“And what’s the object of pleasing him?” Antonia enquired, in scorn of

the masculine claim.

“That it doesn’t hurt me.”

“It _has_ hurt you. It has hurt all of us—through you.” Her lower lip

quivered; proudly she fastened it to composure with her teeth.

“Well?” Deb flung at Gillian; and thoughtfully came the answer:

“I’m not sitting in judgment, Deb. Who am I, etc. But it seems to me the

natural thing to draw such pleasure from the touch of a man, that contact

becomes beautiful and therefore true. Or else to be so repelled by it ...

that you sit up and behave. But what possible reason you can have to lie

there and merely suffer it without joy or fulfilment——”

“It does become annoying at times to think he’s having so much more

fun than I,” flippantly. She pushed her hands impatiently through the

hot thick masses of her hair. “Oh, I’m tired of being a girl, anyway.

I’ll cut my hair short for a start, and be a boy. Have you got some big

scissors, Jill?”

“Nail-scissors, curved; in the shape of a stork.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Deb—your glorious mane....”

“Oh, Deb——”

But in spite of the protests of Antonia, Nell and Zoe—Gillian sat silent,

probably thinking any distraction good for Deb’s soul at the moment—she

unpinned her hair and let it fall in a dense blue-black web over her

face; her voice came in muffled jerks from the improvised tent:

“It’s that once started ... it seems so silly to stop. So silly and

affected. Anyway, they won’t believe you—once you’ve let them start.

And I want to be appreciated just a little ... I’m twenty-five;

and—and—how—how are you to know it’s going to be the real thing at last,

unless you let them begin?... Or even a bit of the real thing? Or even

one single thrill.... I don’t know what’s the matter with me that I

never thrill. I—I’d go back to be chaste and white if I could. But I’ve

had too much tolerance, and my moral sense has got slack and messy. And

men know—the sort of thing you allow. It gets about: Blair knew.... One

might as well live up to it.” All this confession, while the scissors

had been snip-snipping; an occasional soft swish of hair falling to the

carpet—disconcerting sound, that made young Nell suddenly wince and cover

her ears.

“But you can go on—if you can’t go back.”

“This from you, O vestal!” Deb shook back her ragged curtain, and

scissors suspended, gazed in sheer surprise at Antonia. “Or was it Jill

speaking in Antonia’s voice?”

“The whole way—or no way. The last, for me. But you’ve proved that it’s

impossible for you, now. So the whole way. I despise—debatable ground.”

“It’s too late for the whole way, too. Yes, I’m quite logical. You either

rush headlong from chastity into wantonness—forgive me, Jill, it’s

the wrong word, but I can’t think of another—or else into matrimony.

Debatable ground is for those who hesitate. And hesitation makes the

demi-maid!” She gripped a long strand of hair, held it out and slashed at

it savagely.

“And it’s queer,” she went on, “but I’ve still got the inborn conviction

that wantonness gets the worst of it. I seem to see a little woodcut,

like the illustration of a very familiar old book, of a man forsaking

the girl he has betrayed, to die or drag on in squalor and shame and

bitterness, while he returns to his wife, the sheltered woman, the

law-sanctified mother of his children. I may be all wrong—but that’s how

it comes to me.”

“It comes to me in exactly opposite form,” Gillian laughed. “Not

from personal motives, but from the same sense as Deb, of a familiar

picture.... The wife forsaken, worn and weeping, face downwards on a

sofa, while the man hurries away to the woman who is free, insolent and

triumphant. The wanton scores—and that’s why I’ve always avoided being

the wife.”

“The wife scores—and that’s why I’ve always dreaded being the wanton.”

Gillian laughed again. “I don’t mind if you call me a wanton, as long as

you don’t call me a pioneer. And——”

“Oh, Jill,” cried Zoe in clamorous distress, “I thought you’d prefer it,

I did really; or I should never have—but whenever I found people talking

about you, I always excused you by saying you were a Pioneer of the New

Era of Womanhood....”

“God!...” murmured the victim thus mislabelled.

“But aren’t you? I mean, don’t you believe that this is the beginning of

a sort of New Era when we shall be as free as men?”

“I don’t!” Antonia cut in clearly. “I hope it’s rather the beginning of

a New Era (as you call it) when men shall be as self-controlled as us.

Why on earth should development always seem to be along the lines of

licence? Girls nowadays will run wild all over the place for a bit, just

to prove they’ve got their money and their independence and the vote

and a special prerogative and a latitude and a longitude ... all that.

And then they’ll get a sense of responsibility and cool down and settle

down, and ask for limitations—and with that, a new phase, and perhaps a

finer one, will begin. Your Era is nine times out of ten only a phase. I

hold by the law—the old social law of monogamy. It has made itself out

of the instinctive need of it, and it recurs again and again down the

whole cycle of civilization—out of the instinctive need for it. There

have been maidens, wives and harlots through all the ages—surely there’s

no genuine need to muddle them all up? no need for free love, except for

the exceptions from the herd?—and the exceptions can always be trusted to

look out for themselves.”

“But it isn’t monogamy that Gillian & Co. are opposing,” Zoe

contested—with the air of a wise little Bubbles, sitting on a footstool,

with her primrose curls haloed in lamplight—“it’s marriage.”

“Marriage is quite a good institution, for those who want it. You arid

Intellectuals never see that where two people need a symbolic or a

religious or even a civic recognition that they belong together, they

should be allowed to have it.”

“But the millions of cases where it has turned out badly——”

“Would have turned out just as badly if the couple had been living

together in free love.”

“But, Antonia, then they could just have walked away from each other!”

“It’s very rare that it’s a simultaneous walk-away. The one walks ... and

the other suffers. And this wrench would occur in any case. The legal

wrench is a bit of a bother—and I grant you that the divorce laws might

be reformed—but the human wrench is inevitable, in spite of all progress

and propagandists and pioneers!”

Antonia was in battle mood, and Gillian gave her battle. They confronted

each other not unlike a pair of splendid boys, the one erect with her

back to the peacock window-curtains, hands clasped behind her, her head,

a red-brown oval, slewed defiantly upwards; while the other rested her

arms and chin along the back of a precariously tilted chair, which she

vehemently bumped forward again to safety at the alliterative peroration

of Antonia’s speech.

“Propagandists and pioneers—_no_! By heaven, you’re unjust!—do you

suppose we’re out to be as intolerant of the Merely Married, as they have

hitherto been of us? Look here—I loathe theoretical talk—I just claim a

right to do what my own circumstances dictate, without being preached

at and interfered with. There’s no such thing as Gillian & Co.—if I and

my like are accidentally in the van of progress, we advance separately,

each to her own peril. And if we’re only freaks and exceptions,

lawbreakers and wantons—then again, each to her own peril. But what I

do resent, savagely, is that Theo and I can’t have a child, without

raising a stinging pestering swarm of minor considerations—servants,

landladies, schoolmistresses, tradesmen—once there’s a family there’s

got to be a permanent home, and that translates into all this sordid

beastliness of prying and inspection, gossiping and blackmail, deceiving

and finding-out, and the intolerant officialdom you’re so keen on,

Antonia. And I daresay the kid would have to pay too, somehow, sometime.

Well—we’re not going to give all this a chance. But I maintain that the

arid Intellectuals are finer, truer stuff than the Herd, because they

don’t bother the Herd, and the Herd will never stop bothering us. Never.

They’re bothering now because Theo has a wife living. It doesn’t matter

to them that I’m doing far better work and he’s a far better man, because

we live together. The mind of the Herd can’t stretch to individual

demand. It can’t be tender or intuitive—it just fusses. So—yes—call me a

pioneer if you like; not of any glucose Movement to link people together

for a common cause and so forth—there’s too much of that—but for the

right to unlink oneself and to unlink one’s thoughts from other people’s

thoughts—the right of detachment.”

“Oh dear!” exclaimed Zoe. “Isn’t it funny, how people who used to just

talk, ever since the war have talked as though they were making speeches?”

Antonia and Gillian looked guiltily at one another. “I’m afraid she’s

right,” Antonia sighed. “Sorry, Zoe. As a matter of fact, it’s perfectly

ridiculous to be discussing the sex problem at all, since the war.

Ancient cobwebs which the great broom has still left clinging....”

Again Gillian leapt to the assault. “The ‘sex problem,’ as you call it—a

horrid phrase which suggests pamphlets and tracts—has survived a million

wars and even caused one or two. So there’s no earthly reason why we

shouldn’t be discussing it. Here we sit in proof of my statement—five

girls who are all employed on war work (good thing Winnie’s out of the

room for this reckoning), who still find some difficulty in sexually

disposing of themselves—I mean, in the abstract. If Deb and Nell weren’t

at the canteen, and Antonia a chauffeuse, and Zoe an affliction to the

War Office, and I in my laboratory spying out new diseases that resent

bitterly not being allowed to keep themselves to themselves; if we were

just mooching and flirting and grumbling, and prodding our emotions,

people might be justified in saying we were all in an unhealthy frame of

mind from lack of topical co-operation. But as it is, the war goes on,

and sex goes on, quite self-reliantly. You can’t cancel one against the

other. It’s false mathematics.”

“My dear Jill, you can’t state in that arbitrary fashion that war isn’t

going to affect the sex problem—it’s all right, Zoe, I’m not going to

speak for long; take up the ‘Tatler’ in the meanwhile!—It will affect it

in every possible way: lack of men; abnormal conditions; economic liberty

for girls hitherto dependent——”

“I’m wrong. Oh, I’m totally wrong!... Deb, come out of what’s left of

your hair and save me! I don’t _want_ to hear about economic conditions.

The off-side is yards shorter than the other.”

“Wait one minute,” murmured Deb, industriously and wholly absorbed in her

labours.

Antonia continued, in serene mockery of Gillian: “And I, for one, am not

in the least difficulty, thanks, over how to dispose of myself sexually

in the abstract. And I shouldn’t imagine from external evidence that you

were either, Jill. Zoe, are you at all puzzled how to dispose of yourself

sexually in the abstract? Henceforth and hereafter there’s always Pinto,

isn’t there, when the supply of other friendly aliens is exhausted?”

“You may laugh,” cried that young person in eager defence of her

continental tastes—“but it doesn’t seem natural to me to be made love to

in English—it doesn’t really! I always have to turn it into French or

Italian or Portuguese in my head, before it becomes decent somehow. Isn’t

it funny? but it’s quite true. I suppose it’s a habit.”

“Nell is a minor and an adolescent, and, like Jill’s more obscure

diseases, prefers to keep herself to herself,” Antonia went on, “so

there’s no need to include her in our enquiry. Winifred lives mainly in a

state of mental sloth, and is not, I think, wrestling very furiously with

the sexual problem.”

“As long as she’s only kissed at the extremities,” Zoe threw in.

“Manon is, we hear, formally and decorously engaged to be married. So

there really remains only Deb, of the whole group, who might be said to

be in difficulties over the disposal of herself sexually in the abstract.

And Deb is a goose.”

“And Deb is a goose!” echoed Zoe and Gillian in affirmative chorus.

Deb gave a final snip, flung the scissors down, and faced the company.

“How do you like me?”

“Well,” remarked Gillian, after they had all stared in solemn criticism

for several minutes, “I hardly think the shears have disposed of the

problem....”

It was, indeed, a quaint enough perversity that Deb’s present flying mop

of short black hair caused her to look even more girlish than hitherto;

perhaps it was the pure beautiful curve of her throat, now visible from

every angle. Her little round head was the head of a child-saint; her

slim body, lightly-poised and undeveloped, was pathetic anomaly to eyes

and mouth which revealed a mind that had heard of all sin, and was blunt

to all sin, and weary of all sin ... victim of the transition period.

“Don’t you like it?” disappointed at the silence of her comrades, broken

only by Gillian’s one caustic comment. “I shall have to get it properly

trimmed and trained at a hairdresser’s, of course. But I think it suits

me, rather....”

“What are you going to do with your shorn femininity?” Gillian pointed

to the showers of long hair lying about the carpet. “You can’t leave it

here, you know—Theo’s so awfully impressionable.”

“My shorn femininity,” said Deb, gathering it up in her arms, “shall

go into a brown paper parcel and be sold for the benefit of the Red

Cross—‘And nothing in life became it like its death!’”

IV

For a space of time parallel to this discussion, four men were sitting

in Blair Stevenson’s library, drinking whisky and soda, and lazily

depreciating the first-night play they had just witnessed, and of which

Theo Pandos had to supply a dramatic criticism for “The Dawn.” He was

dashing down his copy now, and occasionally pleading with Cliffe Kennedy

to hold back his comic reminiscences about the Censorship, for just a few

minutes longer.

“Why they don’t sack you——!”

“I’m a highly useful servant of the State,” Cliffe rejoined. “And I’ve

never before had as big a private mail as I liked. I used to read my own

letters and my mother’s, and my little sister Beth’s; and the letters

of any stray guest who happened to be in the house, and the servants’

letters—and even then I wasn’t satisfied. Now I can glut myself opening

letters.” He told a few more incredible and very delightful tales of

these same letters. And then Pandos flung down the fountain-pen, to

intimate he had finished a column of the “death-by-a-thousand-slices,”

for which he had made a name, took up his glass of whisky and soda; and

the conversation, as was usual directly he touched it, pivoted round to

the subject of women....

“I don’t understand girls nowadays,” confessed the fourth of the

quartette, who was little Timothy Fawcett of the Royal Flying Corps.

Having been a whole year on continuous active service in France, he was

now stationed at Hendon for a few months respite of light home duty.

Timothy was rather a nice boy. He was fair and shy and solemn, with

those soft cherub curves to his mouth that remind one of dewy sleep

and of a mother fondly shading the candle from the eyes of her baby

son in his cradle. And his innocent appearance did not call for the

conventional corollary that it masked the biggest dare-devil in the

squadron. His appearance coincided exactly with his disposition. Timothy

was undoubtedly both shy and solemn, with wits that moved but slowly, and

nerves and courage as steady as his steady questioning blue eyes.

“I don’t understand women nowadays,” he began. And Blair, with whom he

was rather a favourite, said encouragingly:

“Go on, Sonny!”

Timothy loosened his Sam Browne, and stared at his puttees; then, by an

inspiration, emptied his glass; and thus fortified, was able to continue:

“What I mean is—there used to be the girls you met in your own set, and

they went about with your sisters, and there was no harm if you kissed

’em on the river, but of course you took jolly good care what you talked

about to ’em. Sometimes you married ’em.”

“Exactly,” Kennedy commented. “Sometimes you married ’em. Proceed,

Timothy.”

“And then—there was the other kind.” Timothy came to a full stop.

And the little Greek, his eyes vivid with mischief, took up the sequel of

events:

“And these you kissed also ... and not only on the river. And you told

them those droll stories that could not be told to the girls you married

sometimes. And they laughed with flattering appreciation.”

“What I mean,” Timothy began anew, with obstinate determination to finish

up the subject in as few words as possible, “is that a fellow used to

be able to tell the two sorts apart in half a jiff, and now they’ve

gone and got themselves so muddled up ... you take out one of the first

kind, thoroughly nice girl and all that—and she talks about—well—dash

it—about—about——”

“—The second kind,” suggested Stevenson.

“And she wants you to take her to a night-club, and laughs at you for

bein’ shocked, an’ argues about it—no end knowing! And so one takes

the cue and follows up—and then half times out of ten she turns on the

freezin’ tap, and quite right too, only she ought to have done it from

the beginning. And they’ve got quite pally, too, with—well—the other

sort. It’s so rum. You meet ’em with their arms round each other’s

waists.... It’s all a mix-up an’ you never know where you are or what

you’re safe to say, or who knows who or how much you’re let in for——”

“Tim likes to know where a good woman ends and a bad one begins—that’s

the trouble in brief, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Timothy answered his host. And drew a long breath ... waiting for

enlightenment.

“Keep ’em divided in your own mind, Tim, and it will be all right. The

shuffle is mostly intellectual, and needn’t concern you. Your nice girl,

because she knows rather more than she used to, believes she can compete

with professionals. _Mais ce n’est pas son métier_—and she’ll discover

that in time. Meanwhile, we know where to find our wives and where to

find our mistresses; and those who wish to be met on half-way ground,

let us meet them on half-way ground. It’s not for us to be pushing them

back into innocence or toppling them forward into guilt.” Stevenson lay

back with arms crossed behind his head, in his wonted state of unruffled

good-humour.

Kennedy, greatly excited, contested this bland point of view: “I _object_

to half-way ground. Strongly. Besides, it’s a form of blacklegging. Give

me sharp divisions—sand and rock. Confound it, I don’t want my wife, when

I get her, to be able to chatter like a frank comrade about all the ins

and outs of my squalid existence before I met her. I hate frank comrades.

They’re too—too reasonable altogether. I hate an intellectual mate, and

a pure white friend of my little sister Beth, and almost a harlot, all

combined, like one of those beastly mechanical book-cases and step-ladder

and kitchen-table patent arrangements ... and pull out whichever you

want. Conveniences bore me. Subtleties bore me still more. And you can

never tell, with these new-fangled girls, just how many degrees they’re

still good and how many they’re prepared to be bad. Oh, Lord! Lord!—give

me another one, stiff, Pandos.”

“And yet,” remarked Theo Pandos, complying, “I gathered that you were on

very excellent terms with our special little group of—what do you call

them?—new-fangled girls?”

Cliffe’s features puckered to a gnome-like grin: “Ask ’em. I’m dear old

Cliffe—just dear old Cliffe—quite sexless y’know—never been known to

love—in—er—_that_ way. It’s funny, but I don’t believe he _could_....”

Blair Stevenson shrugged his shoulders composedly. “I’m of a grateful

nature. What God sends me, I take. And what He refuses me, I refuse

to desire. Some people are always returning a gift with requests for

alteration.”

Timothy sat listening; his eyes rested seriously on first one speaker

and then the other. “Yes,” he said at last; “But what’s it all about? I

mean—what are they up to, those girls?”

CHAPTER IV

I

“Captain Rothenburg—killed in action. Rothenburg—Rothenburg—that’s a

German name. What was he doing in an English command, I’d like to know?

Ought to have been interned.”

Richard sprang up, knuckles white with the clench of his hands on the rim

of the breakfast-table, his brows a lowering black ridge of anger. He and

Mr Gryce confronted one another across a space of half the dining-room.

The other visitors sprinkled at the various tables looked up expectant,

conscious of latent antagonism spurting at last into visibility. The old

man’s eyes bulged like pale marbles over the top of his newspaper....

“Ought to have been interned,” he repeated ostentatiously to his

neighbours.

“Sit down, Richard,” his father commanded quietly. And as though with a

physical effort, the wrestling look was unlocked; the boy sat down, head

turned away from the detestable civilian who had dared sneer away Con’s

glory. As if Con wasn’t as thumpingly keen a soldier as any of the purest

British descent! Con, the splendid sixth-form hero of Richard’s earliest

Winborough days. And now ... to make out he had given his life to no

effect because his name happened to be German....

Richard was still shaking from the harsh shock of the news, and from a

sort of desperate hatred which almost approached fear. “Is it true?” he

asked Ferdie, who was searching through “The Telegraph.”

“I’m afraid so. Ah, yes, here: On May 15th ... etc. I suppose his parents

can only just have heard. Nearly a week, isn’t it? Poor Con, he was a

nice fellow. Otto will be upset—his eldest boy.”

“But why do they print the name Rothenburg?” Stella questioned in a low

voice, inaudible to Mr Gryce.

“I expect the young man had the good sense not to be ashamed of his

father’s birthplace,” rumbled Hermann Marcus, in an aggressive voice

distinctly audible to Mr Gryce, who muttered: “Damned old Hun!” amid a

murmur of surrounding sympathy.

Richard explained: “David told me Con held out when the rest of them

changed their name; he was a Territorial ages before the war, and his men

knew him as Rothenburg—good enough for them!” with a defiant scowl in the

direction of Mr Gryce. The latter, sending out his plate for more bacon:

“I’ve had nothing but fat and gristle!” remarked further to the young

lady at the table beside him: “They’re not half strict enough over this

alien business. I like a German to _be_ a German; if they want to fight,

can’t they stick to their own side?”

“Though I’m not surprised some of them are ashamed to,” he creaked on,

pulling his tuft of beard irascibly.

“No more, thanks.” Richard escaped from the room. He very rarely finished

a meal nowadays.... Aunt Stella followed him out, and waylaid him in the

empty hall:

“Richard, you must take care what you say in the dining-room. You

shouldn’t have jumped up like that. Everybody saw.”

“And Con died so that—so that he could have his second helping of bacon,”

Richard exploded.

“Yes, but you know in our position we’ve got to be careful. You

especially.”

“It’s so unfair. So beastly unfair. If I thought he only said it to get

my back up—but he believes it. He oughtn’t to be _let_ believe it. I want

to hammer it into him that old Con wasn’t even conscripted—was ready at

the very first shove-off. Oh, it’s mean to do him out of the credit. Not

that he would have cared, but——”

Stella was surprised. Her nephew’s extreme taciturnity was one of her

stock subjects for jest.

“You’ll have to go and condole with the Rothenburgs to-day.”

Richard immediately lapsed into surly schoolboyhood: “Lord! Must I?”

“David is your friend. And as he happens to be at home—— Your father and

I will be going after lunch. Or you can call by yourself this morning if

you prefer it.”

“Call!” he grumbled. “As if David wanted people mooching about and saying

they were sorry.”

“Saying? Aren’t you sorry?”

... Funny, how aunts were apt to say silly platitudes in a silly,

ready-made voice, just when one was paying them the compliment of

treating them like humans. It showed how careful you ought to be, Richard

reflected glumly, on his way to Hampstead.

How on earth did one “condole?” He knew right enough just how David had

cared about Con, and what a swollen sensation attacked his own throat to

think of anyone so cheery and keen on his job and altogether decent as

his late school-captain, part of a heap of flung-together mixed-up limbs

and mud and stained khaki, here and there twitching still....

But all this was well set apart from official condolence. All this led

to silence, not to speech. Richard, deliberately taking the longest way

round to Fairwarne Gardens, became ever more acutely uncomfortable over

his mission. Besides——

“You ought to have had it out with Mr Gryce.”

The phrase spoke itself so clearly in his mind, and with such detached

emphasis, that he started, and almost glanced over his shoulder for the

speaker.

It was quite true; his father had made a mistake in hushing him: himself

had made a mistake in surrender. Mr Gryce had had the best of the

encounter; and probably never again would Richard be whipped to such a

stinging fury of indignation. An ingredient of fear might well creep in

... fear such as had twanged deep down in his consciousness when Aunt

Stella said: “You especially....” The owner of those light-blue bulging

eyes would not hesitate to use the advantage of an adversary’s birthplace.

Richard perceived uneasily how fatal it would be to live enslaved by the

notion that he had lost all right to resent. Undoubtedly he ought to have

had it out with old Gryce there and then at the breakfast table. Too late

now....

And here was the Redbury’s house with blinds all lowered. He rang the

bell; and waiting on the doorstep, tried to break up his face every time

it stiffened into a set shape appropriate to the business in hand.

“Is Mr David in?”

David, in second-lieutenant’s khaki sobered by a black mourning band on

the sleeve, hardly looked up from his puttees at Richard’s entrance; and

when the first apathetic “Hullo!” was over, there seemed nothing more to

be said. The room was in semi-darkness, and the very slant of sunshine

through the chinks was furtive.

“What on earth have you come for?” David burst out at last irritably. “To

express your sincere sympathy with me in my great bereavement? Then for

the Lord’s sake, express it—if you can—and get it over, and be natural.

You make me nervous, standing about as though you had changed into a

black tie before coming out, which I wonder you haven’t!”

Richard in his turn got thoroughly bad-tempered. The walk had been hot

and dusty, and there was the episode of Mr Gryce that morning, and—and

Con was dead. And now David merely jeered at him.

“All right—I’m going; you needn’t worry. I didn’t come here for fun, they

made me.”

David laughed uproariously. “That’s better; that’s more the little

Richard we know and love!”

Richard grunted, and banged himself into a chair. He understood now....

David’s noisy laughter had shown him.

“When did you get your commission?”

“Only last week. Samson worked it for me—through his cousin, Sir Ephraim

Phillips. Did you know Samson was back from the Front?—trench-feet.

Pater’s still trying to rope him into the family, with Nell as a lasso;

but I don’t believe he’s having any; still keen on Deb.”

“So you’ll be going to France, perhaps....”

“Yes, in about six months I shall be able to avenge Con by killing the

Hun who killed him.”

“Does—would that—help?” Richard asked awkwardly. Then met David’s ironic

eyes—

“It ought to be the attitude, oughtn’t it? Beatrice supplied me with it,

and the family have taken up the chorus. It’s so natural and picturesque

and primitive: the younger brother belting on his sword and going forth

to slay for the sake of the slain. Old Grandmother Phillips, who approves

of me because she thinks I take my religion seriously, even added the Old

Testament touch: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth....

“No, Richard, it doesn’t help at all. If I could land home on the one

actual and definite German who was responsible for Con, it would be

different. I believe in fighting—for love of a cause. As Con did. Oh,

Con never said much, but he was a patriot down to bedrock fundamental;

he was a pre-war patriot, which was pretty rare. And now that he’s

dead, I can’t possibly stand out. Because of my people. It would explode

all that he’s done for them. ‘My son who was killed in action’ would be

see-sawed out of all usefulness by ‘My son who conscientiously objected.’

They wouldn’t be able to say the words ‘My son’ at all. I can’t play

them or Con a shabby trick like that; after all, patriotism begins at

home—loyalty to one’s family is a local form of patriotism, I suppose. If

the Redburys were properly entrenched, but——”

“‘In our position.’...” Richard quoted softly.

And David added with very unboyish bitterness: “Pater’s awfully upset

now—but I can already foresee what a magnificent asset Con’s death is

going to be—‘in our position,’ as you say. Pater will run it for all he’s

worth. Marcus, there’s a kink wrong in civilization when a father’s got

to swank for safety on a son’s death.”

“Swank?”

“There are letters to show, from the Colonel, from brother-officers,

from his men. It seems that long after he was wounded, he held that bit

of trench with one machine-gun to cover a retreat. Oh, the stock tale of

heroism!”

Richard was badly jarred by the last words. It struck him that David was

carrying flippant detachment rather too far; one might well be glad of a

brother who was guilty of the stock heroism. “Con jolly well deserves a

medal for that,” he remarked on an aggressive note.

And David said: “He’s been recommended for the D.S.O.”—and suddenly he

jerked up his head and went crimson.... Richard turned his eyes away from

that surge of hot red pride. Funny, how one never knew, with David!

Trudchen Redbury popped in her head, as though in search of someone.

“Ach, Davidchen——” she nodded kindly to the two boys, but still did not

appear to have found what—or who—she wanted. Her comfortable fat little

face was rough and scrapy with long crying—the kind of crying that goes

on and on, and stops for a bit, and smiles and talks and gives the orders

in the kitchen, and then meanders on again....

Trudchen had none of the Spartan courage recommended to mothers nowadays.

“Hullo, Mums!”—David sprang up and laid his arm round her dumpy shoulders

and gently put his lips to her cheek—(Yes, he was a dear fellow, her

youngest boy, and so much more considerate than Con, who had always

nearly knocked her down with his violent hugs.... “Mein Konrad!”)

“Na, Richard, how goes your Aunt Stella?”

“She’s coming this afternoon.” And Richard growled something in which the

word “sorry” vaguely occurred.

“David, vot do you sink?—if I write to liebe Anna now, it vill gewiss

reach her in the neighbourhood of the sixtieth birthday when there vill

be rejoicings—what one can rejoice these days——” she shrugged resignedly.

“Our Con more than you or Max your Aunt’s loveling ever was. Vot do

you sink, David?”—for the second time; “shall I vait before I write to

Berlin—a month perhaps? One does not wish to spoil a birthday.”

But beyond a queer look shot towards Richard, David made no comment. And

presently Trudchen went on, with a sort of chirruppy perplexity:

“And you know how angry Papa is when I ask him at all about Anna and

Karl, though he used to love and eat largely of her Pflaumentorte and vex

me by naming it better than mine. And yet not even a letter from me for

the sixtieth birthday—vot vill she think? And she and I wiz ever only a

year between ... but how can one write and say nothing about our Con ...

though it will surely remind her again of the armer seligen Fritz—since

how little while is he too ... my eldest and her youngest——” she sighed.

“Perhaps—no—I will not tell zem—now.” And yet again: “Vot do you sink,

David?”

“There’s Max,” he reminded her. “We’ve written to Max—and if he sees

Uncle Karl——”

“Ne, Schatz, not now they have moved him to that camp so far away.... And

one does not know vot to believe or not; they say—Otto says the Chermans

do such terrible sings to the English prisoners—and the Phillips tell me

too—it is almost unthinkbar—to cut off _both_ the hands at the wrist——”

“Mums, Mums, when you’ve had letters through in Max’s own writing——”

“As if the dear boy would worry me by telling it in a letter....” sobbed

Trudchen.

Richard emphatically felt the need of departure. And the Lord spared him

an encounter with Otto in the hall.

He lunched, and then sauntered into the afternoon show at a music-hall,

thinking to get rid of himself by plunging into a mass of people and

a rattle of sound. But the dress-circle was filled with an atmosphere

unusually attentive to the performers on the stage; and when the lights

were raised during the interval, he perceived that the seats were mainly

occupied by a large detachment from St Dunstan’s: men who had been

blinded in the war; men who had been chosen haphazard for the greatest

sacrifice of all. Richard wondered whether a single one of them had

anticipated such a calamity as this; and whether, knowing, they would

still have willingly exposed themselves; he had heard so many soldiers

bound for the Front, half-jokingly prophecy their own death, or a broken

nose, or a wooden leg; but—no, he had never heard the possibility of

blindness joked about. Was this the secret fear they all carried in their

hearts when they volunteered?

“Not a bad show,” he remarked to his neighbour, who immediately turned

on him one immense rolling eye and a tiny glass one, and became

confidential. He was a comical little chap, small and square, with a

wide mouth, a skyward nose, and a knowing air that was enhanced by the

appearance of a fixed wink. He informed Richard that he was the third of

a trio; that he was his mother’s favourite, and his father’s favourite

and the favourite of his two brothers; that one of his brothers had

married a shrew and the other a slattern, and he alone had the perfect

wife; and that the less fortunate twain were wont to say to him: “Jock,

wish I ’ad yer luck!”... Moreover, he was the secret favourite of both

the slattern and the shrew, and he ought by rights to have won the

waltzing competition up at St Dunstan’s on Monday night, but his partner

had fouled his chances by treading three times on his toe, and it was

bluggy well the last time he was going to lug her round the room!...

“_You brick!_” muttered Richard in his heart, over and over again. Not

only to be jolly and normal, but actually keen about things still—prizes,

and your brother’s wife! not, as one instinctively imagined these martyrs

of the war, pensive and resigned and uncannily patient, with a sort of

pale upliftedness....

The jovial rowdiness in that portion of the auditorium was hushed as the

curtain went up on a troupe of acrobats and dancers kissing amorous hands

to the audience, from various inverted positions on the trapeze.

“Wot’s that?” demanded Richard’s neighbour. Then: “‘R—I see, said the

blind man!’ ackerbats—lot o’ use to us blindies, that. Funny idea o’

givin’ us pleasure some people ’ave: one old geezer, she came ter take me

out fer the day in a kerridge an’ all. ‘Wot-o!’ sez I to myself. An’—are

you listening’, you?”—with a nudge—“an’ she took me _three times to

Church_ afore she brought me back in the evenin’!”

Richard ducked his head in a smother of laughter; the enormous eye rolled

mournfully in his direction had been so pregnant of disgust.

“Three times to Church, an’ no lollies. An’ me ’elpless. Some people——”

words failed him. He fumbled precariously with a cigarette and a lighted

match, quite matter-of-fact over his handicap. “That all right?” shaking

the match to and fro and dropping it still alight; Richard’s foot shot

out, stealthily.... “’Ave one? they give us plenty. Yus, when she

come again, I was in ’iding, betcherlife. Scout warned me. ‘That pore

well-be’aved young man anywhere about?’ sez she to Sister; but Sister was

a sport and didn’t let on. So she just took a look round at me pals: ‘Are

they all quite blind?’ sez she; ‘Yus, but they ain’t deaf,’ sez Sister,

quick as ’ell. ’R well, s’pose ’er idea of ’appiness ain’t mine; she did

’er best.”

“What does make you happy?”

The reply was brief and to the point: “Taxis an’ cuddlin’.”

... It was not until the last turn of all, a Chinese conjuror, that

Richard found his companion’s attention sufficiently astray from the

stage to permit him to put a question that had lately nagged for an

answer from its source. “I say—what made you join up?”

“Looked as though ’Is Majesty wos invitin’ specially me to a private

picnic. An’ I sez: _With_ pleasure!... Yus, an’ then I woke up, an’ found

one of my eyes gone West, an’ t’other deaf-an’-dumb. Well, I’m not saying

nuffing to that; wot’s done is done, an’ ’ad ter be done by someone,

an’ Government’s paying me ’ansome for the rest o’ my life; but when it

comes to putting me to a _job_——” again a large disgusted eye appealed to

Richard for sympathy. “Work? not ’alf! And the other chaps is that keen

they makes an awkward president.”

“What?”

“President. Same as setting an example, only not quite. But you just see

what me mother thinks abaht it.” He fumbled in his pockets, pulled out

two or three crumpled letters, and thrust them into Richard’s hand. “Read

’em.”

The main point of the letters was clear: Harold’s old mother passionately

advised Harold not to work—thank God there was plenty while she and

father could live and work for him; plenty afterwards too—“I will see to

that, son, so don’t you bother to learn a trade. Well, son, never mind

about your sight, that don’t matter to us; at any rate your not one as

had cold feet. There’ll always be plenty for you, so don’t you let them

make you learn nothing you don’t want, darling——”

“Thank you,” said Richard gently, passing the letters back. Most of the

last pages were filled up with pencil crosses; he wondered if Harold

knew....

The music was holding its breath while Li Hung Wang surpassed himself in

a last effort of magic; resulting in a terrific display of flags; and

the curtains swaying together, back again, and once more together to the

opening chords of “Land of Hope and Glory.”

Immediately the men of St Dunstan’s shuffled to their feet and stood at

attention while they sang through the first verse of Elgar’s anthem, till

the whole risen audience, enthusiastically joining in, swamped their

voices in a volume of louder, fresher sound....

And Richard carried out into the Strand the blurred vision of uneven rows

of weedy, shambling figures in their ill-fitting mufti, the ephemeral

vanity of khaki shed now for good, ordinary men in ordinary casual

clothes, heads tilted stiffly backwards:

“Land of Hope and Glory

Mother of the Free—”

And he knew that though the picture of Trudchen Redbury perplexed over

the question whether tidings of Con’s death in the English trenches

should be sent to spoil the birthday of her sister Anna in Berlin, might

and did symbolize an international predicament—yet that other picture

was indeed war and the splendour of war and beyond war; was patriotism

itself, the urge and reason for patriotism, the ultimate answer to all

niggling private issues; he knew that before war and after war, war may

be averted; but during war ours is to shut both eyes and stand by the

blind and follow the dead.

And then, in all the forgetful semi-hysterical jubilance of the pride of

belonging, he was brought to a standstill as though by a pounding blow on

the forehead, confronted with a placard of a weekly journal just out:

“Enemy Aliens. Intern them all.”

As surely a personal message for him, as a Salvationist’s shouted text

goes straight home to the heart of a sinner.

“What’s the good? they don’t want me....”

He seemed to be repeating vaguely some childish experience of

disappointment, when his eagerly proffered help was turned away with the

same superciliousness of uncomprehending rebuff.

“They don’t want me. Well—I don’t want them either!” ... he was not so

very much older now, after all.

“I don’t want to be English!”

No, Richard? Not even for the sake of those rows of eyes, bandaged and

gutted and black-spectacled? Not even for the right to join in as those

men stood at attention, and chanted in the queer flat strains peculiar to

the blind:

“How can we extol thee

_Who are born of thee_?”...

Not even to be one of them, Richard?

“Well, I wasn’t born in England, so what does it matter?”

But he was aware, in a positive flash of knowledge, that had he been

permitted to go into the trenches and fight, it would have been bang

there, between the eyes, that his bullet would have caught and shattered

him ... there, where the insult of the placard seemed first to have

struck. He had not been allowed the choice of which blow; so how could he

ever prove to this coldly, carelessly exclusive England, how the choice

would unquestioningly have swung?

* * * * *

Half-an-hour later, as he stormed through the hall of Montagu House, he

was greeted by the menace of Mr Gryce’s voice, creaking, creaking....

“Naturalized or unnaturalized, it’s all the same—the leopard can’t change

his spots!”

And the day was rounded to a perfect circle.

II

And after that, Mr Gryce’s voice mixed itself up with pretty well

everything; but particularly with Richard’s three meals a day in the

dining-room of Montagu Hall. He would like to have disappointed Mr

Gryce by occasional absences from meals—taking it for granted that the

Inquisitor does feel a certain disappointment at the absence of his

victims from the rack; but, remembering David’s remarks on patriotism

locally applied, he forced himself to be present for his father’s sake;

forced his taciturnity to voluble talk, throwing up a screen between

Ferdie and the enemy; or, if that failed, at least grandfather could

sometimes be diverted from the muttered arrogance of patriotism—German

patriotism—which might at any moment, _via_ Mr Gryce’s hearing, provoke

a public scene. Richard dreaded a scene now as much as he had sought it

at the incident of Con Rothenburg’s death; it was as though his pugnacity

had been wounded, and would not heal, and was raw-sensitive....

Especially raw-sensitive to Mr Gryce; his pores were all open to

Mr Gryce, who from merely ignoring the Marcus family, was suddenly

subjecting them to active nagging persecution. The recent loss of the

“Hampshire,” with Lord Kitchener aboard, had resulted in another wave of

anti-German feeling sweeping over the country. Richard hardly wondered

at it; he was furiously resentful, furiously suspicious himself over the

happening—but that did not prevent him from equal wrath when Mr Gryce

considered himself patriotically entitled thereby to bang doors in Aunt

Stella’s face.

The truth was that both Richard and Mr Gryce were both afflicted with

the same obsession—the internment of enemy aliens; to each of them, the

war centred entirely on this point, radiating thence on spokes of lesser

interest. But Mr Gryce was on his own territory.

Three meals a day! They met in the hall; they met on the stairs and

landings; in the streets round about the house ... but they passed with

quickening step, averted eyes, and a twitching sense of the other’s

nearness. But those three meals a day had to be stolidly endured.

Breakfast was worst, for then Mr Gryce read aloud the papers to his

neighbours, and delivered his opinions—all _at_ the Marcus table, for

he never spoke to them directly. Richard tried being earlier than Mr

Gryce at breakfast ... but then he had to see the pink head and the wisp

of white beard travel down the room, sit down at the table, and with a

certain unctuous deliberation, unfold the paper; watch him ... and then

wait, with a cold sickness of anticipation, for the first rusty creak:

“What do you think the Germans have been doing now?——” How many thousand

times more would he have to hear Mr Gryce’s vicious inflexion of the

word: Germans—(“He doesn’t mean the fighting Germans, the Germans out

there; he means us; he means me....”)

Presently it seemed to Richard that the creak of the voice and the

pinkness of the head was mixing itself in with the very food he

swallowed, poisoning it....

For the boy had reached that state where he felt himself acutely and

personally responsible for every atrocity committed by the Hun enemy; his

nerves shrank and cowered from each newly-printed horror or treachery or

brutality, as from a thong laid across his bare shoulders. And there was

always something—hospital ships sunk—English prisoners tortured—liner

passengers drowned—poison gas—Zepp raids on non-combatants—wanton

violation again and again of the code of decent warfare. Richard, tired

out from the long day-to-day strain, only wanted the Germans for pity’s

sake to stop—if but for a little while, to _stop_.... All England had

dwindled to Mr Gryce, and there was no one but Richard himself to stand

forward and answer for all Germany’s accumulating reproach!

He put up a gallant enough struggle to retain his fairness of vision.

And presently his imagination, up to all sorts of tricks in these days,

was able to see himself and his personality on the nerves of Mr Gryce,

in exact replica of Mr Gryce on the nerves of Richard Marcus ... saw the

irritation in the curve of his own stolid ill-tempered shoulders—the

antagonism aroused by his out-thrust underlip and the butting carriage

of his head.... “Always that boy! and a loyal Englishman has no option

but to live in the same house, breathing the same air, eat and sit in

the same room, tread the same carpet—it’s a disgrace!” Richard was so

detachedly aware of this point of view that at certain hysterical moments

of encounter he was not sure if he were driven out of the smoking-room by

sight of that inevitable pink head, or whether he were banging the door

with the hand of Mr Gryce’s fury because those Marcus shoulders were

discovered humping in the armchair by the window.

He mistrusted an imagination as flexible. But the more he denied it and

resented it, the more uncannily it functioned. Marcus of Winborough two

years ago would have cut the present Marcus dead, dubbing him a freak ...

he saw that too.

He was far from desire to defend the Germans. He examined their conduct

generally, their methods of warfare, with that new impartiality of his;

gave them their due of victory, resource, consistency and stubborn

devotion to their country; and nevertheless came to a conclusion that

whereas a decent German might be almost as decent as a decent Briton, a

rotten German is immeasurably rottener than the rottenest Briton. The

sinking of hospital ships, for instance; wantonly to plunge into icy

death the broken suffering bodies of men who had once already, perilously

and with infinite care, been dragged back to life, and only asked now to

be let rest with their own people again in their own land. Nothing could

condone the sinking of hospital ships ... and Richard had to clench his

teeth on the longing to join hotly in the chorus of condemnation; as he

had also to grind down the impulse to join the shouting when the news was

good and glorious—“What have either of these to do with you?”

By unspoken pact, the Marcuses remained silent on these subjects, when

in public; they did not gain much by the attitude, for people commented

in whispers: “Have you noticed that they never have anything to say on

our victories, or about the atrocities? Bound to have sympathies with the

other side; wonder what they say among themselves?” On the other hand, if

they expressed their perfectly spontaneous pleasure over an English feat

of arms, and their quite unaffected indignation over a Hun outrage, they

were instantly accused of hypocrisy and over-acting, and Mr Gryce said:

“I like a German at least to _be_ a German!”

It was a difficult problem, but on the whole, perhaps, silence solved

it best. And Ferdie tried to impart to his son some of that placid

philosophy which formed a firm basis to his more surface characteristics.

“My dear boy, what do you expect?—that in times like these the English

will cherish us for our German origin? On the whole, they are lenient and

fair-minded——”

“Yes, but they promised you—promised without reservation, that you should

be as good as an Englishman, equal to any Englishman. And because it was

the English who promised, we—you—we all thought it was all right ...” his

tone was heavy with reproach for the country which of all countries had a

reputation for welcoming and sheltering those refugees from harsher lands

and laws.

For Richard, in want of occupation, had begun to read lately; hoping

to find in history the companionship of other children of No Man’s

Land; common-sense told him that in every war must have been a few

examples of betwixt and between, belonging to both sides and therefore

outcast from either side. He was comforted, in an odd sort of way, by

this hunt through old tomes and chronicles, for precedent to his own

position. Precedent that he could quote authoritatively to Ferdie, less

well-informed.

“Be patient,” said Ferdinand Marcus. “One day the war will be over, and

all will be forgotten.”

“Not it. Never. No foreigner will ever feel safe in England again.”

“Why not? we suffer from inconvenience, not from tyranny.”

“But in their heart of hearts they’ve chucked us out for good.... Haven’t

you heard old Gryce swear he’ll never shake hands with a German again?”

Ferdie weighed the question of old Gryce with solemn deliberation,

and then summed up: “Yes, he has the mania to persecute. One can

understand—but one wishes he would not insult your aunt. But perhaps he

has lost a son.”

“Oh—is this Regent Street or Tuesday?” impatiently. “No forgivable

link of cause and effect. Besides, he hasn’t lost a son. He’s not even

married. It’s just that he has nothing better to do. You never hear

a fellow who’s back from the Front, using himself up in anti-alien

agitation. But old Gryce talks big about brave little Belgium—and then

raises hell if the Belgians get served with the pudding before him at

dinner. I’m not unreasonable, Dad; I can understand perfectly well that

while the Germans are murdering our men and women it’s natural that the

relations of our murdered men and women find it painful to meet us, even

though we’re not the same Germans. That’s why the internment penalty is

a just penalty, I suppose; at any rate, I don’t see how it could be

avoided. But petty nagging is different. There’d be some sense in the

not-shaking-hands business if one could strike away a hand that was the

concentrated essence of all that was foul in Germany——”

“I wonder,” said Ferdinand slowly, “if you have any idea of all that _is_

foul in Germany?—of what drove a whole colony to England in 1848?—the

Acht-und-vierzigers, as they call themselves, those few who are still

alive and whose sons are now part and parcel of the British Empire,

bleeding for it....”

“Eighteen-forty-eight?—that was a democratic revolt against the

domination of Prussia over the smaller states, wasn’t it?”

“Yes; the only way we could protest; we could hardly enter into Civil

War—we who wanted only peace. The early socialists. So we escaped to

England, and we are glad we escaped. We—well, I was not born yet; my

turn came later, and was more solitary. But there lies the root of our

antagonism to the fatherland that bore us; and that is what the English

find so hard to understand in us now. They argue by analogy: because no

Englishman can ever feel anything but an Englishman, so no German—etc.

But the English nature is different ... and besides, it has had no need

for discontent; no need to exchange their own country for another. They

think we still love Germany. But are we not here _because_ we hate

Germany? I have no wish to make speeches or to give you a history-lesson,

Richard; but I sometimes wish, when I see you angry with me for—how did

you once put it?—shoving you in a position with your feelings in one

pocket and your birth-certificate in the other, I sometimes wish you

realized a little better how you would have rebelled against German

education and drill system and forced Imperialism; rebelled, or—worse

still—submitted. You have noticed your grandfather, even now that he

is old and ill and in a strange land, how rudely he still speaks, how

dogmatically he thinks, how arbitrary are his judgments, and how he

considers nobody. That is all military Germany embodied. There is another

side to Germany, certainly, but it is crushed during war-time. Perhaps it

will flower softly again afterwards——”

“Afterwards? Oh, father, will there ever be an afterwards? Will it be

over by next year, do you think?”

(Next Autumn he would be eighteen....)

The elder Marcus looked doubtful: “Who can tell? Have you seen in

to-day’s paper?—there have been peace negotiations——”

“Anything _real_?”

And again: “Who can tell? You had better see for yourself. Here.”

But Richard only made a pretext of seeing for himself. He dreaded reading

the papers; made any sort of excuse not to do so. The papers were always

full of allusions, direct or indirect, to naturalized and unnaturalized

Germans, to spies in our midst, reproaches to the Government for laxness,

incitements to reprisals, leagues for the future exclusion of Germans

or semi-Germans, root and branch, from all association with civilized

countries. Even if one hunted through the whole paper with ever-growing

relief at one day, one issue, free from barbed reproach ... at the last,

a small paragraph would surely catch the eye and destroy the momentary

security. So Richard read no papers. The posters were bad enough, blatant

or mysterious from the kerbstone; you could not avoid those, except by

never stirring from the house ... and in the house was Mr Gryce. Besides,

there is no escape when the mind is spread like a net to catch all stray

matter that has bearing on the one morbid obsession. Even when it is a

question of going round the corner to have a pair of Aunt Stella’s boots

soled and heeled....

In the little street were rival cobblers; one with the name: Marshall,

obviously re-painted over a name possibly less pleasing to his customers;

the other displaying a large placard in the window: “No German Taint

_Here_!”

“Yes, but it’s rather mean to make an advertisement out of it!” and

Richard, against express orders, carried Aunt Stella’s boots to Mr

Marshall. The latter was a lank sad-faced individual with a slight

cockney accent; he confided in Richard that he had unfortunately been

born in Germany of a German father—— “but p’raps I oughtn’t to be tellin’

you this, sir?” “It’s all right,” gruffly. “Brought up over ’ere with me

aunt and uncle who put me in the army—the reg’lar army, that is. Yes,

oh yes, I wos a Tommy years before the war, an’ went through all the

Gallipoli part of it. ’Ot stuff!—I wos shipped home nearly dead from

an explodin’ shell. They discharged me out o’ hospital at last, an’

discharged me from the army; an’ I took over me late uncle’s job ’ere.

No, I’m not partial to cobblin’; I tried most other things, but they

won’t ’ave me nowhere, being so to speak, a German, sir. They ask very

particular, you see, nowadays. And this isn’t payin’, neither ... not

by any manner of means. Customers remember the name. Fact is, sir, I’m

afraid I shall ’ave to be quick with these ’ere boots—I’m wantin’ to

oblige you, since you brought ’em ’ere, but I’m obliged to shut up shop

next week.”

“What will you do?”

“Nothing for me to do but ask ’em to intern me, sir. A man can’t starve.

Wot I’m fearin’ rather, is that them in the internment camp won’t make

me over welcome neither, me havin’ fought against ’em, and bein’ mostly

English in my ways.”

Richard whistled.... “What an old muddle it is! I’m in the same box,” he

added, envying the man his Gallipoli experience, exploding shell and all.

“Yes, I know, sir; or I wouldn’t ’ave been so bold——”

“Know? How do you know?” God! there surely could not be anything German

in his appearance ... horrible thought!

“It’s talked about among the folks in the neighbourhood, sir; there’s a

gentleman at Montagu ’All as isn’t too friendly to you, I believe; an’ ’e

seems to have told the policeman at the corner to keep a sharp eye——”

“I see. Thanks. Good-day.”

Mr Gryce. And the mythical policeman of Otto Rothenburg’s dread,

materialized at last. Not that it mattered; there was nothing for him to

find out. “May as well make up my mind to the fact that I’m a criminal,”

muttered Richard with a grim smile. It was part of the nightmare that

his absolute belief that the foundations of things were “all right,”

solid ground upon which the foot might solidly tread, had now been shaken

to this ... this ricketiness. “I _can’t_ be a German—I don’t _like_

the Germans!” his cry of a year ago, had been incredulous of a state

of the world in which such things could happen. Now: “I haven’t _done_

anything!”—but his tone was acceptance that such things did happen, and

therefore anything could happen, and go on happening ... who or what was

left to stand security?

“When will the boots be ready?” Aunt Stella enquired.

“Early next week.”

“As soon as that?”

Richard explained.

“I told you to take them to the other man,” displeased.

“Thought poor old Marshall needed encouragement.”

“Then leave encouragement to people in a different position. I’ve warned

you before that we must be careful.”

Stella was certainly careful; the most careful of the family. She would

have nothing to do with the lady who recently came to Montagu Hall and

who gave Richard one moment of sardonic happiness by demanding of Mr

Gryce, in innocent and guttural friendliness: “Haf you got a dable-dime,

my Sir?”

Mr Gryce, more successful with her than with the Marcuses—perhaps her

credentials were less unimpeachable—had her removed within a week; but

not before she had thrice beamingly tried to attach herself to Stella,

under the false impression that here at least she was bound to find

kindly compatriotism and shelter, and thrice had suffered a chilling snub

delivered without consideration for her possible feelings: “She’s ever so

much more German than we are,” Stella explained to the other members of

her family; “we really can’t risk it—in our position! Just as well that

old Gryce is getting rid of her.”

Richard thought: “It’ll be us next....”

He did not say so. After his one outburst to Ferdie, he never mentioned

Mr Gryce to him again ... could not, somehow, get the name past a

thickness in his throat. The three Marcuses imagined that Richard did

not notice Mr Gryce and his malignant attitude—(“Richard was never

observant!”).... He was glad for them to believe it. Mr Gryce had taken

it upon himself, of late, to warn every fresh arrival at Montagu Hall,

of the deadly growth in their midst. Richard watched him do it once,

from the other end of the long drawing-room; he could have strode out,

certainly; but, for discipline of that unruly sense of fear, he forced

himself deliberately to witness the give-away; one did not surrender

to fear without a struggle. But ... Mr Gryce worked himself into his

sleep, now, and made it hideous. He dreamt wildly of scenes with Mr

Gryce, in which, instead of hurling at him all the wounding, tearing

speeches repressed during the day—which might have been some relief—he

was compelled instead to follow him about, pleading his case, over and

over again: “Don’t you—_can’t_ you understand—it isn’t my fault? It’s

nobody’s fault. You can’t stop yourself from hating us, but you couldn’t

have stopped yourself from being born in Germany either—oh, do _try_

and see that....” It was perfectly damnable to have to plead with Mr

Gryce, even in sleep, and to be helpless in preventing the subconscious

self from these humiliating displays. “Can—I—help—for—it?”.... Why, that

was what Gottlieb Schnabel had gasped.... Mixed up with his dreams, the

old sick dream of a flour-smeared face cowering from his pursuers—from

Richard—from Richard himself....

His punishment, these slow fear-bitten months; punishment for his

previous denseness of imagination. Yes, yes, but it has gone on so

long, and there seems no end to it, and I’m tired and frightened and

beaten—beaten to my knees. You who send punishment and You who can stay

it, let it be over now....

III

“Are you alone?”

“Richard!”

Deb shrank with a cold sense of shock at sight of his face, from

which all fleshiness had contracted to a drawn covering of the bony

structure; hollows in the cheeks; hard mouth; and eyes that had known

persecution.... “Richard, what is it? I haven’t seen you for about six

weeks. Have you been ill?”

“No. I say, are you alone?”

“Yes; La llorraine and Manon won’t be in for ages.”

“You—you—you’ve got to marry Samson Phillips.”

“I mean.... I want you to,” when he saw her choking bewilderment.

Deb perceived that he was in extremes. “I’ll do anything, Richard.” She

just touched him with her hand. And he stumbled forward and put his head

down in her lap and began to cry.

“Richard ... dear old boy ...” she was athrill with terror now. It was

horrible to hear him, with the knowledge how his normal self, the self

which for seventeen years had stood for all that was chunky and gruff

and pugnacious, was abhorring, or would presently return to abhor, this

sudden utter breakdown of all control. “Tell me—oh do tell me,” Deb

pleaded to the hunched suffering curve of his shoulders.

“They won’t leave us alone ... the pink heads. Deb—rows of pink heads

everywhere—you can see them from the top—yes, sitting round tables ...

all over England: ‘Intern the Alien Enemy.’ But it isn’t that so much;

I’m getting used to the thought of it, for me; one year—not quite—and I

shall be interned.... What’s the word make you feel?—cold iron and damp

black earth. But it isn’t that——”

“What is it then, dear?”

“Deb, d’you know why England and Germany are fighting? Such a silly

reason!—to find out if Goethe or Shakespeare was the greatest. Lothar

said so.”

“We’re fighting to keep England a free country,” Deb spoke clearly and

simply as to a child ... her young brother was even less than a child in

his shaken hysterical outpourings.

“Are we? I’ve been thinking too much, thinking all the time, and all

round.... I want to stop thinking, but I don’t know where to begin to

stop, or why I ever started to think.... Something happened to Gottlieb

Schnabel and he screamed—but it was quite right, Deb, he was a German;

he shouldn’t have left Germany; perhaps his father brought him here and

didn’t have him naturalized; if he’d stopped over there he might have

fought for his country—tho’ he’d have been a rotten fighter. Anyway, the

Germans wouldn’t have him now. They wouldn’t have me.”

“But even if—you’d never——?... _Richard!_”

He was silent, too tired to attempt to tell her of all the bludgeonings

his spirit had received since that evening in the May of 1915. “But I’d

still knock down the fellow who hinted that I cared a curse for any

country except England ... England....”

But England had informed him fifty times a day, and by fifty different

methods, subtle and brutal, that she had no need of him, no use for him,

preferred to do without him, doubted and despised him.... Loyalty crept

shivering into a corner at last ... loyalty was apathetic, numb——

“What’s the good? It just has to be like this. They’d persecute me in

Germany for being English, worse than in England for being German. And

the neutral countries are all getting sucked in one side or the other....

I thought once we could all go to America. What’s the good! everybody’s

fighting for something they believe in! everybody’s got their back to

the wall ... there’s not even a wall for us; only dropping spaces....

No Man’s Land.... I dream of it when I fall asleep—nowhere to go—and

reeling pushes from all sides—you spin round and round, and your brain

spins round and round—nowhere to go and nowhere to rest—for Thomas

Spalding and me.... You hope it’s going to end, but it doesn’t, and they

hate us worse every day ... they hate us worse than they hate the real

Germans.... I don’t know why, I don’t know what we’ve _done_—except

perhaps that we’re here and near at hand; it’s more fun to hate something

that’s near, isn’t it? We hang on and try to prove that we’re loyal

and all right ... the hate seems to be receding ... and then something

happens—and naturally it all rolls up again. Deb, it’s a double treachery

when one of our lot betrays England to Germany—they betray us to England

at the same time ... and you can see the pink heads bobbing....”

“The war will be over one day.”

The boy lifted his face; showed her the eyes of a fighter crucified to

inaction:

“And what sort of a world do you suppose it will be, after the war, for

men who haven’t fought in the war? The others will talk and remember—and

I’ll be shut outside their talk and memories. They’ll have suffered,

and lost their pals, and helped their pals through with it—I shall have

suffered nothing and lost nothing and helped no one. I—oh, I was kept

safe ... in cold storage! God! the meanest little whelp of a Servian or

Bulgarian, German, Turk, or Belgian—it doesn’t matter what side, when

you’re in the scrum, heart and soul—he will have taken a risk denied to

me. I’m funking life after the war, worse even than to-day and to-morrow

and next week—and next Autumn. Didn’t know I was a funk, did you, Deb?”

She asked slowly: “Will it really do you any good, if I marry Samson

Phillips?”

And Richard got up, frowning. “No. What makes you ask that?”

“You said—when you came in——”

“Did I?” he muttered. “I didn’t know—didn’t mean to. I’m all in bits;

don’t take any notice.” He dug his hands into his pockets, and walked

away to the window.

It was significant that he growled out no apologies for having cried.

That he should be capable of such a thing was accepted, wearily, with the

other horrors.

Queer how the very bend of his neck made his sister feel sore with

tenderness ... she _must_ help him butt through his bad hour. And she

reproached herself for neglecting him all this while—Richard, whom she

loved better than any other.

“Is Samson in England again?”

“Yes. In hospital. Trench feet. David told me. Said that Uncle Otto still

wants him for Nell. Somebody English in the family, to grab on to.”

“Oh—Uncle Otto!” Deb’s tone rang scornfully.

“Yes—I used to laugh at him, too. I don’t now. We—we come down to that,

Deb, when we’re in a panic.”

“Was that what you meant, what you hoped, when you told me I must marry

Samson? Somebody to grab on to?”

Richard nodded. “Yes. But never mind. You don’t care enough for him, do

you?”

“How could he help you?”

“He’s solid English through and through; have you noticed how people

imagine that every Jew must be a German—or every German a Jew—I forget

which. But Phillips’ cousin is Sir Ephraim Phillips; David seemed to

think he was going to be useful over Fürth, get a permit for Hedda to

see him oftener—only David says Hedda doesn’t want to. If he were to

vouch for me, perhaps—they listen to a man who has enlisted from the very

beginning, and got the M.C.” A long pause ... and then Richard whispered

under his breath, with the reverence of a pilgrim who speaks of his

Mecca: “He might perhaps have got me into the trenches....”

Presently he jerked out, in his roughest manner: “Look here, Deb, old

girl—forget all this. Perfect rot, really. Don’t suppose he could do

anything—much. I was simply mooching about—and—and a poster or something

got on my nerves and sent me pelting down here. I wouldn’t for worlds

have you bother about Phillips when you’re not keen on him. Not fair on

him, either.”

“I was wondering how you guessed, that’s all ...” Deb’s head was turned

away from him; he stared incredulously at the wavy black mop of hair—what

had she done to her hair?...

“Guessed?”

“That—I made such a fool of myself.... Oh, Richard! that I chucked away

everything last year—just for a bit of fun.”

“When you put him off by—Deb, you—you’re not bluffing? you’ve cared all

this while?”

“Yes.... And now you tell me he’s back, I wonder if I could put things

right again—I do wonder....”

“But you told me at the time that you were laughing, pulling his leg....”

Richard hardly dared believe in this secret of his sister’s which

synchronized so marvellously with his own petition.

She stamped a petulant foot at him. “I _was_ laughing—because I was too

ashamed to own up that I’d hurt myself by teasing him with that idiot

lie of mine about Cliffe. I thought you would have guessed—I thought you

_had_ guessed, when you first lugged in Samson’s name, and were only

pretending that bit about Uncle Otto and yourself and influence, for—for

cover; to cover me. I thought it was so nice of you. Richard”—she walked

straight up to him, and put her arms round his neck, looking steadily at

his eyes, those sombre, tortured eyes which were beginning already to

lighten hopefully and lose some of their strain—“Richard, own up; it was

that, wasn’t it?”

Play-acting. But she had done it so long and inconsequently and for no

one’s sake at all, surely now she was justified in play-acting to the tip

of her powers, at Richard, and for Richard’s sake....

“Wasn’t it?”

“No. No, Deb. It was sheer selfishness. But if you can ... if you

honestly do love him....”

CHAPTER V

I

Deb, before Richard came to her, was afflicted with the hump. A sort of

diffused hump. The hump of all the world. The hump that says: “What’s the

good?” and “It isn’t fair!” and “I wish——” and “Everything’s so hateful!”

It arose from a blurred medley of causes: the dry heat which seemed to

spring from the pavements and sap all vitality. Then Con’s death; Con

had been her first love, and his death stabbed her with a quick and

poignant memory of eight years ago when they had nuzzled each other like

two affectionate and sportive young foals—“_dear_ little Deb.” “Con—I

_do_ love you, Con!” “For always, Deb?” “Yes, for—I say, look how the

conkers are bumping down in this wind ... let’s collect them and have a

battle, shall we?” “Rather!” and the headlong scamper of boy and girl up

the hill towards the group of tattered, wind-buffeted chestnuts. Such

glorious fun, collecting into your own separate pile the vivid russet

pebbles that every fresh gust thudded and bounced on to the grass; or

even, while you knelt and scrambled, on to the flat of your back. Such

fun, sweeping aside the drifts of mottled yellow leaves to discover

where they hid. Such fun, to shout aloud to Con a find of the embedded

conker, red and plump and shining in its dull white pillow and prickly

burr. Such fun, the after battle, swooping to gather fresh handfuls from

your accumulated store of ammunition. She could be quite sure, always,

that Con would never direct his bullets to hit her anywhere except in

places that didn’t hurt. Con was a dear ... and never such a dear as on

that wind-rushed, sun-flashing afternoon in October, when the Battle of

the Conkers having been decided in her favour, they flung themselves

down on the dry protesting rustle of the dead-leaf carpet, flushed and

tingling and ever so pleased with themselves; the clouds swirling apart

over their heads to show such vivid rollicking patches of blue. “Deb,

_darling_—will—will you let me kiss you just once?” “No, Con—please—I

don’t think you ought....”

Well, Con was dead. But that memory was more excellent to look back

upon, than the long, slow-moving hours spent with Blair Stevenson in his

rooms....

It was not Blair’s fault. She recognized that. He was always charming,

always interesting, even whimsically fond of his demi-maid. He was a

great deal better than she deserved, really. Only—only——

“I’m sick of it!” with a spurt of impetuous dissatisfaction. Sick of it,

and did not know how to wriggle clear of it. Perhaps the Foreign Office

would soon send him abroad again. Deb was prone to hang about, hoping

for some lucky mechanical chance to terminate her mistakes, rather than

herself make abrupt severance. Stevenson was indeed sent on an important

mission to America that July of 1916. And Deb did not altogether like

that either. She missed him. He was, at least, aware of her. The old

dejected sensation of waste enveloped her again.

The endless processions of khaki spectres through the great dim stations,

on their way to the Front, wound like a drab caterpillar through her days

and nights. She had loved being on duty at the canteen when the leave

trains came in; but this new job was different—it was horrible. They were

sucked back to the Front where Con had been killed. And the world was

left full of women—women and girls and old women. The world was rather

like that great dim station, with hollow sounds clanging and echoing far

up in the roof, and trains that came in and trains that went out, nobody

quite knew when; and waiting, drearily, up and down the platform; and

an old, old time-table that offered no guidance in this later chaos,

flapping from the walls....

What guidance was there, moral or religious or traditional? Women took

their cues and rules from one another, propped one another up by new and

hastily-made standards; pointed out solitary examples—solitary pioneers.

Dimly-lit melancholy world of women, invertebrate at first, learning how

to walk and run, learning how to do without their men. Bits of a new

code, and bits of an old tradition. A great deal of talk ... women’s

voices....

Women, and women, and women. One got nauseated by one’s own sex. They did

their best—they did splendidly—but oh, the man’s deeper, calmer note,

and more logical authority, and firm hand outstretched!

The home with La llorraine and Manon was hardly as satisfactory as it

had seemed. The _ingénue_ engaged, required kicking—not from jealousy,

but because of her demeanour which implied that everything good comes

to the good girl. And Dolph Carew, whom Deb hated, was always in the

flat. Wedding preparations were in full swing. And La llorraine, the

sails of her content wide and voluptuously full with a fair wind,

treated Deb in the confidential manner of one battered old _rouette_ to

another—inviting her perpetually to look and rejoice at the spectacle of

the two innocent young things so happy. “You and I, my dee-urr, have long

since outgrown such milk and roses.”... It galled Deb, not unreasonably,

to be identified with La llorraine as a _rouette_ of fifty years ago.

Manon was to marry Dolph Carew ... inevitably Deb’s thoughts drifted

back to Jenny—lingered there ... all that wish and desire and beat for

life wasted ... and that charming little face, mournful or roguish as

a monkey’s. “But Bobby’s left; Bobby with the same crinkle in his eyes

and mouth and heart.... If I were to die, wanting things like Jenny did,

there would not even be Bobby to remind people....”

Yes—she had the hump. The hump of all the world. And then Richard came.

At once life lost its sullen taste; and was sharp with the savour of

brine. Something to do—and that not too easy. Something to be won—and

that not for herself, but for Richard. Something to sacrifice—and that

was contemplation of the future; fatal to brood upon a future inhabited

principally by Phillipses. Something here which demanded subtle

manipulation, probably histrionics ... but this was Deb’s talent. She set

out to re-conquer Samson Phillips in a spirit which was brewed in equal

parts of roguery and swagger and trepidation. Could she or could she not

obliterate her senseless fib of last autumn? It all depended, really,

on how much Samson cared for her, and of what enduring fibre was his

passion. And here Deb had confidence; she could not forget that he had

asked her to marry him—so few men had asked her that, down all that long,

dusty highway speckled with men....

“If it can be wangled, it shall be wangled,” she promised Richard in

her heart. She was not very considerate of Samson in the matter; but you

cannot be too scrupulous of one man when you wish supremely to serve

another.

From Nell Redbury she obtained Captain Phillips’ temporary address,

and also the exact ailment from which he was suffering. It would not

do to make a mistake in that. Then she composed a letter that in its

simple idiocy and clear grasp of Samson’s psychology, was quite a little

masterpiece of guile:

“DEAR CAPTAIN PHILLIPS,

“I hear that you are back again and in hospital, with

trench-feet. I’m so very sorry. Though I’m afraid you won’t

care much if I’m sorry or not. And yet—this letter is really to

ask if you’ll let me come and see you, just once? Of course,

I know it’s my fault that we’re not good friends. But please,

please don’t snub me. It does hurt so to be snubbed. Is there

anything special you would like me to bring you, in case you

say I may come? Flowers I know you love best, but flowers are

nicest when they are wild in the fields, aren’t they? I wish

you could have seen our little brook near Market St Bryan last

month; its banks were a blue heaven of forget-me-nots. Do you

ever think about it, I wonder?

“Yours very sincerely,

“DEB MARCUS.”

She re-read this epistle, and crossed out the last sentence. “It won’t

do to frighten him; I wish I could work in a little old-world touch of

dignity.” She mused; then unable to supply this, sent it off as it was.

She had not miscalculated the durance of Samson’s affection. He was

a stubborn man, and he had deliberately selected Deb. Deb had dealt

his sense of righteousness a hard buffet; but he had not succeeded in

forgetting her. Her letter struck exactly the right note—diffident yet

impetuous; just the same dear, warm-hearted, half-shy, half-wild little

girl ... surely she must have been led astray by some scoundrel. After

all, she had been honest at the time; honest enough to forfeit his regard

and all it entailed, by that confession of her sin. The sin could not be

minimized—but here she was, obviously penitent—he could not resist the

delicious act of magnanimity.

So he replied stiffly, saying he would be delighted if she were to pay

him a visit at the hospital between three and four on the following

Wednesday. He had made arrangements with his sister-in-law, Nell Redbury,

to be present....

This last, with that insistence on a rigorous and formal respect

necessary in such painful cases where respect could not any more be taken

for granted as the lady’s due.

Deb smiled when she received it. “Nell can easily be shunted. Is white

muslin too obvious? I s’pose so. It had better be my spotted pink, which

is a bad fit. And the Leghorn hat with the spray of Alexandra roses that

doesn’t match the dress. Surely no girl would wear two mouldy shades of

pink unless she were a reformed character. Good Lord! my hair! How am I

to account for it?”

She fingered a temptation to dare the risk of winning him back by means

he most disapproved of—peacock and gold jumper of the wickedest cut;

conversation to match, all a-flicker with brilliant unconventionality;

the siren method? It would be infinitely more fun; and a personal triumph

if she succeeded.

But no. Richard’s peace of mind hung on the issue; she must take the

safest way.

II

Ten days later, Samson for the fourth time proposed to her. She accepted

him.

After the first interview, it was easy. She had only to be passive; or

to smooth down any little creases in her texture that she perceived

could still cause him uneasiness. That first interview was her

greatest performance. She blended timid womanly solicitude with that

type of earnest frankness in big and little things, which was to be

interpreted—by him—as the outcome of an inner consciousness of once

having failed greatly in moral steadfastness and the resolve never again

to be betrayed into so doing. She thought his intelligence could be

trusted to perceive that much subtlety, unaided. He did perceive it. And

approved. He approved also of her confusion at his jocular reference

to the forget-me-not stream. “Don’t tell me you went down there alone

to pick forget-me-nots?” “Oh, but I did. I wouldn’t——” she stopped. And

hastily asked him how he liked his tea. “Wouldn’t go with any other

man.”... Samson smiled under his moustache. So that special glide of

silver beneath the plank bridge, had associations for her, too. Good!

he liked sentiment in girls. He was a sentimental chap himself, but in

his case it was sheathed in sternness. He was a soldier—and she was a

sinner.... Never let him forget that.

She never let him forget it. Not once in the prescribed hour. Intuition

pointed out that it was labour lost to try and make him forget. Therefore

he must be brought to forgive.

“So Delilah has been shorn instead of Samson? That’s poetic justice,

isn’t it?” Then, chaffing no more: “What made you cut your hair, Deb? I

don’t like it. It’s like those artist-model girls you see about. I hoped

you’d go on arranging it the way Beattie did it for you, once. It suited

you.”

“But it took so long,” Deb explained. And further, in an outburst of

confidence: “It was stupid of me—I’m sorry now. But—it was just a

mood—one evening, when I had to dash off to the canteen—and it _would_

keep on flopping down after I’d pinned it up ... and it seemed to me

there was so much to do in the world just now, beside one’s hair—so much

to do and so little time to do it in—And ... Oh, I lost my temper with it

and just sheared it off. Does it look hideous?”

He studied her in silence. And his face turned red and his eyes slowly

kindled....

“Not that it matters. Vanity is rather futile since the war, isn’t it?

But one can’t help minding being a fright....”

“You’re not a fright, little girl,” said Samson Phillips.

And then Nell slipped back inconspicuously into the room, and said it was

time to go.

Otto Redbury had rubbed his hands with pleasure when Samson, via

Beatrice, had made known his wish for Nell’s attendance at the hospital

between three and four on Wednesday afternoon.

“So! it gomes to something, then!” and he inspected Nell before her

departure, and gave her five shillings for a taxi, that she might arrive

unheated and unruffled. The taxi had stopped at La llorraine’s, to pick

up Deb, but this Otto did not know. Deb was very glad to arrive at the

hospital unheated and unruffled. And Nell was very glad to spend the

stray half-hour walking beside Timothy, whom Deb had notified to be

accidentally outside the gates at that hour of the day. This Otto did

not know either. Not that he could have gained much by prying on their

dialogue, for the pair were still in that stage of dreamy ecstasy which

prefers not to speak, in addition to their handicap of excessive shyness.

“Soon, zere vill be a vedding at the Synagogue,” Otto prophesied to

Trudchen. But Trudchen, who had lost one of her boys, had no happiness

for the moment in either of her girls.

Otto was right in form but not in detail. A wedding did indeed take place

on October the 12th, and Nell was bridesmaid; and the bride was given

away by her father; and Otto for the look of things had to be coaxed out

of the bathroom by his united family, and coaxed into a frock-coat, and

coaxed into attendance as a guest. Otto’s soul was very bilious, and

he objected to paying for a present, and made several quite snappy and

spiteful remarks concerning the folly of men who married a girl whose

certificate of chastity bore a black mark and the scrawled name of Mr

Cliffe Kennedy....

“Ach, Otto!”

Samson was aware of the enormity of such a choice. Aware, too, that he

would have great difficulty with his family, who were still huffy with

Deb for having dared to refuse Samson on three previous occasions. So he

did an unprecedented thing—he proposed first, and consulted his family

afterwards. Perhaps “proposed” is not the term which exactly sets forth

his proceedings. He announced to Deb that he was willing to make her his

wife—nay, that he considered it his duty to draw her from the gutter back

to the pavement. Deb—who in spite of some deep inner scoldings that she

was again behaving disgracefully towards Samson, and this time worse even

than before—Deb stood before him with eyes downcast and folded hands,

meek and wan—and wildly exhilarated by her success. She had, to quote La

llorraine: “Made a muff from her chances” so often and so disastrously

that a great deal of previous anxiety was inevitable. Anxiety was now

allayed. She stood before her master, meek and wan, and exceedingly

desirable: Israelite maiden in the slave-market.... Samson kissed her

very carefully to show that his respect had suffered no diminishment. (He

was so continually showing her this in all sorts of unobtrusive ways that

Deb only now realized to what extent her lie of last year had earned his

undying censure.) Samson kissed her carefully—and said, “My family will

be pleased about this, Deb.”

For which she rather liked him.

The family, of course, reminded him in an appalled chorus that Deb

was—somewhat disreputable. Had she not run away from home, to live with

that opera-woman? Samson replied inflexibly that they, by their contempt

and reproach, might be responsible for driving a poor little girl to

worse things.

“What worse things are there?” his grandmother demanded, for the rest of

them.

Samson merely shrugged; and opposition perceived that the eldest son

of the house of Phillips had chosen, and would not be swerved from his

choice. His glucose fidelity was impressive. Samson was the Phillips’

fetish, and Samson’s wish the Phillips’ law. Moreover, there remained

still the Phillips’ illusion that Deb had always loved Samson, had loved

him all through his three proposals last Autumn, and must—poor child—have

suffered terribly, refusing him. Certainly she deserved to suffer. But by

this chance of making Samson happy, she might expiate her foolishness,

and expiate it still more in giving Samson a fine healthy son.... So the

many counsels in the dining-room of Mrs Phillips resolved at last on a

programme of bounteous welcome, forgive and forget.

Deb, foreseeing complications, made more than one faltering attempt to

explain privately to her fiancé exactly how the quaint mistake about her

premature initiation had occurred.... But it was an impossible task. At

each successive essay, Samson interrupted at the very start and in his

well-known style: “I don’t want to hear a word about it, Deb. It’s all

over and it’s all forgotten. Let’s turn over a fresh leaf and agree never

to mention it again. I love you, and you know it, and nothing makes any

difference, and I simply don’t want to hear another word about it.”

So she gave in. She was the flame, he was the extinguisher that stands

beside the candle. However ardent her whim to burn, he could always put

her out.

Ferdie Marcus was enraptured at the betrothal. It was what he had always

desired for his little daughter—everyone was prefixing Deb with “little”

just now—a good protector; a Jew; a husband in a solid position, both

financially and—nowadays this was important—in point of nationality. He

would never be quite healed of the unlooked-for wound dealt him by this

same little daughter, last year; and he was rather puzzled as to how

that affair had been glossed over where Samson was concerned. Did Samson

know? But he hid both the scar and the perplexity; and without any formal

reconciliation, it was understood that she had slipped into re-occupation

of her old place in the home—home in the abstract and not literal sense;

for she did not return to live at Montagu Hall. Neither Grandfather nor

Aunt Stella were sufficiently cordial at the prospect; and Samson did not

care either about the boarding-house. For the present he made special

arrangement that she should stay with the Redburys—Beattie and Hardy. She

should be married from his mother’s house, and as he was to be discharged

from hospital in a month’s time, the wedding could quite well be arranged

for October. In fact (“I’m a sentimental chap!”) he asked Deb, with a

twinkle of meaning in his eye, whether October the 12th would suit her?

Just in time to prevent her features from slipping into utter blankness,

she remembered that this might be the anniversary of the silvery-stream

business, and replied with a pretty smile, that she thought October the

12th would be ... nice.

“Will there be time to let your hair grow before then?” he teased her.

“We can’t have a bride with short hair....”

The whole Phillips family had pounced, jabbering and shrieking and with

white teeth all aflash in their olive faces, on the discovery that

Delilah and not Samson had been shorn. Deb was prepared for this, and

constant repetition of the joke did not afflict her in the measure of

last year. The Phillips were themselves a joke, and her engagement,

and Samson, and Otto Redbury sulking in the bathroom on the occasion

of her formal visit on the arm of her fiancé; and the fact that she

must ostentatiously refuse ever to meet Cliffe Kennedy again ... all a

joke! That was her mood, and it was not once interpierced. She saw very

little of her old set during her engagement—very little of Gillian and

Antonia and Zoe. All that had dropped away like a whirl of sparks in the

forgotten night.

The sense of a hilarious joke followed her to the very porch of the

Synagogue, pursued her through the ceremony, with its gabble of Hebrew

and wonderful song. It prodded her midway in the fatherly old Rabbi’s

personal benediction, when he solemnly addressed Samson in these terms:

“You are bearing away to a typically Jewish home a typically Jewish

treasure....” Deb felt irresistibly impelled to drop her eyelids

and murmur deprecatingly: “Oh, no ...” and Samson patted her arm

reassuringly....

And then the joke faded ... for the old man spoke directly to her, and

made her feel suddenly that at last she belonged; that this was her

faith, and these her people; and that standing here under the white

canopy, she was really fulfilling her destiny at last—the destiny for

which Deb Marcus had been primarily shaped and intended. After all, she

had not been able to achieve free adventure—and compromise was a poor

substitute. It was kind of Jehovah to have guided her from debatable

ground to safety.

And she would cease from baffling and bamboozling Samson, who was

high-principled and faithful. What had she made out of her loose-jointed

set of values, to enable her to scoff at his? Deb was now full to the

brim of her being with contrition and clear sweetness and gratitude....

A few yards away Ferdie was beaming happily—Dear old dad—and she had

been such a beast, blaming him for all her own freakish behaviour. And

there was Richard, scowling a little self-consciously in his endeavour

to appear absolutely at ease—all Samson’s brothers were already married

and ineligible for the office of best man, which devolved therefore upon

Richard ... brows hunched over eyes that were wonderfully at peace.

Six weeks ago, he had looked like a man of thirty; now he looked what

he was—a sturdy well-blocked-out pugnacious youngster of seventeen. It

was all right—Deb had spoken to Samson about him, and Samson had spoken

to his cousin Sir Ephraim Phillips, who had promised when the time of

internment drew actually near, to interest himself, not only to the

extent of (certainly) getting Richard off, but furthermore to get him

(perhaps) into the fighting line somewhere. So Richard’s state was that

of a parched creature who had sighted water to slake his thirst....

All the same, it was no joke being responsible for the ring and the

fees—and the carriages and—and half-a-dozen other things. It rendered a

properly nonchalant bearing impossible. And he had made a bad beginning

by the reverent removal of a sleek silk hat from a sleek bullet head,

directly on entrance ... five bearded gentlemen draped in black had made

a rush at him and besought him to replace his hat upon his head.

His eyes met his sister’s in a swift comprehending glance. “Sure it’s all

right, Deb—for you, I mean?” “Quite, quite sure, old boy!” the unspoken

question and answer between them.

The glass was set in the neighbourhood of Samson’s foot, and he ground

it vindictively into powder. His mother at the reception afterwards,

called all her friends and relatives to bear witness with what spirit he

had performed this part of the ritual. It was fortunate that she did not

overhear David Redbury’s remark to the effect that Samson had not only

used all the energy which his great prototype had expended on the pillars

of the temple, to crush one small wine-glass; but had then further

deviated from Biblical history by inviting the Philistines home with him

to champagne and iced cake....

“Oh, hush, David!” from Nell.

“Well—look at us!” Israel was indeed enormously represented. The rooms

glimmered and glittered with the clan Phillips. Already they owned Deb

(“little Deb”); swarmed about her in heavy, jocular proprietorship; bore

her triumphantly away to be robed for the honeymoon journey.

Mr and Mrs Samson Phillips left at 4.30, _en route_ for Torquay.

* * * * *

“Why did you ever tell me that falsehood?”

“I—I don’t know, Samson. What falsehood?”

“You do know, Deb.”

“I don’t know why I told it, Samson.”

“You’ve always been a good girl.” It was a statement, not a query. A

statement weighted with perplexity.

And: “Yes ...” she assented, “I’ve always been a good girl.”

He was not so joyfully illuminated as might have been expected. Indeed,

he was conscious of being defrauded of an essential occupation. He had

married Deb, forgiving her. He had meant to go on forgiving her. He would

never stop forgiving her. Now, in place of these anticipations, was a

vacuum....

PART IV

CHAPTER I

Nell and Timothy lay among thick buttercups. Here and there the

shimmering, glazed yellow lifted to circles of pale cowslips. Nell’s

russet silk jersey was a splash of deeper colour in all the gold; the

spilt pollen trembled on her loosened plaits of hair, the lustreless

heavy brown of water densely overhung. Timothy thought he had never seen

anyone more beautiful ... and he was flying over to France the next day.

“Nell——”

“Wait a minute, Tim.... I’m thinking.” She dared order him to wait, this

fair young hero of hers. Because she had learnt to believe, through a

year of wonder, and hesitation, and ignorance shaken into discernment,

that he was indeed hers. And with belief came power—oh, what strange

new power in her deep look ... young Nell knew everything now—all about

feelings and life and colour ... she knew what feelings were when

Timothy’s hand lay on her bare arm; and life was—Oh, but she mustn’t

tell ... not yet ... you wouldn’t understand, because it’s all got to do

with Timothy. And colour was what happened to Timothy if near to him she

stirred or brushed his khaki sleeve....

She lay on her back among the buttercups; staring into the sky, and

thinking.

“You see,” at last, “it’s such a Great Responsibility.”

He nodded, and echoed her phrase: “Yes—it’s No End of a Responsibility!”

He said this whenever they discussed the subject, and with a more

profound air of worry each time. And they had discussed it so often. That

New Generation! it really gave a fellow a terrific lot to think about.

“It isn’t as if it were just you and me, Tim. That would be so easy to

settle. But—it’s all the others. Just think, Timothy, how many are being

beaten down to be miserable just because they dare not walk away, be

happy—like Gillian!”

“It’s awful!” Timothy’s eyes were round and solemn.... He was not

frightfully keen on the New Generation. Had he been a rollicking

youngster, he would have puffed it away in a laugh. But he followed

laboriously where Nell led ... and thus got his answer, from the lips of

the acolyte and the disciple, to the question he had once put to Blair

Stevenson: “Yes, but what’s it all _about_? What are they up to, these

girls?”

“Look here, Nell.... I do so want to—to marry you. I’ve told you billions

of times. Darling ...” he dropped to a whisper; “Darling, I could get a

special licence; _won’t_ you? now that——.” He meant to say “Now that I’m

off to-morrow,” but bit back the words, holding to an unspoken pact among

the young men who go into the fighting line, that the “last-day-of-all”

leverage is not a fair one to use in the shift of a girl’s will.

“I _can’t_ marry you, Tim. How could I ever look Gillian in the face

again? After she’s been so brave and wonderful ... just to show us all

the way ... it’s simply nothing to follow, after someone else has gone

first!”

“But——” Timothy stopped, his light thick eyebrows were drawn to a puzzled

frown. Then he started off again—“I don’t see what _harm_ it does anyone,

us being married?”

“Marriage—is—obsolete,” said Nell, with absolute dead certainty. “And we

owe it to the future, Timothy.”

“Owe what?”

“Not to give in.”

Nell was resolved not to give in. And hers was a nature of such thick

obstinacy as Timothy had not even begun to suspect. There was little of

Deb’s pliability about young Nell. Impressionable she was, unexpectedly,

as in the case of her unswerving, unquestioning devotion to Gillian

Sherwood, but she could not be readily diverted this way and that, as

could Deb. _This_ way—but not _that_.

“If we gave in and got married in the old stupid fashion, then dozens of

other twos might do it because we did.”

“Would that matter?” Timothy asked unhappily.

She flashed: “Oh, if you’d rather be just anybody instead of Pioneers——”

Then reproachfully, “You pretended to agree last time we talked about

it. You oughtn’t to pretend, Timothy, because it makes me sort of step

on something which I’m quite sure is there but isn’t—like that funny,

hateful feeling when you go up one stair too much in the dark—d’you

know?”

“Yes. But it’s not so bad as when you don’t come down one stair enough.”

“Yes, it is. It’s worse. Your way only makes one fall and hurt oneself

... it’s quite ordinary. But the other way gives you a—an inside feeling

... oh, I don’t know—like a shock!”

“Well, anyway,” said Tim, trying to regain forfeited ground, “I wasn’t

pretending. Of course the idea is wonderful about being pioneers, and not

minding—and—and going first to clear away the rubbish for the others.

And of course I think it no end plucky of Gillian to go and live with

the fellow she loves, nor bother a cuss about being married or anything.

But—_need we_?” He added: “You’re different, Nell ... that’s what I mean.”

It was not quite all he meant. But how could he express his sense of her

harebell frailty; and his great desire—heritage of two thousand years and

more years behind—to act the male, and protect her, and mightily build

her round with protection that not a whistleful of cold air could pierce

one chink of his protection on to one inch of her sensitive soul.

Nell loved Timothy. On the second of April (she remembered the day) he

had kissed her slowly and reverently—and then suddenly, with queer eyes,

and cherub’s mouth grimly puckered and set, had strangled her body in his

arms till she wondered.... Be sure a girl loves the boy in whose eyes she

first sees that special queer look called up by her.

But Gillian still claimed her worship. Gillian she still idealized

from footstool vantage. Gillian was a genius, and Gillian was brave,

and Gillian had taken careless notice of her, and sometimes even been

whimsically tender; Gillian had never laughed at her—the least she could

do in gratitude was to regulate her conduct by Gillian’s; to trust and

follow her chosen pilot; not let the sacrifice be in vain.... Why,

supposing after Gillian had risked her very soul in daring initiative,

all her disciples had scuttled backwards from her example ... and ...

and got married! Nell’s face burnt with the shame of it; she pressed her

hot cheek down among the cool stems.... Funny, how enormous the thicket

of buttercups looked above her, viewed right down here amongst their

beginnings ... flicker of green and shadow of gold and minute fragments

of notched fern and leaf, of weed and moss and wee scurrying insects ...

the polished petals bulged close to her eyelids, a bright blue beetle

swung like a jewel from the tip of a blade of grass ... below all this

stir and hurry and colour—what else was there? Could she get deeper down

into it? Deeper and deeper? If she lay quite, quite still, would the

earth-life fold her up and cover her over with its smell and its hum ...

drowse—that was an earth-word.... Nell repeated it softly ... “drowse ...

drowse....”

“Billy Dawson’s number has gone up,” Timothy’s voice, startlingly near

and loud, split the little circle of hush she had woven about her. “Saw

it in the paper to-day. Poor old Billy—he was one of the best. Brought

down three Boches first and then Archie got him. Rotten luck—I liked old

Bill. This was his second time out there....”

And all not quite as irrelevant as it appeared. Timothy felt urgently

the need of now or never making some special appeal to Nell, a thrust to

penetrate all her spiritual mufflers. Because it so literally might be

never—after to-day. But he could not say this—there was the bother of it!

It simply wasn’t done in the Flying Corps—of course not. But maybe if

he just insinuated into her perception that airmen do occasionally get

killed—other airmen—especially when for the second time out there—well,

no harm in that, surely? Timothy, whose natural blunt honesty did not

often lead him into strategy, now viewed himself as a very Machiavelli

of subtle craft. He watched her closely for a wash of deeper colour in

her neck and cheeks. But Nell rarely flushed ... and he could not see her

eyes....

A wind trembled over the top of the buttercups, swayed them from misty

gold to a brilliant shining sea of light....

“Oh!” and Nell sprang upright, “I want to get closer to them—oh, how

does one get closer and _closer_.... I thought to lie in among them,

but it doesn’t help a bit....” She began to gather up whole masses of

buttercups, not picking each one singly from the stem, but tearing

riotously, indiscriminately, an armful at a time, as though she were

quenching a thirst.... Timothy, his gaze round with amazement, wondered

what was the secret spring of this outburst of passion, venting itself on

buttercups, millions of buttercups ... already she had wrenched away more

than she could carry; they tumbled from her fingers, and unheeding she

stepped on them and grasped for more ... the long stems clung about her

ankles—tripped her to her knees. Timothy leapt forward and clutched her

as she fell against him—saw her and held her and kissed her through the

sharp-edged little petals—brushed them impatiently away.... “Closer—and

closer!” he sobbed—

“Tim—I oughtn’t! We oughtn’t!...”

“It’s _right_—you said so....” (Timothy had no idea he was being funny!)

The meadow, before these human babes stepped into it, was scooped with

the rhythm of a perfect yellow bowl. But now the buttercups which

had escaped the handling of Nell’s fever-fury, stood away, aloof and

delicate, from those other marred and trampled patches ... buttercups

wilting ... buttercups dead.

CHAPTER II

I

“Deb?—oh, she’ll be all right in December,” said Mrs Phillips to

Beatrice, and Beatrice to Trudchen Redbury, and Herbert and Abe to

Samson, and Samson to Grandmother Phillips, and Grandmother Phillips to

Flo and Martha and Gwendolen. “All right in December....”

“Poor Deb!”

“I think Samson is simply too sweet with her. I’ve never seen anyone so

devoted.”

“Of course it’s wonderful luck for Deb that he should be employed at the

arsenal, so that he can get home every evening.”

“I don’t believe he’s missed a single evening since they were married—how

long is it now? Eight months.”

“It’s such a pity she wasn’t well enough to come to Grandma’s

birthday party, I can’t help thinking. You know, it’s important for

Samson—Grandma’s so fond of him—always has been—the eldest ... and Deb’s

rather extravagant. Well, of course, she’s not used to managing yet—she

does her best.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, Beattie. Because if she helped in the garden,

the gardener twice a week would have been sufficient. But they have

Mills on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I asked him. And snipping off

dead blooms is nothing really ... if you care about flowers. My son’s

favourite hobby, too ... one would have thought that Deb—of course, I’m

always there to instruct her how I manage about my seeds, but—”

“Gwen and I have promised her to go in every morning for two hours’

sewing. I still have the patterns we had for little Fanny’s things....

Oh, she’ll be all right in December!”

This was early June.... In December Samson’s son was to be born. Samson’s

son—no misgiving in the minds of the Phillips that Deb might be just the

sort of girl to present him with a daughter instead.... They trusted her

to do her best for the family. “I believe that trusting people is half

the battle,” said Beatrice brightly.

Samson had not yet recovered sufficiently from his bewilderment at the

discovery that Deb was a liar but no sinner, to spread out the matter

clearly in words before her, and ask for enlightenment. Instead, he

brooded.... What could have been her possible object, wilfully to blacken

her character in his sight? And at that crucial period of her life, too,

while he was proposing to her?—“it might have put me right off....”

The magnanimous husband was uneasy whenever he thought about it all.

He felt like Falstaff among the lobs and gnomes on midsummer night; a

sensation of trickery somewhere; somewhere, somebody laughing; an elusive

tweak at his nose.... _Why_ had Deb said: “I have not been good”? _Why_,

as it was palpably not true? _Why_ had she afterwards pleaded for his

forgiveness? _Why_ ... Samson hated things he could not understand. He

went about his home heavily, suspicious that at any instant another such

perplexity might pop up to confront him.... He had taken Mab, Queen of

the Pixies, for wife....

They had settled down in Hampstead, to be near the rest of the family. He

had asked his family to see a lot of Deb, adjudging their influence to

be of solid benefit. His “little girl” would have no time to fret after

her clever (and immoral) Bohemian friends, if she had always someone with

whom to chat; she would probably take to Flo most—Flo was so lively!

Really, almost a Bohemian herself (only moral).

And every night they all dined with Mrs Phillips and the Phillips’

grandparents, or else with Hardy and Beatrice, or with Abe and Martha, or

with Florence and Gwendolen, who were living together now their husbands

were at the Front; or else Mrs Phillips and the Phillips’ grandparents

and Hardy and Beatrice and Abe and Martha and Florence and Gwendolen came

to dine with Deb and Samson.... “We’re a very united family, you know,

Deb.”...

Deb, as hostess, used to combat boredom by a sinister little game

especially invented by herself for those occasions. She used to pretend

that one dish of the meal—only one dish—was poisoned, by her express

orders. It was quite amusing to note which members of the family would

eat of it, and which would escape; and which only partially escape by

helping themselves very moderately.... Curious that Abe, her special

aversion, by some twist of luck, _always_ passed over whatever dish it

was that Deb had fixed as lethal.... She realised that it would be hard

indeed to kill Abe!

If the Phillips were being particularly exasperating, then Deb’s fancy

would carry on the drama through the subsequent stages of her sudden

casual pronouncement of the impending doom: “I think it only right to

tell you all—forgive me for interrupting you, Grandma—that the curry was

poisoned, and you’ve none of you more than a quarter of an hour to live.”

Oh, it was a childish game! Deb, aged twenty-six, wife of Samson

Phillips, prospective mother of a Phillips’ heir, mistress of a

fair-sized house and garden and two well-trained servants and the

gardener three times a week, Deb, anchored in harbour at last, ought to

have known better than to divert herself thus idiotically. But—those

Phillipses!

It was not as though they disapproved of her. That would have been quite

stimulating—to have been the object of violent disapproval, perpetual

scoldings and perpetual defiance, hers the slightly supercilious attitude

of the bomb which explodes sensationally in a cabbage field ... after

all, under such conditions, the bomb is the centre of attention!

But the Phillipses took it so heartily for granted that Deb was one of

them; that their cheerful intelligent interests were her interests; their

alert and wholesome outlook, her outlook. They were so unaware that other

interests or outlook existed; or, existing, that it could possibly claim

a Phillips. For they had taken her to the Phillips’ bosom—no, worse, they

had absorbed her into the Phillips’ bosom; wrapt her densely round with

warm affection and inquisitive solicitude; what Deb did was right; and

if it were not quite right yet, that did not matter either, because Deb

was doing her best. Inconceivable to them that she should not be doing

her best, trying hard, where Samson and the family and the household and

the future heir were concerned. Even as they would believe to the end of

all time that chocolate pudding was her favourite pudding, so not a doubt

existed but that Deb was all right—except when it was natural she should

not be all right—and that would be all right in December....

Therefore Deb poisoned them, one by one, and was not even sorry. It

was a pity only that there was no one in whom to confide these illicit

prancings of her imagination. Samson would certainly not have seen the

joke. Besides, she was rather afraid of Samson. He read the Faerie

Queene aloud to her on Sunday afternoons, sitting in the garden, with a

rug over her knees and cushions at her back; and sometimes he paused to

interpret the more difficult parts of the allegory; and often, playfully,

he called her Una—yes, he could do so now, because she _was_ a pure girl,

though he still did not understand why....

There was compensation in her life when Ferdie came round towards six

o’clock on dry evenings; exultantly dragged out the hose; and solemnly,

but with a kind of red beam shining behind the solemnity, watered the two

long flower-beds and the one short one which bounded their half-acre of

garden; which was not at all unlike their old garden at Daisybanks, with

its one shady tree over the tea-table, and the earwiggy arbour; only the

Virginia creeper over the back of the house was lacking; the mat of dark

polished ivy was not one-quarter as lovable as the clinging tendrils and

late crimson she tenderly remembered.

“Richard is so happy nowadays,“ Ferdie would confide in his daughter,

perhaps with a wistful plea for reassurance that he had not been the

cause of Richard’s year of wretchedness. “He reads of military history

and air tactics all day long.... I believe he thinks himself already a

captain in the R.F.C.”

And this also was good to hear.

Of her previous gang of friends, Deb saw only Antonia. Cliffe was

forbidden; Zoe—obviously one could never be quite sure what Zoe would

say! Her blend of Palais Royale adventure and eighteenth-century

interpretation thereof, was perilous, in the presence of Samson or Mrs

Phillips or Martha.

And they had all heard of Gillian and her achievements in science, and

had heard a vague report, too, that there was something “not quite nice”

about her. Celebrities were often like that, of course, and one did not

mind a bit; but then—one did not come in social contact with celebrities.

They were both too good and not good enough for the Phillips’ standard.

Perhaps anyway for the moment it was better that little Deb—“What do you

think, Samson?” “I don’t want her to be lonely, but you see a lot of her,

don’t you, Beattie? you and the girls and mother? I don’t want her to

mope!”

“Oh, we’ll see that Deb isn’t much alone,” promised Beattie, laughing; “I

expect she’ll almost wish us away sometimes....”

La llorraine was an impossible visitor. Manon, on the other hand, as

Mrs Dolph Carew, was welcomed by the Phillips, who thought her “quite

a sweet little thing” and admired her demure manners and prim foreign

enunciation; and chaffed her for her perfectly conventional point of

view—for the Phillipses considered themselves too intelligent to be

altogether conventional. _Morals_ were different ... morals could be

taken for granted, like Deb’s allegiance to the family, and Synagogues on

Saturday, and clean white kid gloves, and a joint on Sundays, and England

through thick and thin, and the windows always a little open in the

children’s nurseries, and other matters of unalterable standing.

Nell Redbury had entirely taken over Deb’s canteen job, so she was

seldom available for companionship. The other Redburys came and went,

linked by Beatrice to the Phillipses; Otto, still offended with Deb

for her marriage, peevishly forbade Trudchen to instruct her in

private succulent recipes for Samson’s delectation. Hedda was not very

interesting—perhaps because she tried so hard to be interesting. She

pronounced “tempera_ment_” with a far-away look and an accent on the

last syllable; and lamented how wild and free a demi-maid she might have

been had not Gustav Fürth unfortunately made her his wife before she had

even time to get properly started. She capped conversation persistently

with the two phrases “Je n’en vois pas la nécéssité,” and “Ça n’empêche

pas les sentiments,” which really, uttered with the right air of esprit

and diablerie, could be made to impart an indecent flavour to almost any

subject. Hedda was ... rather superfluous. It was not as though she were

definitely musical, like David, or definitely beautiful, like young Nell;

or possessed the quaint wit of Hardy; or the charm and vitality of Con.

Deb did not care about Hedda. Deb was becoming desperate with boredom

... her condition made boredom not lethargic but a restless agony; the

poisoning game had lost any power to relieve those long family dinners,

and appeared merely futile; the Phillipses were growing ever fonder

and more fond of her. She felt her ego to be a tiny object lost inside

an enormous parcel, to which everybody had wrapped round yet another

layer, till the Phillipses had put on the final brown paper and string.

And Samson abandoned the title of Una, and proudly took to calling her

“little Mother.”...

This was an inadequate excuse for her visit to Blair Stevenson’s rooms.

But.... “He might have waited at least another six months ... till

December. But I _know_ they are all going to be facetious about that

baby!”

Her boredom was solely of the mind. Physically, she was feeling

brilliantly well, abnormally vital. Her vitality was not allowed to be

idle.... Samson, like so many rigid Puritans, was also a sensualist.

And Deb, tired of the game itself reiterated, longed once more for the

demi-game which was so much a play of the mind ... a play of two minds;

entraining imagination and nimble fantasy and fear and danger ... all

the fine shades. Promiscuous adventure had become with her too much a

habit to break off with one wrench. The first thought of Blair was an

inevitable reaction from “being good.” Inevitably, also, she englamoured

her final experience before Samson acquired her as his legal possession,

and forgot that Blair had not given great satisfaction, either, in the

matter of ... well, ecstasy. Remembered only that he was her kindred in

mind; that he had the light twist of humour she so missed; the faculty

to play; and to play up ... sometimes a visionist, sometimes a kindly

cynic, always the man of deep and great experience ... she was never dull

with Blair. And if the missing thrill had been her fault, not his, then

perhaps now she was married, things would be different....

Anyway, she was only going to look at his rooms, from the outside ...

because he was still away, still in America. She was only going to steal

from her cosy dug-out back again to No Man’s Land, so that at dinner

with the Phillipses to-morrow, she might console herself deliciously by

the thought that she was a secret rebel to that irksome old Phillips’

Illusion. Certainly Blair was still away, or—or Antonia would have

mentioned it (would Antonia?). So the expedition on to forbidden

territory had the merit of being also perfectly safe.

And yet she might not have gone ... had not general conditions grouped

themselves in a way so absurdly conventional that she could not refuse

to attend to her obvious stage directions. For duty obliged Samson to

stay away for a night; and this fact he paraded with so much pomp and

formality and vexation, made such vigilant arrangements for the disposal

of his little wife’s loneliness, and reassured her so often as to his

certain return the following night, that the comedy of the deceived

husband suggested itself automatically—to anyone whose brain worked

like Deb’s. And then Abe rang up from a call-office to say that Martha

(whom Samson’s care had ensured as a companion for Deb that night) had

a bilious attack, and did not want to go out, and would Deb come to her

instead, or should they let Florence know to go round? Deb herself, being

at that moment in the bath, did not answer the telephone, but received

the information from a breathless housemaid, who thought the telephone “a

nasty thing,” liable at any moment to explode, so that she never listened

long enough to receive and deliver a message as it was given. Deb did

not bother to turn off the taps, but called back carelessly through the

rush and splutter, that she’d expect Florence and would run round to see

how Martha fared in the morning. She repeated this twice; and turning

off the water a moment later, heard afar off the voice of the housemaid

explaining that Mrs Samson Phillips would go round to Mrs Abe Phillips,

and expect to see Mrs Herbert Phillips in the morning....

“Muddler!” reflected Deb. And then she smiled ... all the banal

mechanism was so absurdly in her favour—husband away—a muddle on the

telephone—suppose she assumed that her bath-water had run on a minute or

two longer, swamping all sound, then she would apparently be justified

in her late appearance at Martha’s by an after explanation that she had

remained at home waiting for Flo, according to arrangement. It seemed a

pity to waste all this most excellent clockwork on an appointment with

last year’s shadows in Jermyn Street. But still, even Blair’s wraith

might be more amusing than a surfeit of Abe or Flo.... Deb never bothered

to resist the guidance of external circumstances....

Straight to Jermyn Street ... the servants would believe she had gone

round to Martha.... Then an hour later she would appear at Martha’s,

saying reproachfully that she had been waiting all the time for Flo....

Nobody would bother to verify the discrepancy in time; the loss of an

hour....

So—straight to Jermyn Street ... just for the fun of it! Just for the fun

of huddling herself in a disguising cloak, and once again creeping with

awed feet along that silent, mysterious avenue where “men of the world”

abode ... for the fun of gazing wistfully up at the imperturbable stone

frontage behind which playtime lay forgotten ... for the fun of being

once more in mischief, dreading discovery, thrilling at her own daring

... for the fun of flouting the Phillips’ Illusion!

“He _is_ still in America,” for his windows showed sombre. But she

remembered that in these days of air-raids, the erring woman, creeping

back to her past, could no longer expect to see the welcoming gleam from

her lover’s lamp—or candle—or electric light.... It was still possible

that Blair was at home....

But of course he was in America!

Crouching against the pillar at the foot of the steps, it struck her

how in picture she resembled her private and particular horror as she

had once described it to Gillian—the wanton always and inevitably

“left,” outcast in the rain and the cold, while inside husband and wife

contentedly read aloud the Faerie Queene....

“I only need the baby under my shawl....”

And suddenly she flushed crimson, there to herself in the dusk; and in

secret shame sprang quickly to her feet, “I’m going home—to Flo, I mean—”

And banality, stage-manager till the end, at that moment smartly brought

up Blair Stevenson to the foot of the steps; and suggested he should

switch on his torch to aid his search for the keyhole—the flare of light

swept across Deb’s face.

II