Deb arrived at Martha’s, wondering if anyone so virtuous as herself had

ever inhabited Hampstead or the universe. The scene with Blair had been

a most astonishing one. Not only did he subtly convey to her his refusal

to meet her on the old terms of play, but he rather more directly than

usual put to her the choice of being extremely good or—or extremely bad.

Blair—who of all men had seemed to acquiesce in the demi-game for the

demi-maid! Blair, who was practically the inventor of fine shades....

“Quite so, my dear—but now—” he lightly touched the wedding ring on her

finger.

“Does _that_ make a difference?”

_The slice from the cut loaf_....

Almost crude, from Blair!

“Don’t look so taken aback, child.... Deb, what did you expect? Come,

let’s talk it out, you and I.”

So they sat on the narrow stone balcony jutting over the street—and

side by side, without a touch between them, had talked ... about touch,

and about play, and marriage, and good old times, and loaves, and the

demi-game, and the point of view of the man....

“You can’t go all the way, and then half way back, Deb. Nor will you find

a partner to step that dance with you. Our old instinctive obeisance

before the maiden doesn’t hold good before the wife, so why should I—or

any man—be content with half?”

“I thought you had enjoyed it ...” whispered Deb.

“You were always ... quite charming, dear. But—put it like this:

supposing there had been no one else for me, during our friendship, do

you think then, that our friendship as it was would have been enough?”

“For me!”

“For me?”

“Then there was—someone all the time?”

“Indeed there was ...” his smile entered her into his confidence.

“I don’t mind ...” said Deb uncertainly.

“Of course you don’t. But—now, there’s no reason, is there, why you

shouldn’t be that somebody yourself?”

She shook a doubtful head.

“I love your mop of hair, Deb—I’m glad you cut it.”

“I wanted to look like a boy—”

“You look the most girlish creature that ever plagued a man with

promises.”

She interrupted with a quick: “I never promised anything.”

“Not with your mouth, Deb. Not with speech, rather.... How am I now to

wind the thick black tresses round your throat, Deborah?”

“You’ll have to abandon that pretty old-world pastime—” flippantly. “Or

take the bell-rope.”

“Will I have to abandon pastime altogether?”

“It’s for you to say.”

“For you to choose—all or nothing ... dearest.”

She said petulantly: “I didn’t come here for these ponderous

life-or-death choosings—I came for ... for Japanese lanterns dancing in

the tree-tops.”

“That sort of thing. Yes—

‘A tinkering with the lute of love

By a nervous hand in a padded glove.’”

He broke off, shrugged his shoulders, gesture which conveyed without

insult: “Ça ennui, à la fin....”

Then still without touching her: “Well—is it to be the faithful wife?”

“I think so,” said Deb, and added politely: “But thank you very much

indeed for having been so kind to me in the past.”

“—Or may I have the privilege of loving you as much as I have never dared

to love you?” he continued, unheeding her reply.

Deb slowly turned her head to look at him. A very wan moon shivering

through the darkness, helped her scrutiny.... She laughed softly: “You

don’t love me one bit, Blair. Nor are you likely to.”

“If I told you how much,” murmured the diplomat, “I should influence your

choice unfairly.”

“That’s exactly what Samson said when he wouldn’t take my hand before

proposing to me. Oh dear—I suppose it will have to be Samson—and

everlasting virtue—and dinner with my mother-in-law to-morrow. There is

no choice, Blair—as things are ...” and she sighed, thinking of December.

“If it weren’t for family claims, I might ask you to be godfather,

Blair....”

“I see.”

Abruptly he stood up.

“If you don’t intend to burn your boats—then it’s too late and too dark

for you to be sitting alone with me here. Run home, little mother—silly

child, you need a lot of looking after, don’t you?”

He thrust such whimsical tenderness into the inflexion “silly child” that

she forgave him “little mother,” as she would never forgive Samson. But

she wished she had been the first to think of going home....

“We part good friends, Deb?”

And she, demurely: “My At Home day is on second Sundays.”

And they laughed into each other’s eyes—excellent friends.

III

So perhaps for the first time in her life, Deb had definitely underlined

a previous decision, instead of cancelling it. In marrying Samson, she

was “being good”; in her refusal to lapse from fidelity, she was still

“being good”.... Incredible! Her pleased and proud astonishment had

hardly subsided, when her husband returned late the following afternoon.

“I rang up last night, trunk call, just to see if the little woman was

all right without me,” he remarked fondly, over the fish; “it was about

nine o’clock, but the line must have been out of order—I couldn’t get a

reply.”

“I daresay the line was all right, but cook was out, and I simply can’t

get Annie to realise that the ’phone isn’t a wild beast. She was probably

cowering under the kitchen table, while it rang.”

“But you would have answered it if it had rung?”

“No—I was at Marty’s.”

“Not at nine o’clock. I dropped in just now to see Abe on business, and

he said you didn’t turn up till twenty-five minutes past ten, because of

some mistake in a message. If you were at home and didn’t hear the ’phone

bell yourself, you shouldn’t be so quick to blame Annie. I believe in

being _just_ with servants, Deb. Or—weren’t you at home?”

She lost her bearings. “Oh ... I don’t know....”

The phrase irritated him—reminded him of a previous occasion when she had

used it ... a dialogue on their wedding night.... If Deb were altogether

to be trusted ... he was not the man to ask questions when once he

trusted his wife. But Deb—Deb had not been like other girls. So Deb was

not like other wives. And now, the minute he left her—

Stale type of suspicious husband, Samson glowered, pulled his moustache,

meditated, decided to pass over the incident, changed his mind—and broke

out:

“Look here, Deborah—I’m sick of all this shifting about. It all goes back

further than last night. I’m going to get to the bottom of the matter.

You’ve got to give me a plain answer to a plain question. Why did you

tell me a year before I married you, that you weren’t a good girl?”

Beat back through all that undergrowth? back and back—tangled motive,

and reaction, and example, the example of Jenny Carew, once—but that

was all over ... a word read at a critical moment ... moods, and the

love of whirlwind disguises ... mischief—boredom.... Yes, yes, further

back still ... influence, of course—the influence of Cliffe Kennedy, of

Gillian.... Well, but that was recent—and behind that? The undergrowth

thicker, thickening ... her innate recoil from stinginess; the girl

who will not give.... To and fro her mind rushed and stumbled with a

snapping of twigs in the undergrowth ... trying, obediently trying, to

find out _why_ had she told that silly senseless lie ... the Phillips

family—fear of being sucked into respectability—fear of the fate of the

wanton—fear of wasting, of not being wanted.... Aunt Stella.... And

the scene with Ferdie.... If they did not believe her good, she would

at least be bad.... That look in Blair’s eyes when he thought—no, that

was afterwards.... Women, everywhere women ... and chastity which was

endless vigil.... Richard crying with his head in her lap.... So she

married Samson, yes, and meant to be decent to him—if she could not be

bad, she would as least be good—good—good.... So she married Samson, now

confronting her in the attitude of fanatic orthodoxy, waiting to “get

to the bottom of it”—of what? Of all her life, and the lives stretching

behind her, and the Cosmos that had shaped her—the entire matted web of

cause and effect? All this? How could she hope to drag his understanding

in her wake? His understanding that was such a thoroughly awkward

shape—unpliable, granite-hewn, rigid corners and lumps, bits of lichen in

all the crannies.... Why, she could not even push through the labyrinth

herself, with all her squirrel facility....

“Give me plain answer—”

_Plain_ answer? And suddenly Deb realised the impossibility of even

trying; she was too weary; weary of muddle, weary of herself. There was

no plain answer to anything—in her language; no answer that was not

plain—in Samson’s. So again she just said, replying to his question:

“I—don’t—know.”

“But you must know.”

“I mean—you wouldn’t understand, even if I told you.”

“There ought not to be anything to tell. A good wife has nothing to tell

her husband....”

Deb laughed ironically—“Well, and I’ve nothing to tell you, so it’s all

right.”

“And we had such a jolly talk—and laughed—and sat side by side—and no

harm at all,” she whispered to her memory of the half-hour on the balcony

with Blair. “And I meant to be so nice to Samson ever afterwards.”...

But how would Samson interpret a confession that she had not heard him

telephoning, because she was at that moment visiting Blair Stevenson?

It would be rather fun to hear him thunder the inevitable accusations.

And yet—and yet—Deb was conscious that she had rather outgrown this

sort of cheap fun—outgrown masquerade—outgrown rebellion. She wanted

her child, Samson’s child, to be born in this harbourage of comfort and

tenderness and soft wrappings and people to make things easy—yes, even

the Phillips family. After all, it would be a Phillips’ infant; and they

were kind—always kind. She could not face the shawl-and-cold-stone-step

business, with a baby to be born in December. Deb looked at Samson,

her eyes very dark and grave.... Should she propitiate him? If this

time—then for always. Can you do it, Deb? Kick away indecision and

folly and petulance, little passions and the big passion?... “Suppose

I went to Blair altogether, as he has asked me to come?”... And for

the kiddie—what? No Man’s Land again, a thousand times worse than her

own experience of the between-region; the outer edge of things; no

established identity.... What was the old game they used to play at

Daisybanks? She and Richard and the Rothenburg children?—Touch Wood ...

Touch Wood ... and (triumphantly) “_Home!_”... But oh, the awful dogged

exhaustion of being chased without a blessed knowledge of “_home_” to be

gained at a dash.

Deb made up her mind.

Then she crossed the room to her husband, and put both her arms round

his neck—he was looking more than ever like Oliver Cromwell, with his

features set into those harsh lines—and propitiated him. Whispered futile

childish explanations of her conduct the night before ... dawdling about

in her room till late—_knew_ she was naughty to dawdle—didn’t care!—heard

the ’phone bell and was too lazy to go down to answer it.... “Didn’t know

it was you, Samson ... please! Thought it was Marty being cross at the

other end ’cos I was keeping them all waiting.... Sorry! very sorry....

Oh, do pull out those furrows on each side of your mouth—one could grow

potatoes in them.... Samson, don’t you believe me?” Head snuggling and

rubbing his cheek——

It was so much less bother this way—the way of least resistance. And

anyhow, she had started all wrong, years ago, from the very beginning.

Let others beat out the pioneer track—hers to make “home” for the little

daughter. “Touch Wood,” “Touch Wood”—and already Samson was smiling at

her, fondling her ear.... He did not quite believe her; he would recur to

his suspicions later on; but for the moment Deb’s sweet ways had placated

him. He thought: “She is growing ever so much more tractable, with

happiness....”

CHAPTER III

I

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” David Redbury explained jubilantly to La

llorraine; “the Jewish regiment sails to-morrow, and I’ve dragged this

fellow out to see me through my farewell visits,” indicating Richard, who

leant in the doorway of the drawing-room with “buck-up-and-get-it-over”

expressed in every reluctant line of his figure.

“He’s steadier than I am, you know, and one is liable to make such wild

strange promises on these occasions. Supposing, for instance, Madame,

that I were to send for you the minute the war is over, and I pitch my

tent by the shores of Jordan ... would you come?”

“I say to you, my dee-urr,” and the prima-donna, in an incongruously

correct sports-shirt, collar and tie, smiled whimsically over her owlish

spectacles at his gallantry; “I say to you vot I zay to zat ozzer little

fellow I see last night at the Tube corner—ah, he was a beauty, that

one, with the skin of a peach ... and he watch me a little, I, in my

black gown and my black hat, very tall, very _femme du monde_—you see

it? And he say to himself—‘It is for the first time I adventure—perhaps

one wiz experience?—I learn somsing—Better so. Vot should I with a

pretty flapper, and she so innocent and I so ignorant—Awful! A desperate

affair.’ So I watch him make _that_ reflection. And presently he move

closer sideways, and he make his little proposition.... And I put my two

hands on his shoulders, surprising him. And I say: ‘My boy—you are moch

too young—and I am moch too old ... is it not so?’”

Her deep, hearty laugh rang infectiously. Even Richard joined in, and

Manon, albeit not quite sure whether the mother of Mrs Dolph Carew ought

not to recoil with more dignity from these trifling incidentals of dusk

and Tube corners. As for David, he vowed she was adorable.

“Ah, but the Comtesse—there is one! Vonderful! You vait and see her?

Yes? She lonch with me to-day—her birthday.... I tell you, a great

affair. We all lunch together? And you, who lof that Continent of ours,

you shall eat——” She whispered to David, her arm encircling his khaki;

his thin face vivid with appreciative reminiscence, as she reeled off

the names of what Richard emphatically, but in silence, registered as

“foreign muck.”

The Comtesse arrived, and La llorraine, shedding all bourgeoise

preoccupation with the menu, welcomed her as an exiled ambassadress

welcomes exiled royalty.

The two ladies kissed a great many times, with rapid interchange of

cheeks, and uttering short staccato exclamations; and then held each

other a short way off for mutual and admiring survey.

The Comtesse was large, and wore a black picture hat on her crude

vermilion chevelure; a mustard-coloured coat and skirt, and a pink

ninon blouse crossed by a spray of limp cotton poppies that looked as

though they had passed their lives pressed close to a stiff shirt-front.

She exhausted so much space in her vicinity, magnetically as well as

materially, that her fellow-beings were wont to move some distance away

to avoid being absorbed by suction.

“My dee-urr,” said La llorraine solemnly. “Never—never—never haf I seen

you looking so well as in _that_ blouse....”

She introduced David and Richard with a great deal of ceremonial; and the

Comtesse put her hand to her heart and gasped that they both reminded her

of Antoine, _mon fils_. “That one, in particular,” indicating David, “is

his living image. I vow, he might be his brother.”

“I rejoice that is not the case, Madame, since it would deny the

possibility of any more gallant relationship between you and me.”

“_Mon Dieu—quel garçon!_” the Comtesse delightedly flicked him across the

cheek. And Richard marvelled at his friend’s fluent impudence. But this

was the atmosphere in which David revelled.

The company sat down to lunch, and La llorraine apologized with sad

dignity for her so humble apartment and for inadequacy of service.

Generously the Comtesse reassured her that where loyalty and ancient

friendship existed, the third footman might quite well be lacking. Then

reverting to the question of the blouse—

“I am broken-heart,” the Comtesse announced dramatically; “I can wear it

not. It is over—done—finish. Behold! I throw it away!”

“Tell me,” La llorraine spoke in deep sympathy, but restraining the

outflung hand from more positive operation in the direction of the ninon

blouse—“what is it, then, has happened?”

“It shows the camisole—you see—it show it everywhere. Elsewhere but in

this country what do I care? But my durrling, I have a lowndress”—and the

Comtesse dropped her voice to a curdling whisper—“a lowndress?—_No._ She

is a _vipère_....”

“Ha!” The other prima donna sprang to her feet, galvanized into

opposition melodrama by the word “laundress”—“You say lowndress?—Look

hee-urr!”—Oblivious of Manon, David, and Richard, she wrenched open her

blouse, as Cleopatra might have done to reveal the bite of the asp.

The Comtesse leant forward: “And look!” She was holding out her blouse

tautly from her bosom, leaving a gap, down which La llorraine peered....

“Ah-h-h ... yes, it is so ... they are in a conspiracy—I say it! ... they

destroy—they have no reverence for lace—for embroidery—for the terruly

artistic lingerie!—to zem it is all calico wiz—what is it the _jeune

fille_ wear in this England?—calico wiz _edging_—advertised ‘durable!’”

Scorn quivered to a climax, and slowly subdued; La llorraine and the

Comtesse sank back into their separate chairs, and looked about them,

gently smiling.

“This sauce is of an excellence,” said the Comtesse.

“Oh, my dee-urr,” La llorraine deprecated.

“My pauvre Antoine desires in his last letter to be remembered to you

and to Mademoiselle votre fille,” the Comtesse recollected, sinking into

melancholy over the message to Manon; Antoine, it might be gleaned by the

exchange of looks between the two elder ladies, cherished a hopeless but

entirely respectful passion for the erstwhile _ingénue_. He was nineteen,

decadent and penniless ... nevertheless, La llorraine had long regarded

him as a factor in her “plans” for the safe bestowal of her daughter into

matrimony; plans only relegated into hasty obscurity by Dolph’s sudden

accession to his uncle’s wealth.

“I have brought his letter.” His mother read aloud a few sentences that

breathed such fervent affection for herself, and such rapt adoration for

_la patrie_, that Richard turned crimson at the young Frenchman’s lack

of churlish restraint, and David, catching sight of his agony, chuckled

evilly.... “What’s the matter, Marcus?”

Manon subtly gave the mother of Antoine to understand that she would not

object at any opportunity that offered, to renew her acquaintance with

the young man, from a purely matronly standpoint ... “perhaps I may be of

use to him....”

The mother of Antoine, with equal subtlety, gave Manon to understand that

the young man realized he would find her more accessible—and of more use

to him—now than as a strictly chaperoned _ingénue_; and would therefore

pay his respects to her on his very first leave, if, of course, agreeable

to Monsieur Dolph Carew....

And La llorraine twinklingly sanctioned this appointment. Had not Manon

skilfully piloted herself into a marriage, at an early age? thereby

proving herself far more discreet and competent than any of these English

girls, sailing chartless through their late twenties. Manon could be

trusted to handle such agreeable little interludes in matrimony as

Antoine might provide. “It is only natural zat my child should now vant

_that_ good time,” reflected La llorraine, in exact reversal of the

argument of Ferdinand Marcus—but virtue before marriage, and a good time

after, was Continental fashion.

A small joint of veal appeared on the table. Veal was scarce at this

time, and the hostess received as no more than her due the anticipatory

smiles of the Comtesse. “But what success,” she murmured. The first slice

was carved ... and tragedy fell like a dark mantle upon the scene.

“It is almost raw,” exclaimed Manon, shaping prevalent conviction at last

into speech.

“I know it,” said her mother in a tone ominously quiet.

“But what matter!” cried the Comtesse hectically.

La llorraine stood looking down upon the pink flesh among the gravy.

She held the carvers in her hands, which suddenly she upraised in

denunciation towards the ceiling.

“_That woman!_ That char-r-r! I swear it—we part, she and I—but at once.

In this house she shall not eat again. Heart-breaking; unthinkable. I

have been good to her.... Ven her fourth durrty baby had ze pebbles—Bah,

one does not speak of these trifles! I ask her in return: Prepare me

this little loin of veal with care. Let it be just brown ... with

stuffing—so!—the stuffing I made with my own hands. My dee-urr, should I

be ashamed of it! I who thought to make you pleasure.... You who spoke

to me of how difficult to buy veal.... Ah! I remember—and I bring it home

zis morning, I smile, I am a little triumphant—why not? it is after all

an occasion, that you come to eat here in my poor apartments—I desire to

do you honour—And _that woman_—she spoil it all. She shall fly. Raw meat!

My dee-urr, it is an insult to you, my guest....”

The Comtesse strove to calm her, to rally her from ferocious gloom.

“Durr-ling, see—eet is not so bad. I eat some ... wiz pleasure. True that

I cannot bear the meat underdone, I shudder at it—but your thought of me

was everything. It brings the tears. See, I eat some more of it.... We

haf had to put up with moch, by this c-r-ruel war. Sit down then, chère

llorraine, and to-day in a week you shall déjeuner with me in my little

flat—my chef, Ludovici, shall be specially instructed—he fails me never,

Ludovici—so devoted is he. _Chérie_, you should keep men, rather than

these char-rr-women. I say it to you. It is shame to spoil good veal....

But,” after a pause, and with forced sprightly enthusiasm, “how excellent

are the potatoes!”

“It is from your noble heart that you speak,” cried La llorraine. And

embraced her friend.

II

“Aren’t they luscious?” David chuckled, as he and Richard walked down

Edgware Road.

“’Um. You like these rum people, don’t you? It struck me the two old

women kicked up a lot of silly fuss about the veal, that’s all.”

“And what sort of people does your Unappreciative Highness consider an

improvement on La llorraine and the Comtesse?”

“The sensible sort—like the Dunnes. I’m going to stay with ’em next week.

Grev’s home, training for the R.N.A.S. And young Frank’s just out of

Osborne.”

“Here—get on this Oxford Circus bus—I want to buy presents for everybody

this afternoon, to love me by when I’m gone. You can help me choose—you

have such taste and originality, dear Richard!”

“Feeling lively, aren’t you?” grunted Richard, as they climbed to the

top of the bus. A shower of rain had washed the two rows of seats empty

for them.

“So would you be, if you’d got rid of a nightmare like mine....”

“’M yes—I know something about getting rid of nightmares.” This was the

black September of his eighteenth birthday, but Deb had saved him.... At

any moment now, he might expect to hear from Samson that he was exempt

from internment, and eligible to enlist. So Richard was in high spirits

as well, though they did not leap and exult and fling themselves about

and glitter into speech as uncontrollably as did David’s. David was in

quicksilver mood on the eve of his embarkation for Palestine.

“Just not to be ordered to kill Jews. Men with faces like mine, and

exquisitely humorous noses like mine.... I used to lie awake and think of

it ... the rush into the opposite trench, and my rifle in the stomach of

another Jew, tugging at it to get it out—get it out ... while he looked

at me—with my own eyes.... Well, thank God, I shall be spared that, at

least!”

“I don’t suppose they’d have massed all the German Jews there are, in the

bit of trench opposite yours,” Richard argued.

“One would have been enough, thanks,” grimly. “I wouldn’t have minded

laying in among those swaggering Prussian crop-heads who have always

shoved the Jews off the pavement ... but it does make a difference in war

_whom_ one fights.”

“Don’t see it.”

David laughed: “I might have known that even Richard the Second has his

limitations!” and indeed Richard’s later-born understanding of things

below the surface had thickened somewhat again during his past year of

reprieve.

The Conductor came round; and David said, “I’ll stand the ice-cream if

you’ll stand the fares.”

“Right. Lend me some coppers then, till I change a quid.”

David had only half-a-crown, and the conductor handed Richard back two

and fourpence. David eyed the coins mournfully.... “And _’e_ didn’t

pay for ze tr-ram fares,” he sang, in imitation of a music-hall Hebrew

comedian. “I foresee much trouble hereafter over these reckonings. Look!”

with a sudden wild lurch to starboard—“No—not there, you ass! Chalked on

the pavement!”

“‘British troops across the Jordan’—that’s good going!”

“And he says ‘that’s good going!’ He says it stolidly, as though it

were British troops across the Regent’s Canal—Man, man, where’s your

imagination? The names—the ancient names—don’t they fire you at all?

Jerusalem! Beersheba! Gaza! Mount Sinai! The Red Sea!... Why they’re

our history—_ours_. They call like trumpets. And to think I shall be

out there among it all in a few weeks. Dealing blows for my own land!

Richard, it—it drives me crazy....”

David’s eyes were a blaze of bright brown; his mouth trembled—“Doesn’t

it excite you that the Jews are going to win back the Holy Land for the

Jews?—it _must_ excite you,” he pleaded.

“I didn’t know you were a Zionist.”

“I am—and this war ought to have made you a Zionist as well.—Come along,

we get off at this corner.—Hasn’t it proved incontestably that you’ve

got to have some place to be patriotic about, if you’re to be patriotic

at all? The English have had one spasm of illumination by which they saw

that; and so the Jewish regiment was formed, and so they’re going to give

us back Palestine, after the war.... Israel for the Israelites—and our

gratitude to England....” David leapt on to the pavement, walked along

for a few moments in silence, and then said in his most matter-of-fact

voice—“They shall learn that the Jew can give his pound of flesh as well

as claim it.”

“They want to get rid of you—and that’s the whole spasm,” Richard chaffed

the enthusiastic young Zionist—“Fed up with the Chosen Race—too clever by

half.”

But David was in too radiant a humour to be baited. He merely declaimed

in answer to the taunt:

“A Prince without a sword,

A Ruler without a Throne;

Israel follows her quest.

In every land a guest,

Of many lands a lord,

In no land King is he.

But the fifth Great River keeps

The secret of her deeps

For Israel alone,

As it was ordered to be....”

“Not a gleam of response? Not one?” staring at his companion’s impassive

features. “That’s Kipling, you know. You ought to be chockful of

him—Shall we have ice-cream sodas at Fuller’s now, or shop first?”

“Fuller’s now,” briefly emphatic. And they marched in.

“Yes, Kipling ought to be the god of your budding manliness: burly and

brutal and blustering, and hit-the-bloody-nail-on-its-blasted head ...

all that. I expect you’ve got ‘If’ pinned up over your washstand, haven’t

you?”

“Not keen. (Raspberry, please....) Some poetry’s not bad. I like Rupert

Brooke.”

“Not never you don’t? You _are_ a little bundle of surprises....

“Here am I, sweating, sick and hot,

And there the shadowed waters fresh

Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.

Temperamentvoll German Jews—

Drink beer around.”—

Yes, he’s a poet right enough. How he makes one feel all his ache for the

cool glimmer of an English stream—his loathing of fat bodies, and the

wheezy moist voices and the sun flashing on the curve of their beaks?”

“Can _you_ understand that bit? Good Lord, how funny! Should have

thought——”

“What?” David’s eyes, brimful of suppressed amusement, met Richard’s over

the rim of his glass.

“Should have thought it would have offended you. What the deuce are you

laughing at now, Redbury? I’m glad you don’t sail for Palestine every

to-morrow.... You’re all over the place; like Deb used to be before a

party. Here—no—” as the bill was laid beside them; “I want change for

a pound to pay you back for the ’bus. You can square with me over this

afterwards.”

The change was brought; eighteen shillings. Richard gave the waitress

fourpence in coppers.... “Come along.”

“That was _my_ fourpence,” said David. “You had no coppers in your

pocket. It was over from the half-crown I lent you on the ’bus to stand

me my fare. This is going to be a serious business in settling up,

Marcus. It ought to be attended to at once.”

“Quite simple; if I borrowed half-a-crown, as you say——”

“If? You did.”

“And I pay your penny fare as well as my own, then I owe you two and

fourpence——”

“No, you don’t. You owe me two and six. No, two and eight. My own

original half-crown and twopence for the fares.”

“Why should I pay you twopence for the fares—you’re not the bus

conductor? Two-and-four I owe you. I can’t give you the fourpence—I’ve

just given it away, and I’ve no more small change. Here’s two bob and I

owe you fourpence.”

“You’re _all_ wrong, my lad. Think you can teach a Jew? I’ll argue my

rights to the last halfpenny, if I have to take you along to Palestine to

do it.”

“Argue away,” grinned Richard.

“You were to pay the bus fares, and I the ice-cream sodas. That was the

bond. A confoundedly generous bond, considering you wolfed two, and

they’re eightpence now.”

“The quantity was not nominated in the bond. Go on.”

“If you pay the bus twopence, mine and yours, out of your _own_ money,

then it’s palpably unjust to deduct it from the half-crown I lent you,

and only pay me back two shillings and owe the fourpence. See that?”

“But you lent it to me to pay with.” Richard did mistily perceive the

point David was belabouring, but could not bother to focus it sharply.

“Only till you got some change of your own. You’ve got it now.”

“Well, but ... then _you_ owe _me_ for the ice-cream sodas, they were to

be your affair.”

“Granted. Two shillings, and subtract the twopence and the half-crown and

fourpence for the waitress that you owe me—leaves——”

“Hi—hold on! We halve the waitress. Might as well do things properly now

we’re at it.”

“Twopence for your share of the waitress; add that to _my_ fourpence you

gave her....”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“That makes sixpence. We didn’t give her sixpence. You’re trying to

swindle me, Redbury, because my wits are slower than yours....”

“When are the wits of the Gentile not slower than ours?” laughed David.

“The Gentile must pay.”

“Don’t forget that this is only half a Gentile. Where were we? Let’s

begin all over again. You owe me two and twopence for ice-cream sodas and

a bit of waitress: that clear?”

“Hang on to it. Then you owe me half-a-crown, and twopence for fares, and

twopence for a bit of waitress, and fourpence more.”

“It’s that fourpence always cropping up. I don’t see where it comes from.”

“You took it from my half-crown to pay the waitress.”

Richard looked so worried that David burst out laughing.

“‘Shylock, shall we have moneys?’ Come on, don’t give in; this is rather

sport.”

“Sport!... Look here, let’s leave it all where it is, we’re neither of us

much out of pocket.”

“Leave it all where it is!” scornfully. “Small wonder the Hebrew wearieth

of the slack and foolish stranger, and desires greatly a nation of his

own kith and blood.”

“You’ll get jolly well fed up with your own kith and blood, when you

can’t cheat ’em like the slack and foolish stranger.”

“We’ll have to import a few of you for the express purpose.”

It struck Richard that though David in this wrangle was calling attention

to his own racial characteristic only to buffoon it, yet there was a

sub-stratum of seriousness too, in his laughing persistence.

“I suggest,” said David, “that as we are sadly incapable of adjusting the

matter in our head—after eight years’ public school instruction in higher

mathematics—that we reconstruct as we go along, passing the money to and

fro till we get it right. Now ... we’re on the bus again. You pay!”

“Lend me half-a-crown,” said Richard obediently.

“Give me back my half-crown to lend you, then.”

“_That_ didn’t come in, on the ’bus.”

“It’s coming in now!” David made a grab for Richard’s pocket and

extracted the coin. “There you are,” giving it to him; while Piccadilly

looked on astonished, at the two youths absorbedly passing money to

and fro as they strolled along the pavement. “Now you give it back to

me unbroken and twopence for the fares ... that’s right, isn’t it? You

_agreed_ to pay the fares. And then we settle up my little debt.”

Slowly Richard passed back the half-crown; and two coppers.... Thought

hard for a moment—then, with a yell, pounced on his companion, wrenched

his fingers open, and extracted the pence....

“Got it!” he gasped. “So _that’s_ where you were cheating me, was it?

Well, I’m damned! I pay for your fares, yes, but I don’t pay them _to_

you, no. Or I’d be paying ’em twice over. _Got_ you, David Redbury!”

“Trustful little lad, aren’t you?” David mocked him delightedly. “How

long did it take your homely wits? Twenty minutes. And we’re miles past

the shop I wanted. Here’s the two and twopence I owe you. ‘La commedia è

finita!’” he sang lustily in his beautiful tenor.

“Shut up! Don’t you see the sandwichmen are shying.”

“I’ve got to get farewell presents for everybody, you included,

Marcus. What would you like? An Old Testament to revive your slothful

patriotism for the tribes of Israel?—Burst of gratitude! In here,

then.” He dragged Richard into Hatchard’s; bought the Old Testament,

and forthwith presented it to him; chose also a richly-embossed W.B.

Yeats for Nell; and was with difficulty dissuaded from a selection of

Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great” as a tactful gift for his father. Then,

in a different shop, he bought a rich piece of Chinese embroidery to form

a window curtain for one of Beatrice’s rooms, and a scarf for Hedda.

Richard was amazed at his certainty of choice among the vivid colours

and luxurious sheeny textures; as well as his delight in them. His

personality was as surely at home among the rich Oriental fabrics, as

were Richard and the vendor obviously incidental.

“‘Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like unto these,’” murmured

David, as the shopman departed with the bill and a five-pound note.

“Ever heard the story of the kid in a Jewish school? They read him that

chapter, and then asked him: ‘What did Solomon say when the Queen of

Sheba tumbled down her treasures before him?’ ‘Pleath, teacher’—he thed:

‘Vot do you vant for de lot?’”

No one could tell a Jewish story with such perfect inflexion and gesture

and look, as David; and Richard’s appreciation echoed through the

department.

“Do you think I might offer the Comtesse a little tribute in vermilion,

to match her hair? She had glorious hair, that woman. In two long plaits

and a pitcher balanced on her head.... I shall probably send for her

when I’m established out there—the time will come when I shall long for

the relief of a snub profile to gaze at, as Rupert Brooke longed for

Grantchester. She shall be a wife to me——”

“A wife?”

“_The_ wife shall be Rachel, and her hair will be dusky, not vermilion;

and her throat golden-brown. And she shall walk on the gold-brown sand

so that the pitcher of water be not spilt of a single drop. You know,

Richard, most of our lady friends in Hampstead and Maida Vale and

Bayswater have grown waddlesome with generations of menials to attend

them, so that they’ll have to practise an awful lot with a sort of

wire-frame arrangement on their heads, before they can balance their

pitchers properly.”

“Don’t believe they’ll come at all. A lot of Zionists I’ve heard of are

in a blue funk that they’ll be grabbed against their will and carried

kicking aboard the Good Ship Jerusalem.”

“Set upon by a press-gang, and made to fag for us; for me, David, King of

Zion——”

“King, eh? You’re going it!”

“You shall come and be my Grand Vizier, O Richard.”

“That’s the Arabian Nights. Getting mixed, aren’t you?”

“The deadly habit of accuracy is notably confined to the unimaginative.”

Richard grunted.

“With you beside me is like taking a stroll with a portable farmyard.”

“You haven’t bought anything for your mother yet.”

“I must get some large-sized silver frames. I was photographed to

surprise her about a month ago—they’ve turned out rather well. Beastly

nuisance—but she fretted so, having none of Con. He never _would_ let

himself be taken.... So she shall have me in half a dozen different

positions, bless her, just in case—not that she’ll care about the whole

lot like the one rotten little snapshot of Con that she’s always poring

over ... but still....”

His exuberance was for a moment dulled.

“She’s having such a rotten time. The Guv’nor has put his foot down

over any more correspondence with Aunt Anna, this last year—just as

if it would affect nations if two sisters wrote their pathetic loving

little letters to tell each other of their sons killed and the hardship

of getting good servants nowadays.... But the black curtain is down

between Hampstead and Berlin now—and Mum’s wondering always what is

going on behind it.” He was silent a moment, then burst out indignantly,

“What harm can he possibly suppose it would do——” and left the sentence

unfinished. But Richard, under “he” was flashed a complete picture of

Otto, very bilious, very Jingo, in the art of disciplining Trudchen....

“People are queer nowadays ...” was all he found to say.

“Queer the other way round, too,” David said thoughtfully. “Would any

country in all the world but England ensure that her prisoners of war be

fed on the fat of the land, while her own people want? It’s a sort of

splendid crack-brained chivalry—The German fellows don’t understand it;

makes ’em laugh. It _is_ highly comic when you come to think of it....

‘For Allah created the English mad, the maddest of all mankind!’”

“It’s the old-established tradition of chivalry still upheld by

officialdom. I doubt if it’s in the blood of the people any more; they

grumble about it—call it treachery, not chivalry.”

“Those are only the people left over, not the fighters. One learns bad

habits if one is left over.... I’m glad we’re both for the thick of it

now, Richard.”

“Yes....”

“Is it all right for you? I mean, you’re sure——”

“Phillips promised. I haven’t heard yet....” But he was so sure that he

said quickly: “Of course I may be let down any moment, in fact, I suppose

I’ve no earthly chance——”

David smiled at the unconsciously Jewish trait revealed in the semi-Jew:

the instinct that is afraid to trust its own luck—aloud; instinct

that has learnt to fear the duration of good luck, and thinks to

propitiate Jehovah by an affectation of incredulity. David himself

had behaved in this fashion since his earliest babyhood. Victims of

persecution—was it persecution or justice now meted out to Richard and

his like?—children of No Man’s Land.... “Persecution is for _being_

something wrong; justice for _doing_ something wrong,” came to David

in a flash of insight. Nobody could help _being_—all down the ages ...

Jews—niggers,—slaves—Huguenots—early Christians—Saxon serfs....

“I’m going to take a taxi home; these parcels are too much for me. You go

quite a different way, don’t you?”

“Yes. G’bye.”

Richard turned quickly and walked away in the direction of Hyde Park

Corner. He was suddenly aware of David as a very complete element in

his life; and David was now withdrawn, perhaps for ever, in all his

lithe embodiments of radiance and melancholy, of profound thought and

mischievous ragging; David suffering in front of the camera because

he understood how his mother fretted for a likeness of Con; David

reeling out names off the map of Palestine in drunken ecstasy at their

associations; David savagely ironic over his father’s Jingo attitude;

David playing the fool over twopence in the middle of Piccadilly....

Richard wished he could have been called up at the same time as David,

and thus have slurred over the present acute sense of loneliness....

“I’m glad we’re both for the thick of it now, Richard”—and David would

understand why he had not lingered over leave-taking. David could be

relied upon to understand—always.

He found a letter from his brother-in-law, Samson Phillips, awaiting him

at Montagu Hall. It related briefly that Sir Ephraim Phillips had done

his utmost in the matter of exemption from internment in Richard’s case;

but in view of the fact that he was German-born, with father not at that

period naturalized, could do no more than procure the alternative that he

should be called up to serve in the Labour Battalion——

“No, by God!”

Richard crumpled up the sheet in his hands, and flung it violently

against the wall. The Labour Battalion! Soldiers who were not allowed to

carry weapons? Soldiers who were sent to the Front and not permitted to

fight? The compromise was ignominious.... And David had said: “I’m glad

we’re both for the thick of it, now, Richard....”

It was all right for David, wholly a Jew. “I’m not going to be half a

soldier,” muttered Richard. Rather internment than be tantalized by the

wear of khaki, maddened by audible gun-thunder. Rather internment than

that—and in a fortnight he would be eighteen.

CHAPTER IV

I

—“And would it be indelicate to ask,” said Gillian, “_why_ I’m suddenly

invited to take tea with you, on these lawns of sheer respectability? I’m

touched, Deb, really I am; I even left some jolly little fellows from the

trenches to look after themselves, while I toddled off here; and I bought

a new hat on the way—d’you like it?”

“It’s a monstrosity,” Deb replied frankly. “Take it off at once, somebody

might see you in it; that’s better. Why didn’t you bring your wounded

soldiers?”

Gillian looked puzzled, and Antonia explained laughing: “The jolly little

fellows from the trenches are not what you think, Deb; and I doubt if

your in-laws would approve of their presence here at tea—it’s enough for

a start, that you should be allowed to invite Gillian, without a cortège

of bacillian satellites. How was she finally admitted? I’m curious, too.”

“My husband met an eminent titled specialist, who happened to mention

that a pamphlet with a perfectly ghastly name, published last month

by one Gillian Sherwood, revealed one of the most brilliant pieces of

research of modern times; and that the whole medical and scientific world

were in a state of thrilled awe—that true, Gillian?”

“I believe so,” modestly. “But it’s nice of your husband to overlook my

little aside from virtue, Deb.”

“He didn’t exactly overlook it, you know. Samson doesn’t possess the art

of overlooking. He walked all round it, breathing hard, for nearly a

year; and then hung a label on it: ‘_Eccentricity of Genius_. Not to be

confounded with _Fallen Woman_. So please don’t spit!’”

“Ass!” chuckled Gillian.

“Lest you should grow proud, I may mention that Mrs Dolph Carew, likewise

invited to tea this afternoon, has been and gone, that she might not have

to meet you, Jill. I gather that she’s having a demure affair on the

Q.T. with a certain Count Antoine ... but some women flaunt their affairs

so shamelessly in the face of the world, that r-r-really, my dee-urr,

one can’t possibly be associated with them. One is shocked, sorry—so

ter-r-ribly sorry ... but the good Mrs Dolph Carew comes to tea early

with the good Mrs Samson Phillips—oh, but very early——”

“I’m _not_ having an ‘affaire,’” protested Gillian. “Does that little

careful beast Manon imagine that I’m a cheap French novel? Deb, Deb

_darling_, did you tell her that a multitude of hoary professors are

always to be found squatting at my feet?”

“Yes. ‘We are not impressed.’... Hoary professors aren’t _Society_, after

all.”

Antonia meditated: “We might put Cliffe on to the story of the French

Count——”

“Too busy with Winnie to understudy the God of Vengeance just at present.”

“_Winnie?_”

“_Cliffe?_”

Gillian nodded. “’M. Last night. Quaint, isn’t it? You know, she always

had a queer fascination for him ... she was so placid and plump—and he

so gaunt and impetuous ... he used to try and try and _try_ to rouse her

to some display of emotion, till he went gibbering mad with failure ...

and she just lay on the sofa. I used to watch them. So at last, in a

sort of frenzy, he proposed to marry her—and she really _was_ surprised.

Rather surprised, not awfully. She said: ‘Fancy. Did you ever. What

things you do say, Cliffe!’” Gillian mimicked the slow, fat speech of

Winifred with a fidelity that stirred both her companions to mirth ...

though Antonia was very white; and Deb’s lips were ruefully curved: If

Cliffe were at all inclined to marry ... “then why not me—at the time?”

half laughing, yet wondering a little how Winifred Potter had succeeded

with Cliffe where all the rest of them had failed, and separately summed

him up as sexless—dear old Cliffe—the Uncle type—a flying comet through

their lives.—“And he’s exuberantly, fantastically happy in his choice,”

Gillian added, innocent of sub-currents; “so am I and Theo—No—so _are_ I

and Theo.... That doesn’t sound right either, does it? Theo did all the

flirting he could with her, in about a couple of hours.... So far and no

further, you remember?—and then it bored him to have her always about the

home. And it made a lot of extra work for me—I’m not complaining—but

just mentioning it, now it’s over. Of course we couldn’t turn her out,

but we’re speeding up the nuptials with enthusiasm. And then we two

shall be alone together ...” softly. And no one, seeing her eyes and her

mouth, could have doubted the success of her pioneer experiment with the

audacious but unworthy Greek.

“Does Zoe know?”

“About Cliffe and Winnie? I don’t think so. I expected she’d be here this

afternoon.”

“No, she’s indispensable to the War Office on Monday afternoons—not a

couple of loafers like you—you’re lucky in your Major-General, Antonia,

he _always_ seems to be having bilious attacks!—I received a very

Zoe-esque letter, hinting at a fruitful episode in a cinema, where she

carelessly put her foot up on the seat in front of her and accidentally

left it there even when someone sat down, and it came back with a note

inside—the shoe, I mean—saying he was _follement éperdu_ of the pretty

ankle, and would the owner meet him, etc.”

“A typical Zoe adventure, French and all. ‘Men may come and men may go,’

but there will always be enough for our Zoe! even nowadays.”

“After all, she only needs as many as there are doors to her flat, and

one over. What is it, Antonia?”

Antonia said, “There’s young Nell—and she looks ... queer.”

II

Nell Redbury walked slowly across the lawn towards the tea-table under

the yellowing chestnut tree. Arrived there, she stood, mutely awaiting

interrogation; her gaze full on Gillian.... Nobody spoke; the three elder

girls felt as though nipped and held in the pincers of tragedy, and each

one was afraid....

“I’m going to have a baby,” said Nell at last, in the stupid voice of a

child repeating a lesson she has not quite understood. “The doctor said

so. Mums cried. And father said I was not to come home any more.”

“Is that all!” Gillian almost laughed in her relief. “Oh, you lucky

little devil—no, I don’t mean that—you’re only a kid still yourself, and

it’s rather rough luck, but still—Who and where’s the infant husband? I

suppose it’s Timothy?”

“Yes,” Nell answered gravely, but still standing a little aloof from the

tea-table. “But he’s not my husband. We—I—thought you would be pleased.”

“Because I did it myself?” Her goddess became suddenly stern.

“Yes.” And once more the refrain, “I thought you would be pleased. You

said ... you all said.... I’ve forgotten what you said,” with sudden

droop to weariness.

“Whatever I said and whatever I did, wasn’t for a baby like you,” Gillian

brutally informed her, in a double effort to vitalize the girl’s apathy

and to knock her own conscience insensible. “I may have said that where

marriage is impossible, it’s better to do the other thing than to brood

and mope ... but in your case marriage _is_ possible; possible and

natural and inevitable. Especially now.... There’s no earthly or heavenly

reason, young Nell, why you and Timothy should put yourselves to the

inconvenience of being not married, and you’re jolly well going to be

shoved through the ceremony the very first moment he can wangle leave and

come back.”

“Yes,” Nell acquiesced again. And, after a pause: “But he won’t come

back. It was in the paper to-day.... They’ve killed him.”

* * * * *

She still stood a little way off from the group at the tea-table, staring

with mournful enquiry at Gillian, who had broken down in a fit of wild

sobbing. Then, lest she had not been understood, she repeated: “The

doctor says I’m going to have a baby. And Mums cried. And father said——”

“You needn’t go home, my dear, my dear.... You’re coming to my home with

me. It’s all right—nothing to be frightened of—I’m going to look after

you ... yes, both of you——” It was Antonia who swept to Nell’s side by an

irresistible impulse, had gathered her strongly in her arms, and faced

round on the other two with a look that challenged while it scorched.

“You’re neither of you going to meddle any more where Nell is

concerned—haven’t you done enough harm? with your talk and your example

and rubbish?—No one’s business but your own what you do with your life,

is it, Gillian?—is it? I knew somebody would have to suffer—ancient

law—on those who break the laws—and you go scot free, and this poor

kiddie.... Oh, _damn_ your splendid freedom, and your new era, and your

mix-up and mess-up of everything that’s clear and right—time-tested.

Progress—is _this_ your statue of progress?” She pointed to Nell Redbury,

now crumpled forlornly against the older girl’s tense erect body....

“No use ranting at me, Antonia; I’m terribly responsible in this case,”

Gillian acknowledged. “And of course it’s my business, not yours, to take

Nell home and look after her——”

“With Theo about the place?”

Gillian was silent. And Deb interposed: “She’s better with Antonia, Jill.

_I_ can’t give her shelter, worse luck——” Samson, she knew, would show no

mercy in this crisis.

Gillian said softly, “If Theo can help....” She found it difficult

to put into words her conviction that Nell was only eighteen, and it

might be warmth to her frozen emotions to have it conveyed—even by Theo

Pandos—that men were still in the world and still desiring her ... a

wintry gleam of promise for the future.

But it was heartless to translate her meaning in front of Nell, whose

chubby serious young lover was only just dead.... And Antonia’s wrath

swept out again like a banner in the wind:

“Theo—_help_? isn’t he as promiscuous as the rest of you—as Deb, as

Cliffe ... with your love-making all over the place ... sex discussed

just for the fun of it.... Deb prattling about the waste of her young

limbs—we haven’t forgotten that talk, Nell and I.... Nell hasn’t

forgotten it to some purpose.... Let’s all live our own lives—let’s all

live somebody else’s.... Well, it’s been a merry puddle-party while it

lasted! Come on, Nell,” her voice sank to inexpressible tenderness.

Without a backward glance, she supported the quivering, clinging form of

the younger girl across the lawn and through the garden gate. “Taxi!”

they heard her clear call. And the responding grate of wheels against the

kerb.

Their departure was one little aspect of the war: woman perforce

dependent upon the manlier woman ... while out in France the fatal

shrapnel bullets ripped through the staggering ’planes....

III

“Deb,” Gillian lifted an appalled white face from burial in her palms;

“Deb, she’s right. Antonia’s right. I’m to blame for this little tragedy.”

“So am I. We all talked—and forgot that Nell listened and did not quite

understand.”

“I did more than talk ... with the result that Nell is to have the baby

I wanted and denied myself.... It seems that I couldn’t save that poor

little love-child from birth, after all! But surely I _must_ have had

the sense to say there should be above all a case and a reason before

girls chucked marriage to the winds.... What possible reason could those

children have had to play the fool?”

“The individual exception is beyond Nell. What you did was good—to her.

She took the example and grafted it promiscuously.”

“Antonia called us all fatally promiscuous ... but Antonia——” Gillian

hesitated. “Artemis on the turn,” she remarked presently. “Deb—there’s

a time when virginity inevitably becomes spinsterhood. It’s rather a

dangerous time.... Antonia has kept fiercely pure——”

“Out of a sort of protest to us....”

“Perhaps.”

“What a muddle we’re in, Jill, every one of us, since we’ve left the old

track——”

“We’re beating onwards into the open, no doubt of it. But the transition

period can’t be skipped, like a dull bit of history. There’s bound to be

a generation of martyrs between the old and the new. In whatever context

of development. Education—and sex—and religion—and nationality——” she

debated silently for a pause of time. “Yes—it fits in each case....”

Nationality.... Deb’s thoughts flew to her brother. She was anxious, not

having heard from him or seen him since Samson had written that letter

suggesting the compromise of the Labour Battalion, more than a fortnight

ago. And to-morrow was Richard’s eighteenth birthday....

“It will be all right for the next generation. Our lot are not sure

yet—stumble forwards and backwards in the twilight—let go of established

tradition before they’ve grasped at an equivalent to support them.

And some of us must be sacrificed down the wrong paths to prove them

wrong....”

“Not my child, anyway,” Deb cried with sudden vehemence. “_She_ shan’t be

a victim to neither-nor. One of us is enough.”

“You’ll bring her up in the old way?”

“As strictly as I can, right and wrong, good and bad ... signposts

wherever she may stop and wonder. I’m going to superintend her morals;

I’m going to say ‘don’t,’ and I’m going to ask questions, and forbid her

things. And be shocked whenever it’s necessary I should be shocked——”

“You little reactionary!”

“Yes ... I know. Don’t mistake me, Gillian—I believe it best to be

first thoughtful and then courageous—as you’ve been. But my daughter

Naomi—I’m quite sure it is to be a daughter—will be partly a Phillips;

handicapped from the start. Samson is at least a generation behind even

the transition period. He’s almost extinct. And he’ll be her father.”

“Meaning that if you marry the jailer of a prison, it saves trouble to

bring up the child as a convict?”

“If Naomi rebels, she’ll be up against it.... I want her to be happy. Oh,

I couldn’t bear to see her muddling and experimenting as I’ve muddled

and experimented; a failure as I’ve failed. She must learn to please the

Phillips family, and conform to Phillips’ standards. For her, there’s

only happiness in conformity.”

“And for you?”

“Yes—and for me. That’s partly racial, you know. The Jewish girl isn’t

meant to be a pioneer of freedom.”

“Nell——”

“Nell, I honestly do believe for your greater rest to-night, Gillian,

would have succumbed anyhow. She’s really deep down passionate—not only a

surface affair.... I say, isn’t it curious how we’ve always deplored the

waste of Charlotte Verity’s fanatical tolerance on Antonia who doesn’t

need it?—It fits in splendidly now for Nell. She’ll make a heroine of

Nell, and simply love having her there.”

“The pattern preconceived....” Gillian murmured. “Then was it also

decreed since the first evolution from chaos, O Deborah, that you should

fit into the Phillips’ scheme at last?”

“It seems like it,” not altogether ruefully. “When I tried to play the

old game, just once, just for fun, it politely informed me that it

had no further use for my services,” and on an impulse she confided in

Gillian her expedition to Jermyn Street, three months ago.

“Blair—behaved quite well,” was Gillian’s sole comment.

“Oh yes. Blair is a man of experience. There’s a mellowness about him—Had

it been a chivalrous hot-headed young knight to whom I had flown in

distressed rebellion, he would have urged me to abandon my home and

husband, and trust my future to him—and we’d have been unhappy ever

after.”

“Is Samson still suspicious?”

“Yes—up till the hour of going to press; on and off. But I can counter

it.”

“With what do you counter it?”

“Fascination,” admitted Deb simply.

Gillian laughed, but would not explain her laughter. From the tone in

which Deb had said, “I can counter it,” it was delightfully evident

that Samson was providing his wife with a new game, the game of

re-conquest.... “It keeps the child occupied and amused,” reflected

Gillian; “and of course she’ll coax down his suspicions in the end,

especially——”

“It’ll be all right in December,” she prophesied to Deb, who in her turn

gurgled mirthfully and refused to say why.

“‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady

Are sisters under their skins.’”

—you representing Judy in this instance, with the entire bulk of the

Phillips’ Illusion in the rôle of the Colonel’s lady.”

“Define the Phillips’ Illusion. It crops up in your conversation like

King Charles’ head.”

“The Illusion is that any girl would love Samson; that I love Samson;

that I am happy; that I am doing my best to make Samson happy; that we

are all happy together; that we are a united family. Amen. In the end the

Illusion will become fact. It will overpower me ... it’s already much

stronger than I am.”

“You’re by nature—adaptable, aren’t you, Deb?!”

“Horribly so ... yes, and that fits in, too, Jill, for if I’d been

very emphatically myself, all cornery and defiant, I’d have rebelled

and gone on rebelling and urged Naomi to rebel ... and we’d have been

uncomfortable for the rest of our lives. But for me as I am—the most

pliable, accommodating, imitative creature on earth—I do see, oh, ...

tolerable comfort and resignation ahead.”

“Intolerable discomfort and rebellion are better things for the soul,

Deb. They stimulate it.”

But Deb only said: “The Phillips’ Illusion is too much for me....”

CHAPTER V

I

All this year of hope and reprieve, Richard had just dimly realized the

continuation of Mr Gryce’s attacks; but they had slithered more or less

harmlessly off the conviction that in the September of 1917 would come

his own chance to prove to Englishmen whether or no he be an Englishman.

Now ... Mr Gryce had not improved with keeping; and Richard was again

exposed, without shield, to the old pestered agony of responsibility

... _he_ had committed atrocities; _he_ did not fight fairly; _he_ was

a German, the Germans.... No place for him during the war—no place

afterwards. Where was he born? Where reared? where legally belonging?

Where his sympathies?... All over the place—nowhere—anywhere. What

country wanted him? What country claimed him? For what country and in

what cause had he suffered during the Great War?—Jew, then, at least? Or

Socialist—Conscientious Objector?

But he had no convictions—doubting even his own stubborn loyalty of

schoolboyhood. He was no more a schoolboy. He was a man—a man with

nerves. His nerves gave Richard no rest.

He did not regret, in the week that followed Samson’s letter, his refusal

to serve in the Labour Battalion. Morally, he considered the evasion

despicable—for him; though a good enough solution for those who really

were indifferent for the fight, and impartial as to the issues. He did

not regret it; nevertheless, his loathing towards internment swelled

again to a morbid obsession. He positively could not bear the sound

or sight of the word. And then Mr Gryce began to flaunt a button with

“Intern them all” displayed thereon—Richard went down to stay with the

Dunnes for his last week of liberty. He remembered affectionately and

with a sense of far-off coolness and repose, that chintz sitting-room

in the cottage; its portrait of Commander Antony Dunne over the

mantelpiece; its atmosphere so casually, indubitably English; remembered

too how naturally in those Christmas holidays of 1914 he had fitted

himself into this room and what it stood for. Perhaps here was peace from

the demons plaguing him; reassurance, also, as to where in spirit he

belonged. If he were “all right” among the Dunnes, he was—all right.

The chintz sitting-room, speaking for the Dunnes, repudiated Richard

Marcus; bluff and careless Antony Dunne was definitely antagonistic

towards him—and Antony Dunne dominated his family still, from the

encircling oak frame. Richard had anticipated gratefully the room,

the pictures, the model of a man-of-war, the curios from the Pacific

Islands and Japan and the Malay; the albums with Greville and Frank in

their different stages of allegiance to naval tradition, the battered

boys’ books on the shelf, all yarning about the sea and sea-fights

and sea-heroes; the view of low-lying fields beyond the windows; he

had anticipated all these—and forgotten he was no longer careless

participant. The room informed him now very definitely that he was

an outsider; guilty in his birth-place; the room quietly but grimly

imposed its personality upon Richard, as symbolizing all from which he

was excluded. The Dunnes had lived in Essex, in Market Cottage, since

five generations; the Dunnes had always been naval stock—dedicated to

England’s sea-service long before any question of war; their patriotic

allegiance need not even be mentioned—could be taken absolutely for

granted; it stood—as this room stood. That the Dunnes should ever go

messing about the Continent and having their sons in the wrong places ...

the room was lazily scornful at the mere idea. The Dunnes were quite,

quite certain beforehand where they were to be born and where buried. One

of them had settled in another county, and one—Molly’s father—had married

a London girl; these were their utmost excursions abroad. And one Dunne

had learnt how to speak a foreign language, Spanish, fluently ... it was

a great joke among the other Dunnes. And when their profession took them

across wide seas and into strange ports and islands, these seas and ports

and islands became, at a touch, English ... or English to them, which was

the same thing. They were simply uninfluenced by what was not English;

just as the room absorbed no outlandish flavour from the scattered lumps

of stone and coral, weapons and embroideries. These were vivid and

interesting enough—but only vivid and interesting on sufferance; the real

thing was the chintz, the view, the album.

Richard grew to hate that room.

Next, he grew to hate Frank. Frank was a talkative lad of fourteen, who

had met Richard with the pony-trap on arrival at the station of the

nearest town; it was necessary, before driving out to Market Cottage,

four miles away, that Richard should call at the police-station, and

exhibit his papers and photograph and so forth; and answer the official’s

searching questions. Frank’s curiosity had insisted on accompanying

Richard inside, even to the lengths of bestowing pennies on an urchin to

hold the pony; he thought the whole proceedings “rum”; no previous guest

of the Dunnes had ever been subjected to all this fuss.... Frank asked

the object of the fuss a great many questions about registration—recurred

to it all through supper, in fact: “Five-mile limit—what does that mean?

That you can’t go any further from here without special permit? Good

Lord! Grev, did you hear that? Then you can’t come with us to the meet on

Thursday. What rot for you! don’t you hate it! I say, show the Mater your

photograph, won’t you?—the one you showed up at the Station. I suppose

they think you’re a spy! Do you have to exhibit your thumb-prints too?

Like a bally old convict, isn’t it?...”

Richard could not bring himself to be chatty or informative on the

subject of registration; and Frank, incensed by his surliness, came to

the conclusion that Richard was a spy, and as such ought to be tabooed

from intimacy, and watched.

The situation worried Greville, the more so as he could not quite

whole-heartedly champion Richard—“You see, Mater, he’s not a bit like he

used to be. I mean, he was quite a jolly old bean last time he was here,

wasn’t he? But now—he goes red as fire when Frank rags him about the

police and so on——”

“We must just tell Frank to leave off, if it makes Richard uncomfortable.

He’s our guest, after all.”

“Yes—but Mater—if—if——”

“What, dear?”

“If Richard felt as—as loyal—well, as other chaps, he’d laugh, wouldn’t

he, when Frank....” The handsome young naval sub-lieutenant was no

psychologist. “You don’t suppose there’s anything in it, do you, Mater?

I’d never have dreamt of such a thing if Richard hadn’t changed so from

when he was at Winborough. And Frank is always going on at this child for

chumming up with a German. I punch his head, of course, pretty often;

but _why_ does he shy like an old cart-horse when we talk about the war?

Richard, I mean?”

Mrs Dunne smiled: “I don’t think Richard is a spy in the German pay,

Grev, if that’s what is on your mind.”

“Oh, nor do I,” very quickly.

His mother waited; there were obviously more skeins of perplexity to be

unwound.

“One doesn’t have anything to do with a German,” Greville blurted out.

“But what’s one to do if he’s your pal beforehand?”

“I wonder....” Mrs Dunne thought it out, though hardly realizing that

this was the predicament of a great many of her fellow English.

Greville was not the type of boy who would ever of his own volition

commit any act that was in the least degree complex or eccentric.

Richard had been as normal and sturdy a disciple of take-it-for-granted

as himself, when they had first paired off as inseparables. So that the

shatterment of Richard’s normal world, of necessity involved a twitch

where it joined Greville’s.

“I think you owe something to old friendship, my boy.”

“Oh, this child isn’t going to be a perishing deserter, betcherlife....”

In proof of which, Greville summoned Richard for a long tramp through

the slowly russeting country. They swung along for the most part in

silence, as they had always been wont to do; but previously it was the

silence which signified “all’s well,” whereas now it was lumpish—a case

of nothing to say. For Greville’s natural disposition was for anecdotes

of the gunroom—joyous narrative of the day when they “bagged a Fritz,”

or technical details of his present training for the R.N.A.S.—his

companion’s set face and monosyllabic appreciation was discouraging on

such themes. Even had Greville realized that the other was sick with

envy, and not, as he thought, bored, it would hardly have rendered

matters more comfortable. Mutual memories of Winborough were safe enough,

and recurred in spasms, but Greville’s interest had been superseded

by fresher, more vital stuff; and Richard’s occasional starts on an

abstract subject were, curiously, addressed more to an absent David than

to Greville:—“Have you ever noticed how nearly all the popular songs they

sing have something in ’em about a long long way or long long trails?” he

remarked once, as a chorus from a khaki group in the distance floated to

them in wind-borne snatches. “A long, long road in Flanders or France,

straight and planted with poplars ... tired men dragging on and on with

a sense of endlessness like in a Nevinson picture—but it’s queer that it

should have worked its way into the very songs.”

Greville knew little of roads and cared less.

They were at the moment on the outskirts of a neighbouring town; a

road of detached houses, picturesque and gabled: each so fretfully and

laboriously different, and all so drearily alike. All of these bore their

names painted on the gates; and one was “Heimat.” Richard’s lower lip

twisted sardonically.... “Heimat”—home—after three years of war with

Germany! Who in their simplicity had dared leave such a name displayed?

A wistful group of exiles from the Vaterland, who still clung to their

own tongue, wore plaid, and basket plaits, and stupid socks, drank coffee

for breakfast, and sang in chorus round the piano after dinner?—No—they

would have called their house Omdurman or the Cedars or Kenilworth; was

it likely that a second Otto Redbury would have the temerity to dwell

behind a gate with “Heimat” painted boldly upon it—“In our position—”?

Heimat probably sheltered a serenely unconscious English family, who

accepted the rum name they found when they moved in, and pronounced it

wrong—and who could with safety have dwelt in a house called “Kaiser

Wilhelm” and still not meet with suspicion. Perhaps they had an ancient

German governess whom they tolerated and sheltered for pre-war sake,

and she guarded in her sentimental old rag-bag of a heart the secret

understanding of “Heimat,” and found comfort in it....

Greville, who had not noticed the house called Heimat, interrupted his

companion’s musings: “I say, did you hear old Rogers has had both his

legs shot away?”

“Bad luck! We beat Dumfield by an innings when he was captain.”

“Yes; he wasn’t a patch on Rothenburg, though. D’you remember Rothenburg?”

Yes—Richard remembered Con.

“German name, wasn’t it? What happened to him?”

“D.S.O. and killed at Vimy,” briefly. He wondered if Greville, like Mr

Gryce, was going to say “ought to have been interned”? Even the subject

of Winborough was perilous, might lead to ... the admission they all

sought to drag from his sensitive reluctance.

For this was the latest result of Richard’s nerves, that he imagined

a conspiracy on the part of the Dunne household to make him utter

aloud—scream aloud—the fact that he was a German. Therefore he set stern

watch upon his speech, though never doubting they would win their point

in the end.... “Morose beggar!” commented young Frank. “Molly’s coming

to-morrow—we’ll see if _she_ wakes him up a bit!”

“Frank, I don’t want you to tell Molly about Richard.”

“What—not that he’s a blooming——”

“No, dear.”

“Why, Mater? Strikes me Molly ought to be put on guard. She might want to

marry him. Nice old fizzle that ’ud be.”

Mrs Dunne seriously replied that he might trust her to be responsible for

the safeguarding of Molly (aged fifteen) from contraction of an alliance

with the enemy.

“Are you going in the R.F.C., Richard?” asked Molly, on her first morning.

They were in the orchard, and her mouth was stained a deep plum-purple.

“No.”

“You said last year—no, the year before that, wasn’t it?—that you weren’t

keen on anything except a commission in the Flying Corps. And I was going

to work the wings and ‘per ardua ad astra’ on a silk handkerchief for

you. Lucky I didn’t.”

“Plenty of chaps you could have given it to.”

Molly fastened strong pointed teeth into the downy blue of yet another

plum; and then asked: “Are you going into the R.E.?”

“No.”

“Gunner, then?”

“No.”

“What are you going to be when you join up?”

“I’m not joining up.”

“White feather!” she flashed at him. She had been inclined to regard

Richard as her especial property, whenever they had met at Market

Cottage. Though he had teased her a lot, he was always rather more gentle

in action where she was concerned, than Greville and Frank. So that she

was not prepared now, when in a fit of passion he seized her by the

shoulders and shook her—shook her—“You little beast——”

His fingers dug deep into her shoulders; she tried with a sudden jerk

to twist out of his grasp ... could not.... Then with quite a good

exhibition of resource, tore an over-ripe plum from a bough near at hand

and flung it in Richard’s face—“Hun!”

“That’s right,” he said coolly, releasing her. “Traitor if you like—spy

and coward,” and he grinned at her mute amazement. Suddenly, in a queer,

vicious sort of way he was enjoying the scene. “You’ve guessed it, Molly.

Only a Hun would grab a girl and shake her. I’d be happy dropping bombs

on babies, too; and shooting a half-drowned non-combatant in the water.

We’re all like that. And I’d be happy——” he stopped, and looked at the

girl; a shifting ray of sun through the leaves struck her across the

face; across the half-parted plum-stained lips; showed him the angry gold

freckling her big brown eyes. A tomboy in blue serge with rough chestnut

hair ... yes, but a promise of more than that ... for him.

He moved towards her—and quickly she plucked another dark mauve globule.

“Drop that.”

“Hun! Hun! Hun!” she taunted him.

“There are things one can’t help, Molly—and there are also too many

things you don’t even begin to understand, Molly—That’s why you’re no

good to me, just at present. One day, when I’ve time, I may bother to

make you understand. Or I may not. Meanwhile——” His arm sprang up against

the whizzing plum, averted it, dragged her into his arms and kissed her

roughly ... then more tenderly.... She was passive, recognizing with

wonder that this was suddenly not an uncouth bullying schoolboy, but a

man dogged and fierce and rather unwilling, who had captured her defiance

and stilled it.

But what rubbish! Richard! Why, he was only eighteen; younger than

Grev—and Grev was certainly not yet a man, though he had fought....

Richard had not even fought—the colour stung her brown skin into red, as

she recalled his contempt: “There are too many things you don’t even

begin to understand, Molly——”

“I don’t care! I don’t care!” she raged in a whisper.

“I don’t care either,” came the answer in that cool man-voice, which

reason could hardly yet accept as belonging to Richard; “but if I ever do

care, Molly, then I’ll damned well marry you, and you’ll have a Hun for a

husband whether you want it or not—so you’d better be more polite now....”

“I won’t—you shan’t—never—let me go, Richard!”

“Kiss me first, then. I like your kisses though I don’t like you.”

In a final twist for liberty, she slewed her head backwards ... and saw

his eyes, sad light eyes narrowed under their bending ridges—something

like a tumbler pigeon turned wildly over and over in her breast.... With

a gasp, she offered him her childish fruit-stained lips ... and darted

away between the orchard trees.

Richard pressed his two clenched fists against his forehead....

“What did I say to her?—looks as though I were going mad....” A portion

of himself seemed to slide coldly away from the rest—and then be jerked

again into its place ... it was a nasty sensation; and so was the shame

with which he submitted to the fact that he had no control whatever over

any juggling tricks his brain and body in goblin collaboration might

choose to play him.

A conviction, for instance, that a number of people in assembly held a

threat and a menace for him ... slow horror which the mind communicated

to the flesh—he could not keep still between walls and floor and ceiling,

with people crushing him round and stifling him, blocking his exit—with

people’s voices droning like wasps ... the heavy persistent circling

motion of wasps over food ... yes, he had to get away, if he was to

breathe, if he was to live ... his head, his eyes, his ears and neck,

his wrists and finger-tips and knees, each held their separate hammering

pulse—how could he sit quietly in a chair, at a table, with all these

fever-pulses dinning and throbbing in unequal measure, and that one great

pulse in his left side swinging dominion over the others—he must get into

the open, or die, there, before them all, before Greville’s bewilderment,

and Frank’s loud disdain, and Molly crying, “Hun! Hun! Hun!” ... he

preferred to die alone.

“I ought to go home——” but home was more meals in public, and Mr Gryce,

and traffic, and pavements a-swirl with people. Only a few days more

now—only to-morrow and the day after—only to-morrow—and horror itself

would be there, in place of horror anticipated. How would it be when he

needed to run—and ran up against barbed wire—and was turned back ...

enclosed and ringed by barbed wire? _Senseless_ barbed wire—had it been

enemy fencing, you might cut it, break through and into enemy trench,

bring a rifle smashing down on a fat pink head ... Prussian head ... pink

head ... mud and filth and the swarm of lice, and oozy, sticky blood,

and cold, wet cold.... This was France—war—his birthright—birthright of

everybody growing from 1914 into manhood. Oh, damn ... that hot swollen

feeling round his temples again—no, not inside—round the outside ... and

why did they try so hard to hypnotize him into declaring aloud that he

was a German? even Mrs Dunne, even Greville ... and Frank of course, with

Molly now his partner and confederate. They were all jolly and serene

and happy enough—couldn’t they leave him alone? They and the chintz

sitting-room and that—that stranger dining with them this Sunday after

church. Who was it? The local doctor? Dr Greyson? He had not brought his

wife ... apologized, said she had a cold; Richard knew—he did not care

to bring her into a house where a German was staying; she might have to

shake hands with him, and she had vowed not to shake hands with a German

again—so she had preferred to stay at home. The Dunnes had talked of

asking a Mr Rhodes and his son and daughter—very decent people, Richard

remembered them from last time ... and then the question of inviting them

had suddenly been abandoned, with a great show of tact on Mrs Dunne’s

part—“perhaps they would not care to come out so soon after poor Hal’s

death”—but again Richard suspected the confidential after-discussion

between Greville and his mother. “Better not, Mater, while Richard’s

here; he’s going to-morrow. But they’re the sort who’d _mind_....”

... Would Frank never stop eating pudding? apple suet pudding—two

helpings already, and now a third. Frank did it on purpose—fiendishly—he

knew Richard was mad to get up and out of the cramped cramping space....

“Coffee in the sitting-room, I think,” Mrs Dunne proposed at last; “such

a pity it’s raining, or we might have sat outside.”

They all moved together, glucose in conviviality, towards the room which

held the portrait of Commander Dunne. Greville, in his simple, eager way

was explaining some aviation technicality to Doctor Greyson, who listened

respectfully.

“These youngsters—they’re showing us all the way!” he smiled at Frank in

his blue and gold, at Molly wearing her Girl Guide uniform—his eye swept

over Richard blankly—he knew then? They had told him, or he must have

remarked on all that square muscularity clothed in mufti.... Voices like

persistent wasps ... the pursuing threat was in the room with him now

... it was always worst in here ... with the picture of Commander Antony

Dunne. What was the Doctor saying? something about the German prisoners

employed to work on a farm in the neighbourhood ... but that was part of

the plot, to goad him into his declaration—to lead the talk that way ...

part of the plot....

“They’re lazy swine, you know; won’t do a stroke of work when the

overseer’s back is turned——”

“Why should they?” demanded Richard.

The wasp-drone hushed now; faces all turned towards him, curious to

hear—the plot was working as anticipated.

Fool! why had he spoken? ... that cursed new trick of seeing things all

round and from the other side. But he went on, doggedly: “Do you suppose

that if I were an English prisoner in Germany that I’d do one more stroke

of work on their damned alien soil than would be forced out of me?”

Molly and Frank exchanged a quick look. And Greville frowned uneasily.

Then Dr Greyson said, with perfect courtesy: “It’s rather difficult, I

imagine, for anyone who is not entirely one of us to appreciate our point

of view. For you’re not quite English, are you, Mr Marcus?”

_He knew!_ ... he knew well enough—he only put the question to drag out

his answer—he should have it then!... Frank smiled meaningly at Molly....

Richard saw him—and the room, the little chintz sitting-room which was

all England, was glad, glad, glad at his impending humiliation.... Nerves

drawn tighter and tighter—then they twanged apart, burst strings—“You’re

not quite English, are you, Mr Marcus?”

“No,” Richard screamed suddenly, “I’m a German. And I hate the English—I

hate them——”

It was not true. As he rushed for the door, and down the passage and out

into the garden, all that was left sane in him denied the cry; he did

not hate the English—loved them—wanted to be like them—wanted to belong

to them—fight for them. But they had pushed him into the lie. And now he

could not live, having said it ... the sea was somewhere ... he would run

till he got to the sea....

The pad of footsteps in his rear ... he plunged forward, slipping on the

soaked ground.... More footsteps, louder—only let him get away—if there

were no shock of barbed wire ahead to stay him ... he would escape the

barbed wire, escape the mob that since two and a half years had been

hounding behind him ... never so close as now.... “Schnabel! Schnabel!”

soft rain blowing across his face ... head down, arms pressed against his

sides, breath sobbing fiercely, he ran on in a blind panic....

“I can’t catch up with the beggar,” said Greville, returning to the

sitting-room. “I called him, too.... I s’pose he’ll come back all right?”

CHAPTER VI

I

Why had he not thought of suicide before this? Looked upon calmly and

dispassionately, from a merely business aspect, it was the only course

for him—lacking the vital sustenance which men drew nowadays from love of

their own land. It annoyed Richard that even though he had reached the

sea, the sea was nowhere in sight—lost behind wide flats of mud. He leant

against the rail which divided the path beside the railway from a strip

of coarse sand, sullenly determined not to plunge across all that marsh

till he found deep enough water to drown him; even suicide, it seemed,

was to be a difficulty and a favour;—well, the sea could come to him—he

would wait for the returning tide.

He must have run more than five miles; that was all he knew of his

whereabouts. For when he registered, it was made clear that for him the

Essex coast was prohibited area. Leigh was evidently the name of this

little estuary town he had struck haphazard. There would be half a column

in the local paper: “Enemy alien drowns himself.”... Perhaps two lines in

the London Press, amongst other minor items of news.

Richard stared horizon-wards where might be the dilatory tide of his

desire. He was now peaceful, almost numb in mind and body, caring little

for recent turmoil, where so soon blankness was to be. He wondered

dispassionately as to the time? About six o’clock, to judge by the

western pyramid of opaque storm-grey cloud, a pale yellow sun breaking

its peak into fragments and spilling itself in shaft after shaft of dim

light down the triangle and on to the illimitable green and brown and

fawn, burnishing it to a glimmering fantasy like the hues of a mackerel.

Patches of blue sky were reflected in purple pools. And areas of mud

were almost invisible for ships, their keels deeply embedded, as though

a whole lurching fleet had suddenly flung themselves on their sides

and were impotent ... ropes and nets and sails and tackle, old tubs and

steamers and hulks. The scene was packed and spiked with masts. Behind

the station, and its creak and flap of signals and gates and coal-trucks,

a purple gasometer seemed to have entangled itself beyond redemption into

the mournful landscape; and from an outjutting breakwater, the black

finger of a donkey-engine pointed darkly, accusingly against the sky. The

tide had turned, somewhere far out there; and in monotonous procession

up a narrow flowing squiggle of silvery grey, the fishing-boats came in;

their unclothed masts still gauntly upright; small dark figures of men

hauling with ropes on either side, or gently paddling from the stern;

small dark figures, penguin-height, standing patiently in rows on the

mud, to receive the loads of fish. Round each dwindling bend another boat

could be sighted; they might come in thus for ever, with nothing to break

their soundless even progress. The sky was all grey now, and the grey

and brown of the marshes hardly touched to pearliness. A throb in the

air loudened, as a grey steel airship came pounding, slow and enormous,

across the foreground. Dagon, god of fish ... god significant of grey

steel wars....

From lethargic contemplation, Richard was being imperceptibly hypnotized

by the subtle rhythmic excitement that pervades and hangs about an

estuary; estuary which is not quite the sea; which leads to the sea;

which opens out so wildly and generously from the mere width of a river.

The fishing-hauls were in, and the men had vanished from the marsh; but

to him it was still as though boat after boat were following the curve of

the inflowing stream ... but dimly visible now ... the air was full of

windless dusk, and a quiver shook the keels of the mud-locked fleet; soon

they would begin to stir and lift....

II

The scream of a siren punctured the calm. Another one, from much nearer

at hand, pressed down and swallowed the first long raucous shock of sound.

Richard knew the two blasts were signals of an air-raid impending. He had

heard the Dunnes discussing the possibility of several during this week

of harvest moon. A few lingering footsteps pattered to sudden quickness

and silence. In the little town at his back, and all along the coast,

he was aware of no panic, but of every person on the defensive; sucked

back behind walls and shutters and curtains; braced to sturdy sensible

resistance of the chance-monster and its grim selection. In the morning

the population would emerge and stand about and gossip clamorously, with

frequent repetition of the phrase: “Well, I was just——” “Yes, and I was

just——” But now, all activity withdrawn and waiting....

Richard waited too, a few moments. Then, impatient of immobility,

strolled along the path on his right. He was impressed by the absence of

fuss on the part of the civil population. All very well for him who had

no more fastenings on life; but these ordinary people appeared to take

it so for granted that they should be disturbed in the midst of their

daily business, to an encounter with such grotesque apparition as bombs

and shrapnel and aerial torpedoes.... Their behaviour roused him to the

same queer beating tenderness as when the blind discharged soldiers at

the music-hall had been “still keen on things.” Some people were rather

fine.... English people ... but he had declared out loud that he hated

the English ... and so he had to die.

He went past the gas-works, and along the sea-wall which meandered

through the marshes. Open country all around him now, and no noise but

the swish of rushes, far-off gurgle and squirt of water, occasional

plop of some small animal into the spreading pools. Was there always

this black gaping rent of silence between the signal and the first

gun-mutterings? It was Richard’s unique experience of an air-raid outside

London; and an air-raid in London he had considered was altogether a

second-rate affair.

“First line of defence,” he remembered Greville had called the belt of

fortresses—Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Canvey Island, Tilbury and Gravesend.

He strained his eyes towards the angles of crouching coast-line opposite

him, in vain effort to distinguish them. First line of defence, he

repeated once or twice exultantly—before he pulled himself up as a fool.

What did such trivialities concern him now?

Hallo—was that firing out there? No.

Yes.

Or a dog barking?

Richard told himself persistently it was only a dog barking, to smother

the quality of vital contentment newborn in him and uprising with the

nearer and yet nearer sound of the guns.

The darkness was lit with sinking star-shells; and through the thin white

light which the rising half-moon spread over the estuary, the inland

flight of little winged machines was clearly and delicately visible.

Richard stood stock-still, staring at these, till, in a surge of wild

indignation, he found himself starkly confronted with the fact that they

were the Gothas, and that they were over an English river, carrying death

to an English city.

“Damn their insolence!” he shouted into the sky. “It’s _our_ land——”

_Our_ land, fizzing in a nightmare of flame; drowned in great

gun-thunders. And these small black figures busy with their evening’s

haul of fish not an hour ago, _our_ fisherfolk—could we prevent them from

being torn and hurt?

“Oh, Christ—that’s good!” as the barrage crashed from every side at once;

and the giant gun on Canvey Island mouthed and reverberated above all the

rest. _Our_ barrage!... To Hell with these invaders....

Richard was all right. His at last, that blessed bias on the vision which

he had forfeited, and so desperately sought. He was, thank God, incapable

now of reason or justice or sanity—unconscious of himself and his

position, oblivious of an enemy point of view. Just English for all he

was worth. One man for one land. A patriot ... and—_in_ it!... He forgot

that he was alone; the rending chaos all about him gave him the illusion

of being a central participant; so his solitary figure jigged and capered

on the flat sea-wall with incoherent vocal splutter of encouragement and

fury and a very delirium of pleasure.

A shape of yellowish drab came scuttling along the wall, arms thrown up

to shield the face.... “Hallo—look ahead!” Richard called warningly—then

threw out his hand and clutched at the slipping figure. “You were nearly

down then—I say, what’s the matter with you?” for the little soldier

was clinging to him in a very frenzy of terror, with prayer and sob and

blasphemy mingled....

“Oo—er—O Jesus, the blarsted noise again ... don’t let ’em—don’t lemme

go—I ain’t a coward, sir, ’streuth I’m not—bin two years in the

trenches—but them guns fair do somefink to the inside of me ’ead....

Ow—er——” he fell writhing and vomiting to the ground beside Richard, as

the barrage appeared to have enclosed a stray Gotha, and shook the four

sides of the world with triumphant yelps and rumblings.

“Shell-shock,” muttered Richard. “Corporal by his stripes and—by Jove!

Military Medal”—as a twist of khaki tunic into the moonlight revealed a

strip of ribbon sewn on to the man’s meagre chest.

He was suddenly guilty and ashamed of his own arrogance of calm. This

sort of wreck was what the war made of some of its heroes; “this is what

the war ought to have made of me” ... he should have been blind with the

St Dunstan’s men: broken like the little cockney soldier from France,

cowering here beside him. His mind and body and five senses whole and

immune, were dishonour.

Richard knelt and took firm grip of the twitching wrists. “It’s all

right,” gruffly. “Listen—they’re getting away towards London; we shall

have quiet for a bit.”

“Till they come back,” sobbed the man, but he trembled less violently,

and presently drew himself up to a sitting posture.

“Discharged ‘fit’ from ’orspital larst week,” he whispered, lips

trembling to a rueful smile. His peaked, freckled face was glistening

with sweat, and his fingers still tore at the grass; but he was making

an effort at control. “Doc told me I shouldn’t get another o’ these ’ere

attacks, but—I dunno—it’s the s’noise wot did it. I was walkin’ over

quiet-like from Benfleet—luvly evenin’ an’ all—when that bloomin’ siren

went and gave me fits an’ I begun to run.” His voice conveyed apology,

and Richard flushed crimson.

“It’s all right,” he repeated awkwardly; “where do you want to get?”

“H’under cover,” said the Corporal with distinct emphasis. “We’re nearer

Leigh, I b’lieve, than Benfleet; might make a dash for ’ome sweet ’ome

before.... Oh, Gawd! _don’t, don’t_,” as a fresh growling outbreak from

the Sheerness guns signified the approach up the Thames of a second batch

of raiders.

Cover? Richard looked round the landscape; it was entirely exposed;

not even a tree; nothing humped from the flat marshes except a few old

derelict boats reversed in the mud; one of them at the foot of the slope

where now they lay.

“Better than nothing!” It might at least be suggestive of shelter to his

companion, even if of no actual protection from shrapnel. Richard leapt

down from the wall, and plunged up to his knees in mud, tugged at the

boat with all his welded strength of shoulder and muscle.

“’Ere—you’re not gawn?” he heard whimpered during a lull in the barrage.

And “Rather not!” he shouted back, reassuringly; and succeeded in tilting

the half-rotten boards so that the bows rested against the slope while

the stern remained still embedded; thus the concave bottom of the boat

roofed a small dark space—an amateur dug-out.

Meanwhile, the second raiders were not suffered to pursue their leaders

to London; the barrage waxed fiercer, shutting them in, driving them

from point to point; a few bombs were dropped, and exploded with a dull

concussion of sound quite distinct from gun-fire; and all along the Kent

and Essex coast the shrapnel flew screaming.

“Hot stuff!” laughed Richard, as a moaning hoot snicked past his ears; he

sprang up the bank again, and found the Corporal crying in a quiet agony,

too exhausted to budge. Without explanation he lifted him gently; placed

him “under cover” as he had desired. Then he blocked the aperture at the

tilt of the boat with his own square stocky build. “Shut your ears with

your arms, you won’t know anything more about it till the morning,” he

shouted through the din.

Presently his companion said: “I’ve just remembered me name—it’s

Plunkett—Ted Plunkett.”

“Oh—yes?” Richard was rather surprised at the formality in the midst of

shell-shock during air-raid.

A pause. Then: “Well—ain’t you goin’ to tell me your name now I’ve told

you mine?” reproachfully.

“Richard Marcus.”

“R! Got some pluck, ’aven’t you, Sonny Richard Marcus?”

And amusement twinkled in Richard’s deep-set eyes, as he reflected on the

quality of pluck needful under bomb-fire by a person out for the express

purpose of drowning himself.

“Ever heard the comic story of the servant who had never seen the sea?”

he replied with seeming irrelevance, but thinking how the tide had

temporarily baulked his intentions. “She was so dead keen on seeing it

that she stole her mistress’ jewels to pay for the fare to Southend—and

then they arrested her while she was waiting for the tide to come up.”

“Fair did ’er in!” commented Corporal Plunkett, laughing weakly. “Less

row now, ain’t it?”

“Some of our chaps gone up, I should say. Yes—listen!” as a succession of

quick staccato bangs were knocked out directly overhead, then echoed a

little farther off.

The Corporal subsided, crouching his dazed tormented head deep into his

arms. And Richard, with his hands clasped round his knees, waited through

the ensuing drawn-out silence for the distant inland throb which would

easily mean the return of the first batch of raiders from London. He

longed with eagerness for the renewed sound of gun-firing; it definitely

slaked a thirst in him that had craved for such satisfaction since three

years. Well—he had not been able to go to the war, but a little bit of

the war had come to him.... God was—not so bad, after all! He was happy,

sitting there waiting.

“There they are!” And at the same moment he felt a warm trickle down

his neck. “Cheerio! wounded in action!” that bit of shrapnel which had

scraped so close to his ear, must have scraped closer than he had noticed

at the time.

“Yes, there they are—with a vengeance!”

... In the subsequent transformation of earth, sky, air and water into

sheer noise, he faintly heard his comrade ejaculating “Hell” between

intervals of violent sickness. He thrust a stealthy hand into the

aperture; it was grabbed and twisted by wet chilly fingers.

“It’s all right, y’know,” said Richard gruffly. “Quite all right....”

The last Gotha was chased from the mouth of the Thames out to sea. The

last mutter of guns died away.

“I daresay it’s h’over now.” Plunkett emerged cautiously into the

moonlight some ten minutes later. “May as well get ’ome,” and he

staggered to his feet. “The Missus’ll be wondering.”

“You think it _is_ all over?” Richard was reluctant to believe it. That

one nerve in him was still twanging irritably for the relief of gun-fire.

The Corporal nodded. “It’ll be ’alf-an-’our or more afore they give the

signal. Can’t wait for that. You comin’?”

“Where? Back to Leigh?—No, not for the moment. Can you get along by

yourself? It isn’t far.”

“Fit as a fiddle,” the other declared. He held out his hand to

Richard—“Thank yer, Sonny....”

The boy blurted out, at a reminding prick of the old goad: “I was born in

Germany, you know....”

Corporal Plunkett, M.M., was astonished at the inconsequent confession

... some divine impulse prompted him to the speech that healed. “Lord,

sir—_that_ don’t matter. You’re one of us all right!”

III

... The obsession was lifted. Corporal Plunkett had done it. Corporal

Plunkett had atoned for Mr Gryce. Never again would Richard turn hot and

miserable at the mention of German frightfulness ... he had no connection

with the things the Germans did. Born in Germany, yes, but—“You’re

one of us all right,” the cockney soldier had said. The awful crazed

obsession of responsibility was rolled away; and in utter thankfulness

Richard lay on the sea-wall that first night of the September air-raids,

half-dreaming, content to have heard the guns, content....

He was not going to drown himself. Suicide was surrender without a

fighting chance. Richard’s sturdier business instinct rejected the

proposition. Suicide was stupid—a refuge for weaklings and decadents—he

could wrench out better terms for himself. Now that his spirit was

fixed for one land and one people, the fact of continued official

ostracism hardly counted. He would have to submit to that as to a fact

and a nuisance, but in no way vital.... Internment? That also was only

official—“I’ll just have to get through with it.” Richard scowled

healthily at the annoying prospect.

But he was out of No Man’s Land at last ... it had been dreary fog-sodden

territory, and he was glad, a thousand times glad to be quit of it. Not

once again need he set foot there; his love of England was sanctuary.

He would love England, not as before, in exacting casual certainty, but

with the fierce beating love of a man for the woman who has no love for

him, who will never return his love. He would love England in spite of

herself, and with a love steadily cognizant of its own hopelessness. And

he thought of fireside happiness where passion was mutual and easy ...

and rejoiced, in new-found defiance, that his body should stand outside,

pressed against hard rains and hard storms and hard swerve of the hills.

“But I’ll make her take me somehow—in the end——”

A man must have a country to call his own. To _know_ his own. So much the

war had taught him. Other lessons it might have held for others; but for

him this special groping agony of nowhere belonging.

Internationalism ... brotherhood ... that was all very well; men had

hailed it, and believed in it; had let the careful drawing of boundary

be slurred; had forgotten to set stern limits to their sense of humanity

... had merged the significance of birthplace to freer, more casual

interpretation: The world is my birthplace.... Men had wandered, drifted,

flung themselves down in alien places. Why not? The subconscious trust in

the brotherhood of nations had urged them to such courses.

And Internationalism had failed them. Each country was tightly puckered

again to self-sufficiency. Internationalism had no country to give her

devotees during a European war. No country but No Man’s Land ... desolate

sodden track without end or beginning, neither land nor sea ... to

Richard, almost asleep, came a vision of the estuary echoed somewhere in

space and in deeper shadow ... greyer fog ... shapes stumbling about it,

hunting for cover, some wailing loudly, some silent and bewildered....

He was himself a wraith, one of the betrayed ... and there were others

vaguely familiar....

Voices calling, and receiving no answer, calling again and again ...

red-cheeked waiters, vaguely seen in pre-war days, vaguely disappeared

after 1914—they were all here, paler now.... And here the cobbler to

whom Richard had given Aunt Stella’s shoes ... and Trudchen and her

sister Anna, seeking each other, missing each other.... Otto Rothenburg

squealing loudly that he was British.... And now Richard, in his

travellings, bumped up against Gottlieb Schnabel, who shrank from him and

shrank away into the murky gloom ... and turned into Captain Dreyfus—“I

wonder why?” That legendary soldier who had killed his own brother on

the opposite side—he was native of No Man’s Land; and his brother, the

sticky brown gouts dripping from both his shot arms—And: “You here too?”

said Thomas Spalding to Richard, and held out a hand.... A cloud of fog

seemed to roll between them.... Thomas Spalding was lost again.

Children of No Man’s Land—of Denmark and Norway and Sweden and Spain

and Holland, entangled haphazard in one belligerent country or another,

condemned haphazard as pro-German, pro-English.... Their bewildered

avowals disbelieved and mocked.... “Who are the neutrals? there are no

neutrals—the world is at war....” Born in one place, reared in another,

married in a third—“which is your country?” No Man’s Land is their

country ... we shall meet them in No Man’s Land.... “An artist has no

country”—artists without number groping their way through No Man’s Land,

thinking they are walking straight ahead and out of it, not knowing that

in the darkness and the smiting din they are walking round and round in

circles....

“I have no son!” voice sombre and deep from the shadows; a proud old

man, this, naturalized English, hating Germany, eighteen-forty-eight

refugee.... He sent his son to be killed at Gallipoli, and now they are

interrogating his loyalty—“Have you a son at the Front?” “I have no son!”

He will be accepted at his own word and valuation, or not at all. The

dead boy is too dear to stand for mere pledge and security....

Little distracted figures plunging hither and thither, some of them

frantically waving a sheet of paper—“Look—Look,” but there is no escape

from No Man’s Land by naturalization ... in despair the papers are thrown

away—flutter whitely in the gloom “like a paper-chase,” Richard thinks.

He is hunting for David, in frantic need of comradeship. “Is it you?

Or you?” thrusting away each white distorted face as it looms towards

him. But David is not here—David was once of No Man’s Land, but now no

more.... Zion has him, wholly and completely. David is a Jew, and the

Jews have been granted a cause and a kingdom.... Of no avail to seek for

David in these grey spectral fogs. The noise is louder and louder—no

definite sound, but an intensified cosmic thudding which can be heard

when body and soul are alone and listening.... Richard is aware of

loneliness drenching him like vast breakers—must he stay here for ever?

“Lord, sir—_that_ don’t matter ... you’re one of us all right!” It is

Corporal Plunkett’s voice which bursts the nightmare vision ... and

drags him back to the sea-wall by the estuary....

* * * * *

One day men would dare to wander again, and dare to pitch their tents in

strange places ... but not those who had once been victims; not Richard

Marcus, nor his sons, nor his sons’ sons, he vowed grimly....

And with that came the idea to dig himself in. And with the idea,

determination.

He would marry—Molly, perhaps.... A sort of quick ripple seemed to pass

over the world when he thought of Molly and of his savage outburst with

her in the orchard. He would marry her—as he had said then, whether she

liked it or not—and their son should be born in England, brought up in

England, owning land in England; he should be reared to no ideas that

were not purely insular; and he in his turn should marry an English girl,

and their son—would he be enough Englishman yet to be allowed to tolerate

foreigners? Or must that safer, easier attitude wait for the son of his

son’s son? How many generations did it take to plant a man securely, son

of the soil?

Retrogressive, all this. The result of the war. Who could afford, after

such drastic teaching, again to omit patriotism from fundamental need?

Richard began to muse on just how fundamental was the need; and how much

slapped on from the surface, by suggestion? What was patriotism? He had

first asked himself this on a certain evening of shock, three years ago;

and had since only succeeded in discovering, very thoroughly, what was

the lack of it.

Sense of property, to start with ... but that presupposed actual

ownership; that a farmer, a landed proprietor, was more directly inspired

to fight for England, than—oh, than cockney Corporal Plunkett, who was

probably serving in a shop before the call came.

Birthplace, then?—But Richard himself could answer the question of how

much that mattered to the soul.... The law was surely overstressing

topography.... The law was polishing a hollow shell of sentimentality.

David—David was nearer truth when he defined patriotism as the sense

of family: son of our house; thence to local fanaticism: sons of our

village—and sons of our country, which was patriotism ... but it must

stop there.... Sons of our five continents ... it sounded chilly,

expanded so far. Internationalism again—Richard, denying it, yet could

not prevent thought from crashing up against it from time to time.... One

day, yes—but the soul must first catch cold in the pursuit of it.

What was patriotism? unity of pride in the nation’s slow-born history

and tradition? Impetus of divine fury which springs from sanctuary

violated?... He remembered his rage as the Gothas headed their insolent

course straight up the Thames—“_My_ Thames” ... he looked down the

estuary towards the sea ... loving it ... looked up the river past

Benfleet ... good British name that, pungent with jolly naval tradition

... his inward sight followed the dwindling stream through London,

a draped lady stepping delicately beneath crossed blades of silver,

searchlights that protected her ... and still farther up lay the Thames

valley, noontide of green and gold drowsing gardens, and the glory of

ancient woods.... “My Thames!”

Suddenly Richard flung back his head and laughed, heartily and with no

trace of bitterness, at the mere idea that he could love it less because

his mother happened to be somewhere else than here at the hour of his

birth. It was—so entirely ridiculous! Screaming little red-faced atom ...

what possible difference could it make to him, sucking at his bottle, if

Hun-land or home-land were beyond the windows?... A world constructed

on the arbitrary basis that each person must be screwed down solemnly

and with ritual, in residence and in feeling, to the consecrated spot in

which he was born, was really not unlike a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.

Of course there was the old argument of “blood tells.” _Did_ it? His

sudden rushing worship of the river-god disproved the argument wholly.

For if he were no individual person, but the compound of his ancestors’

emotions, the Thames would bore him, and the thought of the Rhine stir

him to unutterable pæans.

Thus Richard—he not knowing how a little shy German boy had once crossed

to England, and worn a blazer, and sculled in a queer ecstasy from Bray

to Cookham. Richard’s love of the Thames was a heritage from Ferdie....

“I can’t get hold of it—quite——” the boy decided at last, abandoning

his quest for patriotism defined. “But it’s there——” There, elusively,

tormentingly woven into the fabric itself; distinct from patriotism

exploited, talked about, and sung about, and worked up into posters and

pictures ... till it tasted like wood in the mouth. “Can’t a man serve

his land unquestioningly, without all this cant?” But no emotion could

be left deep-hid and dimly private—not love of art, nor love of child,

nor love of man for woman ... patriotism must be thumbed with the rest,

till its name was Jingoism. “A patriot for lost causes, and a Jingo

after victory—that’s the difference....” Had David said so? It sounded

like David.... Richard had not quite realized as yet how awakened by

circumstances was his own powerful, slow-moving brain.

The suck of water startlingly near.... He raised himself on one elbow,

then sprang to his feet, and saw the tide was up, flowing in clear,

luminous black over the marshes, oozing greedily into each hole and

inlet, lapping at the very foot of the sea-wall. The bump of lifted boats

was audible in the moonless night.

Richard reflected, not without humour, that the sea had emerged from

obscurity rather too late to be of any practical value—to him.

He looked at his watch—ten minutes after midnight. Then—he was eighteen

to-day! ... and the dreaded evening would see him in prison—“Rum sort

of birthday!”—But horror had all been drained out of the coming ordeal,

leaving it, well—a nuisance, nothing more odious nor festering. A

confounded nuisance—but inevitable; neither the fault of those interned

nor of those who interned them; just a happening out of greater

happenings.

The last London train from Leigh would have gone by now; he might catch

an early morning workmen’s train. He did not want to go back to the

Dunnes—grimaced slightly at the mere idea of encounter, with his burst of

madness so very recent in their minds. Why—he had come rushing out minus

even his cap; they could pack his bag and send it up to Montague Hall ...

not that he would need anything much for the next year or two ... or for

however long this dreary war was going to last.

And after the war——?

“Let ’em go back to their own country—we don’t want ’em here.” But, “This

_is_ my country....” Richard stood on the sea-wall, an obstinate figure,

black against the dim flat wash of water. He was smiling a little

ironically at the thought of Mr Gryce ... voice creaking in the hall as

he came in: “Intern ’em all!”—and how he would exult on hearing the next

day that one more enemy alien had indeed been interned!...

* * * * *

Suddenly, and with an unexpected tearing at the heart, three

long-drawn-out hoots of the siren shrieked across the swamp, a pause

between each, as though the deliverer were holding his breath. Then, all

along the English coast, the pent-up tension relaxed, and “We can go to

bed,” said the English people. “That’s the All Clear!”

... The boy threw himself full length on the coarse grass; lay with

bare head pillowed on his arm; the same faint smile still twisting his

underlip:

“May as well get some sleep now,” said Richard. “That’s the All Clear.”

The Novels of

Dorothy Richardson

_By MAY SINCLAIR_

... By imposing very strict limitations on herself she has brought her

art, her method, to a high pitch of perfection, so that her form seems

to be newer than it perhaps is. She herself is unaware of the perfection

of her method. She would probably deny that she has written with any

deliberate method at all. She would say: “I only know there are certain

things I mustn’t do if I was to do what I wanted.” Obviously, she must

not interfere; she must not analyse or comment or explain. Rather less

obviously, she must not tell a story, or handle a situation, or set a

scene; she must avoid drama as she avoids narration. And there are some

things she must not be. She must not be the wise, all-knowing author.

She must be Miriam Henderson. She must not know or divine anything

that Miriam does not know or divine; she must not see anything that

Miriam does not see. She has taken Miriam’s nature upon her. She is not

concerned, in the way that other novelists are concerned, with character.

Of the persons who move through Miriam’s world you know nothing but what

Miriam knows. If Miriam is mistaken, well, she and not Miss Richardson is

mistaken. Miriam is an acute observer, but she is very far from seeing

the whole of these people. They are presented to us in the same vivid but

fragmentary way in which they appeared to Miriam, the fragmentary way

in which people appear to most of us. Miss Richardson has only imposed

on herself the conditions that life imposes on us all. And if you are

going to quarrel with those conditions, you will not find her novels

satisfactory. But your satisfaction is not her concern.

And I find it impossible to reduce to intelligible terms this

satisfaction that I feel. To me these three novels show an art and method

and form carried to punctilious perfection. Yet I have heard other

novelists say that they have no art and no method and no form, and that

it is this formlessness that annoys them. They say that they have no

beginning and no middle and no end, and that to have form a novel must

have an end and a beginning and a middle. We have come to words that in

more primitive times would have been blows on this subject. There is a

certain plausibility in what they say, but it depends on what constitutes

a beginning and a middle and an end. In this series there is no drama, no

situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and

on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on. And

in neither is there any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end.

In identifying herself with this life, which is Miriam’s stream of

consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first of

getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so

desperately to get close. No attitude or gesture of her own is allowed

to come between her and her effect. Whatever her sources and her raw

material, she is concerned, and we ought to be concerned solely with the

finished result, the work of art. It is to Miriam’s almost painfully

acute senses that we owe what in any other novelist would be called the

“portraits” of Miriam’s mother, of her sister Harriett, of the Corries

and Joey Banks in _Honeycomb_, of the Miss Pernes and Julia Doyle, and

the North London schoolgirls, in _Backwater_, of Fräulein Pfaff and

Mademoiselle, of the Martins and Emma Bergmann and Ulrica and “the

Australian” in _Pointed Roofs_. The mere “word-painting” is masterly....

It is as if no other writers had ever used their senses so purely and

with so intense a joy in their use.

This intensity is the effect of an extreme concentration on the thing

seen or felt. Miss Richardson disdains every stroke that does not

tell. Her novels are novels of an extraordinary compression, and of

an extenuation more extraordinary still. The moments of Miriam’s

consciousness pass one by one, or overlapping; moments tense with

vibration, moments drawn out fine, almost to snapping-point.—_From an

article published in “The Egoist,” April 1918._

_DOROTHY RICHARDSON_

Pointed Roofs

Backwater

Honeycomb

The Tunnel

Interim

DUCKWORTH & CO., PUBLISHERS, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON