war with the pure scissored curves of her mouth. Deb was aware that

Antonia could never deal in fragments where her love-affairs were

concerned; and that she rather wondered at those who did. It seemed

therefore a foregone conclusion to Deb, whose mind was prone to run on

lines of fairy-tale justice, that life must hold for Antonia the eventual

big thing; bank in which this guarded stored-up treasure would ultimately

find safe deposit. It remained a miracle to her how Antonia managed not

to fritter the treasure. She never saw that trifles simply did not happen

to the other girl. Men ... knew. They liked her peacefully, but some

fundamental quality in her gave them their cue for decent behaviour as a

matter of course. As a same matter of course, they embarked on amorous

experiment with Deb; could not leave her alone. And this, though Deb

longed for Antonia’s secret to attract the better treatment; more than

ever admired her ideal of a girl clad in a sort of symbolic moonwhite

armour, now that it had become incarnate. Though she had been often

to Antonia’s studio, she had never yet succeeded in probing a certain

aloofness in her friend....

Jenny—and then Antonia. Jenny whom one touched ... a fervent cosiness

of friendship punctuated throughout by touch—it was impossible to

conceive of friendship with Antonia thus emphasized. Antonia was good

to look at—delicate, clean lines—no mess; her mind clearly braced to

all encounter, whether of laughter or argument. But it was unthinkable

that one should touch Antonia, nor seek touch from her; Antonia guarded

something ... as yet inviolable.

“Who was the man in the room?” Antonia enquired suddenly, at work upon

her portrait of Deb.

“Oh—he was—a—a man.”

“Yes, I gathered that with the naked eye.”

“Incredible, Holmes—it passes human understanding.”

“It passes human understanding what that gentleman in shirt sleeves was

doing, cooking asparagus in your room.”

“No scandal about asparagus, I hope?”

“They reeked of it—that night.”

Deb moved restlessly. “Don’t be priggish, Antonia.”

“It isn’t priggishness. Oh, do understand that. It’s—decency. Not towards

other people, but towards one’s self. I don’t care about conventions....

Yes, I do—they prevent litter and disorder—and they can’t really get deep

enough to handicap the emotions. What I meant was that I don’t care about

opinion. _I_ do as I like.”

“Well then ... So do I.”

“No. A man in your bedroom for an hour or two, just to talk to ... and

then good-night—that’s not doing as you like. He shouldn’t have been

there at all. Taking you and your room for granted. And your lips.”

“He never kissed me,” said Deb in a very low voice.

“I said he took your lips for granted—and the possibility of them. His

decision is beside the point. Deb, how I wish you wouldn’t!”

After a pause the other girl said, “I won’t ask ‘what?’ because I suppose

I know.... And I agree with you. We ought to save it all up for the one

man——”

“No, no, no. That’s merely commercial. To keep one’s market value

uncorrupted.... Manon llorraine’s standards. Horrid little _ingénue_.

She reckoned every look thrown to that poor begging man Carew as so much

profitless waste of virgin stock.”

“I must say, you took in rather a lot, that one hectic evening at Montagu

Hall.”

Antonia rushed on: “Not to save all up for the one man—but ... isn’t

maidenhood in itself rather a splendid thing? I wish that didn’t sound

so affected. This isn’t the Suffrage standard. I don’t hate the other

sex—not a bit. I like them. But ... just to be proud, and not slovenly.”

“You think I’m slovenly?”

“I’ve never seen you for more than a minute in male company. But I fancy,

if I had, I should have wanted to cry out every minute: ‘don’t—oh don’t!’”

“As bad as that?” lightly Deb had to feign amusement, for her Artemis

girl was flicking her well on the raw. She remembered how she had

experienced just that desire to cry out “don’t” when Jenny——

So she stood half-way between Antonia and Jenny. But Jenny had been

married—and Antonia said “isn’t maidenhood in itself rather a splendid

thing?”

A chill white dawn faintly shot with gold ... for Antonia? for herself

and Antonia? But surely such divine hesitancy and glamour were for the

girl of eighteen, seventeen, sixteen ... wide eyes, intent on vision,

tremulous childish lips, “no one shall kiss me until he comes....” And

the end of the legend was that he came, and kissed her—just before she

was tired of waiting—at twenty, say; or twenty-one. That answered the

riddle so easily for young Artemis. But if the legend missed its obvious

conclusion?... She was now twenty-four, and Antonia twenty-six ...

Antonia’s austere demands were rather a strain on passion unsatisfied

in the late twenties—rather a strain on the chill-white-dawn ideal.

Antonia at sixteen, tingling from hot indignant scorn at anything which

ran counter to her unshaken, unshakeable schoolgirl principles of what

was “right”—Antonia at sixteen, not unlike Deb at sixteen; dreaming in a

walled garden of lilacs. They had outgrown it——

What now?

Some sort of a compromise ... a dream semi-yielded, semi-cherished....

Oh, just chance it! A separate code of rules for every transient

episode—or none at all—or trust to the moment’s inspiration—take love

haphazard—compromise.... Burton Ames had left her possessed by the very

desperation of restlessness. And it was easier now to give lightly, since

striving to compete with Jenny, she had once broken bounds. Jenny had

died, without getting what she wanted; Jenny had shown how easy, how

frighteningly easy, it was to die ... slip away. So cram in something at

all costs, lest it should happen to you like that....

“Here you are!” Antonia threw her the sketch on which she had the last

half hour been working. It was a startlingly clever study in crayons.

Underneath it was scrawled “Girl of the Transition Period.”

Petulantly Deb flicked it away. “‘It’s pretty—but is it art?’” she quoted.

“No. It’s psychology.”

“Résumé of our conversation. And yet my people allow me to do what I

please, say what I please, go where I please, with whom I please—they’re

awfully broad-minded.”

“That’s just why your career is so precarious, my wee one. You’re up

against nothing—except your own extremely hazy sense of self-respect. If

your father and your Aunt Stella were saying ‘don’t’ all the time, and

locking you in your room, and forbidding men the house, and intercepting

letters, and generally behaving as we’ve been taught the Best Parents

ought to behave, you’d be kept busy defying them, which is a quite

healthy occupation. At the worst, in a mood of superlative defiance,

you’d go right over the wall ... well, that’s at least honest. All this

laxness and let-her-do-as-she-likes, and ‘I’m sure young men are to be

trusted now-a-days’.... But parents are not to be trusted. I don’t know

what parents are coming to. My mother—it’s her sorrow that I haven’t yet

formed a Bold Free Union for her to countenance and encourage——”

“And you would never consent to do it; have no desire to do it. It’s a

sad waste of an indulgent parent, Antonia. Thousands of girls get cursed

and kicked out of home for just that boldness and freeness which your

mother pines to find in you.”

“The darling!—it’s only theoretical pining. Any vivid details of a Bold

and Free Union would shock her beyond words. I suppose the truth is that

parents are thinking too much—and not enough. It’s still only surface

lenience. They’d howl quite as loudly, and break their hearts quite as

vehemently as the old-fashioned parent, if we really transgressed.”

“Father would, of course, which puts it out of the question.”

“You being financially dependent on him?”

“Not only that. I happen to be fond of him.”

Antonia smiled, a sweet slow warmth and kindling of her wonted

frostiness. “Is there that much grace in you, woman?”

“Though you didn’t allow for it in the sketch—yes, there is.”

“I won’t exhibit the sketch, I promise you.”

“Antonia, dear——” Mrs Verity stood, with one hand pushing aside the dark

blue and green portière of the studio. A neat little figure in a black

dress with white collar and cuffs; a precise little spinster, one would

say, from a novel of Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell. Manners of superlative

delicacy; speech in which each separate syllable was clearly articulated;

a habit of mind which seized on the most trivial utterance of others, and

smoothed it out flat for earnest consideration. Mrs Verity’s personality

was such as to make it quite credible that Antonia was found in a

gooseberry bush.

“Good afternoon, Miss Marcus. Are you quite well? Yes? Really? I am so

pleased. It is delightful to find you here with Antonia. I wonder if I

might ask for a cup of tea? Not if it is at all inconvenient, Antonia. I

can order it in the dining-room, indeed I can. Do you not think the parks

are looking lovely? I wonder if—— But I interrupted you, Miss Marcus.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Deb, who had only begun an affirmative: “Yes,

aren’t they?” in reference to the parks.

“Oh, but please, please say what you were going to say. It was

unpardonably rude of me to cut you so short.”

“It wasn’t anything worth repeating, Mrs Verity. Do go on with what you

were going to say—‘I wonder if——’”

“No, indeed, that can quite well wait till you say what you were going to

say.”

“But really—I’ve forgotten it,” cried Deb, by now hysterically incapable

of the “Yes, aren’t they?” of her original intention.

“My fault; how could I——”

“Here’s your tea, mother;” Antonia smiled mischievously down on the

punctilious little lady’s distress.

Deb stretched her limbs lazily, without displaying, however, much

determination to move. She was rather hoping that Antonia would invite

her to stay. But:

“I have to be going out presently, but in an opposite direction, or I’d

ask you to wait for me.”

“Are you supping with Gillian? I thought you told me you expected her

here; Miss Marcus, do you not agree with me that Gillian Sherwood is

quite a remarkable character?”

An almost imperceptible contraction of Antonia’s brows expressed

impatience. “What was the lecture like?” she asked. Deb pondered on the

unknown Gillian, hardly hearing Mrs Verity’s painstaking description.

This was one of the moments when she was convinced of mystery in the

background of Antonia’s life. Why had she never mentioned a Gillian who

had a remarkable character, with whom she was on terms of supper? Why did

she apparently object so strongly to her mother’s introduction of the

name? Why was she on certain occasions so anxious to rid herself of Deb’s

company? Why was she so vague and elusive as to the manner in which she

had spent the foregoing day, or intended to spend the morrow? Why had

she once said casually “Don’t drop in here without letting me know, Deb.

Always ’phone. I’m out such a lot, it’s hardly worth your while to chance

it....” Antonia herself was always “chancing it” at Montagu Hall.

A second door in the studio led to a small garden. Beyond the panes

a tall young man suddenly loomed, and rapped three times, as might a

conspirator.

“It’s Cliffe Kennedy,” remarked Mrs Verity, and nodded cheerfully to him.

Immediately, as though at some signal, he opened the door, strolled in,

and immediately burst forth: “I’ve just told a man that his wife was an

abominable female! Yes, an abominable female! and he didn’t know whether

to agree with me or not.—Antonia, one doesn’t put tea away when a visitor

comes. One brings it out.—I think people ought to know their own minds

about that sort of thing, don’t you, Mrs Verity?”

Mrs Verity, as was her wont, gave the matter her weightiest consideration

of puckered brow and clasped fingers. “It certainly seems to me of the

utmost importance that a man should be aware of his exact state of

harmony or disharmony towards the woman in whose company he is compelled

to pass at least two-thirds of his normal existence,” she pronounced.

“But perhaps he hesitated to express his opinion to you in the fear that

it might by some means be carried back to his wife?”

“Not the slightest fear of that—she was _there_, my dear lady, beside him

at the very moment when I said ‘Your wife is an abominable female’—did I

say abominable or loathsome? I forget!—‘And all your old pals including

myself consider you’ve ruined yourself by marrying her. Throw her off,

man, throw her off!’ That was the time for him to agree and get rid of

her. Permanently. No woman of spirit could stop with a man aware of the

opinion of his pals. But he’s ruined, I tell you. His pluck is broken. He

just sniggered and moved away backwards conciliatingly; and She, the hag,

the doll, the curly hypocrite, murmured: ‘Come along, Bertie!’—I ask you!

‘Come along, Bertie!’... Antonia, who’s that Florentine page lying over

there among the cushions wondering about the handsome young man with hair

like the village idiot?”

Deb started at this accurate guess at her reflections, and Cliffe Kennedy

grinned at her in excellent fellowship.

Mrs Verity exclaimed: “Forgive me, I have been exceedingly remiss. I

should have introduced you before, indeed I should. How could I have

neglected to do so?”—though it was hard to say at which point of Mr

Kennedy’s speech she could have effected the introduction.

“This is Antonia’s great friend, Deb Marcus. Miss Marcus, Mr Cliffe

Kennedy. Cliffe, I will think about the problem of your friend and his

wife. I am sure you meant to do good by your intercession. It seems to me

a great pity under the circumstances that they should be definitely and

not merely experimentally married. And now, since we may not meet again

to-day——” She bade good-bye to Deb and Kennedy, patted her daughter’s

shoulder, and slipped unobtrusively away.

“Well,” flung out Kennedy to Deb, “was I right about the village idiot?”

She glanced at his golden shock-head, and parried to save herself. “I see

no straws spiking in every direction in your hair.”

“And you can’t make village idiots without straw. Good. Nor can you break

camels’ backs. Nor tell which way the wind is blowing.”

“Nor eat ice-cream sodas.”

“The straw is a useful animal. Awful dearth of village idiots because

Selfridge’s have made a corner in straws for their soda fountain. Species

practically extinct. Sole surviving specimen, C. Kennedy, Esq., fireman,

pageant-maker and pork-butcher. Pageants and pork while you pause.

Preposterous prices! Antonia, you remember my inspiration for a grand

historical pageant of barques up the Thames in commemoration of the death

of Ethelred the Unready?”

“I remember a few rough suggestions you threw out, of a sort of Lord

Mayor’s show,” laughed Antonia, “presenting every sort of special

occasion on which the English people were notoriously unready, headed

by Ethelred himself, refusing to get up on his wedding-morning because

he had overtired himself the night before, taking cinema films of a

tortoise——”

“And ending with a symbolic presentment of the proverb ‘Always lock the

stable door after the horse has got away; it does no harm and amuses the

horse’—tableau of same, with horse smiling happily over the adjoining

hedge. Would you believe it, Antonia, that when I approached the Lord

Mayor on the subject, and put it to him that this was the undoubted

moment for the Educational Value of such a moral lesson upon the

psychology of the gritty-nosed board-school child, and would he lend me

some of the comic costumes and coachmen he must have lying about from

his own piffling show—Antonia, he said: ‘Young man, are you aware that

this country is at war?’ and handed me a white feather torn from the

hindmost of a flock of geese who happened to be waddling across the hall.

I didn’t lose my temper, Antonia. I put it into my buttonhole, and said

very calmly, ‘Thank you—that’s the second present I’ve had to-day,’ and

turning back the coat lapel on the other side, I showed him my V.C. where

the King had pinned it. Then all the geese rose on their hind legs and

cheered——”

Deb’s childish peals of laughter broke off his narration. Till the last

episode recounted, she had been in bewilderment trying to sift fantasy

from fact; with such vivid conviction did the speaker present each

succeeding picture: the smiling horse, the mayor bending for the feather,

the proud young V.C. ... but that incident at least might quite well be

true——

“_Are_ you a V.C.?”

He gave her rather a queer look from his candid forget-me-not blue eyes.

And he put down his cup and walked sharply to the window, and remarked

in a very matter-of-fact tone: “No. I’ve been medically rejected for the

Army. You see, I’ve only been given another year to live, and I suppose

they thought it a pity to reduce the allowance.”

“Never mind, Cliffe,” said Antonia gently—and Deb, the tears choking in

her throat, waited for the message of divine womanly consolation that was

doubtless on its way—“A well-meaning man can tell an enormous quantity

of lies even in one year. Don’t give up. Look at him well, Deb—he has a

wrinkle in his face for every lie his lips have spoken.”

The man turned round to give the entire benefit of his long face, webbed

and wrinkled by a thousand evidences of inaccurate statement. Sombrely he

looked at Deb:

“Shall I tell you how I was cured of my habit of lying, in spite of

Antonia? Yes, cured, by God, and by pretty drastic means....” He bent his

chin on to his hands. Deb knew instinctively that on this one occasion,

if never again, out of a fever of imaginative falsehood was emerging a

simple and rather poignant piece of truth——

“Never mind the details,” he broke out abruptly—“just take it that there

was a woman, and she loved me—I never knew how much. She was responsive

to my moods as a field of barley to the wind—rustling to shadow and

waving back to pure light. A field of barley, I tell you!” he cried

fiercely, striking the table with his fist.... “I was miserably depressed

over something or other—again a detail—and she tried to laugh it off.

That irritated me—she wasn’t taking the tragedy seriously enough. _My_

tragedy! ‘Ring me up to-morrow, Cliffe, between seven and eight, and let

me hear the worst,’ and again that forced silly little laugh. I replied

with an inflexion of mocking composure—intensely dramatic: ‘Very well,

dear. If I haven’t rung up by five minutes to eight, you’ll know I’ve put

a bullet through my head.’ And left it at that.”

He brooded a moment.

“I rang up at two minutes past eight. And it was she who had put a bullet

through her head.... Couldn’t endure the prospect of life without me. Oh,

no, I hadn’t waited deliberately; I was merely rather rushed, and I’d

forgotten the terms of my farewell the evening before. And she had waited

... at the other end ... fifty-five minutes of slow agony....”

“Well, you can understand it cured me of the habit of the effective lie.”

The girls were both silent. The light was fading from the studio.

Antonia’s voice spoke with a quiver of laughing accusation: “Cliffe,

dear, do I spy another and very recent wrinkle?”

Deb cried in sharp distress, “Oh, Antonia ...” for either the other

had trodden with profane feet on sacred ground, or.... She appealed to

Cliffe. “It _was_ true?”

“It depends what you mean by true,” he replied with the air of a man

slowly descending to earth by parachute. “I think that somewhere or

other, and for the reason I have told you, a woman must have sat

listening through fifty-five moments for the tinkle of a telephone bell

to release her—or how could I know it all so vividly? They say the human

imagination is incapable of conceiving outside reality. That the man was

not myself?—an accident. Or perhaps it was indeed myself, and I have

forgotten it, and in telling you this as a mere tale I’m calling truth

itself a lie....”

“I must go,” said Deb politely. “Good-bye.”

“I’ll see you home, wherever it is.” Cliffe lounged to his feet.

“No, thanks,” coldly.

“But I want to. You’re angry with me. And I must put myself right——”

“By another lie?” A flame of indignation in the grey eyes that accused

him of rousing her emotions by false pretences. Deb had been profoundly

moved by the climax of the tale.

Cliffe argued good-humouredly: “For goodness’ sake, why all this

arbitrary distinction between what I invent and what God invents. Of

course I’ll see you home.”

“Deb’s stopping to supper with me,” Antonia struck in. “She’s dying to

ask me all about you, and my account will be just as picturesque and much

more reliable than yours.”

“But, Antonia, I thought you were supping out—with Gillian somebody?”

“Mother said so. I didn’t. I’m supposed to go to some very dull people

and I’ve decided to ’phone them off.”

“What do you think of our Gillian?” Cliffe asked of Deb.

“I don’t know her.”

“Don’t know her—but she’s always here or at Zoe’s.”

“Who’s Zoe?”

Kennedy turned excitedly to Antonia: “I say, they must meet, mustn’t

they? I believe she and Gillian would hit it off frightfully well. And

Zoe’s a whole music-hall entertainment in herself, though I abominate the

Spanish Jew of a shoemaker she’s walking out with now. Let’s phone them

to come round here to-night. And Winny too——”

“This isn’t a branch of the Y.W.C.A., Cliffe,” Antonia tried amusedly to

check his exuberant overflow of conviviality. But Cliffe ran on.

“No—let me see—Zoe shows off best in her own Palais Royale flat—she

needs all the doors and cupboards to be really at her best. I’ll give a

tea-party there next Saturday. Blair Stevenson may be up on leave, and

has asked me to let him meet that singer woman I told him about, with

hair just like mine! You must meet her too, Miss Marcus—you positively

must.”

“You mean La llorraine—oh, I know her well.” Deb was glad to have found

one name familiar among all these pattering new names.

“Good. You’ll come to the tea-party? Antonia will bring you—it’s in

a street rather tricky to find. I’m keen on backing Zoe against La

llorraine for sheer verbal energy. Take the field bar none. For this

evening we’ll just have Gillian and Winifred and Theo. Shall I ’phone

them, Antonia, or will you?”

“You can,” said Antonia. “No—bother! Gillian is away till Tuesday, and

Winny without her sends me to sleep. And Theo Pandos is a bounder—Deb

wouldn’t care about him.”

“That brings the party down to the present three. At least, I suppose

I can stop to supper, Antonia, as you’re not going out after all? You

haven’t invited me yet.”

“Of course you can. Don’t you know that a studio girl always keeps a

stray tin of sardines in the cupboard?”

“And a black and emerald cushion on the divan. Curse it, what I’ve had

to suffer dodging the lure of the generic studio cushion. But yours

is hardly the generic studio, Antonia. You actually use it for the

quaint and unusual purpose of painting pictures in it. The girl of

nowadays rents a studio to picnic in by moonlight, or because it has

such a ducksome musician’s gallery to sleep in, or a parquet floor for

fox-trotting, or an acoustic. Have you a studio, Miss Marcus? Excuse me

not calling you by your Christian name for a few weeks, but the whimsical

Bohemian vagabond, a species whom I abhor, always uses Christian names

within three minutes of introduction.”

“Or else a charming invented name,” Deb supplemented. “I’ll call you

‘Big-Brother-Man’ and you shall call me ‘All-Alone-Girl.’”

“Or you call me ‘Daddy Longlegs’ and I’ll call you ‘Peg o’ my Heart.’”

“_May_ I? Oh, may I _really_? And _will_ you? Will you _really_?”

“Antonia, I’m rather taken with this new person. Where did you pick her

up?”

“In a boarding-house. Go on appreciating her, while I ’phone up my

hostess for this evening and tell her I have toothache.” Antonia ran up

the two steps to the door which led to the house; and stood an instant

poised on the topmost, surveying Deb and Cliffe with a provocative smile:

“It makes me so happy to think that the two beings whom I love most on

earth may also grow to love each other....”

She vanished. And Cliffe murmured: “And she doesn’t care a snap of the

fingers for either of us.”

“No. More than anyone else I’ve met, Antonia is absolutely sufficient

unto herself.”

“Yet one can’t leave her alone. She’s always the indifferent centre of a

swarm of nibblers. What’s the attraction, I wonder.”

“Have you ever caressed a crystal or a lump of jade, or an ornament in

soapstone, something with a surface perfectly smooth and cool—something

hard and cut and clear, without fuss or anything except its own polish

and beauty? ... that’s the beauty of Antonia, and her fascination.”

“An exquisite statuette in green bronze, standing high up on the

mantelpiece. Psyche with the lamp.”

“Artemis. Psyche is too human—too curious.”

“More in your line—eh?”

Deb shook her head. And on pretext of needing to do her hair afresh for

supper, she followed Antonia into the house. She required to snatch some

general information from Antonia about this long, thin beaky-nosed Cliffe

Kennedy, with the sunny, forget-me-not blue eyes, and outrageously nimble

tongue, before she presented him with the confidences for which he was

angling. As she emerged from the garden passage into the hall, she heard

Antonia speaking in that peculiarly distinct voice one reserves for the

telephone: “No, I want Gillian—Oh, isn’t she?—Well, listen, Winny—Say I

simply must go out to-night. I muddled the days—I expect her to-morrow

night instead....”

Deb walked slowly through the hall and up the stairs. She was puzzled....

Antonia had not seen her. A moment later she came into the bedroom.

“Oh, was Cliffe too much for you?”

“You said you would tell me about him.”

“Certainly,” said Antonia obligingly, sitting on the edge of the bed

and clasping her hands round her knees. “He’s a rich subject—Cliffe

Kennedy, aged twenty-nine—only son of a perfectly sweet old mother. He’s

a completely harmless-uncle type, from the sex point of view; and also

the most dangerous and mischievous person that ever walked this earth,

because he attracts all confidences and secrets, and then betrays them

lavishly as the freakish impulse takes him.”

“But forewarned——”

“Is _not_ forearmed—with Cliffe. He has a magnetic and fatal lure, that

draws and draws you.... You seek comfort each time by an instinctive

self-assurance that just this once and only this once Cliffe is to

be trusted; and when he is relating one of his best impromptus, your

instinct equally assures you that just this once and only this once

Cliffe is telling the truth. Yes, you needn’t flush quite so hotly, Deb;

which one was it you believed? The episode which cured him of lying?

Why, he lies by mechanism. He keeps a sort of stock-pot, into which he

throws the bare bones of every dramatic incident which takes his fancy,

and fishes it up again meated with personal application. He’s everybody’s

best friend and everybody’s worst enemy in succession, and gyrates from

one extreme to the other so quickly that you may be unburdening your

inmost heart to him under an entirely false impression that you are still

on the friendly category. There’s the gong, Deb. Any more questions,

before the Court rises?”

“Why isn’t your best boy in khaki?” laughed Deb.

“He has been medically rejected. That bit of information happened to be

correct. It’s those dotted fragments of truth which make the whole so

perilous. It can’t be altogether discarded.”

“And has he really only a year to live? Oh, Antonia——”

“Bless your tears of sympathy, little girl. Cliffe will probably be a

hale old man of eighty. Come along....”

* * * * *

Mrs Verity detained Deb after supper on some pretext, while Cliffe and

Antonia returned to the studio. In any normal mother, this piece of

manœuvring could easily be interpreted as a wish to further a favourable

“match” for Antonia; and Mrs Verity’s intentions were similar and yet

startlingly dissimilar; she was benignly hopeful that a free union with

that charming Mr Kennedy would be that step in the wrong direction, which

she so earnestly desired for Antonia’s good.

“Antonia is the sweetest of companions, and also deserves my supreme

respect as an artist,” she told Deb. “But sometimes, Miss Marcus, and

oh, I trust indeed that I may be mistaken, sometimes she strikes me as

being just a trifle narrow-minded. She seems too content to accept those

illogical conventions which have been fetishes since countless years.

It would grieve me inexpressibly if Antonia should miss some of the

Fullness of life. Do you not agree with me, Miss Marcus, and pray, if you

do not agree, do not hesitate to contradict me—do not hesitate to call

me unreasonable, but do you not think”—mittened hands fervently clasped

in her lap—“that it is Antonia’s duty to the Age to be a little more

abandoned in her conduct?”

If one could judge by Kennedy’s conversation during the rest of the

evening, Antonia’s friends at least were certainly not to be complained

of in that respect. Cliffe slaughtered their presumable confidences with

as little ruth as a butcher slaughters lambs, and then disported himself

merrily among the mangled heaps. A certain Theo Pandos, after completely

maiming the glorious genius of Gillian Sherwood, was flirting shamefully

with “Winifred,” who, it seemed, was found in dire need by Gillian on her

doorstep, and taken in and clothed and fed. “And I tell you, Antonia, and

this is Gospel truth, that sticky, white-slug girl has done the doorstep

trick before.... Blair Stevenson knows a man who swears for a fact he

met her at Tom Maryon’s, the dramatist, three years ago, under the very

same conditions. He made Blair take his oath never to breathe one word

about it, for fear of making mischief. _One_ doorstep?—she’s lain on

twenty-seven doorsteps.”

From “Winifred,” Cliffe went on to “Zoe” and “Blair,” and was equally

startling in his revelations. There was nothing of vindictive or paltry

gossip in Cliffe’s stupendous onslaughts upon the truth. He committed

mortality on lines that waxed from merely generous to colossal,

breath-taking. He flung about reputations and caught them, as deftly as

a juggler his plates; or dropped them with magnificent disregard of the

smash. Treachery was here conducted on as opulent a scale of grandeur as

falsehood. Coincidence was blown out to a lusty, full-bellied creature

triumphant over those meagre, lean-throated sisters of accuracy and

consistency. No human being could have survived one day of life under

such a stress of superlative achievement, such haphazard of occurrence,

such complicated interplay of motives, actions, and reactions.

Antonia did not interrupt Mr Cliffe Kennedy’s entertainment. It was a

very fine one-man performance, and lasted until eleven o’clock. Then he

relapsed into moody depression, and said he would go mad unless he could

be solitary ... but would kindly see Deb home first, if she promised not

to talk.

And he hovered a moment on tip-toe, taller even than nature had made him,

looking down at Antonia with a wry smile; where she lay dreamily back in

her chair, with hands clasped behind the beautiful, delicate shape of

her head. Then he bent, and took that head between his long, thin, brown

fingers, as though she were a holy saint, and reverently touched her

forehead with his lips, and put her from him, and swung out of the studio.

Deb understood that it was a kiss of renunciation. And that his passion

for Antonia was very real and very hopeless....

Did Antonia know of it?

* * * * *

Antonia telephoned early the next morning to make amused enquiry how much

of her inmost soul Deb had been lured to commit to Kennedy’s precarious

keeping during the homeward walk.

Deb faltered an evasive reply, ashamed to confess that she had

inexplicably delivered up to this persuasive highwayman of secrets the

complete comedy and tragedy of the Chorus.

“Did he say anything about me?” Antonia questioned her further.

Again Deb faltered an evasive reply ... whilst in her ears rang a guilty

echo of Cliffe’s peroration to the bizarre history of Charlotte Verity’s

bold infatuation for a now defunct Arctic explorer who was Cliffe’s own

father (“twenty-nine years ago. And all this time neither she nor I

have dared to tell Antonia that she’s my own half-sister and a child of

love.”...)

“No, nothing, Antonia.”

“What did he talk about, then? Well—whom did he talk about?”

“His m-mother.”

“Deb, I can positively hear you squirming. Own up. Why are you shielding

him?”

“I’m not,” protested Deb unhappily.

Antonia let her off. “What are you doing to-day?”

“I think I’ll go to Hampstead and ask myself to tea with the

Rothenburgs—the Redburys, I mean. Nell was the kiddy I introduced to you

last week; you liked her, didn’t you?”

“Yes—I’ve just rung her up to invite her to the show of etchings at the

Leicester Galleries.”

“Never mind. I can see her another time.”

“Sure you don’t mind?”

“Not a bit. Any message for La llorraine? I’ll pay them a visit this

afternoon, instead of the Redburys.”

“Will you? Then I shall probably come on there after the show—if you

don’t object.”

“Why should I object? I’m very happy in your company.”

“I accept your act of homage,” serenely.

“’Tisn’t anything of the sort,” Deb repudiated the suggestion with

extreme indignation.

“Very well, dear. Ask your Aunt Stella if she’ll lunch with me to-morrow.”

“Me too?”

“The perfect hostess never mixes her generations.”

“That’s an excuse not to give me lunch.”

“You may come to supper the day after, if you bring your brother, as you

once promised.”

“And my grandfather?”

“The old Hun? Certainly. I prefer him to the oh-so-English Mr Otto

Redbury, anyway.”

“Does the oh-so-English Herr Otto Rothenburg go and sit in the bathroom

and sulk when you are there? because it honours you too highly if he

appears, and you might get conceited about it.”

“On the contrary, he entertains me with his most irreproachable Jingo

sentiments—rather loudly, in case a policeman is posted outside the door.”

“An old lady has been posted outside this door for a good twenty

minutes, waiting to wash her hands. Shall I let her in?”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“The ’phone and the wash-basin live together at Montague Hall. Good-bye,

Antonia—do you like me?”

“Moderately. Good-bye, child.”